If the idea of a classical music superstar seems like an oxymoron, then you haven’t followed the career of 48-year-old Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. His home orchestra is Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain, where he has a lifetime contract, but he is also the musical director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. He has earned multiple Grammys. He tours Europe regularly. And he has flair: he wears electric-coloured dress shirts and paints his nails.

In 2018, Bradley Cooper approached Nézet-Séguin with an unusual request: to help him become a credible Leonard Bernstein in the biopic Maestro. Nézet-Séguin became Cooper’s conducting whisperer. During some of the conducting scenes, he even instructed Cooper via an earpiece. In Maclean’s, Nézet-Séguin talks about his rise in the orchestral world and what it was like to parachute into Hollywood for the Bernstein movie. Clearly, whatever he did worked: Maestro is up for several Oscars, and Nézet-Séguin is attending next month.

—Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief

This November, for the first time in over 50 years, humans will head for the moon—and one of them, astronaut Jeremy Hansen, is Canadian. But even the earthbound have reason to be excited about the burgeoning Canadian space industry. In this essay for Maclean’s Year Ahead issue, University of Alberta professor Timothy Caulfield predicts that soon, we’ll see more space flights, more space-related research and more chances for regular Canadians—albeit very wealthy ones—to launch out of orbit.

Terrace, B.C., is a rugged town a 15-hour drive north of Vancouver. It’s the home of Coast Mountain College, which serves students from seven First Nations—Haida, Haisla, Nisga’a, Wet’suwet’en, Gitxsan, Tahltan and Tsimshian. Many travel vast distances to attend, but until recently, student housing was a major issue in Terrace. Now, Coast Mountain students have a new home away from home: a culturally inclusive, three-storey residence with a name that translates to “where learners are content and comfortable” in Sm’algyax, a Tsimshian dialect.

From the 

January/February 

Issue

Canadian premiers will battle the feds over renewable energy projects and emissions caps, while cities and communities will prep for fires and floods with innovative new emergency-readiness plans. Read our top 10 predictions for the biggest upcoming climate stories here.

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