CHANI astrology app founder Chani Nicholas, right, laughs alongside Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui after realizing the Toronto stationery store they were planning on visiting was closed for the day, on Nov. 10.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Each month, generations reporter Ann Hui takes readers along to hang out with fascinating Canadians – regular people and celebrities, teens to seniors – joining them in their favourite pastime for up-close and candid conversations.
The first thing you need to know about my interview with Chani Nicholas is that nothing was going as planned.
Our meeting almost didn’t happen. I had the wrong date in my calendar. I almost missed it entirely. And at our actual interview, I got us, somehow, very, very lost. There was a stationery shop she wanted to check out, but I kept leading us around the block in circles.
Once we finally found the shop – once she finally found it, by taking the phone out of my hands, and taking charge of the navigation – the store was closed.
Ms. Nicholas started laughing. Deep, deep belly laughs. Of course it was closed.
“It looks like such a good shop,” she said between bursts of laughter. “I would have loved to have gone in there.”
Ms. Nicholas, left, and Ms. Hui, look through the window of the stationery store.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
That leads to the second thing you should know about our meeting.
Mercury was retrograde. It was something Ms. Nicholas, a Canadian-born astrologer and one of the most well-known astrology experts in the world, had warned about on Instagram all of November (which was when we met). “It’s making everything just a little stickier, trickier,” she’d said. The moon and the planets were working against us; the world was ripe for mix-ups, and miscommunication.
Judging from the way the meeting was unfolding, even I – a skeptic – was starting to feel like there might be something to this. I told her as much, and she laughed.
“You don’t have to care about astrology,” she said. “I don’t care if people believe in astrology. It’s just that there’s this fundamental yearning to be connected to something bigger than ourselves.”
Astrology is having a moment. Horoscopes have always had their believers (case in point: the most-read daily story on the Globe and Mail website is almost always the horoscopes). But in recent years, millennials and Gen Zs in particular have led a resurgence in interest. One 2024 survey, for instance, found that some 63 per cent of Gen Zs and Millennials rely on astrology for career guidance.
Around the world, astrology has become a multi-billion-dollar business. And the New York-based Ms. Nicholas is at the centre of it. She has, between her hugely popular CHANI app and podcast, some 3 million followers. Her book was an instant New York Times No. 1 best-seller.
Ms. Nicholas, left, and Ms. Hui browse at Red Pegasus gift shop. Ms. Nicholas oversees a staff of 44 employees at her company CHANI.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Ms. Nicholas was in Toronto that morning for an event. It’s a city she lived in as a teenager and throughout most of her 20s. She’d chosen for us to meet at a coffee shop in Little Italy, a neighbourhood where she used to hang out. Back in New York, her wife, Sonya Passi, whom she married in 2020 and shares a three-year-old daughter with, is a stationery aficionado. So we set off in search of something to bring home to her.
Any trained astrologer can deliver a reading. But Ms. Nicholas’s specific brand brings together the personal with the political. Through her app and podcast, she delivers astrology readings through a uniquely queer, feminist, and politically progressive lens.
Through Ms. Nicholas’s eyes, mercury retrograde might mean that yes, we all need to pay closer attention to the details – to dot our i’s and cross our t’s. But it might also help to explain large, global and political events too. Like the millions of Americans who were suddenly without food benefits because of the U.S. federal government shutdowns. Or the leaking of Jeffrey Epstein’s e-mails. On Instagram, her posts are as much about the moon and the stars as they are Donald Trump, or the war in Gaza, or the fight for reproductive freedoms.
The chaos of this specific moment, she says, explains a large part of her popularity. In the U.S. and around the world, people are anxious about the state of things. They’re looking for answers. Trying to make sense of the world around us.
“People find some kind of solace in it, because it’s a chronological context,” she said.
“Astrology gives you a time. This thing is going to happen for this long. This thing looks really hard in this specific way. But it’s not going to last forever.”
It’s chaos, too, that first brought Ms. Nicholas to astrology.
She grew up the child of divorced parents in Nelson, B.C., around “a lot of addiction, and a lot of chaos.” Her dad, who lived in Toronto, took her to see an astrologer when she was about 12, and she was instantly hooked. “I just remember feeling seen for the first time in my life,” she says.
Ms. Nicholas exits Red Pegasus gift shop. She says she has too much to do in the day to worry about those who see astrology as snake oil.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Decades later, she was living in L.A., feeling rootless. She had studied social justice and political activism in college, and found herself working as a yoga teacher.
“Mostly I was teaching very wealthy, very privileged people. And I was like, ‘This is not my calling. This is not it for me.’”
She started writing and e-mailing essays to her friends – horoscopes with a side of political activism. It was meant as a creative outlet. In her mind, activists weren’t interested in astrology, and the spiritual community wasn’t interested in politics.
But the e-mails were a hit.
“It’s really the queer community that was like, ‘We love astrology and we are super political,’” she said. It makes sense to her that her most ardent followers come from the most marginalized communities.
“I think that our institutions have failed us. I think that a lot of our religious and social institutions have put conditions on us that make us feel like we don’t belong,” she said.
Ms. Nicholas orders desserts at Liu Loqum Atelier. She says she was instantly hooked on astrology as a young girl when her father took her to see an astrologer.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Today, she and Ms. Passi (who is CEO of CHANI) oversee a staff of 44 employees. Every staff member is paid a living wage of $80,000 for a four-day work week, and five per cent of revenue is donated to a non-profit that supports survivors of sexual violence.
I asked her about those who see astrology as snake oil. She just shrugged.
“I have too much to do in the day to worry about it,” she said. “I honestly just want everyone to find their purpose in life, to find what’s meaningful and to be of service in the world.”
We ended our meeting at another cafe, this one selling Turkish delight. She decided that, instead of stationery, she’d bring home a box of saffron and pistachio treats.
Her flight was meant to take off that night, she said. If it took off. The government shutdown had caused chaos for air travel too. Mercury retrograde strikes again.
I asked if astrology is just another way to absolve ourselves. To shrug off the weight of responsibility. Or, in my case that day, to find something to blame for my own mistakes.
Again, she laughed. Rolled her eyes.
“People blame everything on mercury retrograde. And they shouldn’t,” she said. “It’s a problem.”