Description (podcaster-provided):
IDEAS is a deep-dive into contemporary thought and intellectual history. No topic is off-limits. In the age of clickbait and superficial headlines, it's for people who like to think.Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):
➤ Contemporary thought • Intellectual history • Cultural analysis • Social issues • Psychological exploration • Philosophical inquiry • Scientific concepts • Historical narratives • Artistic expression • Political discussionsThis podcast, titled "Ideas," delves into a wide array of contemporary thought and intellectual history, pressing beyond superficial headlines to stimulate deep reflection and exploration. This podcast investigates an eclectic range of topics, inviting listeners to engage with complex ideas spanning cultural, historical, and scientific discussions. The episodes cover subjects such as the cultural significance and economic implications of Cuban cigars, the intricate workings of human cells, and the societal role of the United Nations at its 80th anniversary.
Moreover, the podcast frequently examines individual figures and social movements, shedding light on stories of change-makers like Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Canada's first Black woman publisher, and the unique contributions of Chava Rosenfarb, a Canadian Yiddish writer and Holocaust survivor. In addition, there are explorations into the worlds of music, with insights into forgotten compositions and the magic of the violin, as well as discussions of environmental issues and speculative future trends, such as the privatization of space exploration and the ethical considerations in billionaire-driven techno-utopias.
The nature of these episodes often involves revisiting historical perspectives to draw parallels with current-day issues, such as the fall of Rome and its politically malleable narrative or the resurgence of fears regarding American influence on Canadian sovereignty. This podcast also addresses societal and personal themes, from mental health struggles and the benefits of group therapy to the nuanced dynamics of marriage and human responsibility in the face of global challenges. Overall, "Ideas" aims to engage its audience with well-rounded explorations of human experiences, offering intellectual enrichment by addressing both timely and timeless themes.
Episodes: |
The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 1: Why we need to have a conversation about conversations 2025-Mar-17 54 minutes |
The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 2: Public conversations 2025-Mar-17 54 minutes |
The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 3: Personal conversations 2025-Mar-17 54 minutes |
The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 5: Good conversations 2025-Mar-17 54 minutes |
Why Massey Lecturer Ian Williams Stays Open to All Perspectives 2025-Mar-14 54 minutes |
White Wine with Lunch: How much luxury is reasonable for one person? 2025-Mar-13 54 minutes |
We believe in artificial intelligence the same way we believe in ghosts 2025-Mar-12 54 minutes |
A rallying cry to extend human rights to our data-generating digital selves 2025-Mar-11 54 minutes |
How To Build An Empire: The Aeneid Guide to Understanding U.S. Politics 2025-Mar-10 54 minutes |
Believe in ghosts? Why people see spirits and sense visitations 2025-Mar-07 54 minutes |
Smell: Why This Invisible Superpower Deserves More Attention 2025-Mar-06 54 minutes |
How Inuit Storytelling and Modern Horror Fiction Come Together 2025-Mar-05 54 minutes |
Be Reasonable: Scholars Define Who Is and Who Is Not 2025-Mar-04 54 minutes |
How Christian ethics can inform a peaceful resolution to Russia’s war in Ukraine 2025-Mar-03 54 minutes |
Puro Cubano: The Meaning of Tobacco in Cuba 2025-Feb-28 54 minutes |
Our Bodies, Our Cells: An Audio Exploration of Life's Building Blocks 2025-Feb-27 54 minutes |
The UN at 80: Successes, Hopes, Failures, and Challenges 2025-Feb-26 54 minutes |
Remember the Last Time Canada Feared the U.S. Would Swallow It Up? 2025-Feb-25 54 minutes |
Why learn improv? Your unscripted mind can surprise even you 2025-Feb-24 54 minutes |
How the Outdoors Inspired Women to Become Trailblazers 2025-Feb-21 54 minutes |
The Passion of Émile Nelligan: Canada's Saddest Poet 2025-Feb-20 54 minutes |
Naming Life: The Race to Classify Millions of Unidentified Species 2025-Feb-19 54 minutes |
Writer Adam Gopnik on the Evolution of Antisemitism Into Anti-urbanism 2025-Feb-18 54 minutes |
Swinging and Singing: The Violin 2025-Feb-17 54 minutes |
Marriage and the Modern Woman: What It Takes To Say "I Do" 2025-Feb-14 54 minutes |
IDEAS Introduces On Drugs | A Troubled Relationship With Alcohol 2025-Feb-13 54 minutes |
Rights vs Deservingness: How We Decide Who Belongs 2025-Feb-12 54 minutes |
Dreaming of Better: Living With Bipolar Disorder 2025-Feb-11 54 minutes |
North on North: Stories from the Only Independent Publisher in the Canadian Arctic 2025-Feb-10 54 minutes |
From Grit to Glory: Canada’s First Black Woman Publisher 2025-Feb-07 54 minutes |
Indigenous Journalist Calls for a Revolution of Genuine Action 2025-Feb-06 54 minutes |
'Here lived Chava Rosenfarb' : A Profile of the Canadian Yiddish writer 2025-Feb-05 54 minutes |
The Many Lives of Maria Chapdelaine 2025-Feb-04 54 minutes |
The Amazing Henry Box Brown: From Fugitive Slave to Ingenious Entertainer 2025-Feb-03 54 minutes |
The Value of Group Therapy 2025-Jan-31 54 minutes |
Loving Your Country in the 21st Century (Step Two) 2025-Jan-30 54 minutes |
Becoming Aaju Peter: A Guardian of Inuk Language and Culture 2025-Jan-29 54 minutes |
PT 2: What Lies Beneath the Surface: Anthropologist Wade Davis 2025-Jan-28 54 minutes |
Inuit Approaches to Conversation and Conflict Resolution 2025-Jan-27 54 minutes |
Reith Lectures #4: Can we change violent minds? 2025-Jan-24 54 minutes |
Reith Lectures #3: Does trauma cause violence? 2025-Jan-23 54 minutes |
Techno-Utopia or The Billionaires’ Wet Dream 2025-Jan-22 54 minutes |
Who Owns Outer Space? 2025-Jan-21 54 minutes |
Polarizing Times Call for Nietzsche’s Practice of 'Passing By' 2025-Jan-20 54 minutes |
Searching for Truth: The Honourable Louise Arbour 2025-Jan-17 54 minutes |
Reith Lectures #2: Is there such a thing as evil? 2025-Jan-16 54 minutes |
The Never-Ending Fall of Rome 2025-Jan-15 54 minutes |
A Minor Revolution: Prioritizing Kids' Rights Benefits Us All 2025-Jan-14 54 minutes |
What 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes would say about American democracy today 2025-Jan-13 54 minutes |
ARC Ensemble: The Forgotten Music of Exiled Composers 2025-Jan-10 54 minutes |
Reith Lectures #1: Is violence normal? 2025-Jan-09 54 minutes |
Woke Racism and the Language Police | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & John McWhorter 2025-Jan-08 54 minutes |
This Way to Re-Enchantment, with Philosopher Charles Taylor 2025-Jan-07 54 minutes |
What Lies Beneath the Surface: Anthropologist Wade Davis 2025-Jan-06 54 minutes |
Nine: A Number of Synchronicity 2025-Jan-03 54 minutes |
We Give You Five: Odd in More Ways Than One 2025-Jan-02 54 minutes |
The Story and Magic of Three 2025-Jan-01 54 minutes |
Join IDEAS for our annual New Year's Levee 2024-Dec-31 45 minutes |
Echoes of an Empty Sound: The Story of Zero 2024-Dec-30 54 minutes |
Fireside & Icicles — Poems for Winter 2024-Dec-27 54 minutes |
A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Musical Genius of Jerry Granelli 2024-Dec-26 54 minutes |
Christmas Philosophy 101 2024-Dec-24 54 minutes |
Apocalypse for Christmas: Thomas Merton and the Inn 2024-Dec-23 54 minutes |
What the Next 50 Years of Investigative Journalism Might Look Like 2024-Dec-20 54 minutes |
Imprisoned Syrian Wrote Poetry Imagining the Fall of the Regime. Now it's Come True 2024-Dec-19 54 minutes |
Manuscript Used to Eradicate Andean Thought is Now Key to Revitalizing it 2024-Dec-18 54 minutes |
The 2024 Killam Prize Honours Canada’s University Researchers (Part 2) 2024-Dec-17 54 minutes |
There's No Place Like Home: Humanity and the Housing Crisis 2024-Dec-16 54 minutes |
Hawkeye's Army: The War Metaphor in Medicine 2024-Dec-13 54 minutes |
What Should Cities of the Future Look Like? 2024-Dec-12 54 minutes |
Fighting for Climate Justice in The Hague: Payam Akhavan 2024-Dec-11 54 minutes |
Non-Aligned News: The Future of Non-Western Media, Part Two 2024-Dec-10 54 minutes |
Non-Aligned News: A Journalistic Experiment to Decolonize Global News 2024-Dec-09 54 minutes |
Fate Is the Hunter: Ernest K. Gann's Great Fortune 2024-Dec-06 54 minutes |
The Theatre of News: Lessons from Elizabethan England 2024-Dec-05 54 minutes |
School Cars: How Trains Brought Classrooms to Children in Remote Communities 2024-Dec-04 54 minutes |
What It Means To Belong In The World: Writer M.G. Vassanji 2024-Dec-03 54 minutes |
Acclaimed Journalist Connie Walker on the Importance of Storytelling 2024-Dec-02 54 minutes |
The 2024 Killam Prize Honours Canada’s University Researchers (Part 1) 2024-Nov-29 54 minutes |
The 2024 Beatty Lecture Pairs Two Great Minds That Don’t Think Alike 2024-Nov-28 54 minutes |
Disgust: The Good and Evil 2024-Nov-27 54 minutes |
Otherworld: Astonishing Tales of Romance in Medieval Ireland 2024-Nov-26 54 minutes |
Breaking Barriers: The Trailblazing Chatham Coloured All-Stars 2024-Nov-25 54 minutes |
The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 4: Who can speak for whom to whom about what? 2024-Nov-21 54 minutes |
A Harem of Computers: The History of the Feminized Machine 2024-Nov-14 54 minutes |
How Canadians Can Help Lead the Global Fight for Health Equity 2024-Nov-13 54 minutes |
How to Flourish in a Broken World 2024-Nov-12 54 minutes |
Pt 2: Acts of Remembrance: Canadian Veterans Share Postwar Experiences 2024-Nov-11 54 minutes |
Pt 1: What Came After: Canadian Veterans Share Postwar Experiences 2024-Nov-08 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: The Legacy of Doris Lessing and the 'Prisons We Choose to Live Inside' 2024-Nov-07 54 minutes |
The Seven Wonders of the World: A Bucket List for Ancient Travellers 2024-Nov-06 54 minutes |
Do Dogs Feel Guilt? Animal Cognition Discoveries 2024-Nov-05 54 minutes |
Experts Say American Democracy is at a Precipice, and Time is Ticking 2024-Nov-04 54 minutes |
Can a New Conservatism Offer Solutions to Modern Social Problems? 2024-Nov-01 54 minutes |
The Role of Nonfiction in a World of Contested Truths: Writer Pankaj Mishra 2024-Oct-31 54 minutes |
Is Fascism Coming Back? 2024-Oct-30 54 minutes |
PT 2: How Journalism is Fighting Against Polarization 2024-Oct-29 54 minutes |
PT 1: How Journalism is Fighting Against Polarization 2024-Oct-28 54 minutes |
Indigenous Archaeologist Reclaims Pleistocene Epoch Story from Colonial Scholars 2024-Oct-25 54 minutes |
The History and Mystery of Left-Handers 2024-Oct-23 54 minutes |
The Marrow of Nature: A Case for Wetlands 2024-Oct-23 54 minutes |
Arts Icon Joan Jonas on Her Great Muse, Cape Breton 2024-Oct-22 54 minutes |
The Living Dead: Art and Human Remains 2024-Oct-21 54 minutes |
How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation 2024-Oct-18 54 minutes |
Turning the Climate Crisis into Motivation, and Hope into Action 2024-Oct-17 54 minutes |
The Story Behind the 1859 Pig War that Claimed One Casualty: A Pig 2024-Oct-15 54 minutes |
Dinner on Mars: How to Grow Food When Humans Colonize the Red Planet 2024-Oct-14 54 minutes |
The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp 2024-Oct-11 54 minutes |
Modern Patriotism: Loving Your Country in the 21st Century (Step One) 2024-Oct-10 54 minutes |
How the Anthropocene is Changing the Elements — and Us 2024-Oct-09 54 minutes |
October 8,1970: The FLQ Manifesto 2024-Oct-08 54 minutes |
Civil Discourse or Civil War? Ideas and Realities of the Contemporary University 2024-Oct-07 54 minutes |
A Reality Check on Reality TV 2024-Oct-04 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: How Physicist Ursula Franklin's Prescient Ideas on Technology Persist 2024-Oct-03 54 minutes |
Making Justice Imaginable: Lawyer Lex Gill 2024-Oct-02 54 minutes |
Left Is Not Woke: Susan Neiman 2024-Oct-01 54 minutes |
How Indigenous survival offers a blueprint for everyone’s future: Jesse Wente 2024-Sep-30 54 minutes |
Slowing Down in Urgent Times: A Lesson in Hope 2024-Sep-27 54 minutes |
Deliberation in a Time of Anger: Making Space for Collective Decision-Making 2024-Sep-26 54 minutes |
Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space: A Place to Dream 2024-Sep-25 54 minutes |
The Heavy Metal Suite: Music and the Future of Mining 2024-Sep-24 54 minutes |
Child Sex Abuse Prevention: How Best to Protect Kids 2024-Sep-23 54 minutes |
Humboldt's Ghost, Pt 2: The Meaning of Education 2024-Sep-20 54 minutes |
Humboldt's Ghost, Pt 1: Origins of our 200 year-old public education system 2024-Sep-19 54 minutes |
Bureaumania: A 'Granular' Look at Corporate Red Tape 2024-Sep-18 54 minutes |
For the Sake of the Common Good: Honouring Lois Wilson 2024-Sep-17 54 minutes |
Death and the Artist: Four Stories 2024-Sep-16 54 minutes |
New Yorker Writer Calvin Trillin: A Warm Weather Nova Scotian 2024-Sep-13 54 minutes |
Pursuing the Mysteries of Gravity with a Radical New Theory 2024-Sep-12 54 minutes |
Brutalist Architecture, Beyond Aesthetics 2024-Sep-11 54 minutes |
How the Story of the Horse is the History of the World 2024-Sep-10 54 minutes |
Herodotus: Eros and Tyranny 2024-Sep-09 54 minutes |
Brave New Worlds: Rights for the Future, Part Five 2024-Sep-06 54 minutes |
Brave New Worlds: The Rights to Free Thought and Free Expression, Part Four 2024-Sep-05 54 minutes |
Brave New Worlds: The Right to Leave, Return and Seek Asylum, Part Three 2024-Sep-04 54 minutes |
Brave New Worlds: The Right to Privacy, Part Two 2024-Sep-03 54 minutes |
Brave New Worlds: The Right to Security, Part One 2024-Sep-02 54 minutes |
Transhumance: An Ancient Practice at Risk 2024-Aug-29 54 minutes |
Author Robert Macfarlane on the relationship between landscape and the human heart 2024-Aug-28 54 minutes |
Arctic Amazon Art Project: The Mural, Part One 2024-Aug-27 54 minutes |
An Outsider Inside the Trades: Hilary Peach 2024-Aug-26 54 minutes |
Perimeter Institute Public Lectures: The Physics of Jazz | Dark Matter Night 2024-Aug-23 54 minutes |
Feline Philosophy: What We Can Learn From Cats 2024-Aug-22 54 minutes |
Platforms, Power and Democracy: Understanding the Influence of Social Media 2024-Aug-21 54 minutes |
Healing the Land, Part Two: From Eden Ecology to Indigenous Ecology 2024-Aug-20 54 minutes |
Healing the Land, Part One: After the Fire 2024-Aug-19 54 minutes |
Kate Beaton: What's lost when working-class voices are not heard 2024-Aug-16 54 minutes |
Of Dogs and Derrida: Understanding the dogs’ point of view 2024-Aug-15 54 minutes |
Healing and the Healer: Dr. Jillian Horton on compassion in health care 2024-Aug-14 54 minutes |
The Life and Times of Salman Rushdie 2024-Aug-12 54 minutes |
The Hinge Years: 1989 | Uprisings and Downfalls 2024-Aug-09 54 minutes |
Rats: Facing Our Fears, Part Two 2024-Aug-08 54 minutes |
Rats: Haunting Humanity’s Footsteps 2024-Aug-08 54 minutes |
Historian uses Canadian prize money to buy drones for Ukraine 2024-Aug-07 54 minutes |
For the Sake of the Common Good: Honouring Lois Wilson 2024-Aug-06 54 minutes |
Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #5: Escaping the Burrow 2024-Aug-05 62 minutes |
The Hinge Years: 1973 | The Dictators 2024-Aug-02 54 minutes |
Entre Chien et Loup: How Dogs Began 2024-Aug-01 54 minutes |
A Guide to Hope, Learning and Shakespeare: Scholar Shannon Murray 2024-Jul-31 54 minutes |
Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi 2024-Jul-30 54 minutes |
Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #4: Beyond Human Security 2024-Jul-29 63 minutes |
The Hinge Years: 1963 | Social Revolutions 2024-Jul-26 54 minutes |
English: Friend or Frenemy? 2024-Jul-25 54 minutes |
Négritude: The Birth of Black Humanism 2024-Jul-24 54 minutes |
Historian Tiya Miles on how a mother's love outlasted slavery 2024-Jul-23 54 minutes |
Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #3: Consumed by Curiosity 2024-Jul-22 64 minutes |
The Hinge Years: 1938 | The Winds of War 2024-Jul-19 54 minutes |
![]() 2024-Jul-18 39 minutes |
The Endless Procession of Days | Ian Williams 2024-Jul-18 54 minutes |
The Emancipation of Turkish Writer Ahmet Altan, Pt 2 2024-Jul-17 54 minutes |
A Political Prisoner’s Odyssey: Writer Ahmet Altan, Pt 1 2024-Jul-16 54 minutes |
Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #2: Barons or Commoners? 2024-Jul-15 58 minutes |
The Hinge Years: 1919 | Dividing the Spoils 2024-Jul-12 54 minutes |
How philosophy plays a vital role in Canada's biggest ethical debates 2024-Jul-11 54 minutes |
The ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life: Christina Sharpe 2024-Jul-10 54 minutes |
Turn the Other Cheek: the radical case for nonviolent resistance 2024-Jul-09 54 minutes |
Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #1: Cura’s Gift 2024-Jul-08 60 minutes |
Poet Ross Gay on the necessity of joy and delight 2024-Jul-05 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Tanya Talaga on what Canada can learn from the stories of Indigenous peoples 2024-Jul-03 54 minutes |
Flop Sweat: Why We Choke When It Matters Most 2024-Jul-02 54 minutes |
International laws against genocide exist: so why don’t they work? 2024-Jun-28 54 minutes |
How the death of a friend inspired a fight for human rights and justice 2024-Jun-27 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Payam Akhavan on his unwavering advocacy for human rights 2024-Jun-26 54 minutes |
5 Canadian Writers on Subverting Identity 2024-Jun-25 54 minutes |
Cultivating Community, Citizenship and Belonging | Jamie Chai Yun Liew 2024-Jun-20 54 minutes |
Political tribalism is an existential threat to humanity: evolutionary anthropologist 2024-Jun-19 54 minutes |
Taken In: Exploring Credulity 2024-Jun-18 54 minutes |
BBC Reith Lectures: Artificial Prosperity 2024-Jun-17 54 minutes |
Queer Diplomacy: Negotiating 2SLGBTQ+ Rights in a Fraught World 2024-Jun-14 54 minutes |
(Land) Back to the Future | Riley Yesno 2024-Jun-12 54 minutes |
Walking Among the Ancients: The Rare Wabanaki-Acadian Old-Growth Forest 2024-Jun-11 54 minutes |
BBC Reith Lectures: Artificial Democracy 2024-Jun-10 54 minutes |
Bring Back Grumpy George: The Forgotten Message of George Grant 2024-Jun-07 54 minutes |
A Walk of Remembrance: Honouring Canadian soldiers who helped liberate the Netherlands 2024-Jun-06 54 minutes |
On Culture Wars in Christianity 2024-Jun-05 54 minutes |
China's Cultural Revolution: a history that remains widely unknown 2024-Jun-04 54 minutes |
Papyrus: Exploring the Invention of the Book 2024-May-30 54 minutes |
The Making of a Beast: Entering a New World of Fire 2024-May-29 54 minutes |
The extreme in America’s mainstream 2024-May-27 54 minutes |
Wade Davis' CBC Massey Lecture # 5 | The Wayfinders: Century of the Wind 2024-May-24 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Wade Davis on looking to Indigenous cultures for answers to world crises 2024-May-23 54 minutes |
Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel: Jeannie Marshall 2024-May-22 54 minutes |
How global liberation efforts helped shape the Dene fight for self-determination 2024-May-21 54 minutes |
Food Security: Root Causes and Pathways to Change 2024-May-17 54 minutes |
The Lives of Women, Readers and Alice Munro 2024-May-14 54 minutes |
What role can solidarity play when confronting political and social issues? 2024-May-13 54 minutes |
The Return of Inequality | Lessons of History 2024-May-10 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Jennifer Welsh on how inequality is undermining liberal democracy 2024-May-09 54 minutes |
How a nation could be both free and equal 2024-May-07 54 minutes |
Lisa LaFlamme: In Defence of Democracy 2024-May-03 54 minutes |
Starting a global conversation to restore civility and liberal democracy 2024-May-02 54 minutes |
Could resetting the body's clock help cure jet lag? 2024-Apr-29 54 minutes |
Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society | Tech Expert Ron Deibert 2024-Apr-26 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Ron Deibert on how spyware is changing the nature of authority today 2024-Apr-25 54 minutes |
The Making and Unmaking of Violent Men | Miglena Todorova 2024-Apr-24 54 minutes |
Wilkie Collins: A true detective of the human mind 2024-Apr-23 54 minutes |
Salmon depletion in Yukon River puts First Nations community at risk 2024-Apr-22 54 minutes |
“Sometimes I think this city is trying to kill me…” 2024-Apr-19 54 minutes |
The "Reconciliation" Generation: Indigenous Youth and the Future for Indigenous People 2024-Apr-18 54 minutes |
The history of bombing civilians — and why it’s still a military tactic 2024-Apr-17 54 minutes |
The 2000 CBC Massey Lectures: The Rights Revolution by Michael Ignatieff 2024-Apr-12 54 minutes |
Massey at 60: Michael Ignatieff on how human rights language has shaped Canadian politics 2024-Apr-11 54 minutes |
Bonus | 2024 Massey lecturer Ian Williams on courageous conversations and taking risks 2024-Apr-10 45 minutes |
Authoritarian study makes a comeback to understand lure of far-right movements 2024-Apr-09 54 minutes |
Montreal's hidden Confederate history 2024-Apr-05 54 minutes |
Living in legal limbo: How states create 'ghost citizens' 2024-Apr-04 54 minutes |
Betrayal of Faith: The Story of Pastedechouan 2024-Apr-03 54 minutes |
What Good Is Philosophy? 2024-Apr-01 54 minutes |
Nine Minutes that Changed the World 2024-Mar-29 54 minutes |
Putin Critic Garry Kasparov: Winter is Here 2024-Mar-28 54 minutes |
Conflicted: a Ukrainian journalist covers her nation at war 2024-Mar-27 54 minutes |
CBC Massey Lectures: Audience Q&A with Astra Taylor 2024-Mar-25 54 minutes |