Big Ideas

Contemporary media is full of gossip and scandal. It says alot about our preoccupations and moral attitudes. In the same way colonial scandals give historians an inside view of colonial society and how the British empire worked.

Retired spy chief James Clapper was the Director of National Intelligence under Obama. His memoir details the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, the fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks and Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Poet, Lemn Sissay, was taken from his mother and spent 18 years in the state care system in the UK where he was physically, emotionally, and racially abused.

Human evolution is a million-year story.  Yet language only appeared in the last 100,000 years. Psychologist Michael Corballis believes that language evolution is far older and more complex. He describes the connections between language and thinking and argues that we underestimate the cognitive ability of other animals.

We can learn important lessons from cats. These are tales about courage, love and overcoming the odds.

Should home owners subsidize social housing with a property tax? Low income earners struggle with high rents while home owners benefit from low taxes and booming real estate markets. Revenue from a property tax could build affordable public housing.

What is "toxic masculinity" and do men need to rethink what it means to be masculine in an age of #metoo?

With the ability to manipulate DNA we’re now shaping our own evolution and DNA is also revealing the million-year story of Homo Sapiens and the many other human species who’ve walked the earth.

Gene and cell therapy and the search for immortality and DNA revealing human evolution.

If you could live forever would you choose to do it? Art, science and religion provide us with different solutions to our mortality. In this final Boyer lecture Professor John Rasko cautions against over-reach and the temptation to play God.