Ideas

This isn't a wrap or best of 2025 kind of list. This IDEAS podcast is packed full of all kinds of recommendations from our smart, insightful contributors. We asked them to suggest a work of nonfiction that recently made them think — maybe even think differently — about a particular topic. Their answers cover several genres and varied subjects. Some may surprise you.

Don't worry about writing any titles or names down, we have that covered on our website. The online list also includes a bonus: added recommendations from IDEAS producers. Enjoy!

There’s a constant mantra Frank Gehry would always hear from his mentors who have since died – “Don’t you dare ever stop working.” It’s a sentiment he lived by right until his death at 96. In fact his last major cultural building, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, will open in 2026. So how does his fierce, creative drive square with his mortality?

In an expansive conversation from 2017 with IDEAS producer Mary Lynk, Gehry shares his thoughts about death and his life, from growing up Jewish in Toronto, to his complicated relationship with his father, to his move to L.A. at 18, to how his career flourished. *This is the second episode in a two-part series.

Listen to Part One: The architecture that brought Frank Gehry to tears

Rebel architect Frank Gehry believed architecture IS art. He strived to evoke emotion in every design. Last Friday, Gehry died at 96 but he never stopped creating. In 2017, IDEAS producer Mary Lynk had a rare opportunity to spend two days with Gehry at his LA studio. Their wide-ranging conversation covers many aspects of his life and career, including a moment at 40 when the sight of an ancient piece of art from 500 BC led him to weep. "I think if you went and looked at it, you would cry too," he told Lynk.

*This conversation is a two-part series that delves into Frank Gehry's infusion of humanity into his designs.

Listen to Part Two: Architect Frank Gehry on how to exit life

For Afghans, listening to a traditional song can bring them back "home." In 2021, when the Taliban seized power again in Afghanistan, orchestras disbanded and musicians fled for their lives. They brought with them their distinctive and storied music, embedded with notes hailing from classical music from Iran and India. IDEAS takes a journey to Afghanistan with members of the Afghan diaspora, and asks how the idea of home is encapsulated in music and how conflict has played a role in reshaping Afghan music.

*This is the final episode in a five-part series called The Idea of Home exploring the multiple and contested meanings of home. This episode originally aired on June 16, 2022.

Guests in this episode:

Mir Mahdavi is a poet, a writer, and a researcher in the area of art, literature and poetry, originally from Afghanistan. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario and holds a Ph.D. in cultural studies from Trent University and a MA of cultural studies from McMaster University. He was the publisher and the editor in chief of Atab, a weekly newspaper published during 2002-2003 in Kabul.

Hangama is one of the most renowned female Afghan singers of her generation. Born in 1962 in Kabul, Hangama's stage name was chosen by her mother when she decided to pursue a career in music. She left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation and now lives in the Greater Toronto Area.

Sara Soroor is an Afghan-Canadian singer-songwriter and childhood educator in the Greater Toronto Area. She is Hangama's daughter and started singing and playing the piano at age four.

Wares Fazelyar was born and raised in Toronto, and plays the rubab. He is an advisory board member for the Afghan Youth Engagement and Development Initiative. He and his brother Haris perform Afghan folk music in the Greater Toronto Area.

Wolayat Tabasum Niroo is a researcher and Fulbright scholar currently based in the United States. She has a PhD in Education from Old Dominion University and a MPhil in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. She grew up in Afghanistan and has studied how Afghan women's folk music creates an alternative space for political expression, grief and imagining other possibilities.

In 2022, IDEAS explored how the brutal strategy called "urbicide" — the intentional killing of a city — is used in war to destroy residents' sense of home and belonging. This podcast revisits the original story and includes a brief update from architect Ammar Azzouz. Since the collapse of the Assad regime last year, he has returned to Homs, Syria, twice. He tells IDEAS he has mixed emotions being home again.

*This episode is part of our series, The Idea of Home.It originally aired on June 16, 2022.

Guests in this podcast:

Ammar Azzouz is an architectural critic and analyst at Arup, as well as a research associate at the University of Oxford. His most recent book is Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. 

Nasser Rabbat is a professor and the director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. He has published numerous articles and several books on topics ranging from Mamluk architecture to Antique Syria, 19th century Cairo, Orientalism, and urbicide.

Marwa Al-Sabouni is a Syrian architect based in Homs and the author of The Battle for Home: The Vision of a Young Architect in Syria and Building for Hope: Towards an Architecture of Belonging.

Hiba Bou Akar is an assistant professor in the Urban Planning program at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She is the author of For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut's Frontiers.

Nada Moumtaz is an assistant professor in the Department of Study of Religion and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She trained and worked as an architect in Beirut, Lebanon, and is the author of God's Property: Islam, Charity, and the Modern State.

Hospitality — and hospitals. Two words that share a root, but whose meanings often seem at odds with each other. IDEAS traces the historical roots of hospitals, the tension between hospitality and discipline that has defined hospitals throughout their history, and what it means to create a hospitable hospital in the 21st century. 

*This is the third episode in our series, The Idea of Home, which originally aired on June 15, 2022.

People you will hear in this podcast:

Rachel Kowalsky is a pediatric emergency physician at New York—Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City. She co-created a website called Our Break Room to share poems and stories for healthcare workers.

Joshna Maharaj is a Toronto-based chef and activist, and the author of Take Back the Tray: Revolutionizing Food in Hospitals, Schools and Other Institutions.

Kathy Loon is executive lead for Indigenous collaboration & relations at Sioux Lookout Meno Ya Win Health Centre (SLMHC) and a member of Slate Falls First Nation.

Carole Rawcliffe is professor emerita of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. She specializes in the history of medieval medicine and early hospitals. 

Kevin Siena is a professor of history at Trent University. He specializes in the history of medicine and the history of hospitals in England in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. 

David Goldstein is an associate professor of English at York University, where he is also the coordinator of the creative writing program. He is the co-editor of Early Modern Hospitality. 

This episode also includes a clip from a 2016 CBC Radio interview with Maureen Lux, professor of history at Brock University and the author of Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada. 

In ancient Greece, hospitality (or xenia) was seen as a sacred moral imperative. Someone who defied the obligations placed on both host and guest risked the wrath of the gods, or even outright war. Today, the word xenia has largely fallen out of use, but its opposite, xenophobia, has been a driving factor in contemporary politics for years. IDEAS explores ancient traditions of hospitality in this second episode of our five-part series, The Idea of Home. *This episode originally aired on June 14, 2022.

At age 11, writer Andrew Lam fled Vietnam during the Fall of Saigon. Nearly 45 years later, he returned to a radically different city. He believes "you will be cursed with longing" if you continue to search for the feeling of home you had in the past.

At a time when more people have been forcibly displaced from their homes than at any other time in history, IDEAS explores what it means to return home years — or decades — later. *This is the first episode in our five-part series, The Idea of Home, which originally aired on June 13, 2022.

There’s history, and then there’s oral history. And when it comes to the impacts of war on those who fight them — oral history opens doors to the past that would otherwise stay firmly shut. Michael Petrou, an historian with the Canadian War Museum, argues oral history is especially valuable because it allows us to hear from people "whose voices are quiet, downplayed, or ignored." Their untold stories provide a fuller picture of how war shapes people and societies. 

Remembrance Day. Every year we are called on to remember, to reflect on the sacrifices of those who fought in Canada’s wars. Veterans of those wars have a conflicted relationship with Remembrance Day: sometimes their own acts of remembrance include official ceremonies, while others avoid them altogether.

*This the second and last of a two-part series exploring the post-war experience, gathered by the Canadian War Museum’s In Their Own Voices oral history project.