Ideas

In the mid-20th century, convenience was presented as 'the wave of the future,' where revolutionary home appliances would reduce work and save time. Today, convenience drives the success of tech and retail giants, our phones have become 'convenience machines,' and AI has taken the concept to terrifying heights. What happens when a culture positions convenience as a 'supreme value'? In this podcast, IDEAS contributing producer Olivia Trono explores the cult of convenience and considers what inconvenience may have to offer us.

Guests in this episode:

Luang Por Amaro is the abbot of Amaravati Buddhist Monastery. His talk “Choose Life, Choose Inconvenience” is available on YouTube.

Rebecca Beausaert is a history professor at the University of Guelph, and co-curator of "Kitchens of the Future: Food, Technology, and Convenience Culture in Cold War Canada."

Joshua Neves is a professor of film and moving image studies at Concordia University, and co-author of In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a media studies professor at the University of Virginia, and author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy.

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia University, and author of The Age of Extraction and The Attention Merchants.

Theatre of the Absurd was born in the wake of the Second World War as a recoil against the violent fetish that totalitarian regimes had for “order.” For 75 years, absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco's plays have been running continuously in Paris. IDEAS contributor Danny Braun went to Paris to delve into Ionesco's world where a professor can conclude confidently that a dog is in fact a cat. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 9, 2025.

The 21st century is witness to resurgent global authoritarianism, driven by leaders who answer to no law other than their own. Nahlah Ayed and panelists consider the rise of today’s authoritarians — Trump, Putin, Orban, Duterte and beyond — and what we can learn from history about how authoritarianism can be challenged, and ultimately defeated. This final episode in How to Defeat Authoritarianism examines our present moment, identifying the ways in which authoritarian politics has returned — and the tools to resist them.

Listen to other episodes in this series:

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Benito Mussolini's Italy

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's Uganda

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Bashar al-Assad's Syria

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's Chile

Guests on this podcast:

Marie-Joelle Zahar is a professor of political science at the University de Montréal. She is a 2023-26 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow, and has served multiple terms as a mediation expert for the United Nations, including a senior expert in the Office of the Special Envoy for Syria in 2017.

Miriam Mufti is an associate professor of political science at the University of Waterloo. She’s the author of Pathways to Power, Recruitment and Regime Stability in Pakistan.

Lucan Ahmad-Way is the distinguished professor of democracy in the political science department at the University of Toronto, and is the co-author of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism.

Hanif Abdurraqib lives his life heart-forward. His writing is informed by the many losses he's endured, but also by his commitment to "love deeply" and to not let machines do his thinking and feeling for him. Doing so, he says, risks atrophying our hearts and minds. "For me, the cost of a heart that's fraying at the edges is too high."

Abdurraqib is the 2026 Weston International Award winner, presented by the Writers Trust of Canada for a body of work by a nonfiction author. He is a poet, essayist, cultural critic, and author of eight books, including, There’s Always Next Year and A Little Devil in America.

Feeling despair over the threats to democracy coming out of The Billionaire Age? Let alone the predictions we'll see 10 trillionaires within three years. Well, there are concrete solutions. Relatively straightforward ones. Thinkers from Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, to Dutch philosopher Ingrid Robyens to self-described oligarch and American venture capitalist Nick Hanauer say democracy can win over oligarchy.

Listen to episodes in this five-part series, The Billionaire Age:

Listen to Part One: How did we get here?

Listen to Part Two: Disney heiress on the dangers of extreme wealth

Listen to Part Three: How oligarchs are taking over the world

Guests in this episode:

Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher and economist. She is the chair in Ethics of Intuitions at Utrecht University, and the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.

Gabriel Zucman is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nitin Bharti is an economist and lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He is also the South and South-East Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab.

Lars Osberg is an economics professor at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest book is The Scandalous Rise of Inequality in Canada.

Paul Krugman is an economist and the winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Tim Wu is a legal scholar and professor at Columbia Law School. He is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. His latest book is The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-authored the book, Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing The Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America, with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. He also hosts the podcast Pitchfork Economics.

Younger generations in Nunavut today are less likely to grow up immersed in Inuktut. At a language school in Iqaluit, Inuit adults who didn’t grow up speaking Inuktut now have the chance to learn it as a second language at the Pirurvik Centre. By learning the words for kinship terminology, they’re also discovering things about their families they never knew. *This episode is the first in a two-part series on language revitalization. It originally aired on March 24, 2025.

“Truth telling is profoundly visual. Art created by Indigenous peoples is not mere expression — it is cognitive, ceremonial, and political," writes Gerald McMaster in Art,Truth and Reconciliation. His book is the first of its kind, featuring Indigenous visual responses to Canada’s residential and day school system: from the drawings of children in the schools themselves, to the art of survivors, and to their descendants, who are carrying the story forward. McMaster says art does the work that words cannot — "bearing witness, restoring dignity, and refusing silence.”

Guest in this podcast:

Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist, scholar, and author, Art, Truth and Reconciliation.

Emma Hassencahl-Perley is an artist, and Curator of Indigenous Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, in Fredericton, NB.

Adrian Stimson is an artist and residential school survivor and thriver.

Mark Atleo is an elder, a fisherman, an artist, and a residential school survivor.

In 2000, Bashar al-Assad became president of Syria, also known as the authoritarian "Kingdom of Fear" that his father Hafez al-Assad had created three decades earlier. The younger Assad continued and intensified the use of imprisonment, torture and surveillance as tools of domination. His crackdown on a pro-democracy revolution turned into a 13-year civil war. Nahlah Ayed and panelists discuss what we can learn about the rise and collapse of authoritarianism from Assad’s rule and the 2024 collapse of his regime.  

Listen to other episodes in our series, How to Defeat Authoritarianism:

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Benito Mussolini's Italy

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's Uganda

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's Chile

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Today's Authoritarians

Guests on this podcast:

Basilios Zeno is assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at Trent University in Canada. His work combines research, advocacy, and policy work on forced migration and asylum, legal violence, social movement, and interpretive decolonizing methodologies. 

Marie-Joelle Zahar is a professor of political science at the University de Montréal. She has served multiple terms as a mediation expert, in fact, still serving in that role, for the United Nations, including as senior expert in the office of the Special Envoy for Syria in 2017. 

Abdulrahman Matar is a Syrian-Canadian writer and journalist, a novelist, poet, and a painter. He is the founder and director of the Seagull Cultural Forum and executive director of the Syrian Writers Association. He was arrested five times and spent nearly 10 years in prison as a result of his writing and his positions on issues of freedom and human rights.

Tareq Yousbasi is a journalist and a producer at the CBC of Syrian origin, who assisted with live translation.

Would you 'doo-be-doo' if you know it would help bridge divides? Try vocal improvisation — singing sounds, rhythms and melodies. PhD graduate Erwan Noblet teaches the practice and says it's a great way to open up and connect at another level being together. He believes the human voice has the power to communicate creatively when it's released from everyday verbal tasks. We asked three former politicians from different political parties to communicate through vocalization, without words. Their conversation may inspire you to take on vocal improv.

*This episode originally aired on Jan. 6, 2026 and is part of our ongoing series Ideas in the Trenches, which showcases fascinating new work by Canadian PhD students.

Guests in this episode:

Former Conservative MP Lisa Raitt

Former Liberal premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne

Former NDP MP Peggy Nash

Erwan Noblet has a PhD in critical studies in improvisation

French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is mostly remembered for being wrong. He published an early theory of evolution, before Charles Darwin. His claim was that animals were in charge of their own evolution. That didn’t hold up. But author Jessica Riskin

argues maybe it’s time to redeem Lamarck, a little bit. Riskin says that we should give animals — and humans — some credit for our own progress.

Guest in this episode:

Jessica Riskin is a historian of science at Stanford University, and author of The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.