Ideas

Behind every great chatbot are many human workers making decisions on how those chatbots behave and evolve. Recent PhD graduate Noah Khan has been observing these workers and shares his findings on their emotions and motivations as they design and build AI entities that communicate with users — influencing our own emotions and outlooks.

When Rohingya poet Mayyu Ali saw his name in print for the first time, he thought: "I exist." "Even though my government doesn't recognize [me] I exist in my writing," he told IDEAS. The Myanmar government has targeted the Rohingyas for decades, and Ali grew up with no birth certificate, no citizenship, and no human rights. He fled genocide in 2017 to live in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, until he resettled to Canada in 2021. Ali speaks with Nahlah Ayed about survival, the power of poetry, and his long journey to become a citizen for the first time in his life.

Fascism has been called “the aestheti-cization of politics.” Nazis and Italian Fascists both made visual culture, art, even fashion part of their destructive programs. Now the far-right in the U.S. is taking lessons from history, selling its ideas through memes, and hate-filled videos.

How do authoritarian leaders use threats, illusions and force to seize and maintain power? And what does it take for truth and justice to prevail? IDEAS explores the rise and fall of pivotal authoritarians and their regimes from recent world history, and asks what we can learn from their eventual downfall. We start our series with the legacy of Italian fascism and its relevance today.

Listen to other episodes in this series:

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Augusto Pinochet's Chile

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Idi Amin's Uganda

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

How to Defeat Authoritarianism | Today's Authoritarians

Guests in this podcast:

Joshua Arthurs is an associate professor in the Faculty of Information and the Department of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto.

Robert Ventresca is the president of King's University College at Western University and a historian of 20th century Europe.

Aitana Guia is the Mackenzie Papineau Memorial Chair in Modern Spanish History at York University, Toronto, Canada. 

Acclaimed author Gabor Maté joins the conversation in part two of our series exploring Wilhelm von Humboldt’s public education system. Maté is a former English teacher. In this episode we ask: Is Humboldt's 200-year-old system equipped to meet the challenging demands of the 21st century? And does it still reflect his ideals, especially at the university level? *This episode concludes our two-part series. It originally aired on April 16, 2024.

Two hundred years ago, Wilhelm von Humboldt created the education system as we know it today. At the heart of his philosophy of education was the concept of Bildung — reaching one's inner potential. Yet over the years, as his public education system was adopted, Bildung may well have been the critical piece left out. *This episode is part one of two-part series. It originally aired on April 15, 2024.

They were known as School Cars and Schools on Wheels. Trains that chugged along the railroads and brought schooling to children living in the isolated communities of Northern Ontario. It was a novel six-month experiment that lasted from 1926 to 1967. IDEAS explores the early project in remote education, homeschooling, and nation-building. *This episode originally aired on Jan. 9, 2023.

The Trump administration has been targeting higher education for some time now — freezing grants and filing lawsuits against leading universities. But these threats are not limited to the U.S. and there are growing concerns about a potential spillover effect on Canadian campuses. In this podcast, host Nahlah Ayed speaks with three panelists to explore what's at stake with the politicized attacks on universities — and why it matters to all of us. *This episode aired on April 13, 2026.

This podcast was recorded in front of an audience at the Isabel Theatre in Toronto.

Guests in this episode:

Malinda S. Smith is an associate vice president research and a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. She is the co-editor of Nuances of Blackness in the Canadian Academy: Teaching, Learning, and Researching While Black.

Randy Boyagoda is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as the university’s advisor on civil discourse, the first position of its kind in Canada.

Davide Panagia is professor and chair of political science at UCLA, where his work bridges philosophy, media and democratic life. Before that, he held the Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies at Trent University.

A hundred years ago homework was described as a 'sin against childhood.' But the practice is still a staple of our education system. Some parents like Dawn Quelch took a stand and banned it from their home. IDEAS examines the ideological roots of homework and the shift in thinking about child psychology and development.

What happens when original artworks become endless copies? German philosopher Walter Benjamin called it the death of "aura," and his concept predicted our digital age. He describes "aura" as the energy that encases an object, and argued standing before the presence of a great artwork was transcendent. His ideas continue to flourish in university settings around the world. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 2, 2025.