Ideas

This week, Connie Walker and the team at Gimlet won the Pulitzer Prize and a Peabody Award for the podcast, Stolen: Surviving St. Michael's. We're celebrating Connie's achievement on IDEAS with the Indigenous Speakers Series Lecture she gave at Vancouver Island University. Connie shares her observations and experiences, both professional and personal, on the evolution of journalistic coverage of Indigenous stories. *This episode originally aired January 7, 2022.

Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa believes online disinformation could pose an existential threat to democracy — and she's not alone. Ressa joins Citizen Lab founder Ron Deibert for a conversation about how online impunity is eroding civil society and how we can fight back.

Can shame be positive? Some philosophers see it as an emotion that can improve social relationships, and cultivate a better self. Philosophers Owen Flanagan gives context based on his book, How to Do Things with Emotions, and Bongrae Seok explains the shame in the longstanding Confucian tradition. *This episode originally aired on April 21, 2022.

“We travel a tightrope,” writes poet and actor Walter Borden, “which we all must cross in order to embrace the fact that, in spite of everything, ‘we done made it over.” IDEAS celebrates the delightful wisdom of Walter Borden and a revised version of his one-man play, The Last Epistle of Tightrope Time.

Under international law, each person has the right to a nationality including not being arbitrarily deprived of it. Yet citizenship stripping is on the rise, sometimes even leading to statelessness. Could western societies see the return of exile as punishment? IDEAS explores the question: is citizenship a right or a privilege?

The future of the newspaper business doesn't look bright. According to Jordan Bitove, publisher and owner of the Toronto Star, the industry requires government help in creating an "ethical media supply chain." He outlines his plan for the newspaper, and why he won't let it fail.

Ukrainian poet Ostap Slyvynsky has been at the Lviv railway station helping refugees on their way west, escaping the horrors of war. They tell him stories of what they have left, what they have seen and experienced. He has created a sort of A to Z of all these stories — a compendium of all the things that people say about war.

We’ve heard of the Anthropocene: how human activity has altered the planet. But the Great Acceleration? It’s that period from 1950 onwards, when the same human activities revved up even more, and are still accelerating. IDEAS contributor David Kattenburg examines the crucial, and sometimes contested, meanings of this age of Great Acceleration.

Jordyn and Anne had family members with breast cancer. They each got genetic testing and found out they too carried genes that gave them very high odds of getting cancer too. Both of these women decided to deal with the risk preemptively by having surgery. This is part one of 'The Previvor Dilemma.' Subscribe to the White Coat, Black Art podcast to download the second part of the series, and explore the show’s vast archive.

Identity and historical and social context shape what we know and how we know it, even in the most mind-bending science. Quantum physicist Shohini Ghose discusses the interplay between quantum principles and Mi'kmaq astrophysicist Hilding Neilson talks about how Indigenous traditions of astronomy can enrich and broaden our views of the cosmos.