Ideas

The familiar plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear is also the plot of many novels written for our own times. Nahlah Ayed speaks to novelists Preti Taneja and Jane Smiley who have reworked the Lear story. She’s also joined by Stratford Festival artistic director Antoni Cimolino to explore what King Lear has to say to us today about gender, power, loyalty and inheritance. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 13, 2021.

Dante Alighieri died 700 years ago this year. His enemies had him exiled, hoping he'd disappear from history. But instead he wrote a masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, making himself the hero of his own epic poem — and in so doing, attained literary immortality. This is the first part of a three-part series that originally aired in May of 2002.

Salman Rushdie argues that “the breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality.” He speaks with Nahlah Ayed about how the old consensus about reality fell apart — and whether it’s possible to build a new one. *This episode originally aired on Oct. 4, 2021.

They’re weird. They break the rules. They’re kinda bad. They are cult movies. Dive into the stories of films from ‘Troll 2’ to ‘The Last Dragon’ to the ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ to learn what drives people to watch these oddball films again and again. Producer Matthew Lazin-Ryder looks at the history, future, and function of cult movies. *Originally aired on May 19, 2020.

Celebrity culture existed long before the stage, screen, and social media. Famous people, who elicited Kardashian-level feelings of love and hate in the public, were present centuries ago... though they share qualities with stars today, say scholars Irina Dumitrescu and Sharon Marcus.

Central to Dante's Divine Comedy is the idea of contrapasso: the appropriate afterlife punishment that matches the transgressions committed during one's earthly existence. Novelist Randy Boyagoda applies this notion to create Dante's Indiana, a tragi-comic epic that descends deep into the recesses of modern American life.

The demographics of Canada’s prison population are far out of line with the rest of Canada. As part of the Provocation Ideas Festival and the Toronto International Festival of Authors, Nahlah Ayed hosts a panel discussion on challenges facing the legal system, and how to build a better court.

World news, local voices. Nothing is Foreign is a weekly trip to where the story is unfolding. Hosted by Tamara Khandaker. This episode takes you inside the culture and class wars of Egypt and explores what the banning of popular music says about the African country's image and its future. More episodes are available at: http://hyperurl.co/nothingisforeign

Kuper Island is an 8-part series that tells the stories of four students: three who survived and one who didn’t. They attended one of Canada’s most notorious residential schools – where unsolved deaths, abuse, and lies haunt the community and the survivors to this day. Hosted by Duncan McCue. More episodes are available at hyperurl.co/kuperisland

Over the past two years, millions of teenagers have missed out on the rites of passage that generations before them experienced as a matter of course. Add to that their increased levels of anxiety and isolation, and it quickly becomes apparent why the COVID generation stands apart as a uniquely marked one.