Ideas

A Russian soldier has been sentenced to life in prison for committing war crimes in Ukraine. But what are the rules of a war crime and how can they be enforced? IDEAS speaks to three experts to examine how international law deals with war crimes.

Calling something ‘beyond the pale’ puts it outside of civil society. (The word ‘pale’ actually means a ‘fence’.) So is there a fair way to build and maintain that fence in today’s political climate? IDEAS producer Tom Howell finds out how people are placing their private ‘pales’ these days — and what agreement remains on the existence of a public one.

In September 2021, Andrew Potter spoke with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about his book, On Decline. He argues that our entire civilization is in a slow, grinding descent into diminished prospects for a better world. We asked the author to return this month to assess how the past nine months have affected his grim prognosis.

IDEAS delves into one of the great enigmatic figures of the late 19th century: Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Known as the godmother of the New Age movement, she led the Theosophical Society — a group determined to seek 'no religion higher than the truth.'

In her latest book, Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit uncovers a George Orwell who sought simple pleasures and beauty and was besotted with the natural world — something that was core to his being and that was essential to a worldview that abhorred totalitarianism, lies and abuses of language.

"Sand is the material that matters most to what it means for us to be human," says researcher Nehal El-Hadi. She explores how sand shapes everything from our cities to our understanding of time — and what it means that the global supply of sand is dwindling, in her lecture, Poetics, Politics, and Paradoxes of Sand.

The passing of Ronnie Hawkins at age 87 is the inspiration for this special episode of IDEAS in which producer Philip Coulter retools a show he did for Inside the Music. It plumbs the CBC Radio's extensive archives featuring The Hawk and captures the bottomless charisma, warmth and energy that defined his legendary career.

Science writer and scholar Britt Wray specializes in the mental health impacts of the ecological crisis. Her new book, Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis, shares productive ways to cope, think, and act while facing an anxious ecological present and uncertain future.

Richard Wright was the biggest name in Black American literature in the 1940s. He fell out of favour, in part the result of critiques by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. But a recent publication of a Wright manuscript has led to a re-evaluation of his legacy and enduring relevance.

Early on in his coverage of COVID, journalist Ed Yong realized it was more than just a science story — it was an omni-crisis. His journalism focuses on exposing the cracks in society exacerbated by the pandemic. He delivered this lecture as part of the Lind Initiative Future of the Media series at the University of British Columbia in April 2022.