The comedian Phil Hanley remembers his school teachers calling him lazy and stupid, when in truth he was struggling with dyslexia. In his new memoir Spellbound: My Life as a Dyslexic Wordsmith, Hanley writes about how his mother defended him in an unsympathetic education system, and why he doesn’t want dyslexic kids today to feel the shame he did.

Bird populations across North America have fallen by billions over the last 50 years, according to a staggering report from Cornell University. Researcher Amanda Rodewald explains what’s happening, and why common birds like sparrows, blackbirds and finches are suffering the greatest losses.

A small group of Canadian and Danish scientists have been drilling deep into the ice on Axel Heiberg Island, on the western edge of the Arctic Ocean. Ice core scientist Alison Criscitiello explains why drilling into the ice cap can give us a glimpse into the Earth’s past.

Cardinal Robert Prevost is the first American pontiff, choosing the name Pope Leo XIV. Jesuit priest and journalist Father Sam Sawyer explains why that surprised some people, as did the new pope’s social media rebuke, earlier this year, of JD Vance and the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants and asylum seekers.

Hopes for peace in Ukraine rest with three men: the country’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump. Journalists Simon Shuster and Luke Harding have covered this conflict and its characters in depth. They join Matt Galloway to share their insights into each leader’s personalities and motivations.

There’s something undeniably special about Alberta’s World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, with its taxidermied rodents kitted out as firefighters, hair stylists, or even enjoying a game of curling. The CBC’s Allison Dempster went to Torrington, Alta., to find out how the town came up with such an unusual tourist attraction — and why it ended up drawing the ire of Paul McCartney.

Trump’s economic fight with China has already led to a drop in cargo coming into U.S. ports. Supply chain experts are warning that tariffs could soon mean half-empty shelves and higher prices south of the border, which could have a knock-on effect for Canada.

It's not you — the internet really does suck. Novelist, blogger and noted internet commentator Cory Doctorow explains what happened to the internet and why you're tormented by ads, bots, algorithms, AI slop and so many pop-ups. Spoiler alert: it wasn't an accident.

In Understood: Who Broke the Internet, Doctorow gets into the decisions made by powerful people that got us here, and most importantly, how we fix it. More episodes of Who Broke the Internet are available at: https://link.mgln.ai/te1tCG

The internet was once a user-friendly place built to connect people, but now it’s rife with bots picking fights, AI fakery and algorithms hellbent on selling you something. In the new CBC podcast Understood: Who Broke the Internet?, tech journalist Cory Doctorow breaks down what he calls the "enshittification" of the internet — and who’s responsible.

Air traffic controllers reportedly lost track of planes for 90 seconds at Newark airport recently in a chaotic radar outage that prompted some staff to take stress leave. We look at what led to this nightmare scenario, and what needs to be done to make sure it doesn’t happen again.