Ideas

Harvard historian Tiya Miles believes the more girls and women are outdoors, the more fulfilling their lives will be. In her book, Wild Girls, Miles shows how girls who found self-understanding in the natural world became women who changed America.

What do ghost stories capture about the experience of being stateless? IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed speaks with lawyer and scholar Jamie Chai Yun Liew on how states create “ghost citizens” — and keep them living in limbo.

Pastedechouan was an Innu boy taken to France by Catholic clergymen in 1620. What happened to him 400 years ago may well be the template that would later become the residential school system. IDEAS retraces the story of Pastedechouan, revealing that history has an extremely long reach.

For award-winning poet and bestselling author Ross Gay, joy and delight aren’t frivolous or a privilege. He argues they’re absolutely essential to a meaningful life — especially in the face of grief, sadness and suffering. 

In 2015, Garry Kasparov's book Winter is Coming warned that the West’s hesitant policies towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin encouraged his authoritarian tendencies. Nearly 10 years later, Putin’s army is still fighting in Ukraine, and at home, he’s shut down virtually all dissent. Nahlah Ayed speaks with Garry Kasparov.

“We face a continual tension between holding the government to account, and not wanting the enemy to undermine us by exploiting bad news," says Ukrainian journalist Veronika Melkozerova. She delivered this year's Peter Stursberg Foreign Correspondents Lecture, focusing her talk on what Ukrainian journalists confront daily: patriotism versus journalism.

Kate Beaton and her family have deep roots in hard-working, rural Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. In her 2024 Henry Kreisel Memorial Lecture, the popular cartoonist points out what is lost when working-class voices are shut out of opportunities in the worlds of arts, culture, and media.

Writer and political organizer Astra Taylor is the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer. She speaks with Nahlah Ayed about key moments in her intellectual coming-of-age, from her early life in the “unschooling” movement to her involvement with Occupy Wall Street. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 7, 2023.*

Philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain brought up an important question during the 1993 CBC Massey Lectures: is democracy as we know it in danger? Author and critic Randy Boyagoda and IDEAS producer Sean Foley revisit Elshtain's lectures. This episode is part of a series of conversations with — and about — former Massey Lecturers to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the CBC Massey Lectures.

In a world where peace and justice can be hard to come by, The Hague in The Netherlands projects something special: the city is a base for several world courts, as well as non-governmental organizations, charities and non-profits. It's even earned itself the title of the "City of Peace and Justice." In The Fire Within Us, IDEAS takes a look at why some organizations call The Hague home.