IDEAS in the Afternoon for January 2025
* Please note this schedule is subject to change.
Monday, January 6
MURDER, MADNESS AND MARRIAGE: THE SENSATIONAL WORLD OF WILKIE COLLINS
Considered one of the first writers of mysteries and the father of detective fiction, Wilkie Collins used the genres to investigate the rapidly changing world around him, and to upend conventional thinking about society, the home, and the recesses of the human mind. Two hundred years after Wilkie Collins's birth, UBC Journalism director Kamal Al-Solaylee explores his work and its enduring power to make us look twice at the world we think we know.
Monday, January 13
WADE IN THE FOREST: WADE DAVIS
Anthropologist Wade Davis has smoked toad, tried ayahuasca, and figured out the actual zombie cocktail in Haiti. He's spent a lifetime travelling the world and writing books about the wonders of our planet, how we need to take care of all things both great and small, and what we have to learn from our many cultures. Wade Davis goes for a walk in the woods with producer Philip Coulter to talk about the ideas in his latest book of essays.
Monday, January 20
CHARLES TAYLOR'S COSMIC CONNECTIONS
Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor speaks to Nahlah Ayed about his life's journey, from growing up in Montreal in the 1930s, entering politics in the 1960s, developing the ideas for his 1991 CBC Massey Lectures, and more recently, turning towards Romantic poetry as a means to thinking through the most fundamental questions of what makes human beings tick. It's in works such as Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey poem, Taylor argues, that we can best trace the course of a human ambition that's always been at the heart of who we are: a yearning for ineffable connection to a cosmos.
Monday, January 27
NASTY, BRUTISH AND ANXIOUS — WHAT THOMAS HOBBES WOULD TELL DEMOCRACIES NOW
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes might be best known for his belief that in the state of nature, without a powerful sovereign force to rein people in, life is 'nasty, brutish and short.' Amid high anxiety regarding the health of democracy in Europe and North America, McGill University PhD student Vertika (who goes by the one name only) calls for a better understanding of what Hobbes believed about that very emotion: anxiety. She argues that his writing on the topic provides lessons for worried politicos today. IDEAS visits a political theory conference in Virginia, in the wake of the American election, to learn more.
