IDEAS in the Afternoon for December 2024 & January 2025
* Please note this schedule is subject to change.
Monday, December 2
WHAT THE BIRDS SAW
The face we give to our monsters says much about our anxieties as a culture. But…birds? Two classic works of 20th- century horror featured a violent avian army. This documentary looks at why a Daphne du Maurier short story, and the Alfred Hitchcock thriller inspired by it, imagined The Birds as humanity's mortal enemy. Seeded with fears of technological overreach, environmental disaster, and terror at the rise of the violent irrational, our 21st-century anxieties were anticipated. Gothic expert Catherine Wynne, historian Scott Poole, and literary scholar Lynn Kozak speak with IDEAS producer Lisa Godfrey.
Monday, December 9
DON'T LOOK BACK: THE MYTH OF ORPHEUS
Orpheus haunts us — with music and magic. Not a god, but he thinks he might just be, as he's powerful enough to rescue his wife from death, and to bring her back into his world — if he can manage not to break the rules and look at her on the way out of the underworld. The myth of Orpheus is the oldest love story, from ancient Greece — it's the story of the power of art, a story told through opera and film, and poetry. Two thousand five hundred years later, why does the myth of Orpheus still have such a hold on us?
Monday, December 16
THE CHATHAM COLOURED ALL-STARS
Ninety years ago, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars became the first all-Black team to win the Ontario baseball championship. In another time and place, players like Wilfred "Boomer" Harding and Earl "Flat" Chase might have been larger-than-life figures, hailed for their superior skill and athleticism. But they remained both legends and part of the neighbourhood in Chatham's East End. Now the story of their historic 1934 season, including the racist treatment they endured and their exploits on the field has resurfaced, and they're getting their due as trailblazing Black Canadian athletes.
Monday, December 23
KEEPING KAYFABE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF PRO WRESTLING
Is there beauty in a Reverse Frankensteiner? Truth in a Crossface Chickenwing? Meaning in a Turnbuckle Thrust? These are questions for professional wrestlers, and professional philosophers. This episode brings both groups together, for a rough 'n tumble cage match of philosophical inquiry. Featuring Douglas Edwards, author of Philosophy Smackdown and Adam "The Haida Heartthrob" Ryder, philosophers and wrestlers will grapple over truth, ethics, and politics, both inside the ring and out in the stands.
Monday, December 30
FIRESIDE & ICICLES — POEMS FOR WINTER
Facing a cold winter, IDEAS producer Tom Howell seeks not to escape misery so much as exploit it, with the goal of achieving a certain delicious mix of loneliness, nostalgia, yearning, and elevated moaning known to Welsh poets as hiraeth. He digs through a pile of poetic works from ancient to new in search of the perfect works to evoke hiraeth in their own way. Howell enlists the help of poets as well as IDEAS's online community.
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.
