The Sunday Edition for January 5, 2020
Listen to this week's episode with host Michael Enright.
Michael's essay on crying and being human: "The American researcher Paul Zak has spent a career studying how the brain reacts to certain chemical releases. He discovered that the neurochemical oxytocin when delivered and synthesized by the brain makes us more compassionate, more generous and more sensitive to the needs of others. He calls it our 'moral molecule.' It also makes us react by crying."
Paul Rogers on escalating tensions between the United States and Iran: The US and Iran have been waging a proxy war on a number of fronts throughout the Middle East for years. But U.S. airstrikes this week on Iranian targets in Iraq — particularly the killing of Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis — have the entire region on edge, while the rhetoric on all sides becomes more bellicose. British security expert Paul Rogers discusses the escalating conflict and its broader security and geopolitical implications.
Shut Up! I'm Thinking: Michael hosts the return of the game of lexical hilarity. Three intrepid panelists — CBC Radio personalities Nahlah Ayed, Laura Lynch and Peter Armstrong — will invent definitions for obscure words and try to guess their actual meaning. Find out what snollygoster, widdershins and seacock really mean — and what they SHOULD mean.
Repeat: Walking: A Pedestrian Pursuit: A special hour devoted to something our species spent millions of years evolving to do -- something our bodies are meant to do -- and that we've spent the past century trying to do as little as possible: walking. We'll hear from evolutionary biologist Daniel Lieberman on how humans became bipedal and from psychologist Alexandra Horowitz, writer Wayne Curtis and urban designer Ken Greenberg about the psychological, social and economic benefits of walking and why, after decades of being degraded by our car-centric culture, walking has been making a comeback.
Mail: Diary of a Decade
Music this week by: Angele Dubeau, the Cinematic Orchestra, Parissa and Ens Dastan, Maynard Ferguson, Andrew Hutchinson Trio, Andre Previn, Jaron Freeman-Fox, the Canadian Brass, Nancy Sinatra, the Shangri-Las, Patsy Cline, John Lee Hooker and Barry Elmes