The Sunday Edition for July 19, 2020

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Kevin Sylvester:

How fungi make life as we know it possible: Unbeknownst to most of us, we are actually living in a mycelial world — a world infused, connected and possibly driven by our relationship with fungi. Not only do fungi sustain almost all the living systems around us, they also challenge how we think and what we know. Kevin Sylvester speaks with Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, about the magical and mind-bending world of fungi.

COVID-19 is changing the value of passports: American passport holders used to be able to travel to 185 countries visa-free. Today, it's fewer than 30. That means Americans have joined the ranks of people whose passports are viewed with suspicion by the rest of the world. Sri Lankan writer Indi Samarajiva reflects on how his children's different passports — one British, one Sri Lankan — dramatically affect the way they move through the world. And Dutch citizenship scholar and consultant Dimitry Kochenov talks about how COVID is changing the way we think about passports and citizenship.

The catastrophic poetry of Anne Carson (reprise): We revisit Michael Enright's 2016 interview with renowned Canadian poet Anne Carson. They spoke about her fascination with grammar and syntax ("the secrets of life are embedded in grammar,") and why she calls writing "an attempt at catastrophe."

Kevin Sylvester is a writer and illustrator. His books include The Almost Epic Squad: Mucus Mayhem, the Neil Flambé Capers (now at six books), and the MINRs trilogy. For more than a decade, he worked at CBC National Radio Sports as a reporter, producer, documentary-maker, writer and host. Sylvester covered several Olympic Games, and he won the B'nai Brith Human Rights Award in 1998 for "Black Ice," a documentary about racism in hockey.