IDEAS in the Afternoon for April 2025
* Please note this schedule is subject to change.
MONDAY, MAY 5
A GLOBAL HISTORY OF ELON MUSK: QUINN SLOBODIAN
The strange career of this unusual American oligarch has fascinated Slobodian, who views Musk's rise to power in terms of a larger, global story — the development of a new ideology based in video gaming, engineering, and technological futurism, and fed by a lust for both dominance and chaos. Examining Musk's life story alongside the arrival of artificial intelligences capable of infiltrating the public sphere, historian Quinn Slobodian, and author of Crack-Up Capitalism, presents his ideas to a packed house of concerned students, upstairs at McGill University's Faculty Club.
MONDAY, MAY 12
TIMOTHY SNYDER ON FREEDOM
Historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny) speaks to Nahlah Ayed about his newest book, On Freedom. In a political era where the word freedom is defined and redefined by whichever faction needs to evoke it, Snyder argues that — more than the freedom from various things — we actually need the freedom to thrive, for the sake of our common future. Recorded in front of an audience at the Toronto Reference Library.
MONDAY, MAY 19
MY STOMPIN' GROUNDS
Stompin' Tom Connors was a Canadian original — a singer with a voice that sounded like gravel in a bucket, and who wrote songs that celebrated everything about what it means to be Canadian: the glory of hockey, Sudbury on a Saturday night, picking tobacco in Tilsonburg, Ont., beautiful potatoes from PEI. Prolific — writing an estimated 600 songs — and charismatic, Tom died 12 years ago. But we need him now more than ever, just to remind us who we are, who we are not, and what keeps us together. A refresh of a programme first broadcast in 2013.
MONDAY, MAY 26
A HISTORY OF HUMAN SHIELDS
The use of human shields is likely as old as war itself. In contemporary times we often see the use of involuntary human shields in war and conflict by both regular armies and militias — a practice forbidden under international humanitarian law. But there is also a long history of people voluntarily putting their lives at risk as a way to protect and show solidarity with a person or ideal or to lay bare a difficult political or social reality. Depending on the circumstances, choosing to use one's own body as a form of protection might be celebrated or reviled. In this episode, we take a look at the history of human shields and how they've been used both as a weapon of war and a weapon of peace.
