Ideas

How anxiety over today's democracy is political

Anxiety is an inescapable, fundamental human reaction to an unpredictable future. This is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a curmudgeon of the 17th century who believed that without a powerful, sovereign government life would be "nasty, brutish and short." Politics and uncertainty go hand in hand. In this podcast, IDEAS explores how a new take on Hobbes on the topic of anxiety offers a surprising perspective on American politics and democracy. For worried politicos today his way of thinking offers valuable lessons.*This episode originally aired on Jan. 13, 2025.Guests in this podcast:Vertika is a political science PhD student at McGill University.Kinch Hoekstra is a professor of political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes.Bethany Albertson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, and the co-author of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World.Shana Gadarian is a professor of political science and associate dean for research at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

How math and literature are unexpectedly connected

Mathematics is everywhere: said high school math teachers in every classroom. But did you ever think math could be linked to literature? And not just in works from the literary greats of the past but for example Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. The relationship between math and literature are fundamentally creative, says Sarah Hart who speaks to Nahlah Ayed about how these two things that seem so polar opposite are deeply intertwined.Sarah Hart's book is called Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.

What if your favourite food became extinct?

It is possible. Flavours have been lost to the past as culinary physicist Lenore Newman explains. She points to the extinction of the passenger pigeon — one numbering in the billions throughout North America — as an example. In 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati zoo — and in place of the pigeon, came the industrialized farming of chicken. Newman says we're now transitioning lab-raised food — a technology capable of pushing a global history of scarcity into one of abundance, and that's all without any land usage. She calls it the "food singularity."

Massey Lecture Part 2 | The six years that remade human rights

The ideals behind the concept of human rights — such as the sacredness of life, reciprocity, justice and fairness — have millennia-old histories. After the carnage of the Second World War and the Holocaust, these ideas took a new legal form. In his second Massey Lecture, Alex Neve considers six dizzying years that laid out a blueprint for a new world. Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on the series.

Lessons from the women of Iran's 1979 'stolen' revolution

In 1979 mere weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini took power, Iranian women marched in the streets of Tehran to show their fury at the revolution. Forty years after their protest, contributor Donya Ziaee spoke to three Iranian women who were there, fighting to turn the tide of history. Now as Iran's future remains uncertain, lessons from their experience have resonance today. *This episode originally aired on March 8, 2019.