Ideas CBC Discover & Learn

Civility is under threat, authoritarianism and autocrats are on the rise and there's an erosion of institutional trust. Three pre-eminent speakers join IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed to discuss how Canada and other countries can promote respect and protect liberal democracy. 

You can’t pay rent with experimental poetry, so Hilary Peach trained as a welder. Twenty-plus years on, she’s now a boiler inspector, poet, and author of an award-winning memoir, Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood. Peach talks about the joys and contradictions of being an outsider inside the trades.

Salman Rushdie sees reality through the lens of time. There are the months after the nearly-fatal attack of August 2022 that he details in his memoir Knife. And the decade following the Iranian state’s February 1989 fatwa against him. In this conversation with Nahlah Ayed, he describes hinge moments in his uncannily storied life.

Canadian PhD graduate Kritika Vashishtha invented a new colour of light and combined it with artificial intelligence to fool the body into shifting time zones faster — creating a possible cure for jet lag. She tells IDEAS how this method could also help astronauts on Mars. *This episode is part of our series Ideas from the Trenches, which showcases fascinating new work by Canadian PhD students.

In 2020, CBC Massey lecturer and tech expert Ron Deibert asked us to consider how to mitigate the harms of social media and construct a viable communications ecosystem that supports civil society. We revisit his final Massey lecture that explores the kinds of restraints we need to place on government and corporations — and on our own endless appetite for data.

Citizen Lab founder and director Ron Deibert reflects on what’s changed in the world of spyware, surveillance, and social media since he delivered his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society. *This episode is part of an ongoing series of episodes marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the Massey Lectures.