Ideas CBC

Writer Barbara Nichol continues exploring shared assumptions about reading with original thinkers — writers, critics, scholars and journalists. This is the final part in a three-part series called Reading with a Grain of Salt. *This episode originally aired on June 26, 2020.

In his letters and poetry, Austrian writer Rainer Maria Rilke urged readers to “love the questions” instead of searching for answers, and to “sing out” with pain solitude causes them. His writing seems tailor-made for our own era — a dark interval of uncertainty, solitude, and grief.

The playwright Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend that he was writing a play with "a great deal of conversation about literature, little actions, tons of love." The Seagull is not unlike our own lives, where there isn't a ready-made plot with a neat ending. This episode is the fourth collaboration between IDEAS and Soulpepper Theatre Company's audio drama series Around the World in 80 Plays.

Teenagers can be erratic and emotional. But recent science may just have the answer to why teenagers are the way they are — and it's not just about hormones. This new understanding is changing the way some societies see teens and it may just lead to changing the boundary between teenager and adult. *Originally broadcast on January 28, 2020.

You hear the name ‘Alexander Graham Bell,’ and you think ‘inventor of the telephone.’ But he devoted much of his life to the ‘education’ of deaf people. Bell’s fraught legacy with the deaf community is explored in Veronica Simmonds' documentary, Unsound: The legacy of Alexander Graham Bell.

Writer Barbara Nichol continues exploring shared assumptions about reading, readers and books with original thinkers — writers, critics, scholars and journalists. This is part two in a three-part series called Reading with a Grain of Salt. *This episode originally aired on June 19, 2020.