 | IDEAS airs Monday to Friday on CBC Radio One
at 8 p.m. (8:30 p.m. NT) and 4 a.m. (4:30 a.m. NT) | |  | Monday, March 10, 2025 | | | |  | As part of our ongoing series, IDEAS at Crow's Theatre, novelist Janika Oza joins Nahlah Ayed on stage at the Guloien Theatre in Toronto to talk about the longing to return to our memories. (Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images) | | | Live in Toronto? Join us for The Radical Possibilities of Return | What kinds of return are possible when you can’t return home? Novelist Janika Oza considers how the narrative arcs of ordinary lives are shaped by ruptures like colonialism, war, and the Partition of India — and what it means to continually seek to return through stories, memories and objects.
Reserve free tickets here for Sunday, March 16 at 10:30 a.m. | Guloien Theatre in Toronto.
For tickets to the play Trident Moon (March 11-16), use the promo code IDEAS25 for a 25% discount. | | | | | * Please note this schedule is subject to change. | | | MONDAY, MARCH 10 | | | The Aeneid: A Political Puzzle | | The Roman poet Virgil had a knack for telling war stories. This was good news for his patron, Caesar Augustus, who had an empire to build: Augustus would conquer the known world and Virgil would lay down the propaganda. But is The Aeneid, one of the great classics of Latin literature just that, propaganda? Or does it carry a message about the horrors or empire, too? It's worth asking, especially at a time when empires are making a comeback. | | | TUESDAY, MARCH 11 | | | Human Rights in the Age of Rampant Datafication | | To live in 2025 is to be thoroughly 'datafied,' according to Wendy H. Wong, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Social media, smartphones, fitness trackers, facial recognition technology, you name it — a whole galaxy of ways we interact with the world and each other are generating and collecting reams of data about us that are used to define and shape our lives. In Wong's latest book, We the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age — the 2024 winner of the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy, Wong details the myriad tentacles of datafication and argues for a human rights framework to reassert our personhood, autonomy and dignity in the face of datafication. | | | WEDNESDAY, MARCH 12 | | | AI and the Supernatural | | In 1950, British cryptographer Alan Turing proposed his famous test of machine intelligence. It became known as the Turing Test, and for years was a benchmark in the world of AI, inspiring international competitions and prizes. Hidden in Turing's original 1950 publication is a strange little mystery. In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Turing argued that the best way to measure intelligence in machines is to see if a person can't tell the difference between a chatbot and a human. He then offered one strange reason why he might be wrong: humans, unlike computers, might have supernatural abilities, like ESP, telepathy, or clairvoyance. | | | THURSDAY, MARCH 13 | | | White Wine with Lunch | | The pleasant experience of having a civilized lunch, unrushed, at a half-decent restaurant, with the food accompanied by — perhaps — a glass of white wine… relies on a vast matrix of societal conditions, the expertise of others, the financial resources of the luncher, and even the state of the planet. Upon noticing his commitment to enjoying a moderate number of such lunches into the foreseeable future, IDEAS producer Tom Howell investigates the politics and morals he has accidentally signed up for, with help from a restaurateur, an economist, an anti-poverty campaigner, and a light golden Chablis. *This episode originally aired on June 24, 2024. | | | FRIDAY, MARCH 14 | | | The Making of Ian Williams | Ian Williams, the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer, speaks with Nahlah Ayed at the Victoria Festival of Authors about the forces that have shaped him as a thinker and writer, from the encyclopedias he read as a child in Trinidad, to his years as a dancer to the poetry of Margaret Atwood. Ian tells Nahlah why he resists the role of "expert" in conversations about Blackness, how he thinks about the multiplicity of the self, and why he's drawn to abstraction. *This episode originally aired on 15, 2024. | | |  | Inuk writer Ashley Qilavaq-Savard is writes poetry about decolonizing narratives, healing from intergenerational
trauma, and love of the land and culture. (Pauline Holdsworth/CBC) | | | IDEAS IN THE AFTERNOON | MONDAY, MARCH 10 at 2 p.m. | | | | | Inhabit Media are at the forefront of a new era of Inuit literature and film. Since 2006, it’s been working to ensure Arctic voices are heard across Canada. From Iqaluit, IDEAS producer Pauline Holdsworth speaks with writers and illustrators about telling the stories of their home and finding creativity from the land. | | |  | Listen whenever you want.
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