CBC Ideas

From the earliest days of cinema to our era of streaming, zooming, and scrolling, the screen has become a central part of our lives -- so central that it actually impedes our lives, erasing our bodies, and to hiding from one another. Kim Nelson, film professor and director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Windsor, argues in a public talk that remaining c...

For more than a thousand years the Oracle of Delphi sat on a stool at the ‘navel of the universe.’ Under a mystical trance, she would offer cryptic predictions of the future. People would wait months, even years, for their chance to ask the Oracle for guidance on matters ranging from reproductive challenges, to family tiffs to when and how to wage war.

Whil...

More than 2,000 years ago, someone sat down and wrote a travel bucket list for the ancient world — suggesting must-see places that we now call The Seven Wonders of the World. It was kind of a Lonely Planet guide of its time, and included the Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the lighthouse of Alexandria, and the Temple of Artemis, among others. Histori...

Without the Moon, the Earth would be unrecognizable. Across the eons, it has shaped our seasons, our calendars — and even the evolution of life itself. Producer Annie Bender traces our nearest neighbour's powerful influence over humanity — and the planet we call home.

Guests in this podcast:

Charlie Duke is a retired NASA astronaut wh...

Authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor want to stop apocalyptic end-of-the-world thinking and its fantasies about colonizing other planets. “We love it here… we want to stay,” they say. They diagnose today's fascism as having an “Armageddon Industrial Complex,” whose main agents are apocalyptic fundamentalists, ethnonationalists, and tech billionaires fixated on creating a supe...