Ideas

"This is a hopeless situation but we are not helpless." This is what drives Sudanese journalist Yousra Elbagir's reporting on her homeland's forgotten war. She uses what she calls "human reporting" to let the world know Sudan is more than conflict and suffering. "Sudanese generosity is our lifeblood. That's what's keeping us alive right now. We are actually surviving in forced starvation through generosity and kindness and care."Yousra Elbagir delivered the 2025 Stursberg Foreign Correspondents Lecture at Carleton University. She spoke to host Nahlah Ayed about her work and her lecture: Human reporting from Sudan and beyond — a remedy for selective empathy?

"Those who remember the disappeared would also disappear." Under dictator Bashar al-Assad, grieving publicly in Syria was punishable. Now the silenced stories of lost loved ones are emerging and there are public spaces to grieve. Syrian architect Ammar Azzouz's friend and colleague Taher Al Sebai was killed on his street in 2011. After 14 years in exile, Azzouz returned home and says it's not just a right but "a duty to remember." IDEAS hears about Azzouz's classmate from architecture school, the lives of a father, a brother, and a singer who became the voice of the revolution.Guests in this podcast:Jaber Baker is a novelist, researcher, former political prisoner, human rights activist, and filmmaker. He is the author of Syrian Gulag: Assad’s Prisons, 1970-2020, the first-ever comprehensive study of Syrian political prisons.Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He studied architecture in Homs, Syria and is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria.Noura Aljizawi is a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She was a prominent figure in the Syrian uprising and a survivor of abduction, detention, and torture.When civil war broke out in his home country in 2011, Hassan Al Kontar was a young Syrian living and working in the UAE. A conscientious objector, he refused to return to Syria for compulsory military service and lived illegally before being deported to Malaysia in 2018. He became trapped in the arrivals zone at Kuala Lumpur Airport. Exiled by war and trapped by geopolitics, Al Kontar used social media and humour to tell his story to the world, becoming an international celebrity and ultimately finding refuge in Canada.Khabat Abbas is an independent journalist and video producer based in northeastern Syria. Since 2011, she has extensively covered the developments that have shaken her country starting with the popular demonstrations, to the fight against the so-called Islamic State and its aftermath.

Prior to riding horses, no one wore pants. There's a lot to thank horses for in our daily lives. From the Hollywood motion picture to life-saving vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus. Historian Timothy Winegard argues horses are intertwined in our own history to the point that we overlook their importance. His research explains how they shaped societies, economies and cultures. Without us, horses would be nowhere, and vice versa. It was a partnership — our brains and their braun — that truly changed the world. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 10, 2024.

It's getting pretty difficult to read any article online without a paywall in the way. What happened to the internet's great promise to democratize knowledge? On an individual basis, artists, writers and scientists can create without fear of theft thanks to copyright laws. But in practice copyright laws set up barriers, stifle production and prevent equal access to art and research. In this podcast, producer Naheed Mustafa explores the fate of “open access” — all in the ever-expanding universe of copyright laws, paywalls and old-fashioned bureaucratic sludge.Guests in this podcast:John Willinsky is emeritus professor of education at Stanford University with an appointment at Simon Fraser University.Lokesh Vyas is pursuing a PhD at Sciences Po in Paris working on the history of international copyright law.Thea Lim is a Toronto-based novelist, creative writing teacher, and cultural writer focussing on the intersection of power, art and personhood, and technology.

We gorge ourselves on the internet, smartphones, social media, information overload — all of it constantly sap us of our emotional and intellectual vitality. Authors Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt argue it's vital we disconnect from our addictive online world to pursue a fulfilling, and richer life. By curtailing the noise of technology, media and other worldly distractions there's space to reconnect with the things that matter. "Humans were never designed to live at a pace determined by machines. The only way we could begin to do that is by becoming machines ourselves," says Iyer. Pico Iyer and Jonathan Haidt were two of the marquee speakers at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. The theme this year was 'What Makes Life Good.'