Nov 7, 2011 | 53:59Ideas Winter: Five Windows on the Season, Part 1 AudioIdeas Winter: Five Windows on the Season, Part 1 Nov 7, 2011 | 53:59The CBC Massey Lectures celebrates fifty years with bestselling author and famed New Yorker contributor Adam Gopnik. Winter: Five Windows on the Season, is a wide-ranging yet intimate tour of the season that shows how science, economics, psychology and religion made for a new and modern idea of winter.
Nov 16, 2012 | 53:59Ideas The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, Part 5 AudioIdeas The Universe Within: From Quantum to Cosmos, Part 5 Nov 16, 2012 | 53:59All the technologies we use and depend on are the products of the amazing human mind. Our curiosity drives us to seek out the underlying laws of the universe, and the more we learn the better our lives become. But we're arriving at an impasse, says physicist Neil Turok: the more we learn, the more contradictory the laws seem to be. We need new ideas and new ways of thinking to go beyond the horizon.
Oct 12, 2011 | 54:22Ideas 2004: A Short History of Progress, Part 1 AudioIdeas 2004: A Short History of Progress, Part 1 Oct 12, 2011 | 54:22In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age, can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.
Oct 7, 2011 | 54:41Ideas 1998: Becoming Human, Part 1 AudioIdeas 1998: Becoming Human, Part 1 Oct 7, 2011 | 54:41Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, the international organization famed for its innovative methods of working with handicapped people. In this year's Massey Lectures, he discusses the necessity of conceiving a new vision of humankind: a society in which the gifts of all, particularly those of the weak and the powerless, are an equal, common heritage.
Oct 13, 2011 | 53:58Ideas 2010: Player One, Part 1 AudioIdeas 2010: Player One, Part 1 Oct 13, 2011 | 53:58Player One: What is To Become of Us? by Douglas Coupland. For the first time in their history, the CBC Massey Lectures is a work of fiction. In an airport lounge in the very near future, four people are marooned when a kind of apocalypse strikes. Sealed in, the four can only talk to each other, examining their lives and the meaning of love. Thick ash falls from the sky. Cell phones don't work. What is to become of us? In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J.G. Ballard, Douglas Coupland locates his story and characters in an extreme situation and then pushes the implications as far as possible.
Oct 11, 2011 | 54:22Ideas 2003: The Truth About Stories, Part 1 AudioIdeas 2003: The Truth About Stories, Part 1 Oct 11, 2011 | 54:22Beginning with Native oral stories, -winning author and scholar Thomas King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, in an effort to make sense of North America's relationship with its Aboriginal peoples.
Oct 11, 2011 | 54:22Ideas 2003: The Truth About Stories, Part 2 AudioIdeas 2003: The Truth About Stories, Part 2 Oct 11, 2011 | 54:22Beginning with Native oral stories, -winning author and scholar Thomas King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, in an effort to make sense of North America's relationship with its Aboriginal peoples.
Sep 29, 2011 | 29:36Ideas 1985: Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Part 1 AudioIdeas 1985: Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Part 1 Sep 29, 2011 | 29:36Doris Lessing, one of the century's greatest writers, addresses the question of personal freedom and individual responsibility in a world increasingly prone to political rhetoric, mass emotions and inherited structures of unquestionable belief.
Nov 3, 2009 | 1:15:54Ideas 2009: The Wayfinders - Part 1 AudioIdeas 2009: The Wayfinders - Part 1 Nov 3, 2009 | 1:15:54Anthropologist Wade Davis argues that the myriad of cultures that make up our world are “humanity’s greatest legacy…the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all we are and all that we have created as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species.” In the 2009 Massey Lectures, Wade Davis takes us on an astonishing journey through some of the great cultures and civilizations on earth, fragile and endangered, yet essential to our survival as a species.
Jul 5, 2011 | 29:41Ideas 1962: The Eductated Imagination - Part 1 AudioIdeas 1962: The Eductated Imagination - Part 1 Jul 5, 2011 | 29:41In the 1962 Massey Lectures, Northrop Frye writes: "What good is the study of literature? Does it help us to think more clearly or feel more sensitively or live a better life than we would without it? What is the function of the teacher and scholar or the person who calls himself, as I do, a literary critic? What difference does the study of literature make in our social or political or religious attitude? In my early days, I thought very little about such questions, not because I had any of the answers but because I assumed that anybody who asked them was naive. I think now that the simplest questions are not only the hardest to answer but the most important to ask..."
Jul 11, 2011 | 29:33Ideas 1973: Designing Freedom - Part 1 AudioIdeas 1973: Designing Freedom - Part 1 Jul 11, 2011 | 29:33Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as "The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear," "The Discarded Tools of Modern Man," "A Liberty Machine in Prototype," "Science in the Service of Man," "The Future That Can Be Demanded Now," "The Free Man in a Cybernetic World." Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world
Jul 11, 2011 | 34:55Ideas 1973: Designing Freedom - Part 6 AudioIdeas 1973: Designing Freedom - Part 6 Jul 11, 2011 | 34:55Distinguished cyberneticist Stafford Beer states the case for a new science of systems theory and cybernetics. His essays examine such issues as "The Real Threat to All We Hold Most Dear," "The Discarded Tools of Modern Man," "A Liberty Machine in Prototype," "Science in the Service of Man," "The Future That Can Be Demanded Now," "The Free Man in a Cybernetic World." Designing Freedom ponders the possibilities of liberty in a cybernetic world.
Oct 7, 2011 | 54:42Ideas 1998: Becoming Human, Part 2 AudioIdeas 1998: Becoming Human, Part 2 Oct 7, 2011 | 54:42Jean Vanier is the founder of L'Arche, the international organization famed for its innovative methods of working with handicapped people. In this year's Massey Lectures, he discusses the necessity of conceiving a new vision of humankind: a society in which the gifts of all, particularly those of the weak and the powerless, are an equal, common heritage.
Oct 7, 2011 | 54:25Ideas 1999: The Triumph of Narrative, Part 1 AudioIdeas 1999: The Triumph of Narrative, Part 1 Oct 7, 2011 | 54:25Of all the ways that people have learned to communicate with each other, the story is the most human, the most flexible, and perhaps the most dangerous. Journalist and critic Robert Fulford tells the story of how stories live and breathe at the heart of our culture.
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