The Sunday Magazinewith Piya Chattopadhyay

Starting Sept. 13, Chattopadhyay will present a smart mix of long-form conversations that cut deep and mine the forces driving our society, politics and cultures today. The program will take time for deep exploration, but always make space for music, surprise, delight, and fun

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Kevin Sylvester.

Mississauga, Ontario’s Latif Nasser has a PhD in the history of science and made his name as a science journalist with the groundbreaking and wildly popular podcast, RadioLab, and another podcast he hosts called The Other Latif — about a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay who shares his name. He brings his infectious sense of wonder and energetic curiosity to his latest project: Connected, a documentary series on Netflix that explores the dizzying interconnectedness of things in our world.

Migrant farm workers from the Caribbean and Latin America toil in the blazing sun, but live largely in the shadows. Except when a businesswoman in Leamington, Ont., throws them a party — a feast full of the tastes and sounds of home. Alisa Siegel takes us to that 2019 party in her documentary "The Forgotten Ones."

Christopher Hitchens was a renowned and sometimes reviled journalist, essayist, polemicist, committed atheist and contrarian. He eviscerated dictators, fundamentalists, fanatics of all stripes, racists and charlatans. Mother Theresa, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II all felt the pointy end of his prose and rhetoric.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Kevin Sylvester.

Exploring the galaxy for exoplanets that have the ability to support life is the least complicated part of Sara Seager's life. The Canadian astrophysicist and MIT planetary scientist explores her complicated childhood, the untimely death of her husband and raising two young boys, while searching the stars in her new memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe.

Maxim Bergeron is a teen violin virtuoso from Berlin. Gilles Losier is an 83-year-old Acadian pianist from New Brunswick. The bond between them was forged by the music of legendary Quebec musician Ti-Jean Carignan.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Kevin Sylvester.

From the batting cage to the pitcher's mound, young Black baseball prospects face racist stereotypes and recruiters throughout their training and scouting. Baseball columnist Shakeia Taylor believes that even though the MLB puts on a good show of acting as though it cares about racism, the league is not doing nearly enough to change racist attitudes and provide Black players with equal opportunities.

Those in a hiring position know what everyone earns, but employees are in the dark. That’s because asking people how much money they make is a cultural taboo. Melanie Simms, a professor of work and employment at the University of Glasgow, believes it would be not only helpful, but subversive, if we were transparent about our salaries.

Novelist, screenwriter, playwright and journalist Joan Didion experienced two horrific losses in less than two years: the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne, then the death of her daughter Quintana. Michael Enright spoke with her after the release of her book Blue Nights, a rumination on motherhood, frailty, ageing and loss.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Laurie Brown.

In his book, The Three Marriages, poet, philosopher and organizational expert David Whyte argues that it’s critical to nurture all three of these relationships and to recognize how much they affect each other. It’s a reality that has come into clearer focus with the pandemic, as so many of us are negotiating the blurring of work and home.

The next two weeks were set to fill our television screens with the political spectacles of both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, but the pandemic put an end to those plans. The party faithful and much of the media may be disappointed, but Pulitzer Prize-winning political journalist David Shribman has been to a dozen conventions and believes that the centuries-old tradition is well past its expiry date.

Aside from commanding the world’s great opera houses, Renée Fleming sang Amazing Grace at Ground Zero in New York and You'll Never Walk Alone at the 2009 Inauguration Concert for former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Laurie Brown.

It's a very different world now for musicians — one without live performances and in the midst of a reckoning with racism and inequality. It’s leading many artists to think that a repertoire of relationship songs just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Aislinn Hunter’s new novel The Certainties, entwines the fates of two very different refugees and explores what it means to bear witness. Deeply informed by her own life, Hunter blends history and fiction in a story where past and present calamities collide.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Elamin Abdelmahmoud.

Noor Naga chats with Elamin Abdelmahmoud about longing, loneliness, faith, transgression, writing contradictory characters, and the role of technology in modern love. She is the winner of the 2017 Bronwen Wallace Award and the 2019 RBC-PEN Canada Emerging Writers Award.