The Sunday Magazinewith Piya Chattopadhyay

In her debut novel, The Push, writer Ashley Audrain takes those taboo feelings about motherhood — the doubt, the loneliness, the way you suddenly dislike your spouse — and cranks them all the way up.

Piya Chattopadhyay speaks to Javad Soleimani, a young man living in Edmonton who lost his wife in the crash, Payam Akhavan, a renowned international law expert , and Golsa Golestaneh, a young Iranian-Canadian woman, who wrote a poem about a year of tumult and suffering in her home country. 

It's been  another hard week of COVID news … from mounting case numbers to a new curfew in Quebec to continued school closures.  But our listeners have given us something different to think about when it comes to the pandemic.  Following a conversation last week with a Smithsonian curator grappling with what artifacts to collect to document the time we're in, we put a call out to hear what objects YOU would choose to remember this time by.  And your answers were, quite frankly, heartwarming.

Before Hong Kong switched hands from Britain to China in 1997, many city residents left, worried about the city's future under Chinese control. But then the handover happened, and the political climate appeared more stable than feared. So many of the people who had left Hong Kong came back. But now, more than 20 years later, concerns are back about Chinese control and what it means for Hong Kong and its residents. And many of those same people are now moving out of Hong Kong, again. Kennedy Wong studied this "re-return migration" as a student at the University of British Columbia, and sits down with Common to talk about the political forces and personal choices that have led many Hong Kong residents around the globe to move away and back — then away again.

2020 is finally in the rearview mirror, and that has a lot of people heaving a huge sigh of relief. With COVID-19 wreaking havoc on our daily lives, it was a hard year for many. Stephanie Elliott calls it 'relentless.' Her 2020 was not only shaped by the pandemic, but also other major news events of the year, including the politics south of the border, and the wildfires raging in the western United States. Elliott reflects on her very 2020 year, which ultimately brought her home to Canada.

When you think of rapid response teams in the context of a pandemic, you probably don't think: museum curators. But when a novel coronavirus began to take hold last February, curators around the world fired up their teams to collect what they could, as quickly as they could. Common speaks with Smithsonian Institution curator Alexandra Lord about the challenge of collecting and preserving objects that tell the COVID-19 story ... while we're still living it.

As the need for a COVID-19 vaccine and fears about vaccination intensify simultaneously, people are turning to Eula Biss's 2014 book On Immunity to better understand this moment. Biss tells Piya Chattopadhyay about the underlying fears driving vaccine skepticism, how she confronted her own fears as a mother and why she believes vaccination is something we owe each other in an interdependent society.

Guest host David Common speaks to Smithsonian Institution curator Alexandra Lord about collecting COVID-19 stories and Kennedy Wong about migration to and from Hong Kong. Plus, Stephanie Elliott talks about why 2020 brought her back to Canada, Eula Biss on immunity and Beatriz Colomina on why beds have also become workspaces.

2020 has been an abnormal year. It's introduced sweeping changes to the rhythms and routines of our daily lives. But, the speed at which we humans adapt can be both a blessing and a curse. That's something environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth knows well. When Demuth contracted COVID-19, she didn't realise that the symptoms would linger on for months — also known as "long COVID." Demuth explores the dangers of adapting too quickly and forgetting what "healthy" felt like — both in terms of the pandemic and climate change.

Loneliness, grief and resilience are regular themes that emerge from 2020. These themes are especially pertinent for those most vulnerable in our society. We speak to a panel of senior citizens who share these two things — they're in their 70s and they're living alone. As part of a end-of-year panel conversation, Common hears from these seniors located across Canada about their experiences of this year.

Guest host David Common speaks with environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth about the concept of "shifting baselines," and 3 senior citizens talk about their experiences during the pandemic. Plus, Canadian writer and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee talks about her memoir Two Trees Make a Forest and sports reporter Doug Smith discusses 25 years of the Toronto Raptors.

In her memoir Two Trees Make a Forest, Canadian writer and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee returns to her mother's homeland of Taiwan to understand the landscape that shaped her family. The book intertwines her grandparents' histories, the political history of Taiwan, and the island's geological history. She speaks with Piya about home, multiplicity and belonging.

Piya Chattopadhyay speaks to legendary children's entertainer Raffi, sociologist Lynne Murphy, Karina Vernon who has created the anthology The Black Prairie Archives and sociologist Juliet Schor.

It’s been 40 years since Raffi released his defining song Baby Beluga. After decades of entertaining thousands of children, the outspoken singer-songwriter reflects on the tragedies of 2020, the state of North American politics and his claim that having faith in children is the key to a sustainable future.

As a child in rural Alberta, Karina Vernon thought she and her sister might be the only Black people in the prairies. Years later, she stumbled across a description of a Black fur trader on the Athabasca River, and her conception of the region was forever changed. Her anthology, The Black Prairie Archives, includes poetry, fiction, farming journals, editorials, and song lyrics from 1790 to the present.

In the final instalment of our ongoing language segment Word Processing for this year, we get meta by looking at how we processed 2020 through language. Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with Linguist Lynne Murphy about the new words we coined, the old and specialized words that formed the new vocabulary needed to protect one another, and how to capture a time in words.

When the "sharing economy" launched about a decade ago, its proponents said it would revolutionize work and transform society. But it didn't take long before app-based gig work showed a darker, more dystopian side. Piya Chattopadhyay speaks with sociologist Juliet Schor, author of After the Gig, about what went wrong, and how we can engineer a reboot, particularly as many of us have relied more on gig-fuelled services during this pandemic.

Piya Chattopadhyay speaks to Vancouver pharmacist Craig Plain, conservationist Neil Kigutaq and environmental philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht, novelist Maaza Mengiste and constitutional lawyer Adem Abebe, as well as Swedish writer Patrik Svensson.

Swedish writer and journalist Patrik Svensson reflects on his childhood spent eel fishing with his father, as well as how humanity has never fully understood these puzzling creatures.

Acclaimed novelist Maaza Mengiste, whose family fled Ethiopia after the 1974 revolution, speaks with Piya Chattopadhyay about what it means to see Ethiopia once again embroiled in war, and what it will take for the country to reckon with its complicated history.