The Sunday Editionwith Michael Enright

For several days, it looked like Donald Trump’s decision to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani had the effect of quelling anti-government sentiment inside Iran. But now that Iranian authorities have admitted that their own military shot down an airliner and killed dozens of their own people, all that has changed, according to Nader Hashemi, an Iranian-Canadian political scientist and the Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Denver.

In a special one-hour broadcast on the 40th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution, The Sunday Edition explores why Iranians rose up against the shah in 1979, and what became of their dreams for a freer, democratic nation under Ayatollah Khomeini.

The food industry is excited over new gene-edited products altered to have longer shelf life or produce less fat. But it will have to avoid the pitfalls of GMO foods, the last foray into genetic engineering, which were a financial success, but a public relations disaster. Ira Basen's documentary is called The Splice of Life.

Publishers are struggling to meet the burgeoning demand for audiobooks of Canadian titles. We speak with Ann Jansen, who left CBC Radio in 2017 to become the director of audiobook production at Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in the country. And Canadian actors Braden Wright and Tess Degenstein share the challenges and joys of audiobook narration.

John Crosbie, who died on Friday, was one of the most prominent and trusted — and certainly most colourful — cabinet members of Brian Mulroney's governments and served as the Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland from 2008 to 2013. We’ll pay tribute with excerpts from Michael’s 1997 interview with him.

Listen to this week's episode with host Michael Enright.

"The American researcher Paul Zak has spent a career studying how the brain reacts to certain chemical releases. He discovered that the neurochemical oxytocin when delivered and synthesized by the brain makes us more compassionate, more generous and more sensitive to the needs of others. He calls it our 'moral molecule.' It also makes us react by crying."

The U.S. assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani has the entire region on edge, while the rhetoric on all sides becomes more bellicose. British security expert Paul Rogers discusses the escalating conflict and its broader security and geopolitical implications.

Michael emcees another edition of our hilarious game of word play, where three panelists invent credible-sounding definitions for obscure words from the dictionary.

An evolutionary biologist, a psychologist, a city planner and authors and journalists talk about how walking isn't just good for our bodies, it's good for our souls. It connects us to our surroundings, our humanity and to each other.

Listen to this week's episode with host Michael Enright.

It's hard to think of a more tumultuous or disorienting decade than the 2010s — the forces of climate change, migration, technology, social media, in addition to political turbulence made the world a very different place in 2019 than it was in 2010. On the final Sunday of the 2010s, in a special three-hour program, we will take the measure of the past ten years and how they have changed us and the world.

For the last ten years, the very foundations of the current political order seem to have been tested and found wanting. We watched the old consensus of liberal democracy crumble while populist movements gained a foothold. we saw some of the largest progressive protests and social movements in years and, at the same time, saw some of the most right-wing governments in recent memory elected. Our discussion of the 2010s will begin with two observers of the turbulent and contradictory political currents that shaped the decade: Jennifer Welsh, a professor and the Canada Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. And Jeet Heer, National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation magazine.

McGill University law professor François Crépeau served as the UN's Special Rapporteur for the Human Rights of Migrants from 2011-2017. Crépeau looks back on a decade of mass migration and its political and social repercussions, and he outlines a new vision for the decades to come.

The past ten years have brought profound shifts in the earth's climate, in the nature of environmental activism and in the scientific community. Katharine Hayhoe is the director of the Climate Science Center and a professor of political science at Texas Tech University. The renowned Canadian climate scientist is also the winner of the UN's highest environmental honour, the Champions of the Earth Award.

Dizzying changes in the world of social media and the internet have had profound consequences — for how we consume the news, how we talk, how we vote, how we rest, how we learn, how we work, and how we view the world around us. Elamin Abdelmahmoud, curation editor at BuzzFeed News and co-host of the CBC podcast Party Lines, talks to Michael Enright about how the internet has changed us — for better and worse — this decade.

In her most recent book Whose Story Is This?, Rebecca Solnit argues that the question of who gets to narrate the story of our time matters deeply. From Idle No More to Black Lives Matter to Me Too, many of the biggest social movements of this decade have challenged dominant narratives and retold them from a different perspective.

Listen to this week's episode with host Michael Enright.

“Every Christmas window at Simpsons had a puffing train that wound its way around the window and disappeared into a tunnel and moments later came out the other side. It stopped at the little wooden station and you could see the conductor holding a big pocket watch.”

Poet Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbours,” and it seems the corollary is true, that bad fences can make bad neighbours, especially in an age when neighbours are less likely to know, and talk to, each other. Some Canadian cities offer the services of a free community mediator, a volunteer who steps in to help resolve conflicts.

It's what's called a Regina Music Box. Four feet tall and made of beautiful oak. And it plays music that is richer and more complex than you can imagine.

Our man about music Robert Harris, brings us gospel, blues and jazz.