The Sunday Editionwith Michael Enright

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.

One of Canada's most respected Indigenous rights advocates has faced many setbacks over his decades-long career, fighting for justice for Indigenous peoples. As the country faces calls to defund the RCMP, he warns that gaining justice for Indigenous people will be a long, drawn-out process.

Although the pandemic has caused more than 600,000 deaths worldwide and has disrupted life around the world, Mother Nature has breathed a giant sigh of relief. It is the kind of relief author and activist Naomi Klein called for in her bestselling book This Changes Everything. We present a reprise of her conversation with Michael Enright, from the fall of 2014.

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

Anne Applebaum reflects on how many of her former friends shifted further and further to the right as populism surged across the Western world. Her new book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism explores the people behind the politicians, as Applebaum knew them, before and during the rise of the far right in Eastern Europe, the UK and the United States.

The public health nightmares of the pandemic were not realized in Kingston, Ontario. They have had few cases of COVID and no deaths, even though it is a city with long-term-care, a large university campus and nine prisons in the region. Kieran Moore, the local medical officer of public health and the key architect of Kingston’s pandemic plan, tells us how they pulled it off.

She didn't pick up a camera till she was 60, but since then, she's taken thousands of striking portraits. At 100, she's still passionate about photography, creativity and the beauty and strength of ordinary people - on Saskatchewan's backroads and in nursing homes. David Gutnick's documentary profile of Thelma Pepper is called, "These Women Live On."

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

Even though fungi are largely hidden from view, they sustain almost all the living systems around us. They also challenge how we think and what we know. Guest host Kevin Sylvester speaks with Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures to learn more.

United States citizenship is one of the most prized citizenships in the world, giving citizens to both live and work inside the country and travel, hassle-free, to 185 others. Because of COVID-19, that number is down to 28.

The renowned Canadian poet talks to Michael Enright about her love of Greek, her fascination with grammar and syntax and why she calls writing, "an attempt at catastrophe."

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Anthony Germain.

In 1997, China promised to maintain Hong Kong's democratic system and civil liberties for 50 years. But many believe a new security law imposed upon Hong Kong by Beijing effectively means the end of democracy there. Diana Fu — a China expert at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy — discusses the potential fallout over the law and the decisions Hong Kongers have to make now about whether to stay and whether to keep pushing for democracy or censor themselves.

More and more people, including many journalists, are questioning the sanctity of objectivity — especially when the arbiters of what’s objective truth and what’s opinion are largely the mostly-white, mostly-male people who run most newsrooms. Candis Callison is a professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia who argues that objectivity in journalism is illusory and that it reaffirms the outlook of a white male-dominated world.

Three Emmy Awards, seven additional nominations and a show that ran on seven different television networks from 1968 to 2007 — The Dick Cavett Show had a long and illustrious run.

Listen to this week's episode with guest-host Anthony Germain.

In his first major interview in more than a decade — since stepping down from the Supreme Court of Newfoundland and Labrador — former premier Clyde Wells talks about how Newfoundland and Labrador got into a fiscal crisis and the political backbone needed to get out of it.

2020 has unspooled one crisis after another, from the pandemic and long-term care to racial injustice and police brutality. That’s inspired calls for massive changes to our government, economy and way of life. At the same time, many of us desperately want life to return to normal. Ryerson University historian Catherine Ellis looks at the choices Western societies made when faced with similar forks in the road after the two world wars — to attempt to make a better world, or to retrench and just forget about what caused the crisis.

As part of a special hour devoted to Pete Seeger after his death, The Sunday Edition reached deep into the archives, back to Enright's As It Happens days in 1995, when he interviewed Seeger. At the time, the musician was 75 and had lost none of his vigor or indignation at a culture that values money over people and community.

Listen to our final episode with host Michael Enright