Ideas from CBC Radio (Highlights)

Albie Sachs -- longtime freedom fighter and judge on South Africa's Constitutional Court – in conversation with Paul Kennedy about his remarkable life, and what he's learned about building a society.

Artists are visionary, and their work often anticipates tectonic shifts in the future social landscape. But what relationship does art have with social change? What obligations, if any, do artists have to foster social justice? An AGO Creative Minds event

Whales are threatened by us. Their language eroding through noise and climate change. Carrie Haber explores how marine scientists around the world are thinking about our evolutionary courtship with these magnificent mammals in the sea.

CRISPR is a revolutionary new development in gene editing. It has the potential to eliminate genetically transmitted diseases. But it could also be used to wage biological warfare or for eugenics. A panel discussion hosted by McGill University.

A walk through Jean Talon Market with philosopher Frédéric Bouchard. A fascinating discussion about mushrooms, unpasteurized goat cheese and honey bees, and how they can make you think about humankind's place in the universe in a whole different way.

Jean Vanier, who founded the L'Arche movement in 1963 for people with profound disabilities, quickly learned that "normal" people have much to learn about being human by watching those we perceive as weak. Jean Vanier in conversation with Philip Coulter.

Experts on climate change gather for the fourth Muskoka Summit on the Environment and discuss options to offset rising global temperatures caused by the continued use of carbon-based fuels.

Danish director Thomas Vinterberg talks to Eleanor Wachtel about growing up in a commune in Copenhagen, how it inspired him to become a filmmaker, and about his touching new film, The Commune.

Jean Vanier, who founded the L'Arche movement in 1963 for people with profound disabilities, quickly learned that "normal" people have much to learn about being human by watching those we perceive as weak. Jean Vanier in conversation with Philip Coulter.

… we young writers of Canada?" That's a question Margaret Atwood asked in a recent lecture presented at the Canadian Literature Centre. Highlights from Margaret Atwood’s talk and a conversation with Paul Kennedy.

Paul Kennedy takes a trip back in time to the Ice Age with renowned Canadian archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger.

We think we know what money is. We use it every day and our lives are unimaginable without it. But look more closely and you find that coins and dollar bills aren't "real". They're promises, symbols, ideas.

In the 1960s, young Soviet iconoclasts waged a musical battle against the banality of state-sanctioned culture. Simon Nakonechny looks at the phenomenon of Magnitizdat, and ponders its parallels to forms of cultural dissidence in Russia today

The American Empire has been called everything from a "reluctant empire" to "a colossus with attention deficit disorder". A discussion with academic Chalmers Johnson and historian Alfred McCoy.

Monarchies and Dictatorship. Coups and Colonialism. War and civil conflict. The road through 20th-century Iraq is littered with seismic upheavals like these. Mary O'Connell traces the untold story of someone who lived through it all.