Ideas

Africa is a centre of world history — a fact that's been deliberately obscured, says journalist Howard W. French. In this talk based on his book, The Second Emancipation, he explores the surprisingly early seeds of 20th century Pan-African thought, and how Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana went from reluctant student to influential leader of a free Ghana.

Howard W. French delivered the Black History Month lecture at University of Toronto's New College. French was is a former New York Times bureau chief based in Shanghai. He now teaches journalism at Columbia University and is also the author of Born in Blackness.

From Joan of Arc to Kim Kardashian, and Davy Crockett to Donald Trump, celebrity culture has deep and wide roots. Famous people who elicited Kardashian-level feelings of love and hate in the public were present centuries ago — long before screens and social media. Though, as we find out in this podcast, they all share similar qualities. *This episode originally aired on June 30, 2022.

Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, co-host of the LRB podcast Encounters with Medieval Women, and a professor of Medieval English at the University of Bonn.

Sharon Marcus is author of The Drama of Celebrity and the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Heated Rivalry, Love is Blind or Boyfriend on Demand all underline the global appetite for passionate swooning. But let’s not forget the source for all of it: the romance novel. It may have a reputation problem but sales in 2023 reached 39 million copies or romance fiction globally — ringing in at $1.5 billion dollars. The books and readership continue to evolve as popularity increases. What is it about romance novels that women are drawn to? Is it unhealthy escapism, harmless fun or a kind of opiate? IDEAS looks back to a 1992 episode called Paperback Love to understand the enduring acclaim of romance novels.

In the days before her medically-assisted death, journalist Elaine Dewar made it her mission to finish writing her book revealing ignored history. For more than three years, the author investigated how Canada's health care system cruelly mistreated Indigenous people — including forcing them to use segregated hospitals. Dewar's extensive research uncovers not only a shameful past, but that our collective obliviousness to it all was deliberately manufactured.

For thousands of years, estuaries were central to Indigenous agriculture on the West Coast. Then, when colonists arrived, they diked many of these ecosystems to create western farmland. Now, Cowichan Tribes is working with a group of scientists and conservationists to restore an estuary as an ecosystem and a food system — and the project has sparked an unexpected controversy. At the heart of the debate are two questions. What does agriculture really mean? And when the waters start to rise, do we work with them, or against them?

This is the second and final part of this series, What the River Wants to Be. Listen to Part One.

Guests in this podcast:

Tom Reid is the West Coast Conservation Manager for the Nature Trust of BC.

Jared Qwustenuxun Williams is a passionate traditional foods chef who works with elders and knowledge holders to keep traditional food practices alive.

Dr. Jennifer Grenz is a Nlaka’pamux scholar and a member of the Siil'na'mut Ken Elliott is a Cowichan elder and plant knowledge keeper who has worked in habitat restoration for decades. With his wife, he runs Ken Elliott's Native Plant Nursery.

Nava Sachs is a graduate student at UBC conducting research with the Indigenous Ecology Lab.

Kim Lagimodiere is the acting Marine Projects Manager at the Lulumexun Lands and Natural Resources department of Cowichan Tribes. She is also the coordinator of the S-hwuhwa'us Thi'lut Kw'atl'kwa (Thunderbird Protecting the Ocean) program.

Dr. Bethany Coulthard is the acting director at the Lulumexun Lands and Natural Resources department of Cowichan Tribes.

Dr. Lenore Newman is the Director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley.

Erica Gies is the author of Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge and an independent journalist who covers water, climate change, critters, and more from Victoria, British Columbia, and San Francisco, California.