Ideas

“One of your tribe is enough.” That’s what Margaret Rossiter was told when she said she wanted to study female scientists. Nevertheless, Rossiter persisted. She found and documented hundreds of women whose contributions to science had been overlooked, under-credited and misappropriated. Then she made history herself by coining the term “The Matilda Effect” to describe why those women failed to get the credit they deserved.

Who is Matilda? Matilda Joslyn Gage was a suffragist erased from history. She was known as being too radical for Susan B. Anthony. This podcast shares her story.

Guests in this episode:

Katie Hafner is a former NYT reporter, host and co-executive producer of Lost Women of Science podcast.

Sophie McNulty is the producer of the Lost Women of Science podcast.

Ellen Abrams is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. She was a graduate student at Cornell University, who shared an office with Margaret Rossiter and was influenced by her work.

Sally Gregory Kohlstedt is a professor emerita of history of science and technology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and a close friend and colleague of Margaret Rosstier, fellow science historian.

Ailsa Holland is a historian and a co-author of On This Day She Putting Women Back into History One Day at a Time.

Margaret Rossiter (deceased Aug 3, 2025) was the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science Emerita and Graduate School Professor. She coined “The Matilda Effect” and wrote a three-volume series, Women Scientists in America.

Our inherent human rights belong to us from the moment we are born. There is nothing we need to do to earn them, and they are supposed to apply to us until the day we die. But in his third Massey Lecture, Alex Neve argues the powerful have made human rights a ‘club.’ Visit cbc.ca/masseys for more on this lecture series.

One of the strongest ties between the diaspora and home is music. In Iran, music can be politically contentious.

In Canada, it connects a community to its past and to its future. Days after the bombings began in Iran, Nahlah Ayed spoke to three Iranian-Canadian musicians and composers about the role of music in a time of uncertainty.

"Music can be an escape, can be a consolation... Like if we are the stars and galaxies on the planets of the universe, music is like the dark matter of that universe. It's that gravitational force that we know is there but we can't quite put our finger on it." — composer and pianist Iman Habibi

Guests in this episode:

Tahare Falahati is a Persian traditional singer

Kaveh Mirhosseini is an Iranian composer and conductor

Iman Habibi is a composer and pianist

Anxiety is an inescapable, fundamental human reaction to an unpredictable future. This is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a curmudgeon of the 17th century who believed that without a powerful, sovereign government life would be "nasty, brutish and short." Politics and uncertainty go hand in hand. In this podcast, IDEAS explores how a new take on Hobbes on the topic of anxiety offers a surprising perspective on American politics and democracy. For worried politicos today his way of thinking offers valuable lessons.

*This episode originally aired on Jan. 13, 2025.

Guests in this podcast:

Vertika is a political science PhD student at McGill University.

Kinch Hoekstra is a professor of political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes.

Bethany Albertson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, and the co-author of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World.

Shana Gadarian is a professor of political science and associate dean for research at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Mathematics is everywhere: a common refrain from high school math teachers. But did you ever think math could be linked to literature? And not just in works from the literary greats of the past but for example Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. The relationship between math and literature are fundamentally creative, says Sarah Hart, a mathematician and author who speaks to Nahlah Ayed about how these two things that seem so polar opposite are deeply intertwined.

Sarah Hart's book is called Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.