Ideas

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.

It is possible. Flavours have been lost to the past, as culinary physicist Lenore Newman explains. She points to the extinction of the passenger pigeon — a species numbering in the billions throughout North America — as an example. In 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati zoo — and in place of the pigeon, came the industrialized farming of chicken. Newman says we're now transitioning to lab-raised food — a technology capable of pushing a global history of scarcity into one of abundance, all the while easing land usage. She calls it the "food singularity."

At a time when the future of Iran is uncertain, we revisit an IDEAS documentary about the history of women’s resistance in Iran — women who in 1979 harboured dreams of freedom and democracy. After ousting the Shah, and mere weeks after Ayatollah Khomeini took power, Iranian women marched to show their fury at the revolution. Forty years after their protest, documentary maker Donya Ziaee spoke to three Iranian women who were there, fighting to turn the tide of history. *This episode originally aired on March 8, 2019.