IDEAS in the Afternoon for June 2025
* Please note this schedule is subject to change.
MONDAY, JUNE 2
THE END OF THE END OF HISTORY
Marci Shore will be the first to tell you that breaking up is hard to do. But as a historian of totalitarianism, she feels obligated to offer the free world some blunt relationship advice: America is just not that into you anymore. Or as she put it in a recent talk at Toronto Metropolitan University, "The affair is over." The Yale professor says Canada and other countries need to recognize that the United States can no longer be counted on to defend the principles of democracy abroad — or at home — and move on. In fact, that's what Shore and her husband, fellow historian Timothy Snyder, have done. They recently made headlines with their decision to relocate to Toronto in response to the Trump administration's actions. Shore joins Nahlah to talk about that decision and how her knowledge of Eastern European history informed it.
MONDAY, JUNE 9
QUEER IN AFRICA
Homosexuality is considered a crime punishable by imprisonment or even death in more than half of African countries. In recent years sweeping new laws have been introduced and passed in 6 countries making it illegal to advocate for LGBTQ rights. Some of these laws include a 'duty to report' suspicions of LGBTQ activity. These laws bring up questions foreign influence, neo-colonialism, and the role the international community could and should play in nudging human rights on the continent.
MONDAY, JUNE 16
BIBLIOTHERAPY
Can books help us heal? That's the premise of bibliotherapy, where readings from virtually any genre are used as a tool to promote individual wellbeing or self-insight. Researchers Sara Haslam and Edmund King discuss the First World War roots of this practice in the UK. Author Cody Dellistraty considers its role in moving him forward in the grief process. And psychiatrist Martina Scholtens explains bibliotherapy as a clinical option, and why she created an evidence -based reading list online, tailored to a range of mental health diagnoses.
MONDAY, JUNE 23
IMANI PERRY: BLACK IN BLUE
Harvard professor Imani Perry's latest book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, unpacks the deep, centuries-long connection between Black people and the colour blue, from the complex history of indigo dye through the tradition of planting periwinkles on the unmarked graves of enslaved Black people, to the blues itself as a crowning achievement of Black American culture. The love of blue and the pursuit of beauty, Perry argues, was a core part of how Black people asserted their humanity and found ways to create beauty and solace in the face of being dehumanized and brutalized by slavery and racism.
MONDAY, JUNE 30
TBD
