In the hour’s following her mother’s death, Martha Baillie undertook two rituals — preparing a death mask of her mother’s face, and washing her mother’s body. That intimacy shaped her grief. She had learned earlier to witness death and be present, living with regret after she left the room to get a nurse when her father died. It was very hard for Baillie to see mother's body as a corpse that has no life. To her, it would "always be something alive." The novelist and writer explains what signified the difference in her book, There Is No Blue, the 2024 winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Brett Popplewell used to dread growing old. Until he befriended Dad Aabaye, an 83-year-old former stuntman and professional skier who lives in the deep forest of B.C.’s Okanagan Valley. Their relationship gave the sports journalist a new way to think about life, death, and the limits placed on us as we age. Aabaye lives alone on a bus, on a mountain and runs for two to six hours daily. He has run through blizzards, heat waves, and even 24 hours straight. For him, running is “life itself.”

Popplewell chronicles the extreme athlete’s life from childhood to the silver screen in his book, Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past. The book won the 2024 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Last month, Popplewell accepted his literary prize and delivered a public talk at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

The cowboy, a quintessential hero who worked hard, didn’t rely on the government and did what he had to do to protect his family. Historian Heather Cox Richardson calls this rhetoric “cowboy individualism” and says this myth is the basis for 40-year-old Republican ideology. Now with President Trump serving his second term in office, Cox Richardson says the U.S. administration has taken cowboy individualism to an extreme, gutting the government and centring power.

We have a lot to thank horses for in our everyday lives, from the Hollywood motion picture, to life-saving vaccines for diphtheria and tetanus, to a staple in our closets: pants. "Prior to riding horses, no one wore pants," says historian Timothy Winegard. He argues that horses are intertwined in our own history to the point that we overlook their importance. His research explains how they shaped societies, economies and cultures. Without us, horses would be nowhere, and vice versa. It was a partnership — our brains and their braun — that truly changed the world. *This episode originally aired on Sept. 10, 2024.

IDEAS listeners think deeply about the state of the world and how to improve it. To do that, you need to know what's going on. That's why we're recommending World Report.

It's a daily news podcast that brings you the biggest stories happening in Canada and around the world, in just 10 minutes. Today you can get the latest Canadian election results and reaction from political leaders. It's the perfect update for IDEAS listeners who have been reimagining a better Canada.

Make World Report your daily quick hit of news here: https://link.mgln.ai/fEUb9e

It's no secret that reality TV is a recipe of produced narratives, concocted storylines and personalities that bring it to life. But sometimes it becomes hard to tell what's real and not — could the anger or heartbreak be manufactured? It seems so real. When reality TV became popular, the media panicked about the effect "unscripted" content would have on viewers. But according to experts, the result of watching reality TV led viewers to become smarter. They became perceptive, developed media literacy, and analytical skills, to get to the heart of where reality fits into reality TV. *This episode originally aired on May 6, 2024.

In the 5th century BCE, Herodotus travelled the ancient world gathering stories from a wide range of sources. One of his many prescient observations was how given the right circumstances a political strongman can emerge and seize control — a forewarning for us today.

Canadians’ biggest fear for the country’s future is “growing political and ideological polarization,” according to a 2023 EKOS poll. As part of our series, IDEAS for a Better Canada, host Nahlah Ayed headed to the fast-growing city of Edmonton to talk about the creative ways local residents are working to find common ground. From video games to an engagement technique called “deep canvassing” used to bridge gaps across differences, we can learn a lot from Edmontonians on how to build a better democracy for Canada.