Ideas - Open your gift: a podcast of nonfiction recommendations

Episode Date: December 12, 2025

This isn't a wrap or best of 2025 kind of list. This is IDEAS. You deserve more context and information. This podcast offers recommendations that cover several genres and all kinds of topics, to feed your curiosity. Some may surprise you. We asked IDEAS contributors to suggest a work of nonfiction that recently made them think — maybe even think differently — about a particular topic. And then IDEAS producers jumped in to add their picks too.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. About 15 years ago, Google made an attempt to count the total number of bound and printed books that had been published in the world. There were many rules and caveats to the company's approach. But on August 5th, 2010, the Google Algorithm decided on a number. Just shy of 130 million. And ever-growing, of course.

Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. What should I read? or watch or listen to. These are legitimate questions for our option-packed times. So Ideas is making a modest attempt to help by checking in with some of the smart, curious people who we encounter in the making of our episodes. Hi, my name is Jesse Wente, Heron-Preet Kanujan.

Tirina Domitresko. Kamala Solaili. I'm Jillian Horton. In the spirit of this program, we asked five of our contributors to talk about a work of non-fiction that recently made them think or think differently about a particular topic. And here are the eclectic cross-genre results,

presented by those contributors and ideas producer Lisa Gottfe. Okay. Hello, my name is Irina Domitresco. I'm a Canadian. in Romanian, but these days I live in Germany, where I teach medieval literature at the University of Bonn. And I'm also a writer. Right now I'm writing a book that's tentatively titled The Age of Imperfection, and it's about how medieval people struggle to find a path between their outsized ideals and their imperfect realities. You're a medievalist, but you zip between past and present in your work, and you have so many different curiosities. So I'm very interested.

to know what has got you enthusiastic lately. What are you recommending? I should tell you two things first. One is that I love books that take one item or one idea that seems to be irrelevant, like the weekend or something like that, and show how it connects to all kinds of other things in history and how surprising it is. And I also started painting not even a year ago,

and I've become absolutely obsessed with painting. And the thing about painting is, you know, I grew up in a world where colors were things like red, yellow, blue, green, and I thought I knew about color. But when you start to buy paints, you realize they have these exotic names like Alizarin Crimson or Matter Lake or Thalow Blue. It's this whole world. And then you learn that some of the pigments behave differently. And some of them are synthetic, some of them are natural. And that's why I was drawn. to read a book which I had had on my shelf for a while. It's called Move, and it's by Simon Garfield. And it is the story of the discovery of a synthetic dye for the color mauve by a British chemist

named William Henry Perkin in the 19th century. And it seems to be just about a color, but it's actually about a whole revolution in modern science. As I understand it was kind of an accident? Yeah, he was trying to synthesize quinine, which was necessary for malaria, which really got in the way of the growth of the British Empire, so it was quite important. He was really young. I think he was only about 18 or so years old, working under a German chemist in London and really still studying. And his dad set up a home lab for him, and he would go in an experiment. And he was experimenting with what kinds of things could be made out of coal tar, which I gather there was quite a lot of, and there weren't many uses for at that

point. But it had the potential to dye a lot of cloth very, very cheaply in comparison to natural colors, which is all that was available back then. This is a strange question, but what color is Move? How is it different than purple? It's a kind of light purple often with a reddish tinge. How do you feel about Move? I really don't like it. I actually, I bought a hiking jacket that wound up being in Move because there's the only one left in my size in the hiking store and it's a hideous color. But apparently it was a really big hit in 1857. Napoleon's wife, Empress Eugenie wore Move, Queen Victoria wore Move to her daughter's wedding, and then every single woman in London was wearing Move on the street. So I wouldn't have done well in the Victorian period, but they loved it

back then. And have you attempted to use it in your painting? I do love the synthetic colors. I think in that sense, I'm pretty modern. I like colors to be really bright and bold and kind of artificial, and I'm not as drawn to the more muted natural colors. One of the things that I found so amazing about this book was just to imagine what the world would have been like before the availability of cheap synthetic dyes. And I think it's really hard for us to. I think some people live to that change, and the world around them changed. It wasn't just clothes. It was also food. These dyes were used in food. They were used on wallpaper. Before that, you had to find natural dyes. You sometimes had to import them from far away. Some of them were very expensive. And they weren't necessarily always as bright. So I wanted to read you a quotation that Simon Garfield includes in the book from a contemporary 19th century paper about the trend of MOV. One would think that London was suffering from an election

and that those purple ribbons were synonymous with Perkins forever and Perkins and the English Constitution. The Oxford Street windows are tapestried with running rolls of that luminous extract from coal tar. Oh, Mr. Perkins, thanks to thee for fishing out of the coal hole, those precious veins and stripes and bands of purple on summer gowns, that, wafting gales of Frangipani charm us in the West End Street, luring on foolish bachelors to sudden proposals and dreams of love. It goes on.

As I look out of my window, the apotheosis of Perkins Purple seems at hand. Purple hands wave from open carriages. Purple hands shake each other at street doors. Purple striped gowns, cram baroches, jam-up cabs, throng steamers, fill railway stations. All flying countryward, like so many migrating birds of Purple Paradise. So vivid and beautiful, just bringing those scenes completely to life. So, you know, an amazing discovery, what would you say it kind of opened up? Well, here's what I, I mean, there was a lot in this book that I knew nothing about.

And I say this also not as a scholar, but as a reader. I don't really know that much about the 19th or 20th century or the development of modern chemistry. But dye manufacture was connected and helped along a number of other industrial uses of chemicals. So by the start of World War I, most of the world's synthetic dye industries in Germany, about 80%. And the companies which are making dyes and artist supplies, I get great artist supplies in Germany, where I live now, these companies sometimes turned towards making explosives. They made medicines. So Baya, which is a German company, used a dye intermediate, salicylic acid to make aspirin. I did not know that. It was a German chemist who produced chlorine

as a large-scale war gas by the beginning of World War I. It becomes a war tool, right? This whole chemical industry, which really begins as dye manufacturing, becomes a war tool. And the saddest and the most horrible part of this whole story that's also told in the book is about a large chemical conglomerate, I.G. Fabin, which is German for colors, which originally employed Jewish chemists. Hitler was suspicious of it because of its Jewish employees, but essentially got them kicked out. The company was Nazified, and they ran a slave labor camp near Auschwitz, where 25,000 Jews died. It was a subsidiary of the same company that made Cyclone B, which was used to gas Jews in the camps. Just as horrifically, you know, I think a lot of people who have studied

the Holocaust know that the phrase, Arbite-Macht Frey, work will make you free, was used on the entrance to Auschwitz. I learned in this book that the company, IG Favann, first used that on its own factories. So there's this terrible side to what this chemical manufacturer led to, in really direct ways. It's the same companies, right?

It's sometimes the same chemists and so on. And then there's this other side altogether where some of the same advances are being, used to make discoveries. So these dyes are used to dye tissue for biological research. They were used to develop antibacterial agents, the treatment for syphilis. So it's like the best and the worst of human nature is somehow connected to the development of artificial dyes. Who knew? Who knew? Sometimes you go into bookstores and or you're in the library and you just think, come on, you know, book about X, but there's just so much there in small things sometimes.

Yeah, and I think what I find interesting is that when MoV became this big fashion trend, people made fun of it because it was primarily used for something decorative, right? And it was women. It was associated with women and their love of fashion and trendy colors and so on, and it was mocked. But you see that these developments, which maybe are relevant for one industry, which might not be seen very seriously because it's connected with women and beauty wind up having all of these other after effects down the road, both good and bad. As a medievalist, do you have any sense of color in the medieval period?

They love bright colors. So I think that's one thing that the Middle Ages had in common with maybe the late 19th century, not so much today. Today, a lot of people think it's tasteful to wear beige and gray and black and subdued colors. But that's really because bright colors became cheap. as a result of William Perkins' work and the work of other chemists like him. But in the Middle Ages, bright colors were expensive. And there were also sumptuary laws

that basically regulated which class of people was allowed to wear which colors. And if you look at medieval manuscripts, you see that they absolutely adored really bright, vivid, jewel-like tones. There isn't at all this idea that classy means subdued. And that was true also for

spicing in food, right? Food was heavily spiced if you could afford it. More was more in the Middle Ages. So I'm fascinated by the way that colors have such a social weight in history. It also often gets at something more central to the culture, you know, what our attitude is towards brightness, hue, these things which seem like little trends are often quite central to what a culture values. Academic and writer Irina Dumatrescu, with her recommendation for ideas listeners, Move, how one man invented a color

that changed the world. It's a book by Simon Garfield. My name is Kamala Ali. I'm a professor and director of the School of Journalism Writing and Media at UBC, also a journalist and a non-fiction author. Kamal Al Saleli has been a guest on ideas. as well as a documentary contributor.

His own books, Return, Intolerable, and Brown explore the different ways that international politics intersect with individual lives. His non-fiction recommendation for us also fits that bill. One of my favorite books I've read

in the last few years is by American journalist Scott Anderson, King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, a story of hubris, delusion, and catastrophic miscalculation. What do you call authority to enforce the law, to make such fantastic, drastic changes without bloodshed? On one level, it's a biography or a kind of a biographical inquiry into the life of the Shah of Iran.

If you call this authority, I don't think that my people mind that. They want it. In many ways, it is a story of how the very improbable Iranian revolution, came to be. He modernized Iran while forcefully suppressing dissent and political freedoms. The clergy opposed the Shah's social and economic reforms. Discontent grew until in 1978, anti-Shah demonstration spread across the mostly Shia country. Strikes and mass protests erupted, an accusation flew that the Shah was the U.S. puppet. The sheer incompetence of American policymakers.

particularly during the time of Jimmy Carter's four years in power between 76 to 1980. Because of the great leadership of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability. The Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah and brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power in February 1979. It was the first religious revolution in modern history and the first televised revolution ever. No one really expected the Ayatollah community, who was in exile, first of all in Iraq and then in France, to have that much of an influence. It's extraordinary how one man can command such adoration, how so many people can believe that

this frail old priest holds all the answers to Iran's problems. But really is improbable mainly, in my opinion, because, until probably a year before it happened, no one in the Jimmy Carter White House thought it would be possible for the Shah of Iran to be ousted or to leave Iran ostensibly for medical treatment, but everyone knew that he was going to be leaving for good. If you read the kind of quotes that he incorporates into the book from American diplomats, from state officials, everyone expected the Shah of Iran to rule well into the 1980s. But he did leave. Within a fortnight, the Shah's nemesis, Ayatollah Khomeini, returned from exile,

heralding a new era for Iran and the West. The Shah's ordeal did not end. He and his wife could not find a permanent refuge, so they headed for the U.S. where the Shah's. Shah sought treatments for his worsening cancer. On his arrival, American diplomats in Tehran were taken hostage. So U.S. authorities asked the Shah to leave, hoping to calm the situation. Finally, they arrived in Egypt with the Shah's health rapidly deteriorating. On July the 27th, 1980, he died.

We tend to see it as a regional revolution, something that happened. within Iran and its repercussions mainly played out in Iran. But he really makes a very convincing case that we are living in the post-Iranian revolution worldwide. For example, it is the hostage crisis at the end of 79. He argues that actually led to the defeat of Jimmy Carter at the 1980 election, and that's the election that Ronald Reagan won. And that sort of ushered in the new age of new liberalism, economics, cutting down of government,

hardening of lines, politically speaking, in the U.S. So there is a direct line between Reagan and the current American administration. But he also suggests that as a counter-revolution, because when we think of revolution, we think of things that are progressive and things that are about to bring positive change for the people. And to some extent, the Iranian Revolution did that because there's a lot of inequalities in Iran. But he argues that it's a counter-revolution that has sort of paved the way for a kind of religious fundamentalism and religious authoritarianism that we see in India, we see in the U.S., we see elsewhere in the Middle East. And it also led to kind of a perversion of American policy in the Middle East that led to the American administration siding with Saddam Hussein in the early 80s in order to undermine the influence of the Ayatollah in Iran. And that obviously led to the fiasco that eventually became the first invasion of Iraq, the first Gulf War in 91 and then the second one in 2003.

And I never even thought of connecting all these dots. does a fantastic job of connecting them. And I really came to believe that the age we're living in, the historical moment we're in, was born out of the Iranian Revolution. Kamal al-Solele's non-fiction book recommendation is the narrative history, King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution. It's by journalist Scott Anderson. But if you're in a different mood altogether, Kamal has another recommendation, one that encompasses both listening and some related viewing. I've always loved the great American songbook, the great composers and lyricist of the early 20s and mid-20th century, thinking of George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter,

but one of my absolute favorite songwriting teams was Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, particularly Lawrence Hart's lyrics. I call him my sacred prophet. My funny Valentine, Manhattan, bewitched, bothered and bewildered. I could write a book, Blue Moon. Blue Moon, you saw me standing alone.

Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own. There is a certain joy, but also jadedness in his lyrics that I absolutely relate to. He captured something about love and about loneliness and loss. It's just as well as he captured what it really feels to fall in love. And I think that being able to kind of bring these two together and do it in a way that is often very original for the time and that mirrors the kind of the parlance of New York in the 1920s and 30s

is something very witty and the rhymes are very carefully measured. I'll sing to him, each bring to him, Worship the trousers that cling to him. Bewitched, mothered, and bewildered, am I? I just want to say that he was very well-educated, and spoke fluent German, in fact, translated a lot of German plays into the American stage. He studied journalism at Columbia.

I don't think he graduated, but he studied journalism at Columbia. And he was so erudite and well-read. My funny Valentine, sweet comic Valentine, you make me smile with my heart. In my funny Valentine, for example. Is your figure less than Greek? Is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak,

are you smart? You could study the lyrics, in my opinion, their works of poetry, stand-alone works of poetry, even when they're meant to be in the service of a character, in a musical. Not if you care for me. Stay, little Valentine. The last line in the obituary in the New York Times is simply, Mr. Hart was not married. Contemporary readings of his character suggest that he was struggling with homosexuality. He was never able to live an openly free life.

A lot of his lyrics are about both the beauty and the pain of love. I need a drink. And I'm delighted to see that there is a movie about Lauren's Heart called Blue Moon. It's the Richard Linklater movie. They should put my picture on that bottle. The whiskey that made Lorenz Hart unemployable. I think we should be dreaming about. New Rogers and I should say, are something people haven't seen before, something big.

We have to work like professionals, Larry. It's a business. That's all. I'm really looking forward to seeing the Blue Moon movie. I'd like to see how they made sense of his life. And I hope they were kind to him, to be perfectly honest. Some of the interviews I've seen with Richard Linklater and seemed to suggest that he was under decline in many ways,

but he had a lot going for him. Even when he was at the lowest ebb, his second best was always better than most lyricists at the time. So go, Mr. Hart. Writer and academic, Camal As Soleil, on his love for the lyrics of Lorenz Heart. You're listening to Recommended, an episode of reading, listening, and viewing suggestions from some of our contributors. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers.

Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location.

Visit specksavers.com.com to learn more. I've covered a lot of K-pop stories in my time as a Korean journalist, but this one is different. All I need is one person to believe in me. All I need is one person to think I have something. Because Katie Zito isn't a famous K-pop idol. That's what she wants to be. Can she do it in just three months at one of Seoul's grueling K-pop academies? From USG audio and novel, listen to Mission K-Pop. Available now.

Algorithms are programmed to reflect and build on our individual cultural tastes. Your new favorite song, your next read, and that ever popular category, if you like that, you might like this. Algorithms can be helpful, but do they capture all of our messy human desires, including the ones that we didn't realize we had? Probably not. As anyone who's been helped in a bookstore

or converted by a friend can attest. In that spirit, here are more ideas contributors, with the thought-provoking work that they recommend. They describe their suggestions to ideas producer Lisa Godfrey. Is it mostly for work purposes or can a librarian read for pleasure? Oh, the librarian can read for pleasure. I think librarians mostly read for pleasure.

I will say the one huge danger working in a library is there's displays of books out and it's always tempting to just pick up four or five books, walk away, thinking, I will read all of these. Ideas is frequently out on the road, recording public panels and talks right across Canada. There are a lot of moving parts to these events, and they simply wouldn't be possible without the contributions of people like our next recommender. He helped us mount an ideas for a better Canada discussion at his library. My name is Perrin-Kanujia. I'm events coordinator. at Burlington Public Library, which is in Burlington, Ontario. So you're recommending a book to us, and what is it?

Unfit Parent, a disabled mother challenges an inaccessible world by Jessica Slice. It's part memoir, part research, part journalism. It's, of course, about disability. The memoir part follows the story of Slice. At the beginning, she's a fit, athletic person. She starts experiencing health issues, and she's eventually diagnosed with pots and Eler's Danlo's syndrome. And the first part of the book is her coming to terms with that diagnosis.

And accepting that she isn't just sick, but she's disabled. She mostly uses an electric wheelchair. What drew you to this one in particular? We recently moved my in-law. to an assisted living facility. My partner and I, we don't have children. And I've had this thought in the back of my mind is, what's going to happen if we can't take care of ourselves?

What's going to happen if I can't take care of myself? So disability, thought, and literature is an area I'm woefully uninformed about. I wanted to remedy that. I wanted to be informed about it generally, but also for myself. So this is a book that probably no one would have matched you up with and you came to it out of interest. And once you were in it, what compelled you about it?

With any book, it's the writing that, you know, keeps you reading. And this book did have sentences and ideas that made me pause while I was reading. So one of those sentences was, if we're lucky to live long enough, every single person will become disabled. And that spoke to me. It made me realize how unfair I was being, not just to disabled people, of course, but also in my own thinking,

by thinking, oh, it would be really bad if I were to lose body functionality. It's wrong thinking. It's more respectful. and honestly, more true that becoming disabled, yes, it changes everything. But it's not something to see in this negative light. And if I see it that way, I'm being unfair to others and I'm being unfair to my possible future self. For many people,

disability is a reminder that nothing is promised and very little is actually in our control. We think, oh, we don't want to get anywhere close to fragility because that is terrifying. But I think once we kind of look at in the face and live with it, then we actually can live very fulfilling lives. Jessica Slice, author of Unfit Parent, A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World. It does seem remarkable in that it has insights for both parents. parents with disabilities and others who don't fit that bill at all. But in terms of the insights you got into parenting, when one has a disability, what did you take away from the book?

One is that parenting, even for people who may not be undergoing this body situation, it's a struggle. It comes with a bunch of unpredictability. and it can really, really disrupt your life, your economics. But being disabled means adapting. It means being ready for things that are not predictable. It means being resourceful. And because in her situation and the parenting group she was around, the disabled people had those traits.

In some ways, being a parent was less disruptive to their life because they expect that every day of every moment of their life, whereas those who aren't disabled, that might be new to them, and parenting is harder for them. It's just a different view of what a disabled life is that really touched me about this book. She seems to have spoken to people who experienced real prejudice around seeking, you know, reproductive help, around giving birth. Was that surprising to you? It was. And another aspect of the book was that prejudice, it's layers upon layers, as it is for all of society. So people who had a disability at a certain level of prejudice, and then people who were racialized or in another minority group had even a deeper level of prejudice around them. There is a lot of difficulty with being a disabled parent.

One of the sentences that I remember from the book is a disabled parent being asked, like, you can't take care of yourself. how are you going to take care of a child? Like, that's like a common view. Whereas it's quite possible the opposite might be true. This person has learned to take care of themselves in the most difficult conditions possible. They might be better at taking care of a child. You seem to be in good company in terms of other people

who are loving it. It's getting great reviews and blurbs from the culture writer Anne Helen Peterson and Rachel Aviv. of the New Yorker. What do you think that everyone is responding to? So I think one thing I realized while reading this book is each person's disability story is their disability story. But for me, Lice was able to touch something in me that shifted me emotionally, but also shifted my thinking. And I think it's partly because she was very honest.

open about her story, but she was able to back it up with research. One of the other key ideas in the book is the question, is disability a problem, or is the inaccessibility of our world the problem? And this is true for all of us. You know, there's this notion of universal design that if we design something for someone with a limitation, it helps everybody. So Slice takes a look at how our built environments, our social structures, our economic structures, prevent us all from living the best we could be living. Librarian Perimprete Canuja with his nonfiction recommendation for ideas listeners. It's called Unfit Parent, A Disabled Mother Challenges an Inaccessible World by Jessica

slice. I came across a book called You're Not Listening, and that book had a profound impact on how I have been thinking about listening since I read it and how I've been talking to other people about it as well. I'm Jillian Horton. I'm a physician and associate professor of internal medicine at the University of Manitoba, and I'm also a writer, and I'm the author of the book, we are all published. perfectly fine, a memoir of love, medicine, and healing.

Listening is a topic, I bet, in med school. And as you progress in your career, how did you think about that in relation to this book? Well, I love that you started with your diplomatically phrased comment about doctors, because doctors are not naturally good listeners. In fact, most people are not naturally good listeners. But what we know about doctors in particular, there was a study in 2018 that showed that doctors take about 11 seconds before they interrupt a patient on average. So we do not have the market cornered on being great listeners. But when I think about this book and why it influenced me so much, you know, Kate Murphy, and she's a journalist, she's written for the New York Times and many other high impact publications, she really got me thinking about how we make the case for listening in an age. of just increasing social fragmentation.

We're in these conflict-soaked times. And so what is it that happens in the moments when we can put that aside and bring people back together? And that's some of the magic stuff that she talks about in her work and what kind of steps we can take to move towards that. In terms of not listening to other people, what are some of the things that get in the way of us doing that? Well, one thing Kate talks about is how so many of us are listening to respond instead of listening to process, to divine meaning, to interpret body language, and to try to figure out what is not being said, what we're missing as we try to weave all the parts together as someone is talking to us. And actually one of the real gems in the book that I took away, she talks about something that was first described by a fellow by the name of Charles Durber. And that is conversational narcissism and this idea of two kinds of responses that we often have and they are shift responses and support responses. So if we think back to what gets in the way, most of our responses.

So if you and I sit down to have a conversation and you say to me, if I say, how are you? And you say, I have a headache. Most of us will respond in this way. We'll respond with a shift back to ourselves. Oh, I have a headache too. It's such a crappy day out. I don't feel that well. That's a shift response versus a support response.

Say what's going on. How are you doing? What do you think is happening? That's a support response. And when you pull back from that pattern to think about why we so often go to shift versus support, a lot of the time we get caught in these neural patterns of listening to respond as opposed to listening to understand the underlying message. And some of that listening to respond is fear-based.

Can it really be extrapolated from the personal to the political? You know, we hear so much about how people are locked down in their political positions and do find even the searching opinions of other people. offensive or disquieting in whatever way, can it really be extrapolated to the political sort of polarities we have? Yeah, well, that really makes me think of one thing that I found so interesting in this book, and it's the concept of sinking. So when we are in conversation with someone or we're listening to someone, you know, neuroscientists, as Murphy writes, who have looked at this with functional MRIs. So MRI scans that assess in real-time

metabolic activity as opposed to being static scans. They look at when certain things are happening, what parts of the brain light up, what parts of the brain go quiet. And one of the things they found is that when there is kind of a locked in state of communication where one person is speaking or delivering a message that the other person is aligned with them in some way, they begin to share neural patterns. And this is, she talks about this is coupling or sinking. But it actually makes me think of something that we talk about a lot in one of the other facets of my life, which is teaching meditation and being a serious meditator myself. And it's the idea that the more that we listen to someone and vice versa, the more we become of

shared mind is we also have this drive to sink and connect. But in meditation, there's this saying, you know, what you think about, you become, what we practice, we become, what we consume, we become. So we should probably make sure that we're choosing those things with more care than we typically choose at this moment when we get typically fed, you know, these increasingly consistent versions of the messaging that we've responded to previously. And we start syncing only with that kind of content. As someone who, you know, comes from a scientific background, what convinced you that there was real insight in the book? I think it was just that there were a few of those aha moments, you know, where something that I thought to myself, yes, I felt that, but I never really thought about it in this way.

And the messages were often incredibly simple. Like, I'll give you an example of one that really resonated with me as a teacher in particular. You know, Murphy points out, and she takes us to research that in attention from a listener, so let's say I'm teaching a university class, I'm speaking to a group. of people, and I clearly don't have the attention of the people in my classroom, that inattention decreases the quality of the presentation. This just being a great example of research that shows that when a speaker clearly feels that they have the attention of a person on the other side, even if that person isn't asking questions, if they're just signaling physically that they're paying attention, that speaker delivers better information. They are more articulate and they give a better quality of a talk. And I think it's just an example of the

kind of message that is so relevant for this moment. We're not giving attention to people who we feel aren't synced with us. Don't represent the exact views that we represent. We don't, you know, listen to each other because we've forgotten that art of listening. But she kind of reinserts us into that equation reminding us that if we think that other people don't have something worthwhile while to say, we're actually helping to script that. You have another recommendation, and it is a podcast, and it is sort of about listening in a way. The wonderful storytelling podcast by Jonathan Goldstein, heavyweight, thank goodness, brought back to life by a new media company after being brutally paused in 2023, despite being a hugely popular, amazing podcast. And the connection

there that I just found myself thinking about is the way that Goldstein embodies listening. I mean, part of what I love is how he tells stories and how he explores stories. But he has this way of just conveying complete and full presence to people when you're listening to him, when he's taking us as listeners through these tender and intimate stories of all kinds of people all around the world who are carrying something that they need. alleviated. Yeah, I also love that show and it has a kind of a real voice to it and a certain magic. It's also extremely irreverent, by the way, if our discussion of this is making people think that it is an earnest therapy podcast. It's really not that. No, the purpose of the past, Jonathan, there's only one purpose to bring you and me right here and now. Okay. The past The past can be a smoke off the end of my cigar.

For me, the past is also smoke off the end of my cigar. Juicy wafts of precious smoke to be hysterically clod at like a rabid raccoon attacking a healing. And yet it does seem to achieve such psychological insight, huh? It was one of the most beautiful discoveries for me of the last few years. And I know I'm one of thousands and thousands of people who are so glad it's back. Writer and physician Jillian Horton, her recommendations for the podcast, Heavyweight, and the nonfiction book,

You're Not Listening, by Kate Murphy. Hi, my name is Jesse Wente. I'm Anishinaabe Ojibwe from Toronto, and I'm currently the storyteller in residence at the Toronto Metropolitan University. Jesse might be best known these days as a writer and a public speaker. He published a best-selling memoir, Unreconciled, and recently a kid's book called Danger Eagle. He's worked as a journalist, a culture critic, a film programmer.

He was head of the Canada Council for the Arts. It's a wide-ranging career for someone in midlife, but always he works in relation to the arts and in telling indigenous stories. So my recommendation is a book that I read this year that's one of those books that I think I've been waiting my whole life to read. And then it appeared and I got to read it. And I was asked to provide a blurb for it in which I think the blurb was, I've been waiting my whole life for this book. And it's this book called Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes, Settler Colonialism in Horror. And by horror, we mean horror movies, of which I am a big fan. And I've long had my own thoughts around indigenous representation and how indigenous people are both treated, but also the source of so much of, so many of the things that seem to scare, particularly North American people.

And then I got this book, which really is an unpacking of all of that at a much higher level than I would have been capable. And it goes through all of these movies and even movies that I would not have even thought of. Laura Hall, who's the author, does such a great job expanding this notion beyond just how indigenous people appear to how they appear in different forms in American horror movies. And I was just, yeah, blown away by the book. It's one of those books I read in a night. Amazing. Tell us about some of the films that had either a positive or negative impact on you around indigenous horror. An obvious one would be something like John Carpenter's The Thing, which is a movie I adore.

It's about a bunch of explorers in the Antarctic who uncover a spaceship and then have to try to figure out if one of them might be an alien or not or something. sort of monster. And it always struck me as a film that was very much embedded in the legacy of colonialism in terms of you have these folks who are in a strange location who are afraid of something they don't understand. And I think Laura would say like a lot of settler colonial or places that were formed through colonialism, if we want to use a different way to think about it, that a lot of their horror is based in fear of the other and fear of the unknown and frankly in the fear of being colonized. And I think that that fear is very present in the thing, the idea that you could be taken over by something and replaced. Like I think a lot of horror,

particularly in America, is based around that fear. And I would suggest that that's probably be because there is some understanding of what happened here and that it was horrific and there's a fear of it happening to the people who perpetrated it or their descendants. That permeates. And frankly, it permeates not just popular culture. I think it permeates these places right up into public policy. If we wanted to, we could relate it to the immigration policies that are being formed in both America and Canada as we talk and into the future. A lot of that stems from this fear of the other or seems to be based in a fear of the other and a fear of being taken over and that values will be lost. And absence sometimes in those fears is the recognition,

well, yeah, that happens. That's the thing that exists and you live in sort of on top of that history. At the same time, there are indigenous filmmakers all over the world making horror films. What kind of differences or subversions do you kind of see in those films? They often also deal with the horror of colonialism, but from a different vantage point, more from the horror realized. You know, if you think of the films of, say, Jeff Barnaby here in Canada, rhymes for young ghouls or Blood Quantum, both horror movies. They're directly about colonialism, right? Rhymes for Rheals is about residential schools. Blood Quantum is a zombie movie, but very much about the idea of colonialism. One of them will come in here and infect this entire camp.

Who says we're immune? But don't jaw books at Hummel. Oh, and ah, suelixig. And I think they confront sort of the reality of it, because both of those films exist in the aftermath of the events, as opposed to the events themselves. And I think, so there's, I think there's a positionality difference in terms of how indigenous horror folks

approach it. But I think the source material is not at all surprisingly quite similar. You were making this professional transition from the World of Arts Administration and various other things that you've done into being more of a storyteller yourself.

Do you find yourself drawn to horror narratives or what are you finding in yourself as you write and think? The short answer is yes, Lisa. I am drawn to those sorts of things. It's funny in my current work, you wouldn't necessarily see it. You know, I've just published a children's book, which is not horrific in any way. It's very joyful. I'm working on the next memoir, which I would not describe as horrific, although it is filled with some trauma and stuff. That's very difficult. I get the impression when I hear you speak and when I hear you in interviews that you're someone who's very difficult. keenly aware of the need to sort of balance darkness with light in your own life. What do you do for fun when you're not writing or thinking or speaking? During the pandemic, like so many, I was feeling very confined and I was going through a lot

of stuff, not just the pandemic, but all sorts of other stuff in life and was very much wanting to find an outdoor pursuit that I could pour some of the energy that I could, poured into my career for the past 30 years, that I could maybe direct it to something that wasn't as potentially harmful to me, I guess is how I would put it. And so bizarrely I ended up on golf. So yeah, I golf the last three years, more than 150 rounds a year. If I'm not telling a story in one way or another, counseling or working with a a student, then I'm probably on the golf course. How are you as a golfer?

Do you like the fact that there's the ability to improve all the time, I guess, by simply by doing it? Am I wrong about that, by the way? Yeah, no, you're exactly right. I find golf fascinating because you definitely can improve. I've improved greatly. But it's not a game you can ever master. You know, they have a tournament called the Masters, but it's, you can't be perfect. And more importantly than all of that, I find it very therapeutic.

You know, you can't play golf if you're angry or if you're not even about being angry. If you're just not in control of your energy and your emotions and your spirit and you're not sort of aligned, it'll be a tough game. Whereas if you can be humble and accepting of failure, it's a game you can actually excel at. Because golf is mostly about how you recover from failure as opposed to always succeeding. And that's very much like life. And then finally, I would say I read this article. It was about indigenous-owned and operated golf courses. It was just about how they manage them differently in terms of the, say, environmental impacts of golf, which are there.

That's a very real part of the sport. It's played on land. It can require a lot of water, landscaping and all this stuff that can be quite disruptive to the land. And so I'm very conscious of that. But reading this article, this was an article by Catherine Singh in the Globe and Mail, I was just sort of struck by how a lot of the times what we see with First Nations people or indigenous people in Canada is we will take something that has been imported and like try to make it into something a little bit different. like we do with films. This is us with golf.

It has a lot of values and ideas within it that are interesting from an Anishnabe perspective that I think mean it's, it can be a game of both the body, the mind, and the spirit, which is very interesting. And to see it in golf, which is, you know, let's admit, at least in its modern incarnation, among the more colonial games, you could get, you can, side to take up. I just find it interesting that even in those corridors, even on those fairways, if you will, you can find indigenous sort of activity transforming them in interesting ways.

Storyteller and author Jesse Wente. You've been listening to an episode called Recommended, featuring ideas contributors. There is a list of their nonfiction choices, along with some suggestions from ideas producers on our website, cbc.ca.ca slash ideas. This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production by Sam McNulty and Emily Carvezio. Senior producer Nikola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.