Ancient history just got an upgrade. Forget the ruins, empires and great thinkers of the Classical period and make way for escaped slaves, subversive pirates, and freethinking religious sects. These nonconformist communities rejected hierarchy and political order in favour of creating a more equitable society.

Author, religious scholar and historian Christopher Zeichmann offers an alternative lens on the Greco-Roman era in his book called Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings.

The yellow traffic light is a perfect example of imperfection — with intention. While driving you have to think fast. Do you speed up or stop, whether that means easily or slamming on the brakes? Every driver has their answer and what lies in the middle is a vast perceptual field. A great deal of thought has gone into the engineering of the ambiguous yellow light, as IDEAS producer Seán Foley found out. He had his own encounter with what he was sure was the shortest yellow light in the world. It resulted in a traffic fine, and gave voice to so many questions.

Guests featured in this podcast episode:

Travis Stocking is a senior traffic analyst for Durham Region, Ontario

Alfred Mele is a philosophy professor at Florida State University

Ron Usher is a retired lawyer and IDEAS listener in Parksville, B.C.

North Korea is no place for evangelical Christians today. But when journalist Jonathan Cheng peeled back decades he found out Christianity is at the heart of the Kim family’s rise to power and continuing dynasty. Cheng has spent 15 years and two trips to North Korea to piece this all together. His book is called Korean Messiah.

Jonathan Cheng is the China bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, and was previously the Korea bureau chief, running coverage of the Korean peninsula, including politics and society in both North and South Korea.

If you want to hear what a laughing rat sounds like this podcast is for you. From why the sound of laughter triggers us to join in, to how a laughing yoga class starts, to the difference between AHA and HAHA in science, IDEAS contributor Peter Brown takes us on a joyride to reveal the mystery of laugher. Will this podcast make you laugh? Most likely. But it's better than catching a cold. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 4, 2020.

Africa is a centre of world history — a fact that's been deliberately obscured, says journalist Howard W. French. In this talk based on his book, The Second Emancipation, he explores the surprisingly early seeds of 20th century Pan-African thought, and how Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana went from reluctant student to influential leader of a free Ghana.

Howard W. French delivered the Black History Month lecture at University of Toronto's New College. French was is a former New York Times bureau chief based in Shanghai. He now teaches journalism at Columbia University and is also the author of Born in Blackness.

From Joan of Arc to Kim Kardashian, and Davy Crockett to Donald Trump, celebrity culture has deep and wide roots. Famous people who elicited Kardashian-level feelings of love and hate in the public were present centuries ago — long before screens and social media. Though, as we find out in this podcast, they all share similar qualities. *This episode originally aired on June 30, 2022.

Irina Dumitrescu is a writer, co-host of the LRB podcast Encounters with Medieval Women, and a professor of Medieval English at the University of Bonn.

Sharon Marcus is author of The Drama of Celebrity and the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Heated Rivalry, Love is Blind or Boyfriend on Demand all underline the global appetite for passionate swooning. But let’s not forget the source for all of it: the romance novel. It may have a reputation problem but sales in 2023 reached 39 million copies or romance fiction globally — ringing in at $1.5 billion dollars. The books and readership continue to evolve as popularity increases. What is it about romance novels that women are drawn to? Is it unhealthy escapism, harmless fun or a kind of opiate? IDEAS looks back to a 1992 episode called Paperback Love to understand the enduring acclaim of romance novels.

In the days before her medically-assisted death, journalist Elaine Dewar made it her mission to finish writing her book revealing ignored history. For more than three years, the author investigated how Canada's health care system cruelly mistreated Indigenous people — including forcing them to use segregated hospitals. Dewar's extensive research uncovers not only a shameful past, but that our collective obliviousness to it all was deliberately manufactured.