Ideas

When Jay Pitter was eight years old and out shopping with her mother, she began swaying to the music at the mall. Her mother scolded her for it — signalling that it was undignified for a Black person to act that way in public. That incident was the genesis for Black Public Joy: No Permit Or Permission Required. In her book, she addresses the self-policing Black people can internalise, and reveals how culture, urban planning, and memory shape the way people can access joy in parks, streets, transit, and neighbourhoods.

Guest in this episode:

Jay Pitter is an award-winning placemaker focused on creating joyful public spaces that foster belonging, prosperity, and cultural memory. She advances this work through cultural planning, policy frameworks, and storytelling. Pitter is also an adjunct urban planning professor and has engaged students at Cornell, Princeton, and MIT, advancing new theories of public joy that connect practice, policy, and pedagogy.

Mae West shocked audiences and infuriated censors for more than 70 years. She was pop culture’s original blonde bombshell sex-symbol comedienne provocateur. But she was more than just a corseted sex pot with an affinity for word play. She was a trailblazer, transgressive, funny, smart, sassy, lively, a genius. And she got away with all of it. IDEAS contributor Lynda Shorten explores the legacy of the eccentric Mae West.

Guests in this episode:

Linda Hutcheon is a professor emerita of English and comparative literature at The University of Toronto.

Ramona Curry is an associate professor emerita of English at The University of Illinois.

Pamela Wojeck is a professor of film studies at The University of Notre Dame

Scott C. Miller is a make-up artist and retired undertaker

Rachel Jedinak will never forget the day that changed her life in July 16, 1942. She was eight years old, living in Nazi-occupied France at a time known as les années noires — The Dark Years. Police rounded up Jewish men, women, and children for deportation. Rachel, her older sister and mother were among them. That morning two police offers did something that Rachel considers an act of resistance. The girls were saved. But their mother was not. IDEAS contributor Neil Sandell, based in Nice, France, explores the complicated moral territory of resistance, what it actually meant during the occupation, and maybe means now.

Elon Musk is on the verge of becoming a trillionaire. Right now Musk's wealth is currently around $825 billion US — more than double what it was a year earlier. Only 22 countries currently boast economies larger than Musk’s net worth, but he’s catching up. In the third episode of our series The Billionaire Age we investigate how Musk and his fellow billionaires are trying to take over the world. And if they succeed, what will this mean for the rest of us?

Listen to more episodes in this series:

Listen to Part One: How did we get here?
Listen to Part Two: Disney heiress on the dangers of extreme wealth

Guests in this episode:

Ingrid Robeyns is a philosopher and economist. She is the chair in Ethics of Intuitions at Utrecht University, and the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth.

Lucas Chancel is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics.

Gabriel Zucman is an economist and the co-director of The World Inequality Lab. He's also a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley.

Nitin Bharti is an economist and lecturer at the University of Western Australia. He is also the South and South-East Asia coordinator at the World Inequality Lab.

Lars Osberg is an economics professor at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest book is The Scandalous Rise of Inequality in Canada.

Abigail Disney is an American film producer, philanthropist and social activist. She is a member of Patriotic Millionaires which advocates for higher taxes on the wealthy.

Paul Krugman is an economist and the winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Tim Wu is a legal scholar and professor at Columbia Law School. He is also a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. His latest book is The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity.

Nick Hanauer is an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He co-authored the book, Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing The Lies and Half-Truths that Protect Profit, Power and Wealth in America, with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. He also hosts the podcast Pitchfork Economics.

Guido Alfani is a professor of economic history at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. His latest book is As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West.

Our homes have been stripped of their essential humanity, says Leilani Farha, this year's CBC Massey Lecturer. Today housing has become a commodity — one fuelling the biggest industry in the world. In her lectures, Housing Inc.: A Global Takeover and Our Fight for Home, Farha calls on all of us to envision a new ideology for home — one rooted in dignity, humanity and law. “Home is required for human existence," says Farha, who served as a UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing from 2014 to 2020 and is now the global director of The Shift. She speaks with Nahlah Ayed about her 25 years fighting for housing as a human right, the conversation she hopes her Massey lectures will spark and why "home is really everything."