Passages

For more than 20 years, Dave Meslin has been a community organizer focused primarily on three topics: sustainable transportation, visual communication in public spaces and electoral reform. Or, as Meslin poetically puts it, his focus has been on bikes, billboards and ballots.  While these topics might appear disconnected, Meslin thinks there’s a common thread, which is giving voice to groups that...

Canadian historian Harold Innis devoted the years before his death in 1952 to the question of communication–its bias, its relationship with empire, its capacity to foster thought styles so dominant as to entrain "all minds and set them running in predetermined 'grooves.'" Those last words belong not to Innis but to David Cayley. Cayley is a writer and broadcaster, whose decades o...

To lift oneself up against the gravity of common sense, it takes a probing mind and searching spirit. It takes focus and scope, it takes dialogue with people who have real experience, and it perhaps also takes some acquaintance with history. Ed Dunsworth is a historian of labour, migration, and politics at McGill University. His 2022 book is Harvesting Labour: Tobacco and the Global Making of Cana...

There are a number of ways that one could describe Tonya K. Davidson’s new book, Ottawology . On one level, it’s a synthesis of sociological theory and research about Canada’s capital. It is also to some extent a map of the vital tensions that we find in all cities. At yet another level, it's a book that helps its readers perceive the richness of urban life, and every city’s potential to nourish b...

Annie Dillard is verbally vibrant and deadly in description. But it’s the nature of the solstice season too, impeccably balanced, a knife’s edge of mortality and vitality.  Passages featured in this solstice reading bonus episode are from Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974) and The Writing Life (1989).

A great work, like a great river, has many tributaries. In the case of Plato’s Republic , American classicist James Romm divines one such buried stream, exploring Plato’s encounters with tyranny on his several trips to the Greek West. Romm’s 2025 book is Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece’s Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece . Passages from Plato’s Seventh Letter ar...

Ed Broadbent’s political thought and action was based on a desire for a fuller and richer democratic life, and a basic respect for his fellow Canadians. In one of his final years, Broadbent wrote that his political task had been “to communicate a social democratic vision to ordinary Canadians,” providing tangible improvements to their lives in the process. Amongst Broadbent’s co-authors for his fi...

Democracy is both a lofty ideal and a humble collection of practices, institutions and dispositions.  Dave Moscrop’s writing travels between these two poles. Moscrop brings gentleness to his judgment of individual democratic decision-makers and an urgency to the overall project of elevating our democracy. Dave Moscrop is a commentator on politics for TV, radio and print, his writing appearing in a...

Dennis Lee's poems sound the depths of human interiority, but also show that interiority has external (and political) correlates. The poems featured in this summer reading bonus episode are collected in Lee's 2017 book, Heart Residence .

For Andrew Coyne, Canadian democracy has become more ceremony than substance. His 2025 book The Crisis of Canadian Democracy maps the imbalances between government and Parliament, leaders and caucus, prime ministers and cabinets. And he shows the fundamental risks posed by these asymmetries, particularly as declining legitimacy diminishes action and initiative, at a moment when the country badly n...

Richard Kearney is keenly aware of the power and appeal of vision, but shows that it’s rather touch that we find at the heart of the senses, and the heart of philosophy. Kearney’s work is profoundly ethical, and puts an emphasis on how living well entails tactful touching, with the demand that we permit ourselves to be touched even as we touch. Richard Kearney is Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy...

Human beings are forever drawn to simplify in thought what it is that makes us individuals. But there is an alternative, one that Shannon Hoff articulates in her book How to Read Hegel Now .  Shannon Hoff is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University. She is also author of The Laws of the Spirit: A Hegelian Theory of Justice , and has published in the areas of political philosophy, f...

If we dig deeply into and think richly about any particular topic, we usually unearth a perspective much wider than our planned excavation. Herodotus wrote in the fifth century BCE about the invasion of mainland Greece by Xerxes and the Persian Empire. But though he takes that conflict as focal point, his vision unfolds in all directions.  James Romm is the author of numerous books about the ancie...

With winter solstice upon us, here's some holiday reading connecting up to themes from across this season of Passages . Depending on edition, this abridgement is of either chapter 34 or 35 of Herman Melville's Moby Dick : "The Mast-Head." The show will be back with new episodes in the new year.

Inexplicable interruptions can fill us with terror, but they also tear open a space for thinking, and for thinking otherwise. While we want to believe that our tools are adequate to our tasks and our paradigms can withstand any anomaly, chasms to the contrary are opening constantly. In Climate Change Interrupted , Barbara Leckie shows how interruptions can challenge our means of communication, exp...

While a lot has changed since 1867, something that stands the test of time in Karl Marx’s Capital is its aspiration to comprehensively understand the world by bringing to bear every intellectual and literary tool available.  Perhaps fitting then that, on one present-day account, Marx structured his masterpiece with the inspiration of an equally grand thinker more than 500 years his predecessor. Th...

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a 20th century philosopher whose work weaves readers back into the fabric of their lives. In this conversation, Dave Ward immerses the listener in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in just the way that Merleau-Ponty re-immerses the mind in the world. Dave Ward is senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Music for this episode from Uppbeat . L...

One of the powers of language is to permit us to conceptually parse the world with significant degrees of precision. This conversation with humour writer Eli Burnstein shows how our ability to distinguish is not just of practical significance but also a major source of joy and wonder. Eli Burnstein’s book is Dictionary of Fine Distinctions . Music for this episode from Uppbeat . License code: 2CWH...

Plato’s Symposium is a dialogue about members of a community sharing what they know across differences, disruptions and decades. This conversation with Hilary Ilkay works through the narrative and philosophy of Symposium , illuminating along the way the enduring connection between learning and community. Hilary Ilkay is a Senior Fellow in the Foundation Year Programme at the University of King’s C...

Solitude is often invisible to us, but this conversation with Ron Haflidson brings to light the internal dynamics of solitude and some of the ways that we all can cultivate and benefit from solitude in our own lives. Ron Haflidson’s book is On Solitude, Conscience, Love and Our Inner and Outer Lives . Music for this episode from Uppbeat . License code: 2CWHTEVPITF6KWEO