Ideas Folgen

Anxiety is an inescapable, fundamental human reaction to an unpredictable future. This is the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a curmudgeon of the 17th century who believed that without a powerful, sovereign government life would be "nasty, brutish and short." Politics and uncertainty go hand in hand. In this podcast, IDEAS explores how a new take on Hobbes on the topic of anxiety offers a surprising perspective on American politics and democracy. For worried politicos today his way of thinking offers valuable lessons.*This episode originally aired on Jan. 13, 2025.Guests in this podcast:Vertika is a political science PhD student at McGill University.Kinch Hoekstra is a professor of political science and law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes.Bethany Albertson is an associate professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin, and the co-author of Anxious Politics: Democratic Citizenship in a Threatening World.Shana Gadarian is a professor of political science and associate dean for research at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

Mathematics is everywhere: a common refrain from high school math teachers. But did you ever think math could be linked to literature? And not just in works from the literary greats of the past but for example Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. The relationship between math and literature are fundamentally creative, says Sarah Hart, a mathematician and author who speaks to Nahlah Ayed about how these two things that seem so polar opposite are deeply intertwined.Sarah Hart's book is called Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature.

It is possible. Flavours have been lost to the past, as culinary physicist Lenore Newman explains. She points to the extinction of the passenger pigeon — a species numbering in the billions throughout North America — as an example. In 1914, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati zoo — and in place of the pigeon, came the industrialized farming of chicken. Newman says we're now transitioning to lab-raised food — a technology capable of pushing a global history of scarcity into one of abundance, all the while easing land usage. She calls it the "food singularity."