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A podcast dedicated to "thinking slow" about how different topics relate to being more humanist in our approach to a complexly hurting world. Join us as we look at how everyday objects and seemingly straightforward topics can all reveal deeper questions about how to advance better policy and move among one another with greater compassion and curiosity.
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. Over this series, we've looked at deep time and more recent histories of migration, the excessive role of technology in enforcing current borders, and the bigge…
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. One other problem with borders is how ill-prepared they make us, as a species, to address extreme human rights violations. Genocide and civil war are routinely …
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. In this episode, we reflect on how much technology has had to be developed - and often at further cost to human well-being - just to maintain our notions of rig…
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. War has routinely been a transformer of human geography, and changing borders have consistently created significant amounts of human suffering. Recognizing thes…
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. In this episode, we're going back to those deeper histories of migration, to remind ourselves how fragile and recent so many of our ideas about human group stru…
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In this final miniseries for Season 2, "Migration and Mobility Rights", we reflect on the arbitrary nature of national borders, in light of humanity's much more fluid histories of movement. With climate change disaster accelerating, and amid ongoing war, we have more pressure points than ever, challenging our notion of rigid limits to where human b…
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration that our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. We looked at the fragility of money transfers for average citizens, the fraught history of the IMF, and the easily abused s…
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The rise of cryptocurrency has many stories attached to it: some about wanting to change the world, some about exploiting the wo…
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. In this episode, I reflect on a time when I was beguiled by the feel-good story of microfinancing. Nothing is ever that simple, …
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The IMF and World Bank are complex forces in the world today. Located in and funded by countries that caused a great deal of fin…
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. The internet age gives the impression of easy connectivity, but the reality is quite different for those trying to make and send…
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In this second miniseries of Season 2, "Global Finance", we're wrestling with the strangeness of living in a world that aspires to a level of global integration our current systems can't support - and maybe don't want to. In this first episode, we "think slow" about the arbitrary and dehumanizing activity of putting a political price tag on life at…
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, we've been exploring "Petronationalism": the way corporate overlap with state enterprise around the world has created a situation of oil imperialism that underpins a great deal of national and international trauma over the last 150 years. What could we do if we were no longer reliant on, and shaping national my…
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're looking at "Petronationalism". Oil imperialism has done a number on our world. In four snapshots we reflect on the ways that this fossil fuel market has negatively impacted the shape of many cultures. When we talk about reducing oil dependency, we often speak in environmental terms--but what if what's goo…
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, "Petronationalism", we're exploring the myths underpinning modern nation-states, and the arbitrary divisions drawn between corporate and government exercise when it comes to oil imperialism. There are certainly differences between Communism and Capitalism... but do they always show up in the way oil-seeking nat…
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're exploring "Petronationalism". Why have petroleum products played such a significant role in the development of nation-states? There's a story of imperialism here with strong consequences for our ongoing crisis shaped by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but also something deeper. For all that we treat "corpor…
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, we're talking about "Petronationalism". After wrestling with the myths imposed on nation-states in Episode 1, especially around World War I, we turn our attention to myth-making within specific countries over much longer time spans, and the way these histories complicate our understanding of what a nation even …
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In this first miniseries of Season 2, "Petronationalism", we look at the making of nations: our myths around a "balance of power" for sovereign states, and the way they've coloured our understanding of 20th century history. If we're going to make sense of power struggles in the world today, we need to rethink some of our fundamental ideas about the…
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In this Season One closer, we explore the history of the light bulb, and what aligning ingenuity with literal illumination has done for us as a culture (for better, and for worse). When we consider how best to uplift fellow humans today, what lessons can the light bulb and its histories teach us about how not to measure success?…
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In this episode (and in the wake of a few years of toppled statues and related historical markers), we reflect on our use of public spaces to establish a specific ethos for our cultures. What do we venerate with our memorials and monuments? And what other choices exist, that we might not even realize we could make instead?…
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Punk is a complicated term, because its history has found it appropriated by many different - and often completely contradictory - political movements and societal vantage points. How can so many ideologies fit under one umbrella term? Easily, actually. When "punk" reduces to "resistance from a perceived status quo", all manner of difficult bedfell…
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In this episode, I grapple with a passion that I did not fully understand - but wanted to. What kinds of cultural tension points exist in the world of sneakerheads? What can the phenomenon teach us about societal priorities, and the complex interplay of capitalism and cultural identity formation?
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Climate crises require a bigger reframe with respect to how we talk about our relationship to the planet, and the work of prevention as much as crisis management. But do we really need to reinvent the wheel here? Or are there other eras and cultural contexts that already give us what we need to approach the trials ahead?…
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In this episode, we reflect on the phenomenon of blaming social media for human behaviours that showed up in pre-digital eras, too. It's not that these online tools can't be problematic; it's more that a full accounting of our problems with social media requires an unflinching look at the problems with us.…
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Is there such a thing as a "pure" science? I'm not immune to the appeal of such a concept, and have sometimes slipped into the fantasy that a noble enough pursuit of knowledge "for the betterment of all humankind" transcends the complexities of human coexistence. Not so, though, as we explore in this episode, on the wonders of astronomy... and also…
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Consumers sometimes get a bad rap. People making purchases for their families are often trying to do the best they can to juggle value and quality while also being mindful of the most recent social issues news media tells them to prioritize. In this episode, I reflect on some old and new ways in which labeling and company gimmicks to look eco-consc…
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A change in cultural context can transform how one thinks about the most innocuous everyday items. That was certainly the case for me with respect to eggs, when I moved from Canada to Colombia and fell into a complete rethink about how our options as consumers and community members are both constructed and constricted by the societies in which we l…
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In this episode, we reflect on one of the key indicators of familial wellness and a healthy childhood. It's not money exactly, but it's related! For families living with financial precarity, there is often far less opportunity to create supportive domestic environments, and that strife is felt and borne by the kids involved. If we want to do better…
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Sometimes the best way to move forward is to think about how we've responded to issues in the past. In this episode of Global Humanist Shoptalk, I reflect on the early-2000s trend cycle for quinoa as a super-food with key global-activist intersections. The aim isn't to criticize any of us for leaping onto a bandwagon, and then reckoning after the f…
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In this episode, we talk about one of the most delicate and vital issues of our time: how we address our mental health crises as a society. While neoliberalism has made a full industry out of wellness, is it really addressing the underlying reasons that so many people are having the same problems coping with our broken world? How can we reframe the…
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Everyday objects like the sidewalk, and the routines we've built around them, can be sites of reflection on how we've built our societies, and for whom. In this episode, I reflect on how moving from Canada to Colombia compelled me to think differently about mobility, and the different priorities built into cityscapes on the ground. What assumptions…
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In this first main-season episode, we reflect on the role that pronunciation plays in manifesting a deeper curiosity about our world, and empathy for others in it. I will always try my best to pronounce the names of people and places "properly", but is our choice to pronounce the names of other countries the same way that locals do always a mark of…
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In this podcast opener, I talk about the humanist aims of this series, and explore why learning to hold ideas in calmer tension is an important counterpoint to how we "do" discourse in much of our world. Instead of focussing on the "hook", a highly cynical storytelling device with a fairly recent and context-driven history, what if we practised a m…
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