Eliana Johnson joins the podcast today to discuss the startling NBC News poll of Iowa that finds Trump with an absolute majority of Republican voters and Ron DeSantis going exactly nowhere fast. Why did DeSantis run if he was never going to challenge Trump in the first place? What about the poll numbers from CNN today that show Trump beating Biden by ten points in Michigan? And maybe the college presidents said what they said at the hearing last week because they believe it. Give a listen.
Massive cleanup from deadly Tennessee tornadoes. Deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. President Biden losing support in key swing state. CBS News Correspondent Steve Kathan has today's World News Roundup.
Robberies in Chicago have increased more in the last five months than in any other consecutive five-month period since 2001. From July 1 to November 26, 2023, nearly 5,000 people filed reports of robbery with the Chicago Police Department. Reset speaks with the journalists behind the investigation, WBEZ data projects editor Alden Loury and Chicago Sun-Times staff reporter Sophie Sherry, to learn more.
Our correspondent joins the French air force on a mission in the Baltics, seeing increasing support for NATO just as the country draws down in Africa. Drones have by now become a standard feature of warfare, but in Gaza the demands are different—and Israel has much expertise to draw upon (09:36). And artificial intelligence predicts the structures of 2m brand-new materials (16:38).
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With the fall of the Soviet Union, the theoretical physicist Armen Sarkissian returned home and became first the Prime Minister and then the President of the newly reformed state of Armenia. In his book, The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World, he argues that successful smaller nations have had to learn to be more agile, adaptive and cooperative, compared to the world’s ‘greater’ powers.
The world map has changed considerably, especially in the 19th and 20th century, as empires fell apart and smaller nations fought for independence. The Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan looks back at this time, and considers how small states survive during times of conflict. In 2018 she presented the BBC’s Reith Lectures, The Mark of Cain, on the tangled history of war and society.
The BBC’s Chief International Correspondent Lyse Doucet is no stranger to conflict in the world, as she has covered all the major stories across the Middle East and North Africa for the past two decades. But she is also interested in the way small states have been instrumental in mediating world conflicts, and punching above their weight on international issues like the climate crisis.
It's another physicode with Dr. Bryan Gillis! Bryan heard the food episode recently and wanted to chime in with a physics perspective on why your brain needs energy. Sure, there are obvious biological reasons, but also, speaking more universally, there's a reason why computing information requires energy. It involves entropy! Come learn about it! Are you an expert in something and want to be on the show? Apply here! Please please pretty please support the show on patreon! You get ad free episodes, early episodes, and other bonus content!
Released in 1919, "Anders als die Andern" (Different from the Others) stunned audiences with its straightforward depiction of queer love. Supporters celebrated the film’s moving storyline, while conservative detractors succeeded in prohibiting public screenings. Banned and partially destroyed after the rise of Nazism, the film was lost until the 1970s and only about one-third of its original footage is preserved today.
Directed by Richard Oswald and co-written by Oswald and the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, "Anders als die Andern" is a remarkable artifact of cinema culture connected to the vibrant pre-Stonewall homosexual rights movement of early-twentieth-century Germany. The film makes a strong case for the normalization of homosexuality and for its decriminalization, but the central melodrama still finds its characters undone by their public outing. Ervin Malakaj sees the film’s portrayal of the pain of living life queerly as generating a complex emotional identification in modern spectators, even those living in apparently friendlier circumstances. There is a strange comfort in knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and Malakaj recuperates "Anders als die Andern"’s mournful cinema as an essential element of its endurance, treating the film’s melancholia both as a valuable feeling in and of itself and as a springboard to engage in an intergenerational queer struggle.
Over a century after the film’s release, Anders als die Andern(McGill-Queen's UP, 2023) serves as a stark reminder of how hostile the world can be to queer people, but also as an object lesson in how to find sustenance and social connection in tragic narratives.
Ervin Malakaj is associate professor of German studies at the University of British Columbia.
Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.
