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.
We're talking about a tornado outbreak that devastated parts of the South.
Also, we'll tell you what the White House decided to send Israel without approval from Congress and how last week's hearing on antisemitism has garnered more backlash.
Plus, chronic fatigue may be more common than previously thought; a new sports contract shattered the previous record, and some $2 bills could be worth thousands.
And use my link go.mycopilot.com/NEWSWORTHY to get a 14-day FREE trial AND 20% off your first month of personalized fitness if you sign up before February 1st!
The Texas Supreme Court temporarily halted the abortion procedure for Kate Cox, a 31-year-old pregnant woman who was granted the country’s first court-ordered abortion last week since the fall of Roe. The justices said Cox's procedure is on pause while they review her restraining order, which is meant to protect her and her doctors from the state’s anti-abortion measures.
Sickle cell disease is a painful condition that occurs more frequently in Black people, and last Friday the FDA approved two new revolutionary treatments for it. They both use technology to edit a person’s DNA to remove the gene that causes the disease.
And in headlines: the University of Pennsylvania’s president resigned after a Congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus, Donald Trump will not testify on Monday at the civil fraud trial against him in New York, and Ron DeSantis’s wife Casey erroneously suggested that everyone in the country should participate in the upcoming Iowa Caucus.
Glaciers like the ones in Greenland are melting due to climate change, causing global sea levels to rise. That we know. But these glaciers are also moving. What we don't know is just how these two processes – melting and movement – interact and ultimately impact how quickly sea levels will rise. This encore episode, Jessica Mejía, a postdoctoral researcher in glaciology at the University of Buffalo, explains what it's like to live on a glacier for a month and what her research could mean for coastal communities all over the world.
Curious about other research happening around the globe? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!
"We're growing boys into godly men," Mark Hancock, the scouting organization's CEO, tells "The Daily Signal Podcast." "We've discovered a proven process for turning boys into godly men, and it involves four things."
Hancock, today's guest on the podcast, diagnoses four major problems American boys face: They are unguided, ungrounded, unappreciated, and uninspired.
