Apple Seed

Guest: Eric Jensen, JD, Professor of International Law at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School  World Powers – including the US and Russia – agreed to work toward a ceasefire while meeting in Munich late last week, but there appear to be some significant hang-ups over the details.

Guest: Carmen Fought, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at Pitzer College  Disney’s princesses have come a long way since Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Ariel and Belle and Mulan and Merida and Anna and Elsa are so much more capable and independent than the damsels-in-distress of the classic Disney animation era. Much better role models for girls, many of us would agree.  But, a couple of linguists have been analyzing Disney’s catalogue to get beyond the basic storyline of these princess films and they’ve discovered that while most of them feature strong heroines, men do 50 percent, of not more, of the talking and, in some cases, as much as 90 percent. The gender gap in both roles and dialogue is striking, when you start looking at the numbers.

Guest: Susan Roberts, PhD, Senior Scientist and Director of the Energy Metabolism Laboratory at Tufts University 

Guest: Alireza Taghdarreh, First to Translate Walden into Farsi and a Self-Taught Iranian Scholar of Thoreau