Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.
In this week’s episode, we discuss:
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Trans women in sport
The world governing body for swimming, Fina, announced a ban this week on trans women competing at elite events if they started going through puberty as a man. This set off a chain reaction of other sports reviewing their policies, with rugby league introducing a ban and Fifa and World Athletics reconsidering their approach to trans competitors. Is there a way through the increasingly toxic debate to ensure that sport can be both inclusive and fair?
The smell of friendship
This week, The New York Times published a piece called Does your nose help pick your friends?, which was pegged to a recent study by researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. The researchers discovered that similarity in smell was a factor in the enabling of “swift” friendships – in other words, when people “click” upon first meeting. We’ve long known that smell is an important factor in sexual attraction but what does this news mean for purely platonic relationships – and for humanity in general?
The ultimate hangover
A Japanese IT worker who passed out on the street after a night of drinking woke up to find that his bag, containing a USB drive with the personal data of half a million people, had been stolen. The dates of birth, addresses, bank account numbers and tax details of every resident of the city of Amagasaki was lost in the incident. Though an extreme example, this highlights the tension between convenience and security in handling potentially sensitive information – particularly at a time when many people use the same phones and laptops for work and leisure.
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‘Irony’ as Zoom calls staff back to officefeature And other stories from the stranger side of life
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Can the US stop Chinese cyberattacks?Today's Big Question Chinese hackers reportedly outnumber FBI cyber personnel by a ratio of 50 to 1
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Sex toy ad joking about Prince Harry is bannedfeature And other stories from the stranger side of life
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Swimming pools vs. wild swimming: which is worse for germs?feature A microbiologist explores where’s cleanest for a dip: swimming pools, or rivers, lakes, canals and the sea?
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The Week Unwrapped: Korean succession, terror by algorithm and German disquietpodcast Could a 10-year-old girl rule North Korea? Will an Isis victim upend web law? And why is Germany upset with its Oscars contender?
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The Week Unwrapped: Chinese chips, the Pope in Africa and podcastingpodcast Is China losing the microchip war? What is the Vatican doing in South Sudan? And has the podcast tide turned?
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The Week Unwrapped: Sex and health, the Earth’s core and another new yearpodcast Is the NHS failing British women? What’s going on at the centre of our planet? And what’s in a date?
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The Week Unwrapped: Antisocial Saudis, hormone therapy and retro techpodcast Why is Saudi Arabia investing in – and banning – social networks? Will new research make life easier for trans women? And is the future of technology dumb?
