Eric welcomes friend of Shield of the Republic Hal Brands back to the show. Hal is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the editor of a new book, War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy and the Return of A Fractured World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), a weekly columnist at Bloomberg.com and also has a recent article on the Foreign Affairs website. They discuss the origins of the new book and 6 overarching themes that emerged from the essays by the distinguished contributors to the volume. They also discuss why America's unique system of alliances may obscure for Americans the potential for disruption that tightening relations among authoritarian regimes presents to the global order and the rise and future of isolationism in the Republican party.

“Democratic women, independent women, and pro-choice voters have been mobilized by the decision to overturn Roe,” says Jennifer Lawless, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

There has long been a belief that pregnant and lactating women are excluded from clinical research due to potential legal liability. However, until now, there has never been a systematic examination of legal liability in the US for the inclusion of pregnant and lactating women in clinical research and whether this fear of liability is supported by evidence.

When pregnant women get sick in the United States, they take medications that have been tested almost entirely on people who are not pregnant. Now, a federal report is pushing back on the long-held notion that pregnant people are “too vulnerable” to participate in clinical trials.

Fascination around the conjoined twins Brittany and Abigail Hensel’s romantic relationships is especially inappropriate, because it often stems from "prurient sexual interest," said Elizabeth Ellcessor.