Former President Donald Trump’s New York trial on charges related to paying hush money to an adult film star begins on April 15, 2024. The Conversation U.S. asked Tim Bakken, a former New York prosecutor and now a legal scholar teaching at West Point, and Karrin Vasby Anderson, a political communication expert at Colorado State University, to set the scene from each of their perspectives.

As fanfare blares, female sprinters at the starting line suspiciously eye a man in a wig. A hulking, goateed wrestler slams a woman half his size to the mat. An ominous voice-over intones that women’s sports are being “trans-formed.”

Controlling the narrative has long been crucial to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine.

As the “Barbie” movie’s worldwide box office passes the billion-dollar mark, and some conservative pundits push back against its popularity with negative hot takes, the phrase “toxic femininity” is back in the news.

As comic books’ cultural impact has grown, scholars have explored how they have reflected and shaped attitudes about everything from politics to war to economics to gender, race, ability and sexuality.

Few people would have predicted that a loquacious drama about a woman foreign service professional would have been Netflix’s next big hit.

In the autumn of 1922, Benito Mussolini, the ambitious and charismatic founder of the Fascist Party, became Italy’s youngest prime minister – seizing power in a march on Rome that ushered in a dark period of totalitarian rule.

The race for the presidential post in France began with 12 candidates. It will conclude on April 24 with the same choice that confronted voters five years earlier: the centrist Emmanuel Macron or the far-right Marine Le Pen.