Politis

What does a bánh mì have to do with empire? Recorded while traveling in Vietnam, this episode of Politis follows the word COLONY from its Latin roots to French Indochina and Japanese-ruled Taiwan, with the International Booker Prize–winning novel Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated by Lin King) as our guide.

"Colony" comes from the Latin verb colere, to till or cultivate, the same root that gave us "culture" and "cult." That makes it a gardener's word used to describe conquest. We follow it through two empires that both claimed to be cultivating the places they ruled.

In Vietnam we look at French colonialism in detail: the civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice), the opium, salt, and rice-alcohol monopolies, forced corvée labor, the rubber plantations, Côn Đảo prison, and the 1945 famine. We also cover how the Vietnamese alphabet, chữ Quốc ngữ, went from a colonial tool to the script of independence.

In Taiwan we look at Japanese rule, the "model colony," through Taiwan Travelogue. It's a 1938 story about a Japanese novelist and her Taiwanese interpreter who eat their way across the island. Along the way we cover the kōminka campaigns, the Japanese-language and name-change policies, and Hōrai rice, which was bred for Japanese tastes. We also get into the novel's famous fake-translation twist.

This one's for anyone interested in world politics, colonial history, Southeast and East Asian history, translated fiction, or the history of words.

Book mentioned: Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King (National Book Award for Translated Literature 2024, International Booker Prize 2026)

Related episodes: GRAMMAR, VERNACULAR

Politis is the podcast about the language of politics and the politics of language. Every episode starts with one word. Follow the show so you don't miss the next one.

An American engineer moves to Seoul and a Korean engineer moves to Milwaukee, and they're doing the exact same thing, but one gets called an expat and the other gets called an immigrant. Those two words are not synonyms, and who gets which one is not random.

This week's word: EXPAT. From the Latin ex patria, out of the fatherland. The homeland is packed inside the word, while "immigrant," from immigrare, to move into, carries only the arrival. And the word's own history has a twist: expatriate originally meant exile, the renunciation of your country, before the twentieth century rebranded it as a lifestyle.

Kloe breaks down the expat vs immigrant difference the dictionaries won't tell you: how the labels sort people by race and class rather than intent, why the "immigrant" label got retired for some communities and renewed for others, what happens when a Filipino works in Thailand or a Sri Lankan spends a career in Dubai where everyone is an "expat" and no one is allowed to stay, and how the vocabulary is quietly becoming visa policy, with open doors for "talent" and higher walls for everyone else.

Bottles thrown at Cape Verde fans. Beer dumped on Egypt supporters. A chant spreading across Latin America: "América Latina menos Argentina." Argentina's fans are the most talked-about story of the 2026 World Cup, and none of it started this summer.

This week's word: CENSUS. From the Latin censere, to count and to judge. In ancient Rome, the censor who counted the citizens also policed their morals, and Argentina's founders understood that power perfectly. In the early 1800s, a third of Argentina's population was Black. Then the censuses stopped counting them, the textbooks taught their "disappearance," and the country rebranded itself as the Europeans of South America.

Kloe connects the myth of white Argentina to everything happening now: the racist incidents at the World Cup and the 2024 Copa América, the online backlash across Latin America, Milei's vote against slavery reparations at the UN, and why Argentine tourists keep getting arrested in Brazil, where racism is a non-bailable crime.

Late one night in November 2024, the vice president of the Philippines went on a livestream and said that if she were killed, she had already arranged for the president to be killed too. "No joke. No joke." Twenty months later, that video is Exhibit A in the biggest political trial the Philippines has seen in decades.

This week's word: IMPEACH. From the Latin impedicare, to shackle, built on pes, the foot. To impeach someone is, literally, to catch them by the foot. Kloe traces the word from Roman snares to the Manila courtroom, then walks you through everything you need to know: how running mates from two political dynasties became enemies, how the first impeachment slipped the snare on a Supreme Court technicality, what actually happened in week one of the trial, and why a senator-judge got fact-checked for litigating the evidence on Facebook.

No prior knowledge of Philippine politics required. Sixteen votes decide whether the front-runner for the 2028 presidency stays on the ballot.

In 2001, an airline refused to let a pregnant Nigerian woman board her flight home to London. Twenty-five years later, her son is scoring World Cup goals for the United States, celebrated by a president who spent years trying to end the exact rule that made him American.

Welcome to Polites, the show about the language of politics and the politics of language. Every episode starts with one word.

This week: CITIZEN.

Kloe traces the word from ancient city walls to the French Revolution's swap of "subject" for "citizen," then follows it into three stories unfolding right now: the US Supreme Court's birthright citizenship ruling and footballer Folarin Balogun, the American spouses discovering that marriage no longer extends the word's protection, and the global shift making citizenship revocable in ways it never used to be.

One word draws a circle. This episode is about who holds the pen.