The Podium

No snow, no problem: more than 25 nations competing in the Winter Olympics in PyeongChang are considered tropical countries. In Episode 1, Tim Struby set out to examine why a generation of "tropical" athletes decided to focus on the Winter Olympics, delve into the influence of the movie "Cool Runnnings," and learn about some of the challenges that "tropical" Olympians face along their journey to PyeongChang.

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Get ready for the 2018 Winter Olympics with NBC Sports and Vox Media. All this month, The Podium will introduce you to athletes to watch in the lead up to PyeongChang in February.

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The most important story in the world right now is how real the chance of war with North Korea is — and how cataclysmic such a war would be.

Part of the reason the risk of war is so real is that our understanding of North Korea is so sparse. "The Hermit Kingdom" is a world unto itself; a land of deprivation, of lunacy, of tyranny, of delusion. We have no diplomatic relations, no trade, no cross-cultural exchanges. We don't understand Kim Jong Un, we don't understand his people, and they don't understand us. And so, ignorant, we lurch towards the possibility of nuclear war built atop mutual miscomprehension.

The best view we have into life in North Korea is Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: The Ordinary Lives of North Koreans. Demick was the Los Angeles Times bureau chief in Seoul and Beijing, and she found herself obsessed with this country she couldn't cover and couldn't understand. So she began talking to the people who had left it, the refugees who escaped across the DMZ. She began asking them to reconstruct their lives, to tell her what it was like, to make everyday life in North Korea intelligible. And they did. They told her what it was like to grow up, and to fall in love, and to go to school, and to have dinner, and to flee. They told her what it was like to build new lives, to remember past friends, to know their family was in a place they could never visit again, to hear the rest of the world fear and pity the place they had once called home.

This conversation is about North Korea, but it's also about North Koreans — about what it's like to live in the most closed society on earth, about what they know and don't know of the outside world, about how their existence can be both ordinary and extraordinary, about what would happen to them if there was a war. And this is a conversation about what we need to know about North Korea, about how the country's past informs its present, about what Demick would tell Trump if he would just listen.

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In a special Olympics-themed episode of Worldly, Yochi, Jenn, and Zack look at how global politics will shape next year’s Winter Games in South Korea in a way that hasn’t been seen since the height of the Cold War. The International Olympic Committee has already banned Russia because of a massive doping scandal, and the nuclear standoff with North Korea could make some countries jittery about sending athletes to the games. Add it all together, and you have the potential for an Olympics like no other.

Plus, Jenn confesses to a passionate love of figure skating, Zack argues for taking the world’s guns and giving them to Olympic biathletes, and Yochi makes the case for why skeleton is the only sport you should watch.

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Chang Rae Lee’s books include “Native Speaker,” “Aloft,” and “The Surrendered,” for which he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His most recent book is “On Such A Full Sea,” a cool, sci-fi dystopia. It was published in 2014. His novels tackle some of the most important themes in American life today, including immigration, life after war, and even the divided Korean Peninsula. He was born in Seoul, South Korea, but moved to the U.S. with his family at the age of three. His home country has been in the news a lot lately. And we’ll be hearing about it for more cheerful reasons in February, when South Korea hosts the 2018 Olympic Winter Games.

He spoke to Vox's Todd VanDerWerff for this episode of Vox Media's "I Think You're Interesting."

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Introducing The Podium, an insider look into the 17 intense days of competition at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang. In the run-up to opening ceremonies, hear in-depth interviews with your favorite Winter Olympians, explorations of host country South Korea’s culture, history, and more from industry experts. Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for automatic download.

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