The World and Everything in It: July 17, 2026

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning!

Today on Culture Friday: Britain says yes to almost any visitor—but no to a Christian member of Finland’s parliament.

NICK EICHER, HOST: John Stonestreet is standing by.

Also today, one of the oldest stories in Western civilization gets a Hollywood remake.

AUDIO: My dad is coming home.

Collin Garbarino reviews The Odyssey.

And later: Children who changed their bodies, and then changed their minds.

BROWN: It’s Friday, July 17th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

BROWN: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR:  Trump address » President Trump addressed the nation last night from the White House and painted an alarming picture of election security in the United States. He said his administration has data to back it up and is making it public.

TRUMP:  Tonight, I'm announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure

He said the documents were being posted to the official White House website at WhiteHouse.gov, and that they cover several major areas of concern.

First, he said that China tried to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections and carried out a massive and sophisticated US election interference program, starting with the 2020 election cycle — an election President Trump has long asserted was stolen.

TRUMP:  The People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of two hundred and twenty million US voter files

He asserted also that in the run-up to the 2020 election, the CIA expressly determined that China was actively working to prevent Trump’s reelection.

The president claimed furthermore that “deep state” actors within US intel agencies worked to suppress information about China’s election meddling.

The president also stated that the data being released reveal what he said were previously identified hidden vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, along with evidence about voter fraud and other illegal voting.

He also used the speech to once again urge lawmakers to raise the standards for voter verification.

TRUMP: Congress must pass the SAVE America Act!

Many Democrats dismissed the president’s remarks as fearmongering.

Ahead of the address, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced what he called—quoting here— “this administration’s attempts to steal and undermine the 2026 elections by peddling old election conspiracies and lies."

Republican $95b plan » In Washington…

CHAIRMAN JODEY ARRINGTON: The ayes have it, and the motion is to agree to the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2027, and it’s ordered favorably reported to the House of Representatives.

With that, the House Budget Committee moved ahead on a plan to pass $95 billion in new spending for GOP priorities.

WORLD’s Harrison Watters reports now on what those priorities are.

HARRISON WATTERS: The resolution would increase the deficit to give the Pentagon up to $60 billion in additional funding. It would also greenlight election-related spending that could be used to pass portions of the SAVE America Act. Conservatives in the House have held up business for several weeks, demanding a vote on the legislation to ramp up voter verification standards ahead of November midterm elections.

Republican lawmakers on Thursday shot down Democrats’ amendments to block funding for White House projects.

While some Republicans have concerns about another big government spending increase, most support getting party priorities over the finish line before the midterms.

The bill now heads to the House floor. If both chambers approve it, committees will get to work drawing up a budget reconciliation bill to boost spending for the next fiscal year.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Harrison Watters.

Canada Wildfires & Midwest smoke » Much of the Midwest is choking on wildfire smoke, blowing in from fires in Canada and northern Minnesota. The air has turned hazardous, and officials are telling people to stay inside or mask up.

The haze has swallowed skylines from Minneapolis to Detroit to Chicago, and put some 100 million Americans under air quality alerts across more than a dozen states.

One visitor to Chicago reacted:

AUDIO: I live down in Miami, so we don't really get that much wildfires happening, and it's a bit overwhelming. I had to run to the store and buy myself a mask and emergency inhaler. I was not expecting this.

It's even reached the World Cup, with Toronto calling off fan festivals and outdoor watch parties. Health officials warn the tiny particles can lodge deep in the lungs.

Relief may be slow. In Canada and Minnesota, firefighters are still battling the flames, with some fires expected to burn until the first snow.

Texas flooding » Meantime, in central Texas a year after floods killed more than 100 people in the Texas Hill Country, floodwaters are again swamping the region. At least one person has died so far.

But this time, the warnings came early. Kendall County Judge Shane Stolarczyk:

STOLARCZYK: The most important thing on this event is, we had notice. And so the notice allowed us to plan and prepare. We were even better positioned this time to pre-position assets, because we had some notice.

Last July, there was no warning. Floodwaters raced down the Guadalupe River and killed two dozen children and counselors at Camp Mystic. This time, counties ordered evacuations early, and crews have rescued more than 70 people.

Still, residents are on edge:

AUDIO: I'm nervous for the people in the area where their homes are potentially gonna be flooded. We knew a flood was coming, but we didn't know it was gonna be to this magnitude.

The governor has declared disasters across dozens of counties, many still rebuilding from last year's floods.

Ukraine update » In Ukraine:

SOUND: [Ukrainian demonstrators]

...thousands of demonstrators took to the streets on Thursdayafter President Volodymyr Zelenskyy fired Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

He had only been defense minister for six months, but gained widespread popularity for his use of battlefield drones to turn the tables on Russia.

Zelenskyy cited friction between the defense ministry and Ukraine's top commanders as the reason for his decision. In Fedorov’s place, Zelenskyy appointed the acting head of Ukraine's security service.

32 convicted in 2018 bridge collapse » An Italian court has convicted more than 30 people in the deadly collapse of a highway bridge six years ago. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has that story.

KRISTEN FLAVIN: The court convicted 32 of the 57 defendants this week.

The stiffest sentence — 12 years … went to Giovanni Castellucci, the former CEO of Italy's main highway operator.

It’s all tied to the 20-18 disaster, when a huge section of the Morandi bridge in Genoa collapsed in a rainstorm. Dozens of vehicles plunged to the ground, killing 43 people.

Prosecutors argued that years of neglected maintenance played a big role, and the court called the collapse preventable.

The defense blames a construction flaw, not neglect, and Castellucci's lawyers plan to appeal. Under Italian law, none of the sentences are final until appeals are exhausted.

For WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: John Stonestreet joins us for Culture Friday. And later, Collin Garbarino reviews the new Christopher Nolan epic, The Odyssey

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday July 17th.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. It’s Culture Friday. Joining us now is John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Good Morning John!

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

BROWN: John, did you see Rod Dreher’s latest piece on Päivi Räsänen? She’s a Finnish member of Parliament who was just blocked from entering the UK, even just to catch a connecting flight at Heathrow. Why? Because back in March, Finland’s Supreme Court convicted her of hate speech over a Christian booklet she wrote 22 years ago, and because of that conviction, the UK canceled her electronic travel pass.

Now she can’t even get to Northern Ireland, where she was scheduled to speak at a conference on, of all things, freedom of speech. Dreher calls this a clear slide toward a new totalitarianism in Europe. John, what are your thoughts on this?

STONESTREET: First of all, having been at a conference just recently with Päivi Räsänen, I can assure you she’s completely safe. In fact, she adds an awful lot to the atmosphere, and they’re the ones losing out on her presence, not the other way around.

Now, look, I think this could actually be, at some level, a computer glitch, where you basically build into the system of this new ETA program, but then you have these little things that trigger off: “Oh, we don’t want these people here.”

And it’s interesting what it is that can get you into that kind of trouble for a hate crime. When you think about the citizens of London and what they have protested in terms of the immigrants that have been allowed in and the behavior that Britain was willing to welcome for so long, and now you have someone who actually questioned her own church as a Christian with a religious set of beliefs, holding her own church to those religious convictions, and that’s what’s worse than Pakistani rape gangs and everything else that’s been let into Britain.

You look here, and up is down, and down is up, and right is wrong, and it’s all super confusing. And you can actually build totalitarianism into a computer system like the ETA. That’s how this is enforced.

So to me, if we’re going to go back to Dreher’s own analysis from Live Not by Lies, where he talks about soft totalitarianism and hard totalitarianism, at some point these two things merge. The soft totalitarianism of the system is leading to a harsh totalitarianism where you’re keeping Christians out and welcoming in Muslim rape gangs.

So, good luck with that, Britain. We’ll see how that project works out in the long run. But you can’t say that this is not an apocalyptic sign for Great Britain. Of course it is.

EICHER: John, kind of a different story here. The National Institute on Aging is studying a rare phenomenon called terminal lucidity, where some patients with advanced dementia briefly regain coherent speech or memory near the end of their lives.

One scientist compares it to a decaying highway system. So imagine roads deteriorating with potholes and narrow bridges and uneven pavement. In that case, traffic ought to get worse and not suddenly better just before the whole thing collapses. And yet that is precisely the mystery that researchers are trying to understand.

John, does this remind us that one of the assumptions of our age—that consciousness is nothing more than brain activity—is not nearly as settled as many people assume? The Christian worldview has always insisted that we are more than the sum of our physical parts. So how does that shape the way we think about a story like this?

STONESTREET: I think a couple ways. Number one is the brain is such a remarkable thing. The capacity of the human brain just so exceeds anything that we could measure or map. That in and of itself points to something beyond itself, because the explanation for the origins of this thing has to include some kind of intelligence, some kind of designer that gives us the capacity to know and gives us the capacity to think in these kinds of grandiose terms that the brain can do when it’s perfectly healthy in the first place.

A lot of us are in relationships with individuals and watching dementia, Alzheimer’s, other things take place, and how the brain works is such a mystery. The memories that stick and the memories that don’t—these things are things we don’t understand to begin with.

There may be a physical explanation for this phenomenon that we find out at some point. But still, given the capacity of the human brain to begin with, and the sorts of things that the human brain cares about—questions of meaning and purpose, questions of eternality, things that you don’t find in the animal brain, questions of beauty and aesthetics—we eat. Animals eat. We’re the only creatures I know of that garnish. We decorate our food.

We have apartments. Squirrels have apartments. We hang pictures on the wall. We want to have memories like this. So there are ways that the human brain works that are unparalleled by others. So there’s something else going on.

And even if there’s a neurological or completely physical explanation for this particular phenomenon, just as neurological researchers have attempted, for example, to explain why it is that the human brain thinks about things like God and eternal things, listen, if you could even find a physical explanation for that, you’re still left with the question: Do we believe in God because of what our brains do, or do our brains believe in God because of how they’re made?

You still have the question of origin that haunts the whole thing and everything about the human body. But especially when you start talking about something like language and knowledge and eternal thoughts and the transcendent, none of this stuff can be fully explained from a completely horizontal explanation.

You’ve got to go vertical. You’ve got to say, where did this stuff come from, and what explains this added dimension to how we think and how we know?

Because, as C.S. Lewis said it, I think, very well: If the universe had no meaning—and I’ll add on to that, if our thoughts really had no meaning—we should have never figured out they had no meaning. In other words, we shouldn’t have the category of meaning that gets imposed on the thought. And I think that applies here, as it does in so many other areas of life.

BROWN: One of our reporters, Juliana Chan Erikson, shared a fascinating article today that I really want to get your take on, John. The author argues that it’s not just money or housing keeping people from having kids; it’s actually peer culture.

So get this: For Americans under 30 with the least supportive friends, the desired family size is not quite two children. But for those with the most supportive friends, that number jumps to nearly three.

Think about that—an additional child just because you have trusted friends who’ll show up with a meal or volunteer to babysit. As the author puts it, real-world friends lead to actual births. A society can be full of pro-family influencers and still be barren if nobody is willing to babysit.

But John, do you buy that? When you and Sarah were having babies, did having a peer group doing the same thing make all the difference?

STONESTREET: At least our fourth baby had to do with the fact that the older siblings were all praying for another one. So I think God just answered their prayers.

I think family size and what motivates, especially the young right now, to have children is such a fascinating topic. And it would just be a matter of fascination, kind of sociologically and anthropologically, if we weren’t talking about something that was so absolutely important, which is the fact that we’re facing, across the Western world, a grand demographic winter.

And I’ve been tracking the birth rates in the Western world for about 15 years in the United States, from when we were at 2.06 and rounding up to this past year, when it’s pushing down even around 1.6 and 1.5.

But it is interesting because we are so alone and we are so isolated. We’re experiencing things like college and high school and all kinds of things that used to be very much community events, that were defined by their relationality, in increasingly isolated ways, either online or by yourself.

The number of high school principals who tell me their kids don’t start driving right when they’re 16. The day I turned 16, I was getting my license, then in the car, then going to hang out with friends and hoping some girls would be there.

So there’s a whole cultural reality there that’s circling around that just doesn’t exist anymore. And so you think about who are the people with a whole lot of supportive friends. Where do they get those friends?

I don’t think they’re getting them on Facebook or certainly Instagram or Snapchat. So it’s not social media that’s delivering those friends. They’re not getting those friends in professional situations, where you have to go and sit in a cubicle, or you’re actually working from home virtually.

So where are you getting these friends? You’re not getting these friends in big cities. Maybe you’re getting some, but you’re not getting large groups of them. And if you have young professional friends, my guess is they’re probably not willing to babysit, unless it’s your dog. Everyone seems to love pets these days more than kids.

You think, listen, if these are the people that have lots of friends, many of them are probably going to church. And the other corresponding factor here that we have seen from Brad Wilcox talking at the Institute for Family Studies is that religious people have more babies. Religious people actually are happier and more relational than others too. They have more friends.

In fact, it’s fascinating because what we see is all these kinds of corresponding markers. The happiest people on the planet right now are middle-aged, married, religious women, and they also are the ones that are the most connected and have the most friends, against all the narratives that we hear.

And so you put all this together, and there is a joy of relationality that is unique. It’s unusual. It’s weird.

EICHER: Weird, but in a good way.

Hey, I don’t know whether you caught this, but yesterday was the 75th anniversary of the great American novel The Catcher in the Rye. You’ve got Holden Caulfield, the character who became the patron saint of adolescent alienation, turning 75, and somehow he’s never really gone out of style.

Why do you think that our culture became so captivated by youth and so hesitant to celebrate growing up? And, by the way, I do think this is connected.

STONESTREET: It is very much connected. Diana West years ago wrote a book in which she explained where all this came from, and we can blame it all on Chubby Checker, because Chubby Checker is the one. He gave us the Twist.

And the difference was that prior to the Twist, kids went to the adult dances and dressed like the adults and danced like the adults. But then they had their own dance. And when the Twist came on, then the adults would go to the side of the room.

Then you have this group of evil people that entered the world about this time: advertisers. No, I’m just kidding. Advertisers aren’t evil. But they realized there was this whole new demographic by which you could make an awful lot of money. You could sell a lot of things.

And, of course, it was only a matter of time when you could figure out, “Oh, I could sell to adolescents, that I could sell to pre-adolescents, and maybe we should extend adolescence.” And this thing has been an evolving reality that’s taken over the West ever since.

It’s created things that are now part of our nomenclature, like Peter Pan syndrome. How common it is for young men, in particular, not to grow up.

And it’s a sociological reality where this adolescent stage of life, which historically was considered between 13 and 18, is now sociologically considered to be the age between 11 and 30. And you have extended marriage or delayed marriage from that. You have delayed childbearing from that. There are all kinds of other effects.

It also becomes a very, very difficult place for young people to stay sexually pure, and it becomes a very difficult thing for young women who themselves are seeking the sort of thing that the culture is not providing.

So adolescence has not been good for us. Adolescence is a made-up stage of life that did not exist prior to the latter part of the 20th century. We always had teenagers, but it was never a remarkable thing to be teenaged.

This has been a dramatic shift and a marker, I think, of the decline of the West. What we should do is go back to the rite of passage, and particularly the way that Paul talks about the older women calling the younger women to account, the older men calling the younger men to what matters—to be productive, to work hard.

And I think that kind of vision of what it means to be human is baked into the biblical story. It’s baked into the description of what it means to be human.

Look, it was an adolescent girl who bore the Messiah. She was probably 14, 15, 16 years old when we’re talking about Mary. So this is a cultural reality that has not been good for us.

EICHER: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint Podcast. John, thanks. See you next week.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, July 17th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Christopher Nolan has spent hundreds of millions of dollars bringing The Odyssey to the screen.

But can Hollywood faithfully retell one of the books that helped build Western civilization?

Here’s WORLD’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino to tell us whether the film is equal to the task.

COLLIN GARBARINO: In Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the Greek hero who’s trying to make his way home after the end of the Trojan War.

CALYPSO: Tell me what you remember.

ODYSSEUS: A wife. A son.

Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway play Telemachus and Penelope, his wife and son who have been waiting 20 years for his return. The film includes the major moments from the epic poem. Odysseus and his crew struggle to make headway because of unfavorable winds. They face perils along the way, including the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the witch Circe. All the while Telemachus must contend with a house full of suitors who wish to marry his mother.

PENELOPE: Ithaca’s king is coming back.

ANTINOUS: No he’s not.

Nolan has a reputation for making big, bold movies for cinema lovers. And he leans into that reputation with The Odyssey. It’s his first film to be shot entirely on IMAX film, a feat that’s even more remarkable considering the exotic locations he lugged those massive cameras. He also relies on practical effects rather than computer-generated imagery. This is some serious old school filmmaking. Nolan has some experience telling a story with competing timelines. And he succeeds yet again with this film by making the episodic source material feel like a cohesive narrative.

ODYSSEUS: No one can stand between me and home. Not even the gods.

But despite showcasing some fine technical skill, Nolan’s Odyssey left me dissatisfied. Maybe it’s because I used to teach The Odyssey in my university class on ancient Greece, but I found many of Nolan’s choices irritating.

Let’s begin with the most trivial. In Homer’s poem, the Greeks’ weapon of choice is the spear, but everyone in this film relies on a short sword. And do they use those short swords for stabbing, like they’re supposed to? No. It seems most people get dispatched through having their throats slit after some kind of fancy spin move. The film is rated R for violence and language, but it’s only marginally worse than many PG-13 action movies. I also thought it foolish that Odysseus and his men would wear their bronze breastplates when they’re just hanging out on the ship. And then there’s the continuous mentions of “the law of Zeus,” which in this movie sounds like Jesus’ Golden Rule rather than the Greek custom of hospitality to strangers. These were minor irritations. I have major complaints as well.

At 2-hours-and-52-minute the runtime might feel epic, but Nolan’s attempts to update the 2800-year-old story for a modern audience cheapen it. The script relies on colloquial and cringe-inducing language. Part of that R rating comes from two awkward f-bombs that feel wildly out of place. At times, the dialogue is downright painful.

TELEMACHUS: My dad is coming home.

Moreover, Nolan lets his left-leaning politics get in the way of telling Homer’s story. The Greeks in this movie are no longer Greeks, but a multiethnic people. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with having diversity in the cast. But it should make sense within the story. Why is Helen black? Why is Odysseus’ right-hand man Indian? And how did a guy from east Asia get roped into fighting in the Trojan War? Maybe Nolan is trying to say Western civilization belongs to everyone now? I don’t know. But the cast also includes a transgender actor who is laughably unsuited for the role.

Worse is what Nolan does to Odysseus himself. He’s no longer the brilliant, yet proud-to-a-fault, hero who refuses to give up on his goal of reaching home. He’s become a conflicted, broken man who must atone for his role in sacking Troy and letting his men die in battle. This Odysseus exhibits sorrow over his toxic masculinity.

PENELOPE: Promise me you will come back.

ODYSSEUS: What if I can’t?

Homer’s Odysseus demonstrates his excellence through cunning and skill in battle. By the same token Homer’s Penelope shows excellence through her own cleverness and steadfast devotion. Nolan’s Penelope screams at her son because she doesn’t like the idea that she can’t rule the country herself. The film includes more than one feminist twist.

Did the story need these modern updates? It’s been popular for the entirety of Western civilization. Nolan seems embarrassed by his source material, so he repackages Odysseus’ story with progressive values. In fact, he seems embarrassed by the entire heritage of the West. In the end, he subtly tried to communicate to the audience that Western civilization itself has caused the world’s problems. Odysseus and the other Greek veterans turn out to be their own worst enemy, and they all need to just get out of the way. Nolan uses some speechifying toward the end to imply his story is a metaphor, suggesting perhaps something better will rise from the ashes of Western civilization.

But fear not, I’m sure Nolan fanboys will convince themselves that this is the best movie ever.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Next up: Doubletake is back with a new episode.

There have been some striking developments in the battle over transgenderism in recent months. As we reported on Legal Docket just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled that states do have the right to limit women’s sports to, well, women.

And earlier this summer federal and state prosecutors forced two major hospitals to agree to stop performing transition procedures on minors and pay substantial fines. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.

BROWN: Texas Children’s also agreed to set up a free de-transition clinic and run it for five years. It’s a stunning development, and the hospital might not have had to make that deal without a nurse whistleblower named Vanessa Sivadge. 

Doubletake host Les Sillars will bring us her story in tomorrow’s episode. But he’s here today. Hi, Les.

SILLARS: Hey thanks Myrna.

Vanessa has an amazing story. In 2022 she was working at Texas Children’s and suddenly found herself involved in a gender transition clinic. Here she is when she realized what was happening.

VANESSA SIVADGE: It's a huge weight on my conscience. But how do you, how do you fight back? It's literally in my job description, I have to do it.

BROWN: It must have been awful.

SILLARS: She was worried about her job, but there was also just this incredible cultural pressure. Here’s a clip that illustrates what it was like for kids and for parents. To set this up: one day Vanessa was in the adolescent gynecology clinic and a young Hispanic girl comes in with her mother.

SIDVADGE: I’ll never forget her.

She was dressed like a boy. Very baggy clothes. She told the gynecologist …

SIVADGE: That she'd really hated her period and she didn't want to have it anymore, and it was just she, you know, wanted to get rid of all of this. And the gynecologist looks at her and says, Oh, we can just stop your period altogether if you want. You don't ever have to have a period again.

He offered to prescribe a pill. It’d be easy, he said.

SIVADGE: Thank God I had a mask on …

It was the COVID era.

… because my face under that mask, I couldn't believe it.

The mother’s English wasn’t great, but she knew what the doctor was suggesting. She asked, is it safe? Are there any side effects?

SIVADGE: And the doctor was like, no, no, no, it's, we don't, we can do whatever your daughter wants. We will do whatever she wants. And the mom just kind of sat back, and she just kind of took it.

And so the girl started hormone treatments. Vanessa says she might actually have liked the results. At first.

SIVADGE: You know, they do seem like they're getting better, because it's a new experience that is drastically changing their bodies and their puberty.

The girls stop their periods. Boys’ voices change, become more feminine.

SIVADGE: And at first, it's a very exciting thing. And then, you know, the girls start to develop hair on their legs, and their voice begins to deepen …

Gender doctors rarely emphasize to young patients that the effects of pumping them full of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers are often irreversible. They don’t call it chemical castration, but people can end up sterilized. Detransitioners also describe altered bone development. Stunted growth. Hormonal imbalances. If they have genital surgery or breast removal, they certainly can’t get their actual body parts back.

SIVADGE: I think what I observed was that they started to really understand what they had, what they had signed up for, and it wasn't so appealing and shiny and new after a couple of months.

But the kids and their parents can’t stop. They’ve bought into the lie.

SIVADGE: They just kept going, and they learned to deal with the multitude of side effects that came with weekly doses of testosterone or estrogen, wrecking havoc on all of their bodies.

Vanessa says this is the biggest lie the medical establishment has ever sold to confused children and vulnerable parents.

SIVADGE: I mean, the parents were also very entrenched in this too. They were convinced, they were manipulated by the doctors, that if they did not do this for their kids, that they would harm themselves, they would commit suicide.

BROWN: Thanks Les. That sounds great.

SILLARS: You’re welcome.

BROWN: That’s the upcoming episode of Doubletake. It’s out tomorrow. Right here on The WORLD and Everything In It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Now it’s time to name the crew who helped with this week’s programs:

Mary Reichard, David Bahnsen, Mary Muncy, Lauren Canterberry, Abby Young, Janie B. Cheaney, Hunter Baker, Onize Oduah, Abby Johnson, Lauren Smyth, Cal Thomas, Jenny Rough, Bekah Bernhardt, Joe Rigney, Collin Garbarino, John Stonestreet, and Josh Goniea.

Thanks also to our breaking news crew: Kent Covington, Steve Kloosterman, Travis Kircher, Daniel Devine, and Christina Grube.

And thanks to the guys who are up late so your program is ready early: Tech producers Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz.

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Kristen Flavin is features editor, Emma Eicher is assistant producer, Lindsay Mast is Producer. I’m Executive Producer Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance. I bless the LORD who gives me counsel;in the night also my heart instructs me. I have set the LORD always before me;because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken.” (ESV) —Psalm 16:5-8

Who can you encourage this weekend? Encourage one another, as you worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ in church. And Lord willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

Go now in grace and peace.

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