Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Who would dream of starting a traveling circus at the dawn of the 21st century?

Nell Gifford would.

Our obituaries editor looks back on the life of a woman who thought the circus could be more and better than sad animals and carnival barkers.

And plenty of languages associate every noun with a gender, even those for inanimate objects.

That doesn't sit well with modern gender sensitivities.

Yet a push to strip the gender out of German is messy.

The language just isn't suited to sexlessness.

But first...

In Poland this month, a battle over the rule of law is coming to a head.

It carries some uncanny echoes of the country's past.

Poland used to be a communist country, so it is familiar with governments that run the courts.

Matt Steinglass is our Europe correspondent.

And there's this very funny phrase in Poland, Lex Telefonica, meaning rule by telephone.

Basically, in the old days, if you had a court case, some politician or apparatchik

at Party Central would often call up and tell the court how to rule. And what they're worried about

is that that's the kind of thing that we're going to see again in the future. Those fears are based

on what the country's ruling Law and Justice Party has been up to. Despite its name, it's shown itself

to be no fan of judicial independence.

Poland's governing party has been trying to take control of the courts basically since it came

into power in 2015, and you can't do that in the EU because every country in the EU has to have

an independent judiciary. So that's a threat to the whole union. And it just keeps

...