I am currently working on a podcast that explores stories from academia. Although doing a PhD is pretty much the obvious route for anyone who desires to pursue academics, it made me wonder when this entire process started. Any insights would be much appreciated!

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WW2 nearly erased an entire generation of men in Soviet Russia creating a massive gender imbalance. How did this play out in terms of dating?

What did people do about this? Would women throw themselves at you if you had a pulse? Did they resolve to never marry? Did they drop out of the dating market entirely and try to live without love? Polygamy? Were there roving bands of Soviet cougars preying on the younger men when they came of age? Did they have children on their own through hookups? Given their lack of immigration and huge population I can't imagine importing husbands was practical.

Given the invasive nature of Stalinist government at the time, what'd the government do about it? I can't imagine somebody as managerial as Stalin didn't try to assuage such a massive population drop.

As regular AH users know well, questions often don't get answered the first time they are asked (or the second, third, etc.).

For mobile users particularly, it can get tedious to re-ask these questions since the mobile interface isn't the friendliest and copy/paste on a phone can be a chore.

So, my question is, could a "repost" feature be added wherein a user can dig up an old question that they want to re-ask, comment a keyword (like "!Repost"), and then a bot could automatically repost it as a new question.

I think this would be a neat feature to have, but (1) there is the potential for abuse or having it spam up the "new" section, (2) there are the obvious questions of developing a bot to do it (I'm not a developer), and (3) I don't know how this would/could bypass the automatic archiving of old posts (but maybe that counteracts the "spam" of the first point)

What caused there to be several small countries, rather than one large one? Before they were countries, that land and its peoples were all colonized by Spain, so what caused the division of this region? Why didn’t it end up like America or Canada?

How could one possibly acquire the funds necessary to get out of prison while being locked up? Unless someone came to bail them out, I see no other way. Is it possible perhaps that they were forced to work in the prison? Even then I am curious to how this would work, because the person owed money and the person keeping one captive were not the same. This would mean that one could not pay off his debt by simply working at the prison, they would have to work for money to then pay off the person they owed. What type of work would be done in these prisons anyhow? Also, the function of debtors prison is unclear to me. If you were owed money, would you be able to turn in your debtor and have them imprisoned by force?

I decided I should know more about Ireland's history as my current knowledge is small and mainly centered around the Easter Rising and Irish Civil War.

I’m watching the new WWII in color on Netflix. It said the American landings started around 6a and the British/Canadians at like 7a. I never knew this. Why did they not land simultaneously?

Are all such people dismissed as frauds, insane, or (for the religiously inclined non-Tibetan-Buddhist) deluded by various gods/demons?

Je Tsongkapa was apparently condemned even by his sectarian rivals of the time as deluded by a god (in Buddhism gods are inferior in many ways to humans and Buddhas), and many tertons tried to create circumstances where their discoveries of termas could be seen by many - and so not rejected as fake.

I mean surely Newfoundland/Labrador weren't the most isolated places in the world, i wouldve thought disease could've spread from there. Had the diseases not yet developed or were none of the Vikings infected, which imo is hard to believe?

I've written the question vaguely so as to encompass "restaurants" (eat on the food preparer's premises), street food (eat at the point of purchase), and "take-out" (take with you to eat on your own premises). I'm also excluding preparing lots of food for long-distance trade or travel. How far back do references to such activity go, and/or are there indications that it predates any record?

If the Europeans had a surefire way to trade directly with Indians, rather than through Middle Eastern middlemen, did trade decrease significantly in the region?

I had a Professor in undergrad who would read the homeric Greek versions of texts aloud to the class, and as he would read them, he’d stop to discuss certain puns or phrases that he thought had yet to see proper translation into English and other modern languages and how mistranslation has shaped our understanding of what the text was saying. In particular, I remember him discussing how “Hades,” which often refers to the God of the Underworld, is a figure of speech that literally means “unseen” or “beneath sight”; he then mentioned that translations of this word have instead preferred to interpret the figure of speech as literally indicating a place beneath the visible world rather than preserving the word’s figurative basis. We were reading the Iliad. While I’m sure the word “Hades” is used in a variety of ways, is there any truth to what my professor was saying? What good sources exist regarding this issue?

So I've been wondering if there were any historical examples of footsoldiers sleeping in armour, or if it's even a possible/sensible thing to do. Can anyone here tell me anything about this?

Argentina, Chile and Brazil did not need a strong navy, especially not multiple dreadnoughts. They didn't have any overseas possessions nor any strategic necessities for one. It is kinda like Germany before WW1, except that Germany at least had overseas possesions to protect.

So why then did it happen, how did it happen and how was it financed?

Did citizens evacuate the cities? Are there numbers? How did authorities react to them? Thanks in advance.