The liquid drop model is an isoperimetric problem with a competing non-local term. It was originally introduced in the nuclear physics literature in 1930 and has received a lot of attention recently as an interesting problem in the calculus of variations. We discuss some new results and open problems. We show how the insights from this problem allowed us to prove the ionization conjecture in a certain model in density functional theory. The talk will be non-technical and does not assume any knowledge in physics.