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For a few bucks off and the pleasure of shopping from bed, have we handed over a precious natural resource — our nation’s books — to an ambitious billionaire with an engineering degree?

France, meanwhile, has just unanimously passed a so-called anti-Amazon law, which says online sellers can’t offer free shipping on discounted books. (“It will be either cheese or dessert, not both at once,” a French commentator explained.)

Amazon has a 10 or 12 percent share of new book sales in France. Amazon reportedly handles 70 percent of the country’s online book sales, but just 18 percent of books are sold online.

As with many things in France, an unresolved colonial history lies below the surface of the battle over the word ensauvagement.

The word is a direct outgrowth of France’s colonial and slave-trading past, a history that the French have yet to come to terms with and that they have often preferred to ignore, said Pascal Blanchard, a historian on French colonialism and its enduring impact on French society.

More than any other imperial power, France justified colonialism by describing it as a “civilizing mission,” Mr. Blanchard said.

“The conversion phenomenon is significant and impressive, particularly since 2000,”

Of an estimated six million Muslims in France, about 100,000 are thought to be converts, compared with about 50,000 in 1986, according to Mr. Godard. Muslim associations say the number is as high as 200,000.

Conversions to marry have long been common enough in France, but a growing number of young people are now seen as converting to be better socially integrated in neighborhoods where Islam is dominant.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

kea’s investigations were conducted for various reasons, including the vetting of job applicants, efforts to build cases against employees accused of wrongdoing, and even attempts to undermine the arguments of consumers bringing complaints against the company. The going rate charged by the private investigators was 80 to 180 euros, or $110 to $247, per inquiry, court documents show. Between 2002 and 2012, the finance department of Ikea France approved more than €475,000 in invoices from investigators.

the spying cases occurred in a country that, in the digital age, has elevated privacy to a level nearly equal to the national trinity of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.

Last month, the company’s current chief, Stefan Vanoverbeke, and financial director, Dariusz Rychert, were questioned along with Mr. Baillot for 48 hours by the judicial police before being placed under formal investigation. That set in motion a process in which the next step, if it comes, would be the filing of criminal charges.

probably bias in the coverage. People are more likely to be concerned about victims they can identify with. Research tells us that U.S. media outlets are more likely to cover terrorist attacks with U.S. victims. The news media are more likely to cover disasters in wealthier countries. And tragedies that are physically closer to the United States are more likely to appear in U.S. news

First, “news” is generally considered to be something especially unusual. The journalism truism is that “dog bites man” is not a story, but “man bites dog” is. That’s not a judgment on whether dog bites matter; it’s a judgment about what’s surprising.

news outlets are influenced by their consumers. Human beings are especially interested in events that might affect them personally.

Yet corruption is not a victimless crime. Cutting corners on good governance costs money, endangers lives and erodes the public trust that oils the machinery of state in modern democracies.

Conversely, the interior of France is largely corruption-free, some departments even entirely so. Of course, the incidence of corruption varies with the density of population, and perhaps declines disproportionately in the almost-empty interior because there are so few people to be corrupted by.

Mapping corruption at country level brings home the pervasiveness of the problem.

Traditionally, the bourgeoisie dictated the fashions for names, which then percolated down the social scale to the middle and working classes. By looking out, rather than up, for inspiration, the parents of Kevins—along with Brandons, Ryans, Jordans, and other pop-culture-inspired names that took off in France in the nineteen-nineties—asserted the legitimacy of their tastes and their unwillingness to continue taking cues from their supposed superiors

I asked Coulmont if he could think of any other first name that provoked such strong feelings. “The name Mohamed, perhaps,” he replied. “But Kevin triggers reactions from people who reject the cultural autonomy of the popular classes, while Mohamed triggers the reactions of xenophobes.”

Kévin Fafournoux received some three hundred messages from Kevins around the country, testifying to their ordeals. Some told of being shunned after introducing themselves at bars, or zapped on dating apps as soon as their names popped up. One Kevin, a psychologist, said that he had agonized about whether to put his full name on the plaque outside his office building. “We find people who have a sense of malaise and who have real problems,” Fafournoux said. Coulmont found that students named Kevin perform proportionally worse on the baccalaureate exam, not because of a stigma surrounding the name but because Kevins tend to be, as he put it, of a “lower social origin.”

France’s business ecosystem thrives on contradictions — the country has some of the highest labor costs in Europe and restrictive regulations, and yet its companies regularly make the Fortune 500 list; it has highly skilled graduates and engineers but struggles to compete globally; it has an alphabet-soup of agencies intended to support fledgling businesses, but they are so lacking in coherence that they remain unheard of to many; there is a vibrant investor community ready to commit funds, but only once an entrepreneur has a proven track record; and the French embrace money, but not bling.

the French like entrepreneurs when they remain very discreet and don’t transform into a businessman. That’s where the evil begins. So they like the number two. They don’t like success. They have a problem with wealth and with money.”

French businesses have their wings clipped by onerous social charges paid to the government based on the salary of the employee. Companies need to think twice before hiring and firing, when employees are often due extensive severance benefits. They also need to coax financing from a traditionally risk-averse market and console themselves with the relatively small clout that businesses hold in government.

the real question is not so much ‘What is genius?’ or even ‘Who is a genius?’ but rather, ‘What stake do we have in the whole idea of genius?’ or even, ‘Who’s asking and what’s behind their question?’

These are the issues I address in my new book by looking at the different views and theories of genius over the course of three centuries, from the start of the eighteenth century to the present day.

I concentrated on France, partly because French literature and intellectual history happen to be my area of expertise and personal interest; partly because the French contribution to the literature on genius hasn’t received its due; but mostly because the variety and the inventiveness of the views and theories of genius in France was a story worth telling for itself

For language lovers, the facts are grim: Anglophones simply aren’t learning them any more. In Britain, despite four decades in the European Union, the number of A-levels taken in French and German has fallen by half in the past 20 years, while what was a growing trend of Spanish-learning has stalled. In America, the numbers are equally sorry.

compelling reasons remain for learning other languages.

First of all, learning any foreign language helps you understand all language better—many Anglophones first encounter the words “past participle” not in an English class, but in French. Second, there is the cultural broadening. Literature is always best read in the original. Poetry and lyrics suffer particularly badly in translation. And learning another tongue helps the student grasp another way of thinking.

The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.

You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.

Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free. Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.

t was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.

They have eavesdropped on the enemy for decades, tracking messages from Hitler’s high command and the Soviet K.G.B. and on to the murky, modern world of satellites and cyberspace. But a lowly and yet mysterious carrier pigeon may have them baffled.

igeon specialists said they believed it may have been flying home from British units in France around the time of the D-Day landing in 1944 when it somehow expired in the chimney at the 17th-century home where it was found in the village of Bletchingley, south of London.

s code-breaking and communications interception unit in Gloucestershire, agreed to try to crack the code. But on Friday the secretive organization acknowledged that it had been unable to do so.

ringleader of the Paris attacks last month appears to have directed the three terrorists inside the Bataclan theater by phone from a few blocks away,

Abdelhamid Abaaoud standing in a doorway yelling into his phone for about an hour.

Abaaoud's head was shaved and he was wearing layers of loose clothing, but when photographs were later published in the media the witness immediately recognized him and alerted the authorities.

3,700 migrants from overcrowded and unsafe boats in the last two days

18 different boats

Eyad Ismoil is one of the half-dozen men convicted for carrying out the World Trade Center bombings in 1993

sentenced to 240 years in prison for driving a rental van packed with a bomb into a garage, killing six and injuring about 1000 more

for someone who's supposed to "hate the infidels," he shows no signs of loathing towards the many prisoners and staff who openly despise him.