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March 1889 stood nearly 1,000 feet high and was the tallest structure in the world—a distinction it held until the completion of New York City’s Chrysler Building in 1930.

Initially, only the Eiffel Tower’s second-floor platform was open to the public; later, all three levels, two of which now feature restaurants, would be reachable by stairway or one of eight elevators.

Not all of the city’s inhabitants were as enthusiastic, however: Many Parisians either feared it was structurally unsound or considered it an eyesore.

The Eiffel Tower Becomes a Permanent Feature of the Paris Skyline

the Eiffel Tower was almost torn down and scrapped in 1909.

Several years later, during World War I, the Eiffel Tower intercepted enemy radio communications, relayed zeppelin alerts and was used to dispatch emergency troop reinforcements.

Over the years, the Eiffel Tower has been the site of numerous high-profile stunts, ceremonial events and even scientific experiments.

The Eiffel Tower has also inspired more than 30 replicas and similar structures in various cities around the world.

Now one of the most recognizable structures on the planet, the Eiffel Tower underwent a major facelift in 1986 and is repainted every seven years.

great gaming experiences speak to our inner desire for mastery, autonomy and purpose, Mr. Zichermann noted. The same can be said of travel. “Why do we travel?” he said. “It’s all about creating memories and discovering ourselves. Gamification is perfectly aligned with that.”

Gamification can engage people simply by making travel more playful and social, like Virgin America’s new seat-to-seat delivery feature that encourages fliers to “get lucky” by sending one another cocktails and messages through the entertainment system touchscreens on seatbacks

Even acquiring travel skills has become a game with language-learning Web sites like Duolingo and MindSnacks.

Despite gamification’s popularity, there are many poorly designed experiences. In fact, the technology research company Gartner is predicting that by next year 80 percent of gamification projects will fail to meet business objectives. When done right, however, gamification can garner brand loyalty while also helping travelers interact, learn, share opinions and explore the world.

companies that specialize in gamification say they are trying to design experiences that are emotional, that delight or surprise, unlike early loyalty programs

“In this case both the Kouachis and A.Q.A.P. insist that A.Q.A.P. financed this operation, trained the brothers for it and formulated the target,” he said, using the acronym for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Rather than being suggestive of a sleeper cell that sat and waited for three years, some subsequent contact seems likeliest although at this point not definitely proven.”

vessel is expected to be delivered to the US-based firm in two months.

50m longer than the Eiffel Tower is high.

6,000 passengers.

About 2,000 crew members will cater for their needs.

Closely related is a divergence in expectations. In January, Matt Schiavenza argued perceptively in The Atlantic that one striking difference between the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and a roughly contemporary suicide bombing by a 10-year-old in Nigeria was that France is not a country with a failing government or chronic conflict. As a result, attacks there are more shocking.

Many Americans hear “Paris” and think of the Eiffel Tower; they hear “Beirut” and immediately associate it with war. Yet that’s an outdated impression, as

Nor is Paris quite as calm as Americans might imagine. For example: Riots of considerable size are roughly a yearly event, especially in the banlieues; in 2005, during some of the largest riots in recent memory, three people were killed in violence triggered by police chasing three boys, but clearly emblematic of deeper tensions. This may not be the Paris that many Americans think of, but it is Paris just the same. (Both Paris and Beirut even suffered serious garbage-collection strikes this year.)

Beirut, in fact, was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. And while that name is no longer in common usage, there are still similarities between the cities. In the centers, prosperous neighborhoods offer fine dining and glamorous shopping. Farther out, less wealthy residents—many of them immigrants or children of immigrants—live in working-class districts. Paris’s suburban districts, known as banlieues, are heavily populated by Muslim immigrants.

Or should the empathy gap be attributed to an American and European press that focuses too heavily on attacks in the “West”? It’s far easier to get reporters to Paris than, say, Nairobi, though the critique is unfair to the brave reporters who report from dangerous parts of the globe year-round, not just when violence erupts. It’s a good bet that if American news organizations had devoted every resource that they dedicated to the Paris attacks to the bloodshed in Beirut instead, readers, watchers, and listeners wouldn’t have paid nearly the same amount of attention.

In an article for The Atlantic last year, Jacoba Urist reported on the findings of a study of natural disasters around the world, which found that the level of American media attention correlated with geographic proximity to the U.S. and the number of American tourists who had visited the country in question. (Urist noted that a 1976 Guatemalan earthquake with 4,000 fatalities accrued a third of the media coverage of an Italian earthquake with 1,000 deaths.) And as Faine Greenwood suggested after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, journalists and their audience alike suffer from a novelty bias. If it isn’t new—a new attack, a new place—it won’t garner the same buzz.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the only reason there was no safety check-in for Beirut was that Facebook decided only after the Paris attack to deploy the feature for non-natural disasters. That aside, it makes sense that Facebook would move faster on Paris. After all, there are twice as many people in the Paris urban area as there are in all of Lebanon. Even assuming 100-percent Facebook penetration in Lebanon (not far off, probably), there are simply more Facebook users in Paris for the company to respond to.

Abu Bakr al Baghdad

rusader" countries and beyond.

indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets

, symbols of Western power or decadence

Beyond ISIS "branded" attacks -- those launched by affiliates and members -- ISIS also seeks to make political capital out of individuals who claim to be "inspired" by it, such as those in San Bernardino, California, in December and last week in Philadelphia.

stage of the investigation, there is no evidence accused gunman Edward Archer was part of an organized cell or that other attacks were in the works.

here is no doubting ISIS' lure to a fringe of extremist Muslims and Muslim converts

Istanbul, Jakarta, Philadelphia, multiple locations in Libya, the Russian republic of Dagestan: within the past two weeks all have been the target of attacks by ISIS supporters or affiliates, killing and wounding dozens of people.

An early indication that ISIS' leadership favored overseas attacks came when the Belgian jihadist Abdelhamid Abaaoud -- a high-profile member of the group, if only a lieutenant -- plotted a series of gun and bomb attacks against police stations

"Know that we want Paris -- by Allah's permission -- before Rome and before Spain, after we blacken your lives and destroy the White House, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower."

the "caliph" himself, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, suggested ISIS will look for further opportunities to export its war to the "far abroad."

Throughout 2015, there was a steady stream of terror attacks that could be linked firmly to ISIS-associated groups, even if the relationship between them and the group's central leadership was often opaque

What, if any, role the central ISIS leadership had in the bombing of the Metrojet plane is still unknown. Its Sinai affiliate claimed the attack, and it was some time before the ISIS online publication Dabiq referred to it.

The suicide bomb attacks in Ankara were likely ordered by ISIS itself

The Paris attacks in November were a landmark: the first clearly organized and claimed by ISIS itself from Syria rather than the autonomous actions of affiliates or individuals.

t has a growing network of wilayat, or provinces -- places where it has an established presence such as Libya, Yemen and Afghanistan -- where government is weak and conflict endemic. In some instances it has sent fighters from Syria and Iraq to expand its presence in these places, most notably in Libya.

It also has a pool of experienced foreign fighters

The disappearance of one of the Paris attackers, Salah Abdeslam, and several alleged co-conspirators suggests ISIS may have a network of safe houses and travel facilitators in Europe

The oldest of the books of the Hebrew Bible date to roughly 3,000 years ago; the pyramids of Egypt go back about 5,000 years. These were not prehumans or near relatives. They were like us: complex, organized, alive to meaning and living at a time beyond reckoning.

Ruth Tringham of the University of California, Berkeley, who has devoted years to humanizing the remnants of this city of the dim past by focusing on one skeleton, of a woman she has dubbed Dido. Dido replastered her walls regularly, kept her home swept clean, covered the floor in reed mats and decorated the place with art: clay figures of animals and stylized human females. In other words: much like us.

Catalhoyuk was founded by pioneers of urban living. “When the earliest construction began,” Newitz writes, “many people coming to live at Catalhoyuk were only a generation or two removed from nomadism.” It was brand-new, this fixed settlement thing, but it proved remarkably successful. By the time Dido was born, the city was about 600 years old

A thousand years ago, meanwhile, East St. Louis, Ill., was the site of an urban sanctuary that archaeologists today call Cahokia. With a population of 30,000, it was larger than Paris was at the time. Like Paris, with its Eiffel Tower and Notre-Dame, it had distinguishing physical landmarks in the form of black earthen pyramids. It sprawled across both sides of the Mississippi River, beckoning visitors from all over the present-day Southern United States.

Cahokia seems to have been a place of spiritual pilgrimage, which drew diverse groups of Native American peoples, who spoke different languages and worshiped in various ways but came to share a reverence for this city and its ceremonial customs, which included human sacrifice. Its multiethnic, year-round population apparently serviced the religious pilgrims and, in the off-season, went about their own affairs.

Cahokia died not as a result of sudden catastrophe, like Pompeii, but seemingly because it lost its spiritual significance over time. Its people didn’t perish. The pilgrims just stopped coming; the local residents merged with other tribes. There is linguistic and other evidence that the Sioux are their descendants.

Newitz devotes space to debunking the popular notion that civilizations of the past “collapse” and become “lost,” pointing instead to indications of gradual change.

The operative lesson from the past, at least from this curated offering of former metropolises, seems to be that human culture is a plastic thing. Rather than lamenting the fragility of our current urban structures, we might do better figuring out how to bend and shape society for the future.

the effect of reading “Four Lost Cities” was more meditative. This is a long, long, long ride we are on. Much is beyond our control. Humanity trundles on.

“We’re not going to recycle our way out of this,” Mr. Weiss of ClientEarth said.

Environmental groups also say that recycling has not proved effective at the scale necessary: Only 9 percent of all plastics ever made have been recycled, according to the United Nations, with most of the rest ending up in landfills and dumps.

The company said that it reduced its plastic consumption by 12 percent from 2018 to 2021, and that it has committed to use only reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025. But Danone is not on track to reach that target, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which set up a voluntary program with the United Nations for big companies to address plastic pollution.

To sue Danone, the environmental groups have relied on the so-called duty of vigilance law, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that France passed in 2017. It requires large companies to take effective measures to identify and prevent human rights violations and environmental damages throughout their chain of activity.

The French duty of vigilance law, the first of its kind in Europe, has since inspired similar legislation in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as a proposed European Union directive.

There is nothing like a duty of vigilance law in the United States. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would require plastic producers to finance waste and recycling programs, and ban single-use plastic bags and the exporting of plastic waste to developing countries, is currently in committee.

“It’s often about streamlining existing practices,” said Pauline Barraud de Lagerie, a sociologist at University Paris Dauphine who published a book on corporate responsibility. She added that by suing companies, “N.G.O.s are trying to somehow bring back an obligation of result.”So far, around 15 legal cases based on the French law have been reported. Half of them have gone to court and are still awaiting judgment, which could take years.

The lawsuit is part of a wider trend of climate litigation that has gained momentum in recent years, expanding the climate fight beyond traditional demonstrations and civil disobedience initiatives.

The number of climate change lawsuits globally has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, from about 900 to more than 2,000 ongoing or concluded cases, according to data from the Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.