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Fast-food restaurants have a problem: Customers are returning but workers aren’t.And, increasingly, neither are their dining rooms.

Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.

That’s 1,734,000 openings vs. an estimated 1,475,000 unemployed people, the Fed data shows.

n order for the World Happiness Report and other international happiness indexes to compare self-reports of happiness, they have to assume that people around the world define happiness and answer happiness surveys in roughly the same way. If this assumption does not hold, then happiness indexes are about as reliable as a ranking of music quality based on how much residents of each country say they like their local songs. This would indicate something about each country’s enthusiasm for their musical styles, but would provide little information about what music is objectively “best,” given differences in people’s traditions and tastes.

On first pass, the ways people around the world say they experience happiness have some obvious commonalities. One 2016 study of 2,799 adults in 12 countries found that in all the nations studied, psychological definitions of happiness—“an inner state, feeling or attitude”—dominated all others. In particular, people worldwide said they found happiness in achieving “inner harmony.”

Inner harmony might sound universal, but it can mean very different things in different places. For example, while shooting a documentary film in Denmark on the pursuit of happiness two years ago, I found that the Danes often described inner harmony in terms of hygge, which is something like coziness and comfortable conviviality. Meanwhile, I have found that Americans tend to define it in terms of their skills meeting their passions, usually in the context of work.

Germany's national and regional leaders have agreed to bar unvaccinated people from much of public life in a bid to fend off a fourth wave of Covid-19.

Only those who have been vaccinated or recently recovered from Covid will be allowed in restaurants, cinemas, leisure facilities and many shops.

Vaccinations could be made mandatory by February, the chancellor added.

The way people post on Twitter is different from the way people post on LinkedIn which is different than how people post Facebook which is different from the way people post on Instagram, no matter how much Facebook keeps telling you to cross-post your IG stories

Some people whose job relies on onlineness (like me) have to refine their voices, their ways of being, across several platforms. But most normal people have found their lane — the medium that fits their message — and have stuck with it.

People post where they feel public speech “belongs.”

Behind the strikes, inflation numbers and talk of all the difficult decisions politicians have to make are a multitude of trapped people, their choices shrinking. People in bad relationships who cannot leave because rents and mortgages have gone up so being single is no longer viable. People who would like to have a child, or another child, but cannot afford its care, or who would like to return to work after having a child but the sums just don’t work. People in bad jobs with no security or benefits who cannot quit and look for alternatives because they have no savings to buffer rising costs. The end result is a crisis not just of the economy, but of freedom.

With that crisis, an entire liberal ambition becomes thwarted. We talk of liberalism in grand abstract terms, as the noble heart of an ideal political order that promotes human rights, the rule of law, civil liberties and freedom from religious dogma and prejudice

But when economic arrangements themselves become coercive and abusive, then political liberalism can coexist with, and indeed mask, a state of illiberalism and bondage. In the throes of personal challenges, lofty political ideals feel remote and irrelevant. All that people like Jane and others have the time or energy to register is a set of invisible oppressive economic forces that simply must be weathered because they are facts of nature

“To us,” she writes, “reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95% of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.”

The matter and life we cannot see are demonstrated with stunning effect. Bacterial cells make up 0.2kg of your body weight; one handful of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth; the tiny particles called neutrinos generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion are so small that they can penetrate the Earth, enabling a subterranean observatory to come up with an image of the sun.

In three sections – on biology, society and civilisation – Tong relentlessly focuses on all the things we either do not know, or decide not to pay attention to, as we carry on with our lives

In 2023, Jeep rolled out a new edition of its popular four-wheel-drive SUV. For the first time since the company introduced the car in 1986, air conditioning wasn’t an option, it was a must. This appears to be the end of an era: “The last car in the U.S. without standard air conditioning,” read the headline of an article in the automotive press, “finally gives up the fight against refrigerant.”

Summers now last longer — well past the autumnal equinox in many places — and as hot weather spreads to more clement regions, schools must consider the effects on learning without air conditioning. A 2020 study predicted that if temperatures in the contiguous United States rise as predicted, by 2050 students will learn on average 10 percent less each year. The effects are cumulative, and students without AC in their schools, who often live in cooler regions of the country, are the most vulnerable.

More fundamentally, air conditioning is evolving rapidly from an appliance that adds comfort and convenience to an ever-present life-support system. I

Jonathan Clarke, writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, of which he is a contributing editor, said the “democratization of dress” in recent decades has produced “the rapid casualization of American life.” But this has calcified into an unattractive norm

Is there a more obvious contemporary ostentation than tech billionaires conducting business wearing T-shirts to advertise that they are too rich to have sartorial concerns?

Clarke, who confesses a “slightly antique sense of propriety,” writes “few things are more heartening than to see a man or woman of advanced age very well dressed.

Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.

Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.

“If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”

taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitan

The world is at a startling demographic milestone. Sometime soon, the global fertility rate will drop below the point needed to keep population constant. It may have already happened.

Fertility is falling almost everywhere, for women across all levels of income, education and labor-force participation.

Governments have rolled out programs to stop the decline—but so far they’ve barely made a dent.

A survey earlier this month suggested that only a fifth of voters are currently satisfied with the chancellor’s work – the worst result recorded since this type of polling began a quarter of a century ago

If they could pick a chancellor from any political party, only 5 per cent said they would choose Scholz.

This year has also been a difficult one for Germans.