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Hyper Voisins, thanks both to its size and the sheer diversity of its activities, goes much further. About 5,000 people, he believes, is the maximum, but, with his group as a model, he has proposed to Paris authorities that they encourage 150 more to be set up. “That would be 750,000 people, a third of the population,” he said. “We would change the face of Paris and turn it into a convivial city.”

Among the 1,000 diners, there were also a few hundred from other parts of the city, who are welcome to sign up and come along.

Roberdeau now praises the scheme for having changed her life: a few years ago, after she was widowed, her daughter, worried about how long she could go on living alone, tried to persuade her to move into a retirement home nearer to her in Charente-Maritime, 300 miles to the south. “I didn’t want to leave the area or the apartment where I spent the last years with my husband,” said Roberdeau. Thanks to the support she gets from her neighbours, she has been able to remain.

HGTV is regularly a top-five cable channel—and its growing popularity has coincided with a huge increase in actual renovations. In the 1990s, American homeowners spent an average of more than $90 billion annually on remodeling their homes. By 2020, it was more than $400 billion

For homeowners, pressure to keep up with the Joneses has reached a logical extreme. Everywhere you look, there are new reasons to be unhappy with your house, and new trends you can follow to fix it.

Annetta Grant, a professor at Bucknell University who studies the home-renovation market, recently co-authored an ethnography on how home-reno media has changed people’s relationship to their home. She and her fellow researcher, Jay Handelman, conducted extensive interviews with 17 people in the process of renovating their home, attended a consumer-renovation expo, interviewed renovation-service providers, and consumed dozens of hours and hundreds of pages of home-reno media.

emember Manuel in Fawlty Towers? “He’s from Barcelona” was Basil’s explanation for his apparent idiocies, which the guests (and the audience) accepted because Spanish workers were the bottom of the pile. Poor and put-upon, they took low-grade jobs in Britain to get away from political instability, poverty and rotten infrastructure.

A holiday in 2022 Spain suggests the tables have turned. The airports are efficient, the roads good and the streets clean. Nobody talks about politics, because the government is sensible and stable.

A Spanish member of our party described a trip to Britain a few weeks ago. Arriving at Heathrow, his suitcase took two and a half hours to come through. There was “garbage everywhere” in London; his trains were delayed or cancelled; when he managed to board one he had to stand for two hours. Departing from Manchester airport, it took two hours to check his suitcase in. “It didn’t feel like a developed country,” he said. Political instability, rising poverty and rotten infrastructure: Manuel would have been at home in 2022 Britain.

“Battles are the principal milestones of secular history,” Winston Churchill wrote in his biography of the Duke of Marlboroug

The strike on the Kerch Strait Bridge was not a battle, but it was an important contributor to one of the great inflection points of this war—the moment when Russian elites began to understand that they are losing

The Kerch Strait Bridge attack, by contrast, inflicted at most a couple of casualties but packed multiple punches

LEDs are now dimmable, with their light available in a range of colors, some warmer, some cooler. They are stealthy and can assume the familiar forms of old-fashioned bulbs or disappear altogether into the fixture, manifesting themselves only as bright beams.

. LEDs use 90 percent less energy and last up to 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs.

In the early days, when LEDs lasted a mere 25,000 hours, they couldn’t be swapped after burning out, making the entire lamp defunct. Now they have life spans of 50,000 hours and are more likely to be replaceable.

Johnson also demanded a more aggressive strategy for combating violent crime — which was delivered by his new police chief, Eddie Garcia, who took over the department in early 2021. Parts of it involved tactics such as deploying “violence interrupters” to resolve street-level conflicts and guide those who need them to social services, and cleaning up blighted areas, such as trash-filled vacant lots and dilapidated buildings, where crime can breed.

The plan that Garcia developed, working with criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, also refocused policing in Dallas on “hot spots.”

They divided the city into 101,000 “microgrids” — areas roughly the size of two football fields side-by-side — and discovered that crime was heavily concentrated in relatively few — an apartment complex here or a nightclub parking lot there. Just 50 of these hot spots accounted for almost 10 percent of violent street crime in Dallas.

Current poverty – just being poor right now – is seventh on that list, and it alone causes 10 times as many deaths as homicide, close to five times as many deaths as gun violence, and 2.5 times as many deaths as drug overdoses.

Cumulative poverty that lingers year after year is associated with approximately 60% more deaths than current poverty, putting only heart disease, cancer and smoking-related deaths ahead in the number of Americans it kills

poverty is right up there with these other dreaded scourges – much higher, in fact, than many ills that have inspired investigative committees, major policy investments and sustained attention from the public and private sectors in American life.

Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state

“A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.

the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.

Why did we think big protests reliably brought about social change? Because it seemed to be the case in the past

In the past, a truly big march was the culmination of long-term organizing, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, indicating prior planning and strength.

they didn’t just manage to hold a protest; lacking easier ways to organize, they ended up having to build organizational capacity, which then helped navigate what came after.

In May 1945 a lone Russian soldier approached the Brinnlitz Nazi labour camp on a horse. He had come to tell the inmates they were free. Delighted as they were — the soldier was rewarded with hugs — the newly liberated men and women were also bewildered. Where would they go now?Realising that their liberator was, like them, a Jew, the former prisoners peppered him with questions. “Have you been in Poland?” they asked, since that was where most of them had come from. “Yes,” replied the officer, “I’ve just come from Poland.” “Are there any Jews left up there?” The officer told them what was simply the truth: “I saw none.”So where should they go? The officer looked them in the face: “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east — that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” He paused and added: “They don’t like us anywhere.”

My mother’s father, Alfred Wiener, had been one of the leaders of Germany’s Jews in the 1920s and 1930s and articulated the view of most German Jews at that time, though by no means all of them. He supported those Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine, but he didn’t support the creation of a Jewish state there.

As I relate in my recent family memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, in 1927 Alfred published a highly successful book based on his travels in Palestine. He argued strongly against the Zionist project. There were, he said, too many Jews in Europe to fit into such a tiny area, the economic ideas of the settlers were utopian, and (he was a considerable Arabic scholar) peace with Palestinian Arabs would be hard to come by. His critics said that his survey of the area was biased and described him as “one of the leaders of German anti-Zionism”.

In the mid-1800s, the most prolific slaver in Brazil was a man named José Bernardino de Sá. The transatlantic slave trade was banned in Brazil and abroad, but Bernardino nonetheless financed the trafficking of nearly 20,000 Africans to Brazil — and became one of the country’s wealthiest people.

He used that wealth to buy farms, build roads — and, historians say, fund the Banco do Brasil. It’s just one of several links that ties this country’s oldest and most prominent bank to the slave trade. Not only was its initial capital drawn from slavery, historians say; its original vice president and director were also notorious slavers.

That history, and what should be done about it, is now at the center of a remarkable legal filing by government attorneys in Rio de Janeiro — an action that’s asking some of the most fundamental questions about Brazil, its history and the long shadow the transatlantic slave trade casts over it.

ust a few hours after Hamas launched its assault on Israel, India’s prime minister was among the first world leaders to respond. In a strongly worded statement, Narendra Modi condemned the “terrorist attacks” and said India “stands in solidarity with Israel at this difficult hour”.

it was not a sentiment restricted only to the upper echelons of Indian government. As Azad Essa, a journalist and author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel, said: “This messaging gave a clear signal to the whole rightwing internet cell in India.”

In the aftermath, the Indian internet factcheckers AltNews and Boom began to observe a flood of disinformation targeting Palestine pushed out by Indian social media accounts, which included fake stories about atrocities committed by Palestinians and Hamas that were shared sometimes millions of times, and often using the conflict to push the same Islamophobic narrative that has been used regularly to demonise India’s Muslim population since the BJP came to power

On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers.

He wanted me to know that whatever AI’s ultimate risks turn out to be, he has zero regrets about letting ChatGPT loose into the world. To the contrary, he believes it was a great public service.

Altman can still remember where he was the first time he saw GPT-4 write complex computer code, an ability for which it was not explicitly designed. “It was like, ‘Here we are,’ ”

Stare at a climate map of the world that we expect to inhabit 50 years from now and you see a band of extreme heat encircling the planet’s midriff. Climate modelling from 2020 suggests that within half a century about 30% of the world’s projected population – unless they are forced to move – will live in places with an average temperature above 29C. This is unbearably hot. Currently, no more than 1% of Earth’s land surface is this hot, and those are mainly uninhabited parts of the Sahara.

The scenario is as dramatic as it is because the regions of the world affected most severely by global heating – above all, sub-Saharan Africa – are those expected to experience the most rapid population growth in coming decades.

But despite this population growth, they are also the regions that, on current trends, will contribute least to the emissions that drive the climate disaster.

social media use also differs by race and ethnicity — and there’s far less discussion of that. According to a new study by Pew, Black and Hispanic teenagers ages 13 to 17 spend far more time on most social media apps than their white peers

One-third of Hispanic teenagers, for example, say they are “almost constantly” on TikTok, compared with one-fifth of Black teenagers and one-tenth of white teenagers.

Higher percentages of Hispanic (27 percent) and Black teenagers (23 percent) are almost constantly on YouTube compared with white teenagers (9 percent); the same trend is true for Instagram.

Sometime in recent history, possibly around 2004, Americans forgot to have fun, true fun, as though they’d misplaced it like a sock.

Instead, fun evolved into work, sometimes more than true work, which is where we find ourselves now.

Fun is often emphatic, exhausting, scheduled, pigeonholed, hyped, forced and performative

A little boy pulling up a girl’s dress. Another grabbing a classmate from behind, his hands across her chest. Bulges protruding from male students’ pants. Suspiciously pro-American images.

The illustrations can be found in a Chinese state-run publisher’s mathematics textbooks for elementary school students — books that have been used for years. They set off a furor in China after they were flagged on social media last week by angry commenters as crude, sexualized and anti-China.

“The problems identified will be rectified immediately, and those responsible for violations of disciplines and regulations will be severely held accountable,” the ministry said on Monday. “There will be zero tolerance.”

The international airport, built a decade ago in the name of Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa family, is devoid of passenger flights, its staff lingering idly in the cafe. The cricket stadium, also constructed on the family’s orders, has had only a few international matches and is so remote that arriving teams face the risk of wildlife attacks.

As Sri Lanka grapples with its worst ever economic crisis, with people waiting hours for fuel and cutting back on food, nowhere is the reckless spending that helped wreck the country more visible than in Hambantota, the Rajapaksa family’s home district in the south.

This enormous waste — more than $1 billion spent on the port, $250 million on the airport, nearly $200 million on underused roads and bridges, and millions more (figures vary) on the cricket stadium — made Hambantota a throne to the vanity of a political dynasty that increasingly ran the country as a family business.