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Javier E

Led by Its Youth, U.S. Sinks in World Happiness Report - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ppiness-report-finland-us.html

youth happiness report world us decline culture history crisis

shared by Javier E on 22 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Each year, it’s no surprise that Finland tops the annual World Happiness Report. And this year was no different, marking the country’s seventh consecutive year doing so
  • Americans — particularly those under 30 — have become drastically less happy in recent years
  • the latest data point in what some researchers have described as a crisis among America’s youth.
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  • For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was published in 2012, the United States fell out of the Top 20 and dropped to 23rd, pushed down by cratering attitudes of Americans under 30.
  • Americans have long been an unhappy bunch. They have never ranked in the Top 10 of the World Happiness Report, which is based on how respondents in different countries rate their own happiness.
  • cited the disruptions to life brought about by the coronavirus pandemic as a chief cause of mental health challenges among younger Americans.
  • The happiest young people are in Lithuania, while the unhappiest are in Afghanistan.
  • “I have never seen such an extreme change,” John Helliwell, an economist and a co-author of the report, said in an interview, referring to the drop in happiness among younger people. “This has all happened in the last 10 years, and it’s mainly in the English-language countries. There isn’t this drop in the world as a whole.”
  • Respondents were asked — among other prompts — to think of their life as a ladder and to rate it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best possible life.
  • this was the first time that the consortium separated results by age, finding disparities in the views of younger and older Americans. Among the 143 countries surveyed, the United States ranked 10th for people 60 and older, but 62nd for people under 30.
  • Jade Song, a 27-year-old novelist, counted herself among those who had become increasingly unhappy in recent years.
  • “Many of the things that would have normally taken place for people, particularly high school young adults, did not take place,” he added. “And that is still occurring.”
  • “It’s mostly because as an adult you suddenly become aware of all the world news and you pay attention more to what you can control, and you realize that there is so little you can control,” Ms. Song, who was not part of the study, said in an interview. “Even if you’re going to protests or paying your rent and bills all on time, it’s so difficult, especially now, to break free from how you’re living your life when you realize how little impact your actions actually have on a broader level.”
  • There is a silver lining, though
  • In 2022, a Harvard University study showed that well-being among young adults in the United States had declined in the previous 20 years. Young people — those between the ages of 18 and 25 — reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with other age groups, as well as the poorest mental and physical health, sense of purpose, character, virtue, close social relationships and financial stability
  • Similar findings have emerged in Britain and Canada.
  • “One factor, which we’re all thinking about, is social media,” said Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development
  • “Because there’s been some research that shows that depending on how we use social media, it lowers well-being, it increases rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among young girls and women, teenage girls.”
  • In addition, Dr. Waldinger said, the negative feedback loop from news consumption has become a contributing factor.
  • “There’s also a lot of anxiety about the state of the world,” he said. “About climate change. About all of the polarization that we’re seeing.”
  • in some other countries, such as Croatia, Switzerland and Austria, the World Happiness Report shows that young people are becoming happier.
  • “Part of the problem is that we have this huge expectation of happiness in America,” said Eric Weiner, the author of “The Geography of Bliss,” and so we suffer partly from the unhappiness of not being happy and the expectation that we should be happy. And not every country in the world has that.”
  • “There’s an assumption that if you’re American, you’re wealthy and you’re high tech and you’re successful; you should be happy,” he said. “There’s a lot of data that shows that the greater your expectations, the less you’re happy.”
  • The expectations for young people like Ms. Song, the novelist, said have shifted.
  • “We have less to look forward to,” she said. “Because in the future, there’s going to be climate change that will affect the way we live. I think there’s less of a clear-cut trajectory for our life paths, because for so long, it was so easy just to know that you could go get married and have your 2.5 kids, and then pay for your house. But now that path is a lot more closed.”
  • “The literature is clear in practice — the effect that this had on socialization, pro-social behavior, if you will, and the ability for people to feel connected and have a community,”
  • “A, this angst is very local and, B, it’s very recent, which means, C, it’s not fundamental and going to last forever,” he said. “If it has been created that quickly, it could be removed that quickly.”
Javier E

Percival Everett Can't Say What His Novels Mean | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...percival-everett-profile

music history jazz culture

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The more I read Everett’s work, the more my thoughts turned to jazz. “It is the player who, by improvising, makes jazz,” Bernstein said. “He uses the popular song as a kind of dummy to hang his notes on. He dresses it up in his own way and it comes out an original.”
  • A jazz player may reference sheet music, but the resulting performance—animated by intuition and impulse—exceeds the descriptive capacities of the language it draws from.
  • Everett is not the first to reimagine Huck and Jim’s coupling, which other artists have interpreted as romantic or paternal. But he is perhaps the first to try to invert it. In “James,” Huck is Jim’s shameful appendage, the object of Jim’s resentful affection. He is the secret Jim can’t give up, the wedge that cleaves Jim’s family
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  • James Baldwin compared it to the talking drum, used to convey messages across distances that the human voice can’t travel: “It is a music which creates, as what we call History cannot sum up the courage to do, the response to that absolutely universal question: Who am I? What am I doing here?”
  • it’s difficult not to read “James” as a corrective of Everett’s previous works, if not of its source material. For Jim’s predecessors, freedom requires abstraction: the problem is other people. But Jim’s understanding of freedom is literal. He knows that his happiness depends upon the emancipation of his family. At first, he wields a pencil, but then he exchanges it for a gun.
Javier E

Aya Nakamura, French-Malian Singer, Is Caught in Olympic Storm - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nce-olympics-aya-nakamura.html

france culture politics history music language olympics singer african

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • “There is a sort of religion of language in France,” said Julien Barret, a linguist and writer who has written an online glossary of the language prevalent in the banlieues where Ms. Nakamura grew up. “French identity is conflated with the French language” he added, in what amounts to “a cult of purity.”
  • France’s former African colonies increasingly infuse the language with their own expressions. Singers and rappers, often raised in immigrant families, have coined new terms.
  • Ms. Nakamura’s dance-floor hits use an eclectic mix of French argot like verlan, which reverses the order of syllables; West African dialect like Nouchi in the Ivory Coast; and innovative turns of phrase that are sometimes nonsensical but quickly catch on.
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  • In “Djadja,” her breakout song from 2018 that has become an anthem of female empowerment, she calls out a man who lies about sleeping with her by singing “I’m not your catin,” using a centuries-old French term for prostitute. It has been streamed about one billion times.
  • Ms. Nakamura has encountered criticism of her music before in France, where expectations of assimilation are high. Some on the right complain she has become French but shown more interest in her African roots or her American role models.
  • She responded to her critics on French television in 2019, saying of her music, “In the end, it speaks to everyone.”“You don’t understand,” she added. “But you sing.
  • The Olympics furor appears unlikely to subside soon. As a commentator on France Inter radio put it: “France has no oil, but we do have debates. In fact, we almost deserve a gold medal for that.”
Javier E

To Live Past 100, Mangia a Lot Less: Italian Expert's Ideas on Aging - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...italy-aging-valter-longo.html

aging longevity italy research researcher diet genetics

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.
  • “For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,
  • Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”
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  • Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.
  • In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.
  • He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.
  • Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.
  • “It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe
  • “Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”
  • He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).
  • in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.
  • he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.
  • even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.
  • many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.
  • “Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”
  • The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.
  • Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.
  • At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.
  • He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.
  • He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.
  • he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.
  • His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.
  • “Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”
  • He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.
  • Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children
  • A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.
  • The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.
Javier E

How Boeing Favored Speed Over Quality for the 737 Max - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-quality-problems-speed.html

boeing quality

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • After the Max 8 crashes, Boeing and its regulators focused most on the cause of those accidents: flawed design and software. Yet some current and former employees say problems with manufacturing quality were also apparent to them at the time and should have been to executives and regulators as well.
  • Davin Fischer, a former mechanic in Renton, who also spoke to the Seattle TV station KIRO 7, said he noticed a cultural shift starting around 2017, when the company introduced the Max.
  • “They were trying to get the plane rate up and then just kept crunching, crunching and crunching to go faster, faster, faster,” he said.
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  • When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.
  • Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.
  • “For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.
  • In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,
  • “We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”
  • the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.
Javier E

The Phantasms of Judith Butler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677874

trans gender debate critical

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones.
  • Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer.
  • Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom.
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  • But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims?
  • Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.”
  • why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate
  • The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”
  • But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asser
  • Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”
  • ascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet.
  • As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own
  • Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality.
  • They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part.
  • They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”
  • Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope.
  • It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want.
  • what is authenticity
  • In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.
  • I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”?
  • The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.
  • They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists
  • What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?
Javier E

Why Facts Don't Change Our Minds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...hy-facts-dont-change-our-minds

facts culture knowledge bias language brain science psychology

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • reason is an evolved trait, like bipedalism or three-color vision. It emerged on the savannas of Africa, and has to be understood in that context
Javier E

Germany, a Loyal Israel Ally, Begins to Shift Tone as Gaza Toll Mounts - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...germany-israel-gaza.html

germany israel support history crisis policy

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • “What changed for Germany is that it’s untenable, this unconditional support for Israel,” said Thorsten Benner, director of the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin. “In sticking to this notion of Staatsraison, they gave the false impression that Germany actually offered carte blanche to Netanyahu.”
  • Foreign-policy experts say that by hewing to its strong support of Israel, Germany has also undermined its ability to credibly criticize authoritarian governments like that of Russia’s Vladimir V. Putin for human rights violations.
  • During a visit to the region, her sixth since the attack, Ms. Baerbock also described the situation in Gaza as “hell” and insisted that a major offensive on Rafah, where more than a million people have sought shelter, must not happen.“People cannot vanish into thin air,”
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  • Berlin, like Washington, has tried to position itself as a concerned friend, intent on ensuring Israel’s long-term security by not allowing it to go so far that it loses even more international backing. But the stakes are high for Germany, too.
  • The country needs to maintain friendly relations around the world to pursue its own interests, whether Europe is cutting deals with Egypt to curb migration or seeking support for measures to back Ukraine against Russia
  • this week, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, said she would be sending a delegation to Israel because as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, her country “is obliged to remind all parties of their duty to abide by international humanitarian law.”
  • The sense of diminishing credibility on human rights is particularly strong in the set of developing or underdeveloped countries sometimes referred to as the Global South, a point brought home during a visit to Berlin this month by Malaysia’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim.
  • “We oppose colonialism, or apartheid, or ethnic cleansing, or dispossession of any country, be it in Ukraine, or in Gaza,” Mr. Ibrahim told journalists as he stood beside Mr. Scholz. “Where have we thrown our humanity? Why this hypocrisy?”
  • polls by public broadcasters in recent weeks show that nearly 70 percent of Germans surveyed felt Israel’s military actions were not justifiable; just a few weeks earlier, the number was around 50 percent.
  • On the one hand, she said, Germany was calling on Israel not to invade Rafah. On the other, Germany remained one of Israel’s biggest arms suppliers. “We have to really do something to protect these people.”
Javier E

I Always Knew I Was Different. I Just Didn't Know I Was a Sociopath. - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...now-i-was-a-sociopath-68ebe08b

sociopath origins response morality

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • I wasn’t a kleptomaniac. A kleptomaniac is a person with a persistent and irresistible urge to take things that don’t belong to them. I suffered from a different type of urge, a compulsion brought about by the discomfort of apathy, the nearly indescribable absence of common social emotions like shame and empathy.
  • I didn’t understand any of this back then. All I knew was that I didn’t feel things the way other kids did. I didn’t feel guilt when I lied. I didn’t feel compassion when classmates got hurt on the playground. For the most part, I felt nothing, and I didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt. So I did things to replace the nothingness with…something.
  • This impulse felt like an unrelenting pressure that expanded to permeate my entire self. The longer I tried to ignore it, the worse it got.
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  • Stealing wasn’t something I necessarily wanted to do. It just happened to be the easiest way to stop the tension.
  • The first time I made this connection was in first grade, sitting behind a girl named Clancy. The pressure had been building for days. Without knowing exactly why, I was overcome with frustration and had the urge to do something violent.
  • I liked Clancy and I didn’t want to steal from her. But I wanted my brain to stop pulsing, and some part of me knew it would help. So, carefully, I reached forward and unclipped the bow. Once it was in my hand, I felt better, as if some air had been released from an overinflated balloon. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t care. I’d found a solution. It was a relief.
  • Together we went through the box. I explained what everything was and where it had come from. Once the box was empty, she stood and said we were going to return every item to its rightful owner, which was fine with me. I didn’t fear consequences and I didn’t suffer remorse, two more things I’d already figured out weren’t “normal.” Returning the stuff actually served my purpose. The box was full, and emptying it would give me a fresh space to store things I had yet to steal.
  • “Why did you take these things?” Mom asked me.I thought of the pressure in my head and the sense that I needed to do bad things sometimes. “I don’t know,” I said.“Well… Are you sorry?” she asked.“Yes,” I said. I was sorry. But I was sorry I had to steal to stop fantasizing about violence, not because I had hurt anyone.
  • Empathy, like remorse, never came naturally to me. I was raised in the Baptist church. I knew we were supposed to feel bad about committing sins. My teachers talked about “honor systems” and something called “shame,” which I understood intellectually, but it wasn’t something I felt. My inability to grasp core emotional skills made the process of making and keeping friends somewhat of a challenge. It wasn’t that I was mean or anything. I was simply different.
  • Now that I’m an adult, I can tell you why I behaved this way. I can point to research examining the relationship between anxiety and apathy, and how stress associated with inner conflict is believed to subconsciously compel people to behave destructively. I believe that my urge to act out was most likely my brain’s way of trying to jolt itself into some semblance of “normal.” But none of this information was easy to find. I had to hunt for it. I am still hunting.
  • For more than a century, society has deemed sociopathy untreatable and unredeemable. The afflicted have been maligned and shunned by mental health professionals who either don’t understand or choose to ignore the fact that sociopathy—like many personality disorders—exists on a spectrum.
  • After years of study, intensive therapy and earning a Ph.D. in psychology, I can say that sociopaths aren’t “bad” or “evil” or “crazy.” We simply have a harder time with feelings. We act out to fill a void. When I understood this about myself, I was able to control it.
  • It is a tragic misconception that all sociopaths are doomed to hopeless, loveless lives. The truth is that I share a personality type with millions of others, many of whom have good jobs, close-knit families and real friends. We represent a truth that’s hard to believe: There’s nothing inherently immoral about having limited access to emotion. I offer my story because I know I’m not alone.
Javier E

How Africans Are Changing French - One Joke, Rap and Book at a Time - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...africa-french-language.html

french frANCE africa culture language

shared by Javier E on 31 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • A growing number of words and expressions from Africa are now infusing the French language, spurred by booming populations of young people in West and Central Africa.
  • More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa. There are as many French speakers in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, as in Paris.
  • Through social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube, they are literally spreading the word, reshaping the French language from African countries, like Ivory Coast, that were once colonized by France.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • “We’ve tried to rap in pure French, but nobody was listening to us,” said Jean Patrick Niambé, known as Dofy, a 24-year-old Ivorian hip-hop artist listening to Marla on the rooftop. “So we create words from our own realities, and then they spread.”
  • The youth population in Africa is surging while the rest of the world grays. Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.
  • Nearly half of the countries in Africa were at one time French colonies or protectorates, and most of them use French as their official language.
  • President Emmanuel Macron of France said in a 2019 speech: “France must take pride in being essentially one country among others that learns, speaks, writes in French.”
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