It’s tempting to imagine that if our leaders were better teachers, consensus would ensue. But what works in the classroom doesn’t necessarily apply to politics.
Month: February 2019
Despite episodes of hatred and nationalism, Gandhi’s ideas are still alive and well in India.
In southwest France, the ‘eusko’ currency has become the centerpiece of an alternative ecosystem that is not obsessed with economic growth.
Mining firms, coca farmers and criminal gangs have brought social degeneration, pollution and extreme violence to one district in western Colombia.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/GrGHbA32YJ0 expand=1] When War Was Just A Game (© Étienne Mallard) | OneShot Etienne Mallard has spent a lifetime venturing far and wide. A retired high-school philosophy teacher, he has always considered himself just an amateur photographer — with decent equipment. He has visited a running total now of 80 countries since he first […]
Family and friends waited for incarcerated Egyptian blogger Shady Abu Zeid to be able to arrive at his father’s funeral.
Categories
A Happier Kind Of Philosophy
I’m not a religious person. As a philosophy teacher, my go-to thinker was Spinoza, who once wrote that religion was created “to deceive the people and to constrain the minds of men” But I guess that if I had to pick one faith, the smiles of Buddhism I discovered throughout my Asian travels would be […]
With the rise of social networking, fake news and changing psychologies, political parties have little use now for traditional campaigns.
MUNICH — Do machines replace humans? Since the beginning of industrialization 200 years ago, we earthlings have been plagued by this fear. From the early uprisings of the weavers to the 1970s “job killer computer” slogan, and up until the 2013 thesis of researchers Michael Osborne and Carl B. Frey, according to whom machines could […]
-Analysis- The #MeToo movement was, above all, a collective “breaking of the silence” that shifted the longstanding balance of power on the question of sexual misconduct, particularly in the professional world. Many have noted that what became a collective raising of (mostly female) voices may have required the accusations of a few Hollywood movie stars […]
Researchers are sending remote-controlled aircraft into residential neighborhoods to figure out just who’s burning what in their stoves or fireplaces.
From Venezuela to Brazil, Latin American armed forces are returning to front-line roles in response to political crises and fighting organized crime. But will they threaten democracy again?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/embed/IR3JN13nloA expand=1] Bertrand Piccard’s Selfie — © Solar Impulse | OneShot Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg accomplished a feat of aviation that few believed possible: the first Round-The-World flight, powered only by the sun, with no fuel or polluting emissions. The flight of Solar Impulse demonstrated not only that clean technologies are the future, […]
PARIS — Are there pictures? Nowadays, in almost every criminal inquiry, this is the first thing judges and prosecutors ask. “We can’t work without these tools,” says Elisabeth Sellos-Cartel, video-protection officer in the Interior Ministry’s security cooperation delegation. “Big Brother is watching you” is no longer a concept of much concern, it seems, to authorities […]
PARIS — Twice a year (for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl), I renounce my 6-hour beauty sleep and fight timezones to tune in to a bit of live transatlantic spectacle. Blame it on three reasons, ranked by order of importance: my americanophile wife; a chance to take the temperature of U.S. cultural hegemony; […]
We know that children’s books educate, shape, socialize. And yes, according to a new study based on key words, they still assign antiquated roles and characteristics for boys and girls.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service likes to boast that it is the nation’s most trusted government agency. It certainly has the trust of dope dealers. A report by the Postal Service Office of Inspector General demonstrates just how valuable the mail is as a marketing tool for drug pushers: “For example, a cocaine trafficker claimed to have used the Postal Service to successfully distribute nearly 4,000 shipments, stating that they had a 100% delivery success rate. In addition, of the 96 traffickers who indicated they used the Postal Service as their shipping provider, 43% (41) offered free, partial, or […]
Categories
The French Venice
Port Grimaud, near Saint-Tropez in southern France, has it all. Canals, bridges, islets … It’s just missing a couple of gondolas.
From Spain’s Podemos to Noam Chomsky, many left-wingers around the world are too blinded by ideology to see the Venezuelan crisis for what it really is.
As life expectancy numbers rise, a growing number of seniors experience kodokushi (lonely death), as it’s known in Japan.
From Madrid to Cork to Shanghai, some of the most revered old bookshops are closing doors as they face pressure from big chains and e-readers. But our bookworm writer found some small signs of hope.