Portunhol is a hybrid language spoken on the borders of Portuguese-speaking Brazil and its Spanish-speaking neighbors. The author’s time learning it was a reminder that language is so much more than just a means of communicating.
Category: Society
The Viberti Barolo winery in the Piedmont region of Italy employs cutting-edge solutions to preserve tradition and craftsmanship regardless of severe climate change.
For safety reasons, the mayor of an Italian village struggling with overtourism has banned tourists stopping in certain areas. It is not the only Italian travel hot spot trying new ideas to counter the effects of mass tourism.
Top chefs in Bogotá and other big cities in Colombia are rediscovering and updating the country’s traditional fare to celebrate local ingredients.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for a year. Many have died, fled or been traumatized — day after day and night after night. Such harrowing experiences leave deep wounds. But there are ways to overcome traumatic experiences.
The remarkable power of ChatGPT on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence took Beijing by surprise. As China rolls out its own version, it remains to be seen how the country will balance the need for control with technological development and innovation
A confrontation between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox churches has been brewing for centuries. But a video showing a Ukrainian war veteran being beaten up in church shows that the standoff has become all-out war.
The rise in popular culture of ghost hunting has had a big but strange effect in Brazil. YouTubers and bloggers aim to create a bridge between Brazilian popular spiritism and American ghost-hunting.
Atheists may not have been blessed with faith, but God has graced them with a mischievous wit and a love of the arts that has led to some of the most beautiful depictions of religion.
April 9-10 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ What do you remember from the news this week? 1. In Tuesday’s indictment on alleged hush money payments, how many criminal charges is U.S. President Donald Trump facing? 2. Which neighboring country did Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky visit? 3. France’s Bernard Arnault replaced Elon Musk on top of […]
Bogus images of angry dark-skinned men and bloodied blond women were quickly flagged as fakes, but the quality of the artificial intelligence is only bound to improve.
Christian Easter, Muslim Ramadan and Jewish Passover are coinciding this year on the lunar calendar — and it won’t happen again for three decades. It is a singular opportunity for the descendants of the prophet Abraham to come together in generosity and humility.
The author describes his experience as a transgender man: How his physical transition has given him access to new spaces and conversations that were previously inaccessible to him as a woman, and how it’s made him feel like a spy within the patriarchy.
Media coverage of Iran’s mass protests of 2022 failed to truly show how most Iranians thought about the hijab or a general dress code for women. Centering the whole fight for justice in Iran around the headscarf has its risks.
After more than a year of war, a journalist from Spanish publication La Marea returns to one of the capital’s top clinics for foreign couples looking for children. Business is better than ever, though the clinic is looking for women from other former Soviet republics to become surrogate mothers.
Shortly after rumors leaked of former President Donald Trump’s impending indictment, images purporting to show his arrest appeared online. These images looked like news photos, but they were fake. They were created by a generative artificial intelligence system.
Praise in the West has been heaped on the popular protests in Israel that have halted undemocratic judicial reform proposed by the Netanyahu government. But this supposedly noble fight for democracy doesn’t apply to 20% of its citizens, not to mention the policies carried out in the Occupied Territories.
Even beyond the bloodshed of its war in Ukraine, lesser acts of aggression by the state are a clear expression of the intentions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
April 1-2 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ What do you remember from the news this week? 1. Moscow’s FSB security service arrested a reporter from which major U.S. publication? 2. Where did King Charles III go on his first overseas trip as monarch? 3. What country woke up in two different time zones amid a […]
From ballet to opera to classic literature, Russia has turned its culture into an instrument for its own expansion. The West must fight back, Ukraine’s culture minister Oleksandr Tkachenko writes in an op-ed in German daily Die Welt. It’s time to stop supporting Russian artists and seek out Ukrainians instead.
Nicaraguan publication Divergentes takes a night tour of entertainment spots popular with locals in Managua, the country’s capital, to see how dictatorship and emigration have affected nightlife.
A series of interviews in Wuhan with aging gay men — all currently or formerly married to women — reveals a hidden story of how Chinese LGBTQ culture is gradually emerging from the shadows.
Since 2015, Europe’s strategy to stop irregular migration has focused on arresting so-called smugglers. But those steering the vessels are usually desperate migrants themselves, forced to take the helm.
The Mapping Diversity platform examined maps of 30 cities across 17 European countries, finding that women are severely underrepresented in the group of those who name streets and squares. The one (unsurprising) exception: The Virgin Mary.
March 25-26 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ What do you remember from the news this week? 1. Despite general support for Russia on his trip to Moscow, what important trade deal did Xi Jinping wind up not signing with President Putin? 2. The French government faces widespread anger over its decision to raise the legal […]
Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a “hostile” world. It’s a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.
What if the devastating earthquake was caused by a weapon fired from a satellite that pierced the earth’s surface? How does someone like this wind up in charge of science in a great nation like Turkey?
Architects in Mendoza, western Argentina, have used hundreds of tons of recycled building material, shipping containers and discarded decorations to create an otherwise high-tech winery.
The pushing through of a bill to raise the retirement age in France has caused widespread, sometimes violent, protests. The government is worried the movement will spread, as unions warn the protests are just beginning.
Rain often brings deadly flooding and property damage to neighborhoods around Brazil, where people are organizing to address the worsening problem.
Argentine journalist Ignacio Pereyra travels to Italy alone to do some paperwork as his family stays behind. While he walks alone around Rome, he experiences mixed feelings: freedom, homesickness and nostalgia, and wonders what leads people to desire larger families.
March 18-19 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ What do you remember from the news this week? 1. Over what body of water did a Russian fighter jet collide with a U.S. drone? 2. Protests rocked Pakistan after whose attempted arrest? 3. How much did Europe’s biggest bank HSBC pay for SVB’s UK arm, after its […]
Learning to actively be more grateful to those in our lives, even when it’s hard, can change everything.
The ongoing strike of garbage collectors in France shows us why we try so hard to hide how much garbage we throw out. As trash piles up in the streets, philosopher Gaspard Koenig reminds us that it wouldn’t be so hard to recycle and compost more of it.
Seven days a week, the “patchers” of Burkina Faso roam the streets of the country’s capital, looking out for any clothes that might need mending.
An evangelic group has threatened to take legal action against a samba school because of its mix of religious iconography at the 2023 Carnival festivities. A Brazilian secular institute has a response.
March 11-12 OUR WEEKLY NEWS QUIZ What do you remember from the news this week? 1. What footage from social media has Ukraine asked the International Criminal Court to investigate? 2. Which country saw mass protests that led to the withdrawal of a controversial “foreign agents” draft law? 3. What update has Apple announced […]
The case of 12-year-old twins, one of whom was transgender, who jumped off a balcony after being bullied, led experts in trans childhoods to reflect on how to better protect children. And how to talk about it.
One of the chief victims of radical clerical rule in Iran has been religion, historically a bulwark of Iranian society now seen as a tool of tyranny.