From ancient religions to contemporary ecology, dire warnings that the end of the world is upon us are not only false — they bring a damage of their own.
Category: Society
Bogotá’s Central Military Hospital has seen the worst of decades of civil war in Colombia — from severed limbs to longstanding traumas, Amid prospects of peace with the FARC guerrillas, its work begins a slight, and welcome decline.
In the western state of Rajasthan, a group of about 70 village girls, some of them already married, are receiving a full education, a break from their families, and a chance at independence.
Ennahda’s founder Rached Ghannouchi calls for an end to ‘political Islam,’ a groundbreaking shift for a key Tunisian leader and intellectual long identified as Islamist.
Amid more and more incidents of bullying in China, schools and the legal system appear to be doing very little to stop it.
Changing your diet is not easy, but the power of messaging service WhatsApp keeps you connected to help keep you on track.
An upstart from Savoy has challenged the royal authority of Marcello I, prince of the unofficially unrecognized so-called Principality of Seborga.
As much as freedom of expression, the Atfal al-Shawrea (Street Children) troupe challenged the Sisi regime’s control over freedom of assembly.
A female Islamist member of Parliament and an alternative-minded blogger have very different ideas about the role of religion in post-Revolution Tunisia.
A Sao Paulo cleaning lady turned to a group of architects in hopes of sprucing up her ramshackle home. The result was a prize-winning revamp that challenges conventional ideas about cost and aesthetics.
BERLIN — Shortly after World War II ended, American cameramen filmed people living in Berlin. Technicolor, an expensive proposition at the time, showed people on the streets, apparently happy to have survived. The film shows the joyful faces of people, some sunbathing, others swimming in the river. But the footage is telling from what is […]
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A Libyan Family’s Quiet Resilience
MISRATA — The weather is fair as the moon hangs over a family home in Misrata. The al-Rufai’s tiled courtyard, with its table and plastic chairs, and a vine shoot wrapped around the arbor, feels strangely peaceful this evening. Inside a dismantled Libya, the enclosure is an unexpected oasis, a welcome safe-haven against the chaos. […]
American forensics researchers place human corpses in so-called “body farms” to study their decomposition for a variety of sometimes surprising reasons.
NEW DELHI — The journalists gathered for an editorial meeting at their newspaper in the Indian capital. Their work includes hard-hitting reportage and investigative scoops that other publications in the country followed up on. The group of journalists are unlike most others. They live on the streets. And they are all under the age of 18. Their paper, a New Dehlhi monthly called Balaknama or ‘Voice of Children,’ publishes stories of children living and working on the streets. Exploring topics such as child sexual abuse, child labor and police brutality, the newspaper has doubled in size from its original four […]
What has become of the generation of people born in 1946? Le Temps‘ Joëlle Kuntz ponders the past seven decades and the findings of a watershed study of her age group.
An exhibition currently underway at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau museum showcases 300 artifacts from the ancient Mayan civilization.
-OpEd- PARIS — A sex scandal is again shaking up politics and media in France. Denis Baupin, a a Green Party member and vice president of the National Assembly, who also happens to be husband to the current housing minister, is being investigated after accusations that he harassed many women, including colleagues and elected officials, […]
From the poor to the pretty rich, women are still stuck with the lion’s share of housework and child-rearing. By one estimate, if each hour of domestic work were paid at minimum wage, it would total 33% of France’s GDP.
Maxima Acuna, an illiterate farmer in the northern Peruvian region of Cajamarca, faced years of litigation — and police beatings — to protect her property from the bulldozing and toxic dumping of a US-based mining firm.
The annual Kyotographie Festival creates a unique alchemy as world-class modern art occupies a timeless sanctuary.
BERLIN — During the last school year, some 18,000 young Germans began year-long adventures abroad, thrust into complete independence: suddenly, they were on their own, in a new environment, surrounded by strangers who spoke a language the students had only experienced from inside the safety of a classroom. Psychologists from Friedrich Schiller University in Jena […]
A generation ago we saw the Berlin Wall come down and Nelson Mandela go from prison to the presidency. Today, we have Orban, Erdogan, Trump. What happens next?
Gay marriage separates the two major Christian communities that dominate Germany. But what does the Bible really say about homosexuality?
-Essay- On Mothers’ Day, mothers are recognized and receive praise from their families and society at large. It’s a special day that nobody should forget to celebrate, right? My homage will consist of a few requests and some words of gratitude. Cultivating patience is the first thing I would ask mothers to do. They would […]
Each night I return home to one of the greatest luxuries available to human beings: an empty room. There is no one to speak to if I do not wish to make conversation, and no one to make demands of me as I sit idly in front of my window. I only became conscious of […]
Why do we refuse to admit that discrimination and poverty help the spread of Islamic fanaticism? Understanding is not justifying, explaining is not forgiving.
A temporary ban on the Facebook-owned messaging service sent countless Brazilians into a momentary panic, revealing how rapidly communication habits have evolved.
Autonomous vacuum cleaners are just the beginning. As time goes by, artificially intelligent machines will play ever greater roles in our lives. Which is why now is the time to start asking some important questions.
TUCUMÁN — Pope Francis declared war on waste months ago. Now, three of his kinsmen in northern Argentina have developed an idea to keep perfectly good food from being tossed and to help the hungry at the same time: “social fridges” where people can leave “neat portions” of leftover food. The initiative was launched in […]
Whether it’s about Syrian refugees, Syria or Iraq, the truth is sometimes better left unsaid. It all depends on the country in which it is said. One thing is certain: In these troubled times, censorship and self-censorship are thriving.
MUMBAI — In the western state of Maharashtra, dozens of men, women and children surround a water tanker on the main road. They hold pitchers, buckets and other containers, and are trying to fill as many as they can. Renuka, 35, pushes her way to the top of the tanker and is able to fill her five pitchers. “I waited 15 days to get this much water. But how long will it last?” she says. “We haven’t had tap water for the last two years. Our ponds and wells have dried up. There’s no water at all.” Manohar was less […]
LYON — In 2012, you could still catch sight of “yoyos” hanging from the jail cell windows. A yoyo, in French prison jargon, is a cord inmates throw through window bars to reach another cell and retrieve various objects. At the Saint-Paul and adjacent Saint-Joseph penitentiaries, in downtown Lyon, inmates could even get stuff from […]
Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, winner of the 2014 Pritzker, has used material like paper and cardboard to rebuild homes in disaster zones. The displaced of Ecuador await his singular eye.
A book published recently by French writer Pascal Bruckner cuts to pieces the taboo of money in French society. For him, it’s one of the barriers French needlessly impose on themselves.
People with particularly high IQs are often viewed as difficult and socially awkward, a new survey suggests. But in reality, they’re not so different from the rest of us.
-Analysis- BEIJING — After 30 years of domestic reform and opening up to the world, China is a changed country. Society has progressed, but also diversified, resulting in a true plurality of opinions about various issues. With a wink to earlier liberalizations in China, included Mao Zedong’s aborted call to let “100 schools of thought […]
PRAGUE — Czech Republic was the first country I visited that wasn’t either Latin or Germanic. Czech, as I found out the hard way, is a very tricky Slavic language, one of those that rarely lets you deduce the meaning of a word and in which entire sentences seem to have been written by somebody […]
Rock music, tight spandex bodysuits and staged maneuvers aren’t just for audiences in working-class America. Wrestling is thriving in Switzerland and elsewhere across Europe, where it’s seen as a different kind of performance art that even
A cooperative that’s giving formerly jobless Argentines a second chance has evolved from a recycling enterprise into a flourishing sustainable-design business. Many of its partners could never have seen this coming when they lost their jobs back i
In the best case, take Socrates as your instructor.