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WHAT THE WORLD

Fed-Up French Mayor Bans Snow From Falling

Icy roads, electricity outages, whiny city folk … There's only one solution to ending winter chaos.

Google Street View screenshot of Cerdon, in eastern France

No snow (for now, and forever?) in Cerdon

Rozena Crossman

No one’s dreaming of a white Christmas in the town of Cerdon, in eastern France. Marc Chavent, mayor of this municipality tucked into the Jura mountains, apparently has a very different dream: So frustrated by the difficulties his community faced due to snowfall that earlier this week, the mayor banned the chilly precipitation altogether.


Wait, what? The bonafide decree (see below) was of course an act of legislative symbolism, drawing attention to very real issues: As French news website actuLyon reports, the town’s electricity often gets cut as soon as it begins to snow, and a few weeks ago Cerdon’s snow removal tractor broke down.

The plague of neo-rurals


“It’s difficult to invest 150,000 euros in new snow removal material,” Chavent wrote in the mandate, blaming the larger French government’s endless red tape for hampering the financial autonomy of small cities and towns.

The mayor also took a swipe at a new part of Cerdon’s population — “neo-rurals who, despite having made the choice to live in a mountainous region during winter, believe themselves to be in downtown Lyon” — who apparently find that snow is cold, wet and slippery.

Well, if Chavent's law can't stop the snow, maybe there's an app for that?

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Society

Freedom From Social Norms Is Generation Z's Gift, And Its Burden

While many young people have shaken off the social and emotional shackles of their parents' years, they must now resist the pressures of their own peers to constantly experiment, and never settle for anything or anyone.

Photograph of a group of young people taking a selfie on an iPhone

A group of young people take a selfie

Priscilla Du Preez/Unsplash
Guadalupe Rivero

BUENOS AIRES — The "crystal generation," or young people born since 2000, is often described as fragile and intolerant of setbacks. Also termed Generation Z or Gen Z, the group is also perceived, more positively, as sensitive, reflective and spiritual, in its own way.

Argentine psychologist Sofía Calvo (born 1993) believes young people of this generation share traits beyond their age. She is the author of a book on modern relations, La generación de cristal: Sociedad, familia y otros vínculos del siglo XXI (The Crystal Generation: Society, Family and Other Ties in the 21st Century).

"We understood as a generation that enjoying our sexuality, building a free identity, separating from a partner, leaving a job or doing what we love or going to therapy were not failures, but in fact a great win," she says.

She believes this generation must hold onto the gains of people who struggled for rights in preceding centuries, "When the world was a place that was still much more hostile to the individual's social, sexual and ideological freedoms. We must ... keep looking for whatever is uncomfortable," or what "nobody would ask," she tells Clarín.

This is a generation conscious of "aspects that seemed irrelevant before but certainly were not," she says, referring to traits like sensitivity or personal pain.

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