WorldcrunchStefano Lupieri is a journalist, columnist and editor for Les Echos business newspaper in Paris.
November 9 marks 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Once seen as a step toward open borders, walls and fences now span a quarter of the world’s land borders today. It’s central to what’s being called the “rebordering” among nations around the world.
While wine consumption is declining and operating costs increasing, winegrowers also face increasingly frequent and extreme climatic hazards. Is this the last straw? As the sector is preparing for a new uprooting plan, some winemakers are looking into ways to adapt to the new market needs and climatic conditions.
Impoverished by decades of intensive farming, soils are losing their capacity to store carbon and retain water. Today, alternative farming methods try to offer a solution to the problem, but the results are far from ideal.
Even more so than laughter, smiling is the human trait par excellence. It’s a real language — but can we learn to understand it? Or to cultivate it? The rewards could be high, and not just to boost morale: Smiling could increase life expectancy.
The Seine, the backbone of Paris’ Olympic celebrations, is being reclaimed as a recreational and transport hub. Does it mean Napoleon’s dream of a “Greater Paris” stretching all the way to the sea will finally happen?
How can we make the city both more dense and more liveable? By opening up its rooftops! At a time of land scarcity and global warming, this vast reservoir of largely unused land is the focus of much interest.
Stuffed toys, fetish objects, lucky charms, pets — we all have our comforting objects or companions, even if we sometimes find it hard to admit to ourselves. It’s an anthropological need that makes our lives more comfortable. But with smartphones, chatbots, and soon robots, taking up a new role as our future companions, we need to rethink whether our new, digital teddy bears create more harm than they provide comfort.