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Paris Calling

Uvalde And Moi: Reflections From The French Niece Of A Gun-Owning American

There is perhaps nothing more foreign about America than its "gun culture," and of course its plague of mass shootings. For a French-American who has lived her life in Paris, there is a search for understanding with her family in Louisiana.

-Essay-

PARIS — The daughter of a French mother and American father, I’ve lived my whole life in France. Still, having attended the American School of Paris, where my dad was a teacher, I was surrounded throughout my childhood by kids from the 50 States, learned my U.S. history and sold cupcakes at pep rallies. It was like going to school in America, but with the Eiffel Tower just a metro ride away. And, yes, without school shootings.

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Luddite Chronicles: Whatever Happened To The Telephone

Why must I feel like a washed-up nobody just because I have no need for a new "data plan"? All I want to do is make (and pay for) a simple phone call.

-Essay-

MADRID — I recently tried telephoning my mother in Tehran. By that, I don't mean some kind of 1950s rotary phone or 1990s cordless relic. I've long embraced the convenience of using my mobile phone — though now we are told that it is a smart phone.

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What Is Freedom? Surviving The Facebook Outage In Bulgaria

-OpEd-

"Do you get how big this is? It's been two hours now…"

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Manga Mon Amour: On French Passion For Japanese Anime

The visiting American writer pieces together how the French culture of comics (bandes dessinées) mixes with their deepening love of Japanese anime'.

PARIS — When I was in sixth grade, Cartoon Network aired episodes of the TV show Code Lyoko almost every day around 3 p.m. I was a loyal fan — watching practically every day when I got home from school.

In the show, a group of teenagers wage virtual battle against a virus-like artificial intelligence force that threatens to wreak havoc on the physical world. If I had to categorize it, I would place it loosely into the "anime-influenced Western animated series" box. Uninformed as I was, I had simply assumed the show was a real Japanese anime, when in actuality it was a French animated television series. Fast forward a decade: I had just moved to the Paris region and begun work as a middle school English teacher. About halfway through the day, it was time for free reading. As I told my students to take out their reading materials, I was struck as, one by one, virtually all pulled out the same thing: Manga.

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Green
Alessio Perrone*

Why All The E-Scooter Bashing Is Just Urban Myth

European media is failing to state the obvious about electric scooter reality: Our cities have to adapt.

Across Europe, newspapers and magazines continue to warn the public about the Biblical scourge of electric scooters. The stream of articles have turned into a tired trope: Start with the story of a recent electric scooter accident. Then move on to explain how the driver violated decades-old traffic rules — maybe he rode on the sidewalk or didn't wear a helmet or two people rode it at the same time. Then rant about how chaotic our streets have become after the coming of the scooters. And the article inevitably wraps up with a scathing indictment: Electric scooters should be banned or heavily restricted.

Such articles litter the media across the continent. We've seen them in Paris, where electric scooters are a mighty fearsome time bomb and prompted public outcry after an accident on the sidewalk caused the death of a young woman, as Le Parisien reported. The city of Lisbon has levied hefty fines for the electric scooters parked on its sidewalks. And the latest has come from Italy, where national media thundered against them after a young man died in an accident. (Plot twist: The man who lost his life was the e-scooter rider; a motorbike plowed into him. But I digress.)

If we find electric scooters so annoying, it's because most of our infrastructure was built to serve cars.

A few telling details are often missing. Accidents frequently happen on sidewalks or roads, because there is no adequate infrastructure for e-mobility. Often, it's the driver that gets hurt. In Italy, media emphasized that four people have lost their lives in e-scooter accidents in 2021 so far — but failed to compare that with the number of casualties of car, motorbike, bicycle, boat or plane accidents. Demand for this new technology is high, and it's not hard to see why given how inexpensive it is, how little public space it takes and how convenient it is for short-haul commutes.

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Italy
Alessio Perrone

Confessions Of A Recovering Meme Stock Trader

MILAN — There were a few moments of silence when I told my girlfriend what I'd done. I'd kept the information from her for a few days, fearing her reaction and forced to explain: I had chucked a few hundred dollars at shares of the so-called "meme stock" extraordinaire GameStop on the New York Stock Exchange. Then, still dissatisfied, I'd come to own shares of AMC, BlackBerry, Plug Power. I'd never even heard of these companies until I saw them, well, trending on the internet. And in just a few clicks, the same internet made it easy to invest my hard-earned money in these stocks.


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Italy
Alessio Perrone

Italy To India To Brazil, How COVID Has Trivialized Mass Death

We've gotten used to too many people dying, and too many dying alone.

-Analysis-

MILAN — I was recently alerted to an event I had missed here in Italy: A couple of weeks ago, as the government announced the easing of coronavirus restrictions and restaurant workers protested because Italy wasn't reopening fast enough, funeral parlors also took to the streets of Rome. It was "a funeral of funerals," they said.

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Geopolitics
Alessio Perrone

Balkan Scars And A Secret Plan To Redraw The Borders Of Bosnia

The colored tattoo of a fortified bridge towering high over troubled waters takes up almost all of my friend Ivan's shoulder. In his early 30s, Ivan has a footballer's build and flawless cockney accent. He's been a British citizen almost all his life, but was born in Mostar, in present-day Bosnia, in the late 1980s — a bad time to be born in Bosnia..

He says he remembers the din of the bombs falling on his town when he was a kid and the Yugoslav Wars broke out, in 1992. Ethno-nationalist groups seceded from Yugoslavia and turned on each other. They fought prolonged, bloody conflicts that killed at least 140,000, and committed genocide on at least one occasion. In Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995, pro-Serbian forces executed at least 8,000 Muslim Bosnian civilians. Ivan's family, ethnic Croatians, fled Mostar as refugees, resettling first in Germany, then in London.

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Sources
Anne Sophie Goninet

How A Road Trip And YouTube Saved Me From A Bad TV News Habit

Watching the nightly news on television was a recipe for unhappiness. It's just one lesson from two years on the road in Europe, even though the depressing headlines will follow you through other channels.

In 2018, I set off with my partner in our camper van on a road trip across Europe that would wind up lasting more than two years. The experience has, not surprisingly, changed us in many ways: from how we think about bigger questions of work and life, but also our daily habits. For one thing, it has ended our attachment to television — but not for the reasons you might think.

Before beginning the van life, in our Nissan Primastar nicknamed Foxy, we lived in an apartment and had a nightly rendezvous of watching the news on TV while eating dinner. Most of the time, those 30 minutes left us, well … depressed. Even before COVID, the news mainly revolved around bleak events and bad politicians.

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THE WASHINGTON POST
Anne Sophie Goninet

Happy Birthday, COVID: The Moments Missed We’ll Never Get Back

When I blew the candles on my 29th birthday cake, on March 27th 2020, it was only 10 days after the first lockdown had begun in France. Still, I felt lucky. I remember telling myself that, even though the day included no friends, at least in 2021 for the much more momentous passage into la trentaine, I could celebrate properly. Alas...

Besides a fleeting opening up over the summer, France, like much of the world, has largely remained in lockdown mode for what in fact has now been more than one full year. Three weeks ago, when I turned 30, I was able to invite some family members to share a slice of delicious chocolate cake and a champagne flute, but my parents and my brother, who live in another region, couldn't make it because of the curfew restrictions. A big party with friends was of course out of the question.

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eyes on the U.S.
Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

Say It Proud, Joe! Stutterers Of The World Will Be With Biden

Our New Delhi-based writer will be watching with pride as Kamala Harris becomes the first woman of Indian descent become vice president — but is also very much aware of the glass ceiling the incoming president is breaking.

-Essay-

NEW DELHI — On January 20th, four glass ceilings will be shattered in Washington: the United States will have its first woman vice president, first vice president of color, first vice president of Indian origin… and first president with a stutter.

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Sources
Carl-Johan Karlsson

Sweden Revisited, From Nordic Model To Pandemic Pariah

MALMÖ — On one of the final Fridays of 2020, I passed through the Malmö airport customs and underwent that subtle metamorphosis from The Swede to a Swede. This crossing from the definite to the indefinite is familiar to all returning expats, and its downside (deflated exceptionalism) and perks (nostalgia, familiarity) are felt at the first native exchange, and then sporadically with depreciating force — until, if you stay long enough, you're once again part of the herd.

At this year's homecoming however, the usual reassimilation also included a new adjustment: to a country that had lost its international shine. Yes, Sweden is still perceived abroad as exceptional. But this past year, the government's refusal to impose rules to restrict contact to combat COVID-19 led to a death toll higher than all of the country's northern European neighbors combined. By flirting with a strategy of so-called "herd immunity," decades of reverence for the Swedish model of common sense and social protection has steadily turned from doubt to outright disdain.

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