Worldcrunch
They’re both named Juliette. One is American, the other French. Each lost her father to a terror attack — the first in 9/11 in New York, the other in Paris, ten years ago. Out of shared grief, a rare friendship was born between the two Juliettes across the Atlantic.
When a child’s blunt questions about death collide with the sudden loss of a neighbor, glass marbles in hand, lessons on fragility and presence take shape in unexpected ways.
Ask your neighbor whether they have sought out a psychic for advice or a message from a dead loved one. You might be surprised by what you hear.
For €50 a month, some people are buying into cryogenic preservation, hoping the future holds the key to immortality. With investors pouring millions into Tomorrow Biostasis, the once-fantastical idea is edging into the mainstream. But critics warn that what’s being sold isn’t science — it’s hope on ice.
Some patients “come back to life” shortly before dying: they regain consciousness and control of their minds and interact with their families as they normally would. It is an illusion, but one with interesting scientific implications.
After a brush with death in Ukraine in 2023, Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince discusses his experience, survivor’s guilt, his new book, Ahora y en la hora (“Now and in the Hour”), and the war in Ukraine.
As official data vanishes from Russian state reports, independent experts warn that losses from Putin’s war in Ukraine are becoming too large to hide.
By most accounts, Pope Francis was close to death in his recent illness, before recovering. He said the experience was “brutto” bad. Just what did he mean by that? Should death be faced with obedience or resistance? Should we cling to life or welcome what comes next? Reflections from an Italian theologian.
End-of-life planning can be hampered by misconceptions − but the process is easier than you might think.
The numbers are troubling but also still unclear. Are more people dying in the quest for cheaper medical services — often plastic surgery — that Turkey has become a magnet for. It’s time to check more closely.
Many of life’s biggest questions can’t be answered by an algorithm. We must learn to embrace uncertainty instead.
A father goes back to the role of son for a while and discovers things about his parents: their music, habits and upbringing. Is it harder now to be a parent than it was before? What will the author’s children be left with from their upbringing?
Updated July 23, 2024 at 11:00 a.m. On this day in 2011, Amy Winehouse was found dead in her home in the Camden neighborhood of London. The cause of her death was determined to be accidental alcohol poisoning. How old was Amy Winehouse when she died? Amy Winehouse was 27 years old at the time […]
Funeral undertakers belong to one of the oldest professions in the world. But now, startups want to disrupt old-fashioned funeral homes. Unafraid to tackle taboos, new services offer ways to live on digitally after death.
Satnam Singh, an undocumented laborer from India, was left dead after losing his arm in a work accident near Latina — just 50 kilometers from the capital, Rome. Could it be that no one in power saw the realities like the one that sealed Satnam Singh’s fate?
In 19 years in Gaza, she always felt lost in her mind, body and even time. She was desperate to escape abroad, and made one attempt after another to find a way out. Eventually she did, for better or worse.
With the passing of President Ebrahim Raisi, some dare hope for a boost in anti Iranian regime movements. Others mourn the death of a martyr or blame Israel. But his succession is for all a high-stake issue.
Since the 1990s, thousands of migrants have tried to enter the U.S. by crossing the borders of Arizona and Texas, and many have died in the desert. Yet there is no unified DNA program to identify the remains of missing migrants. So who identifies them and how do they do it?
“If heroes were to ask themselves each time about the risks they face, then they would never accomplish their feats…”
Euthanasia and assisted suicide laws are still largely taboo, as Italy has been reminded recently. Still, lawmakers from New Zealand to Peru to Switzerland and beyond are gradually giving more space for people to choose to get help to end their lives — sometimes with new and innovative technological methods.
Updated Jan. 12, 2024 at 11:45 a.m. An earthquake in Haiti that killed 220,000 people happened on this date in 2010. Why was the 2010 Haiti earthquake so devastating? The earthquake registered a magnitude 7.0, which is a high level of energy at the point of impact. But it occurred at 6.2 miles below the […]
Updated Jan. 4, 2024 at 12:00 p.m. Novelist and philosopher Albert Camus died in a car crash on this day in 1960. Who was Albert Camus? Albert Camus was a French philosopher, journalist and novelist, best known for his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), and The Fall (1956). He won the Nobel Prize […]
The list of notable deaths in 2023 includes Henry Kissinger and Silvio Berlusconi, who many believe had already overstayed their public welcome before our writer was even born.
Thanatology or the study of death has entered Italian academia, led by the University of Padua, which is taking an interdisciplinary approach to our fascination with mortality.
China shares praise, Cambodia throws shade, Germans show pride … and from Moscow?
Inspired by a new book on vampires, Italian writer Chiara Valerio analyzes how the figure of the vampire has come to represent life and death over centuries of science, art and culture. When understood through a modern lens, what can the vampire tell us about our own Gothic concerns?
He was buried in an expensive coffin in a closed ceremony on Tuesday. By the next day, supporters were coming to the graveside to pay their respects.
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s death at the age of 86 reveals his complexity as both a public and political figure — in Italy and beyond. The author, who has tried in vain to write Berlusconi’s biography, sifts through the truth behind the many myths.
As he is faced by questions about death from his 4-year-old son during a family visit to Argentina, Recalculating author Ignacio Pereyra replies honestly. “I can only tell him the truth, at least the little truth that I know…”
Anger depletes and debilitates; grief, on the other hand, creates a new strength and resolve. What is centrally at stake for me, three years after I lost my husband, is a stubborn refusal to forget the disease that took him away.
France’s much discussed citizens’ convention on assisted dying has just delivered its conclusions, including some proposals the government deems too ambitious. But the freedom to choose one’s own death is the ultimate achievement of self-control, says French philosopher Gaspard Koenig.
A reflection of what the Feb. 6 earthquake exposes deep problems in Turkish public life over the past two decades, and what we can expect in the coming months and years.
Our Neapolitan psychiatrist reacts to the public blame directed at an exhausted Italian mother, after she fell asleep while breastfeeding her newborn son at a Rome hospital .
Soccer is a useful political tool for dictatorships. But Qatar is able to milk the World Cup as much as possible because the sport is infected by unbridled capitalistic greed.
Faced with the resilience of the national protests, Iran’s security forces are now facing unusual acts of sabotage on state installations, and clerical authorities have started to wonder which of their loyalist forces can be firmly relied on still to defend the regime.
Whether or not the 64-year-old died of natural causes, the Kremlin is reinforced now in Minsk — leaving even less wiggle room for Belarus strongman Alexander Lukashenko.
Zimbabweans cling to hope even after years of silence from loved ones who have disappeared across borders.
The recent shooting of Takeoff, a rapper, is another sad incident of gun crime in the U.S. But those blaming hip hop culture for contributing to gun violence ignore that rappers themselves are also victims. And the real point is that in today’s America, nobody is safe from gun violence.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky condemned Russia’s strike Wednesday on a maternity ward in southern Ukraine that killed a baby born two days ago. The newborn’s mother and a doctor were pulled from the rubble of the hospital in Vilnyansk, located in the Zaporizhzhia region. [shortcode-Subscribe-to-Ukraine-daily-box] The morning strike was part of what appears to be […]
The deaths of migrant worker deaths and Qatar’s poor human rights record will linger over the upcoming World Cup. Foreign powers need to intervene to help the situation of those trapped in slavery-like conditions.