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ça sent les quais :)

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Who are “the peers” of four M.D.’s writing up an observational study? Four more M.D.’s who know just as little as the topic.

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Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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OK, I've been saying this over the phone to a bunch of journalists during the past month so I might as well share it with all of you . . . 1. The peers . . . The problem with peer review is the peers.

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Le rakugo (落 語, littéralement "mots tombés") est une forme de divertissement verbal japonais. Le conteur en kimono (落 語 家, rakugoka) est assis sur la scène appelée kōza (高 座). En utilisant uniquement un éventail en papier et un petit tissu (手 拭, tenugui) comme accessoires, et sans se lever de la position assise, l'artiste raconte une histoire comique longue et complexe (dans certains cas, elle peut aussi être courte). L'histoire implique toujours un dialogue de deux personnages ou plus. La différence entre les personnages est représentée uniquement par un changement de ton et un léger virage de la tête.

Certains considèrent le rakugo comme une sorte de sitcom sur scène où tous les personnages seraient joués par un seul comédien. On peut également parlé de stand-up à genoux. L'autre grand style de comique sur scène étant le manzai.

Le rakugo tirerait ses origines des historiettes comiques racontées par les moines bouddhistes. Plus exactement, il date du début de l'époque Edo (1603-1868).

De nos jours, certaines représentations sont diffusées à la télévision et grâce à cette exposition, le rakugo reste très populaire.

Voici d'ailleurs une histoire racontée par l'un des maîtres du genre, Sanyutei Ryuraku.

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In 1999 Edward De Bono, the celebrated master of lateral thinking, suggested to the UK foreign office that Marmite might be the answer to the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East. There, he reasoned, they tend to eat unleavened bread and so miss out on the zinc found in yeast, and a lack of zinc makes men irritable and belligerent. Marmite is high in zinc, hence it is a way to peace.

:DDD

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Marmite
Preserves

Trade name for a savoury spread made from yeast extract, salt, vegetable extracts, vitamins, and celery extract. Usually served spread very thinly on toast.

The precise receipt and method of manufacture remain secret, but it is thought to be derived from waste brewery yeast mixed with salt so as to break down the cell walls and then concentrated using the process pioneered by the German chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), the 'Father of Artificial Fertilizer'. The Marmite Food Extract Company was formed in Burton upon Trent, a major brewing centre, in 1902, and is now owned by Unilever.

In 1999 Edward De Bono, the celebrated master of lateral thinking, suggested to the UK foreign office that Marmite might be the answer to the seemingly intractable problems of the Middle East. There, he reasoned, they tend to eat unleavened bread and so miss out on the zinc found in yeast, and a lack of zinc makes men irritable and belligerent. Marmite is high in zinc, hence it is a way to peace.

There is a long-standing, and quite uncorroborated, opinion that eating Marmite can ward off mosquitoes.

Bill Bryson, in 'Notes from a Small Island' described Marmite as "an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant..."

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Marmite Preserves Trade name for a savoury spread made from yeast extract, salt, vegetable extracts, vitamins, and celery extract. Usually served spread very thinly on toast.

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Leurs descriptions de l’espace urbain dénoncent un espace perçu comme ennuyeux⁴. L’urbanisme fonctionnaliste est en outre accusé d’organiser une sorte d’aliénation aux services des temples de la consommation ⁵ avec en point d’orgue l’impossible « réappropriation de l’espace urbain par l’imaginaire »⁶.

Selon l’Internationale situationniste, la ville, érigée en suivant les principes de l’urbanisme fonctionnaliste provoque la mise en place d’un dispositif d’isolement, d’exclusion et de réclusion des citadins, in fine, la ville participe à l’établissement d’un ordre dans lequel le désir n’a pas sa place.

Leur projet est de refonder la ville afin de créer des ambiances inédites permettant la construction de situations, c’est-à-dire des moments de vie à la fois singuliers et éphémères ³.

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Les situationnistes, sous la houlette de Guy Debord, avaient forgé le concept de psychogéographie pour étudier la perception de l’espace urbain par les individus, et ses effets sur leurs émotions et leurs comportements. Ils en avaient tiré des cartes psychogéographiques, sur lesquelles chaque ville est représentée non pas par quartiers ou par arrondissements mais par une juxtaposition d’'unités d’ambiance', chaque unité correspondant à une perception commune du lieu par ses habitants

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Il y avait pire autrefois que les interminables repas du dimanche, avec interdiction de quitter la table ; pire que de devoir parfois aller à la messe le matin ; pire même que l'idée de retourner à l'école le lendemain : il y avait, après le déjeuner, la promenade autour du pâté de maisons. Moment le plus ennuyeux de la journée la plus déprimante de la semaine.

Ce n'est pas le moindre effet du confinement que d'avoir transformé ce rituel assommant en moment salutaire. Hier, profitant du soleil, de la brise, de la douceur des températures et de mon bon de sortie quotidien, je me suis promené, seul, en bas de chez moi. Et pour la première fois, j'ai visité mon quartier.

C'est fou comme une ville change d'aspect quand l'œil n'est plus happé par les vitrines des magasins. La plupart sont fermés, une tragédie pour les commerçants, mais une petite vengeance pour les autres bâtiments, ceux qui n'ont pas les moyens d'attirer à eux seuls les regards des touristes.

J'évoquais l'autre jour le chant des oiseaux, on ne les a jamais entendus aussi distinctement que depuis le début de cet inoubliable printemps. Et bien c'est comme si les immeubles à leur tour, mais aussi les rues, les murs, les arbres... prenaient un nouveau relief. Le promeneur, masqué et solitaire, pour peu qu'il n'ait rien d'autre à faire, et qu'il parvienne à esquiver les joggeurs (qui lui feraient presque regretter les trottinettes), plonge le regard dans un environnement nouveau, qui est pourtant le sien.

La porte étant désormais grande ouverte, enfonçons-là gaiement : oui, à condition de ralentir le pas, le monde se révèle à nous autrement. Petites notes personnelles : je n'avais pas remarqué, les autres années, que les prunus de l'allée Vivaldi à Paris donnaient d'aussi jolies fleurs. Ni qu'il y avait une fresque, pourtant colorée, à l'entrée du tunnel qui conduit à la partie la plus agréable de la Promenade plantée. Les sorties sont si rares et si courtes qu'il ne faut rien en perdre : elles favorisent la contemplation.

Les situationnistes, sous la houlette de Guy Debord, avaient forgé le concept de psychogéographie pour étudier la perception de l'espace urbain par les individus, et ses effets sur leurs émotions et leurs comportements. Ils en avaient tiré des cartes psychogéographiques, sur lesquelles chaque ville est représentée non pas par quartiers ou par arrondissements mais par une juxtaposition d''unités d'ambiance', chaque unité correspondant à une perception commune du lieu par ses habitants.

Je serais curieux de voir à quoi ressembleraient ces cartes aujourd'hui, au temps du confinement. Ce qui est sûr, c'est que les conditions de sortie qui sont les nôtres -ne pas s'éloigner de plus d'un kilomètre de chez soi- redessinent les parcours dans la ville. Il y aura sans doute des leçons à en tirer en matière d'urbanisme.

Et en matière de tourisme aussi, puisque nous n'irons pas à la campagne cet été. Les ruraux, dit-on, nous y attendent avec des fourches. Dans une nouvelle qu'il vient tout juste de publier en ligne, l'auteur de romans policiers Olivier Norek* va même jusqu'à imaginer une France où partout ' 'brûlent les résidences secondaires''. Jacquerie des temps modernes, qui voit le Parisien incarner la figure du mal, le propagateur de virus.

Surtout, ne les détrompons pas. J'ai la chance d'habiter une 'unité d'ambiance' à l'écart du flot des visiteurs. Les rues ont beau y être larges, les autocars ne s'aventurent que rarement dans le 12e arrondissement. Parmi les résolutions que je tiendrai peut-être à l'issue de cette crise, je me suis donc promis de poursuivre l'exploration attentive des environs. Au mois d'août, nous partons en vacances autour du pâté de maisons.

* chaque jour, l'association Polars sur Garonne publie une ''nouvelle du lendemain'', en lien avec le confinement

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Il y avait pire autrefois que les interminables repas du dimanche, avec interdiction de quitter la table ; pire que de devoir parfois aller à la messe le matin ; pire même que l'idée de retourner à l'école le lendemain : il y avait, après le déjeuner, la promenade autour du pâté de maisons.

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Ruby Nikara et Sarah Fraisou gros clash en live💥

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La dérive urbaine  constitue le principal outil pour appréhender « le relief psychogéographique »⁸,  c’est-à-dire le changement d’ambiance au sein de la ville, de ses quartiers et de ses rues. Ces espaces urbains que l’Internationale situationniste nomme « unités ambiances » sont les lieux dont les caractéristiques sont homogènes. L’objectif de la dérive, qui se déroule à pied, est de localiser ces ambiances, de les évaluer et de les expliquer⁹. À partir de ces observations récoltées sur le terrain, les « psychogéographes » reportent et localisent ces aires d’ambiances sur des cartes.
///
Les cartes psychogéographiques sont donc le résultat de l’objectivation de la dérive. Elle matérialise  sous forme graphique les états d’âmes des individus au contact de l’espace urbain. Plus artistiques que scientifiques, les cartes psychogéographiques cherchent à tracer le rapport entre les quartiers et les états d’âme qu’ils provoquent. Dans la littérature, la carte la plus souvent utilisée comme exemple est celle Guy Debord dans « The Naked City » (guide psychogéographique de Paris). Dans cette carte faite de collages, les flèches rouges indiquent sur fond blanc, le parcours de la dérive qui relie les différentes unités d’ambiance
//
La contradiction la plus fondamentale réside dans l’impossible mariage entre la dérive et la psychogéographie ¹ ⁵. La première se revendique d’un comportement ludico-constructif⁸ puisqu’à travers la dérive, les marcheurs sont en quête d’émotions et de plaisir. La seconde quant à elle relève d’un comportement rationnel qui permet d’identifier les unités d’ambiance.

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A beautiful $800,000 home in Flushing NY

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du coup, c'est marrant parce que je parlais de ça avec Yohann le we dernier: dès mes 18 ans, je marchais quasiment tous les jours des heures durant dans Paris et toutes les banlieues, de jour comme de nuit.
j'adorais ça et j'étais CERTAIN que tout le monde faisait comme moi.  progressivement, j'ai réalisé que je voyais pas grand monde marcher comme ça, la nuit par exemple le long des chemins de fer, et  c'est que vers mes 23 ans, que j'ai réalisé qu'en fait tout le monde faisait pas ça

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micro-aventure??

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Au terme d'une expérience professionnelle au Cambodge, Thibaut Labey a décidé de rentrer en France... en triporteur ! " Quelque 20.000 kilomètres, 17 pays, quatre mois de voyage et une très longue préparation en amont, se souvient le trentenaire. C'était vraiment l'aventure de ma vie ! De retour en France, je me suis demandé si on pouvait vivre ce genre d'expérience sans avoir besoin d'autant de temps, de préparation et d'argent. Alors, un jour, j'ai mis mon vélo dans un train, je suis allé à la frontière italienne, à Menton, et j'ai tracé une diagonale jusqu'à la pointe Saint-Mathieu, dans le Finistère. " Bilan de la traversée ? " Les sensations de découverte, de dépassement de soi et de défi, qui caractérisent l'aventure, sont très similaires. Il y a aussi ce même regard sur le voyageur, que vous soyez au fin fond du Laos ou dans les monts d'Ardèche. "

Il n'est donc pas nécessaire de partir loin pour vivre des " expériences extraordinaires " : c'est sur la base de ce constat que Thibaut fonde, avec un ami, Chilowé, un guide en ligne de la micro-aventure en France. Depuis trois ans, tous deux se font ainsi ambassadeurs d'un concept popularisé par le Britannique Alastair Humphreys, un aventurier qui, après avoir bourlingué aux quatre coins du globe, a décidé de faire de son pays son nouveau terrain de jeu (1). La micro-aventure est généralement proche, spontanée, brève, en plein air et bon marché, même si rien n'est figé, l'absence de règle absolue étant intrinsèque au concept. " C'est l'aventure de manière simple ", résume Amélie Deloffre, partie à de nombreuses reprises avec " un vieux vélo, des vieilles affaires et sans GPS pour aller voir des paysages pas forcément 'waouh'. "

Deux jours suffisent

Originaire des Alpes, Fabio a ainsi toujours été " amoureux et accro des grands espaces et des sorties en montagne ". Il a découvert en arrivant à Paris " qu'on était en train de mettre un mot sur le fait de partir deux-trois jours de façon un peu atypique ". Cette démarche de démocratisation lui semble bénéfique. " Partir ainsi n'est pas réservé à ceux qui ont la chance d'habiter dans des environnements où l'idée vient tout naturellement. C'est finalement à la portée de tout le monde, même quand on vit dans une grande métropole ", assure cet ingénieur en sécurité informatique. Et de passer une fois de plus à l'acte : " Le week-end prochain, je vais prendre mon vendredi, partir à vélo de chez moi pour remonter la Seine et voir jusqu'où je peux aller dans la limite des 100 kilomètres... ", disait-il mi-mai avant que cette contrainte ne saute.

La micro-aventure, grande tendance du post-confinement ©Mugluck pour les Echos Week-end

Où trouver l'inspiration ?

Amélie Deloffre a publié un livre intitulé " 2 jours pour vivre " où elle raconte 34 de ses micro-aventures (Editions Gallimard Loisirs, 2019). Elle anime aussi le groupe Facebook " L'incubateur de week-ends ", où l'on peut lancer une idée et proposer à d'autres amoureux du grand air de s'y joindre, ou s'associer à un projet en cours. www.2jourspourvivre.com

L'écrivain-marcheur Olivier Bleys, auteur de l'ouvrage " Les aventures de poche " (Editions Hugo & Cie, 2018), partage sur son site ses carnets de marche, tours de ville et micro-aventures. http://olivierbleys.com/

Le site Chilowé, qui propose des idées de microaventures, fédère aussi une communauté de 100.000 personnes, notamment via des groupes Facebook par villes ou régions (Paris, Lyon, Occitanie...). www.chilowe.com

Le site Helloways recense des randonnées accessibles en transport en commun depuis plusieurs grandes villes (Paris, Bruxelles, Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Nantes, Strasbourg, Annecy, Toulouse). D'autres villes seront couvertes dans les prochains mois. https://www.helloways.com/

Se lancer des " petits défis "

Fontainebleau, Kathleen y est allée l'an dernier avec ses deux enfants de 2 et 8 ans. " On est parti un matin avec les sacs à dos, on marchait depuis quelque temps quand on a aperçu deux chevreuils. Ce fut un de ces instants magiques, comme suspendus, on n'y croyait presque pas. Le lendemain, par contre, ce fut beaucoup moins drôle quand mon fils a voulu attraper un serpent à mains nues ! " Cette kinésithérapeute libérale, qui vit et travaille en Ile-de-France, apprécie le concept de micro-aventure notamment pour sa brièveté et son -caractère économique. " Deux, trois jours, c'est facile à caser dans mon planning professionnel. Et puis, c'est une soupape, une façon de recharger ses batteries avant d'affronter la semaine. "

La micro-aventure, grande tendance du post-confinement ©Mugluck pour les Echos Week-end

Quand on demande à cet aventurier, membre de la Société des explorateurs français, si ses micro-aventures lui procurent les mêmes sensations que son tour du monde à pied par étapes, commencé en 2010, il avoue être partagé. " C'est un registre différent, mais on est dans une époque de questionnement de l'aventure au sens large. Elle a longtemps eu une justification géographique, recouvrant l'exploration. Or les blancs de la carte ont été pour la plupart résorbés et des hauts lieux traditionnels de l'aventure comme l'Antarctique deviennent très fréquentés... Alors, où se réfugie l'aventure aujourd'hui ? Je crois qu'elle est à reformuler. "

La " saveur incroyable " du bivouac

Si les micro-aventures procurent des sensations fortes, explique Olivier Bleys, c'est parce qu'elles nous confrontent aux " questions que nos ancêtres de la préhistoire se posaient quotidiennement: où vais-je dormir ce soir? C omment trouver à boire et à manger? Puis-je faire confiance à cette personne que je rencontre? Même si on est à portée de taxi de chez soi, on ressent ce petit frémissement qui est le début de l'aventure parce qu'il nous relie à cette expérience immémoriale de nos ancêtres. " Dormir dehors prend alors une " saveur incroyable ", renchérit Amélie Deloffre. " Le bivouac est un élément central de l'aventure, une expérience à part entière qui décuple le sentiment d'être aventurier ", assure-t-elle avec enthousiasme. Tout comme les galères, qui sont le sel de l'aventure et le socle des bons souvenirs.

La micro-aventure est ainsi un " beau petit laboratoire pour reprendre confiance en soi, pour penser par soi-même et pour s'épanouir ", estime Xavier Bourgois, créateur de la chaîne YouTube de micro-aventures The Other Life. Un nom qui condense son histoire : celle d'un communicant qui s'interroge, au tournant de la trentaine, sur l'intérêt de " s'enfermer encore dix ans dans un bureau à faire des campagnes pour vendre plus de voitures et de jus d'orange ". Trois ans plus tard, il a fait le GR20 corse en hiver, traversé le plateau du Cézallier dans le Cantal - " une petite Mongolie en France " - et construit un igloo dans le Jura. " J'ai envie d'insuffler un peu d'audace aux gens, de leur donner le goût du risque et de les inciter à être autonomes plutôt que de se fier à d'autres internautes pour choisir leur prochaine destination. " C'est pourquoi il ne partage jamais ses itinéraires.

La micro-aventure, grande tendance du post-confinement ©Mugluck pour les Echos Week-end

" L'aventure, c'est le contre-pied total de notre société axée sur le confort et la sécurité ", indique Amélie Deloffre, qui voit là l'un des ressorts du succès de la micro-aventure, avec les préoccupations écologiques, les méfaits de l'hyperconnexion et la dénonciation de la société de consommation. " Déjà, avant la crise du Covid-19, il y avait un terreau très fertile pour la diffusion et la démocratisation de la micro-aventure ", observe ainsi Fanny Parise, anthropologue de la consommation. Elle cite aussi les préoccupations environnementales, dont le " flygskam " (la honte de prendre l'avion), ainsi que l'importance de la dimension expérientielle et les injonctions au développement personnel. Il y a également l'attrait pour le localisme et l'envie d'authenticité, qui, au demeurant, entrent en tension avec la quête d'ailleurs et la recherche d'" instagramabilité ", dit-elle.

Un succès à double tranchant

Ce qui était une tendance de niche avant le confinement a désormais toutes les caractéristiques pour répondre aux problématiques du plus grand nombre dans le monde post-Covid-19

(1) https://alastairhumphreys.com/

La nano-aventure en soixante minutes chrono

Lorsqu'il travaillait comme courtier à Leeds, Rob Kilner (@workerslunchtime) a pris l'habitude de partir à l'aventure... pendant sa pause de midi. C'est ainsi qu'il a visité un vignoble, fait une balade à cheval ou encore un aller-retour express à York, à chaque fois en plein milieu d'une journée de travail. " C'était une façon pour moi de me débarrasser du stress accumulé pendant la matinée et de revenir totalement détendu, comme après des vacances ", raconte-t-il. D'ailleurs, un an de pauses-déjeuner mises bout à bout équivaut à environ deux semaines de temps libre, souligne-t-il. Ayant quitté cet emploi pour diffuser sa démarche, notamment dans une optique d'améliorer le bien-être au travail, il a pris plaisir à renouer avec ces petites excursions pendant le confinement, cette fois autour de chez lui. " Nous avions le droit de sortir une heure par jour, sans limite kilométrique. J'ai exploré jusqu'où je pouvais aller, à pied, en courant, à vélo... J'ai fait de belles découvertes ! "

Jessica Berthereau

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La micro-aventure, grande tendance du post-confinement

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Pourquoi chercher l'aventure au bout du monde alors qu'elle peut être à côté de chez vous ? Le confinement forcé a relancé le concept de micro-aventure, une façon très intime et personnelle de s'inventer et de vivre des expériences uniques à portée de marche, de vélo ou de train.

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Dans une nouvelle étude, Simone Bertoli, Lucas Guichard et Francesca Marchetta (2020) ont cherché à déterminer quel a été l’impact du maintien du premier tour des municipales sur la mortalité au cours des semaines suivantes. Pour ce faire, ils ont tiré profit de l’hétérogénéité dans la participation aux élections d’une municipalité à l’autre.

Ils ont constaté que le nombre de décès parmi les 60 ans et plus a été relativement plus élevé dans les cinq semaines suivant les élections dans les municipalités où la participation a été la plus forte. Si la participation avait été la même qu’au cours du premier tour des municipales en 2014, Bertoli et ses coauteurs estiment que le nombre de décès parmi cette tranche d'âge entre le 18 mars et le 21 avril aurait été 21,8 % plus élevé que celui qui a été enregistré et que plus des trois quarts de ces décès supplémentaires auraient concerné des individus âgés de 80 ans et plus. La désaffection des urnes a donc permis d'éviter une bien plus grande tragédie humaine.

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La tenue du premier tour des élections municipales le 15 mars a tout d'une anomalie, surtout avec le recul. Au cours des semaines précédentes, le gouvernement avait adopté des mesures de plus en plus strictes pour freiner la propagation de l'épidémie de Covid-19, notamment l'interdiction de larges rassemblements publics. Lors de son allocution le jeudi qui précède les élections, le Président avait annoncé de nouvelles mesures, notamment la fermeture des crèches et des écoles, et appelé à la distanciation physique pour faire face à " la plus grave crise sanitaire qu'ait connue la France depuis un siècle ". Le lundi, au lendemain du premier tour, le Président annonça l'instauration du confinement à partir du mardi.

Le maintien du premier tour a pu avoir deux effets pervers : d'une part, il a pu amener une partie de la population à sous-estimer la gravité de la situation sanitaire et à éroder la crédibilité des injonctions gouvernementales, compliquant le respect de la distanciation sociale et favorisant par conséquent à terme la propagation de l'épidémie ; d'autre part, il a pu directement alimenter cette dernière en faisant des bureaux de vote un lieu de contagion. Le gouvernement anticipait certainement ces possibles effets pervers ; il a envisagé le report des deux tours des municipales, mais l'opposition avait été réticente à une telle éventualité, en y voyant un " coup d'Etat ".
GRAPHIQUE Nombre de décès par jour en France jusqu'au 18 mai 2020 source : INSEE (2020)
Comme le montre le niveau exceptionnel de l'abstention le 15 mars (qui s'est élevée à 55,4%, alors qu'elle avait été de 36,5 % lors du premier tour des municipales en 2014), une grande partie de la population a préféré ne pas aller voter par crainte d'une contamination [CEVIPOF, 2020]. Mais la participation n'a toutefois pas été nulle et de nombreuses personnes ont organisé physiquement les élections, si bien qu'il n'est effectivement pas improbable que de nombreuses personnes aient été contaminées à l'occasion de la tenue du scrutin. Les médias ont notamment relayé l'hospitalisation de plusieurs maires et le décès de plusieurs conseillers municipaux dans les semaines qui ont suivi.

Dans une nouvelle étude, Simone Bertoli, Lucas Guichard et Francesca Marchetta (2020) ont cherché à déterminer quel a été l'impact du maintien du premier tour des municipales sur la mortalité au cours des semaines suivantes. Pour ce faire, ils ont tiré profit de l'hétérogénéité dans la participation aux élections d'une municipalité à l'autre.

Ils ont constaté que le nombre de décès parmi les 60 ans et plus a été relativement plus élevé dans les cinq semaines suivant les élections dans les municipalités où la participation a été la plus forte. Si la participation avait été la même qu'au cours du premier tour des municipales en 2014, Bertoli et ses coauteurs estiment que le nombre de décès parmi cette tranche d'âge entre le 18 mars et le 21 avril aurait été 21,8 % plus élevé que celui qui a été enregistré et que plus des trois quarts de ces décès supplémentaires auraient concerné des individus âgés de 80 ans et plus. La désaffection des urnes a donc permis d'éviter une bien plus grande tragédie humaine.
Référence BERTOLI, Simone, Lucas GUICHARD & Francesca MARCHETTA (2020), " Turnout in the municipal elections of march 2020 and excess mortality during the COVID-19 epidemic in France ", IZA, discussion paper, 13335.

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Covid-19 : le premier tour des municipales a bien été meurtrier

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La tenue du premier tour des élections municipales le 15 mars a tout d'une anomalie, surtout avec le recul. Au cours des semaines précédentes, le gouvernement avait adopté des mesures de plus en plus strictes pour freiner la propagation de l'épidémie de Covid-19, notamment l'interdiction de larges rassemblements publics.

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India-China dispute: The border row explained in 400 words

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Here's what you need to know about the border dispute high in the Himalayas.

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ショート スリーブ ティー (パーティー ゴーズ オン)

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A short history of the stores that-even now-keep us supplied with an abundance of choices

H. Armstrong Roberts / Classicstock / Getty / The Atlantic

Fairway Market, which credits itself with introducing New Yorkers to clementines, radicchio, fleur de sel, and vine-ripened fruit, started off as a small grocery store at 74th Street and Broadway, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it still stands. According to family lore, Nathan Glickberg arrived at Ellis Island from Russia sometime in the 1910s, and by 1933 had saved up enough money to open his own fruit-and-vegetable store. Signs of a family fixation with produce are obvious in a black-and-white photo taken sometime in the vicinity of World War II: Nathan's wife, Mary Glickberg, is dressed up in heels, pearls, and an omelet-fold updo and, for her formal portrait, positioned in front of the store's rickety wood fruit crates, which are sagging under the weight of apples, lemons, and oranges stacked shoulder high. Pears back then came wrapped in squares of paper, which Nathan saved and placed beside the toilet. What was good enough for pears' skin was, evidently, good enough for his.

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In 1954, Nathan brought in his son, Leo. In 1974, Leo brought in his son, Howie, and together they brought in Harold Seybert and David Sneddon, brothers-in-law who'd sold tomatoes wholesale. On Howie, Harold, and David's watch, the Fairway store grew, expanding into Tibbs luncheonette next door, then into the adjoining drugstore, and then into the D'Agostino supermarket to the north. "We were beating them up," Howie told me cheerfully. "They couldn't make a living." In 1995, the partners opened a second Fairway, in a former meatpacking plant in Harlem. That brought in my grandmother, ecstatic at being able to shop at a supermarket just around the corner from her apartment. And my grandmother brought in me.

I don't remember my first visit to Central Park or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but I do remember my first trip to Fairway. Coming from Oregon, where I grew up, I felt like Fairway had taken New York City's big, brash, elbowy spirit and crammed it into a single store: There was the smash of bodies on the subway at rush hour; the dull roar and occasional skronk of Midtown; the hyperactive buy-now pushiness of Times Square, with signs hollering from all directions (handmade stuffed peppers: wow! hooo! strange but true!) and festive murals featuring steaks the size of taxis and promising wholesale prices for the retail customer. My grandmother, who had been forced to flee her home in what was then Yugoslavia during World War II, had spent nearly two decades as a stateless person and, before coming to the United States, pieced together family meals from cabbage, offal, and the produce with which farmers paid my grandfather for teaching in a rural Italian school. Fairway, to her, was a place of surreal abundance. She could roll her black-metal grocery cart down the hill and roll it back up stuffed with old- and new-country fare: an Entenmann's Danish ring, Kraš Napolitanke, Thomas' English Muffins, Hungarian salami, panettone, hot dogs, ajvar, cornflakes. And the deals! She'd sit me down at the kitchen table and, beaming, haul out new brands of wafer cookies to marvel at how little she'd paid. Fairway acquired a mythic status in our family. We did not make a trip to the supermarket so much as a pilgrimage.

In 2007, Harold and David wanted to retire. Together with Howie, they brought in Sterling Investment Partners, a private-equity firm that acquired an 80 percent stake in the company in a deal that valued Fairway at $132 million. Since then, Fairway has expanded to 14 stores in the tristate area, gone public, declared bankruptcy, cycled through owners, and declared bankruptcy again. On March 25, nine days after New York restaurants were banned from seating customers and five days after grocery stores were declared one of the few businesses allowed to keep their doors open, Fairway announced that it had sold six stores, the leases of two others, and its name in a bankruptcy auction. The news came even as customers were lining up outside their neighborhood Fairway, spending nearly three times as much as usual on groceries, and finding store managers unable to keep much in stock. The fate of the other six stores remains, as of this writing, uncertain.

Read: How you'll grocery shop after the coronavirus pandemic
Such is the whiplash supermarkets are now experiencing. Long-suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to visit, the supermarket has, for more than a decade, been under assault from e‑commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, accused of contributing to climate change, abandoned in favor of restaurants, and, in parts of the country, disappearing at a concerning pace. Esteem for the supermarket runs so low that, although Fairway technically is one, Howie bristled when I called it that. "I never liked us to be considered a supermarket," he told me. "We used to be, you know, a food store."

Yet in recent months, the supermarket has assumed a new centrality in Americans' lives. Cashiers, stockers, distributors, wholesalers, packers, pickers, and truck drivers have, even in the absence of adequate health safeguards, continued working to ensure that shelves stay stocked. Foodtowns, Nugget Markets, and Piggly Wigglys have emerged as crucial lifelines, spawning a broad reappreciation for one of the most distinctly American institutions. Grocery shopping is no longer one in a long list of mundane errands. For many people, it's the errand-the only one-and it now seems not inevitable, but somewhat amazing to be able to do at all.

Supermarkets, technically defined as behemoths housing 15,000 to 60,000 different products, from tampons to sliced turkey, evolved in the only place they could have: the U.S. of A. Fourteen years after the creator of Tennessee's Piggly Wiggly came up with the revolutionary idea of a self-service grocery where people could hunt and gather food from aisles rather than asking a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter, Michael Cullen (christening himself the "World's Greatest Price Wrecker") opened America's first supermarket, King Kullen, in 1930 in a converted garage in Jamaica, Queens. (There is some debate about who was first, but over the years, King Kullen has pushed itself to the front of the line.)

For some 300 years, Americans had fed themselves from small stores like Nathan Glickberg's and from public markets, where shopping for food involved mud, squawking chickens, clouds of flies, cadaverous smells, haggling, bartering, and getting shortchanged. The supermarket took the Fordist factory, with its emphasis on efficiency and standardization, and reimagined it as a place to buy food. Supermarkets may not feel cutting-edge now, but they were-a "revolution in distribution," one supermarket researcher declared in 1955. They were such exotic marvels that, on her first official state visit to the United States, in 1957, Queen Elizabeth II insisted on an impromptu tour of a suburban-Maryland Giant Food. During his own visit to the United States in 1989, Boris Yeltsin made an unscheduled, 20-minute detour to a Texas supermarket that is credited with souring him on communism. "When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort," wrote Yeltsin in his autobiography, "for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people."

Over the past 90 years, the average American supermarket has swelled from 12,000 square feet to nearly 42,000-big enough to swallow the Lincoln Memorial, two basketball courts, and a couple of Starbucks and still be hungry for more. The typical supermarket layout has barely changed during that time and could be thought of as a reverse mullet: party in the front, business in the back. Most stores open with a colorful bounty of flowers and produce (a breath of freshness to whet our appetites), followed by the flyover expanse of the center store (cans, jars, boxes, bags), followed, in the way back, by milk, eggs, and other staples (pushed to Siberia so you'll travel through as much of the store as possible, and be tempted along the way). Store designers can choose from a variety of floor plans-forced-path, free-flow, island, wagon-wheel-but by far the most popular is the combination grid/racetrack, with nonperishable items in rectilinear aisles, and the deli, cheese, meat, seafood, and produce departments circling them on the exhilaratingly named racetrack, so called because we scoot faster on the store's perimeter.

As the supermarket proliferated, so did our suspicion of it. We have long feared that this "revolution in distribution" uses corporate black magic on our appetites. The book The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957, warned that supermarkets were putting women in a "hypnoidal trance," causing them to wander aisles bumping into boxes and "plucking things off shelves at random." A few years ago, National Geographic published a guide (one of many like it) to "surviving the sneaky psychology of supermarkets," as though buying milk were fraught with existential risk. Supermarkets have drawn comparisons to casinos-both are believed to cunningly manipulate us into staying longer and spending more-though, according to one architect who specializes in constructing stores, this gives regional grocers far too much credit.

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Still, a staggering number of studies have marshaled everything from video surveillance to eye tracking to decode how we behave while food shopping. The results suggest that we haven't been applying ourselves. An analysis of more than 400 million shopping trips by the company VideoMining found that the average supermarket visit lasts just 13 minutes. During our time there, according to a study published in The Journal of Consumer Research, we typically demonstrate "only a minimal degree of cognitive effort." My review of more than three dozen papers, ranging from "Observation of Parent-Child Interaction in Supermarket Decision-Making" (less exciting than it sounds) to "Shelf Management and Space Elasticity" (highly recommended), reveals that we ignore a full third of packages on the shelves; never make it to three-quarters of the store; take an average of just 13 seconds to pick out a product (including the time it takes to walk down the aisle and locate the item); spend 40 percent of our money on whatever chips or sports drinks the store's manager is promoting on the aisles' endcaps; dedicate, at most, 30 percent of our time in a store to actually selecting things to buy; and, per a 2012 article in Obesity Reviews, devote the rest of our shopping trip to "ineffective wandering."

The experts have concluded that we buy more of the products stocked at or just below eye level, think more highly of items placed on high shelves, are 40 percent more likely to give a product a second look if it has eight facings on a shelf instead of four, and will buy 6 percent less canned soup if it's organized alphabetically by flavor instead of clumped by brand. (Inefficiency can be profitable, and the soup study observed that making products easier to locate corresponded with a drop in sales.) Findings such as these are used to create planograms-aisle-by-aisle, shelf-by-shelf, inch-by-inch maps that indicate whether Jell‑O gets two facings or three, and whether Coke Zero is to the left of Diet Coke or to its right. (Often, the manufacturers whose products sell the most in a category-like Kellogg's or Coca-Cola-get to advise grocers on where to put their products as well as their competitors'.) Howie Glickberg used to sketch out Fairway's planograms by hand; more typically, they're determined using "category management" software that, per one vendor, relies on "space-aware assortment optimization," "robust supply chain and shelf analytics," and other things likely to make your eyes glaze over. "We're constantly changing planograms in the stores, 52 weeks a year," one supermarket executive told me.
Read: Can you get the coronavirus from the grocery store?
Analyzing data is one way to determine where things go. Cash is another. Among grocers' least-favorite topics of conversation is slotting fees, which many of them charge manufacturers in exchange for real estate in their stores. Say you want to introduce a new product. In early 2018, getting it placed in the most visible areas of Whole Foods stores would have cost you, on average, $25,000, according to The Wall Street Journal. Distributing it in supermarkets nationwide would cost nearly $2 million, but that's per a 2003 Federal Trade Commission report, and the price now is almost certainly higher. Although a Nielsen survey found that 85 percent of retailers take slotting fees, the practice is covered by a strict omertà. One woman, fearing retribution for testifying on the subject to a Senate committee in 1999, only did so while wearing a hood, hiding behind a screen, and having her voice scrambled.

Before something is in your supermarket, it is in a truck. "Everything you have comes in by truck," one long-haul driver told me proudly. "We always say you'd be hungry, homeless, and naked if it wasn't for our trucks."

Over the past 40 years, Ingrid Brown has pulled bull racks and garbage trailers, but right now she feels blessed to be hauling a reefer. She runs 48 states with her refrigerated trailer, carrying eggs, milk, beef, toilet paper, computers, raw plastic on three-foot-tall rolls that will melt in the summertime, energy drinks that will freeze in the wintertime, and what she considers her specialty, "dead-on, fresh-hot freight"-blueberries out of California, bananas off the port in New Jersey, Vidalia onions out of Georgia, lettuce, squash, corn. "We're seasonal," she told me. "We move just like cabbage moves, from the bottom of Florida up."
Read: How the coronavirus could create a new working class
Haulers consider produce one of the most difficult and temperamental loads to run. The Department of Agriculture's guide to "Protecting Perishable Foods During Transport by Truck" is high on drama and full of inspiration for the aspiring horror writer: chilling injury, highway shock, mold attacks, sunken skin, "pitting and physiological breakdown." Each fruit and vegetable has its own rider specifying its preferred travel conditions. Apples, for instance, are most comfortable between 30 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit, unless they're Cortland, McIntosh, or Yellow Newtown Pippins, which desire an ambience 8 degrees warmer. Truck drivers must also know which foods do not get along. Apples are gassy; they release ethylene, which causes bananas, Brussels sprouts, kiwis, carrots, and a long list of other produce to brown or ripen prematurely. Other fruit is deliberately gassed: Strawberries are sealed in packaging into which carbon dioxide is injected, and grapes are often fumigated with sulfur dioxide. Garlic affects apples and pears the same way it affects us, which is to say, it makes them smell like garlic. Summer squash, poor thing, is "easily wounded," while the humble potato turns out to be a mini miracle that, even after it has left the ground, can self-heal a nick by essentially growing new skin.

Brown has a house in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, but her home is a Kenworth 18‑wheeler named Peach O Mind. She spends about 11 months a year on the road. She sleeps on a narrow bunk with pale-blue sheets behind the driver's seat, and curls her hair most mornings in truck-stop bathrooms. While driving, she looks out on 40 gauges and switches, two orange teddy bears, and the open road. Brown drives for a carrier that pays either a set rate per run, or by the mile-44 to 47 cents, depending on tenure. When she and I spoke in the first week of April, the curve had not yet flattened, and Brown had just pulled into Love's Travel Stop in Lake City, Florida, with a load of apples from Wenatchee, Washington.

It took Brown a week to get from Wenatchee to Lake City. She drove southeast until she reached the Ranch Hand Trail Stop near the Idaho-Wyoming border; continued east to Nebraska, where she searched unsuccessfully for a Subway sandwich and settled for crackers and a can of Beanee Weenee; moved onward to Carthage, Missouri, where she did seven loads of laundry and sanitized her truck; then drove down through Alabama to Lake City. She was scheduled to deliver her load at 4:30 a.m. the next day at a Target distribution center, but Target wanted to delay. The panic-buying had apparently subsided. "Now they're actually getting overfilled, and they don't have as many workers in the warehouses to unload it," Brown said. "It's taken a flip-flop."

Brown has been bringing food, but having trouble getting it. "I'm living off peanut butter on a spoon," she told me. Roadside restaurants are closing early, if they open at all, and the convenience stores at truck stops have become heinously expensive: $4.95 for a little cup of fruit, $7.89 for the very smallest jar of peanut butter, $8.39 for a bowl of instant mac and cheese. (Peach O Mind can't fit in a drive-through lane or a regular gas station, or stop at a Walmart, which is notorious for booting rigs parked in its lots.) At Love's, Brown couldn't even find sliced bread.

What Brown wishes she could spend her money on, but can't, is hand sanitizer, Clorox wipes, anything to disinfect her hands and truck. "There's none. None, zero. I ran out of everything last week, the last of everything. I have not had Lysol, a mask, gloves," she told me. "I've been searching and searching." There is nowhere to wash your hands in a truck, and finding bathrooms has become a challenge, as many rest stops have closed. Brown felt she was putting herself and others at risk. "Do you realize how many people I could infect?" she said. "If I got this across New York to New Jersey to California to Florida to Portland to Washington? Fourteen days before I had any sort of symptom, I would be in twice that many locations. And nobody is listening."

There had been stories in the news about truck drivers not wanting to run loads into New York City, which is a logistical headache even in the best of times. But during the last three weeks of March, Brown had delivered three loads of vegetables to the city. Most recently, she brought 40,000 pounds of cabbage, which had been transferred, on a predawn morning, from a packinghouse in North Carolina into Peach O Mind's dark, frigid trailer; had rumbled north for a day; and then had been thrust into the fluorescent, honking insanity of the Bronx's Hunts Point, the site of the largest produce market in the world.

The New York City Terminal Produce Market, as the Hunts Point Produce Market is officially known, has a face only a mother could love. Bordered by barbed wire and concrete walls, the 113‑acre complex is home to snowbanks of flattened cardboard boxes and four long, squat buildings with mottled cinder-block exteriors. At each building, there are 18‑wheelers unloading, six-wheelers picking up, and boxes everywhere-top red washington state apples, top quality limes, premium california citrus-piled two stories high in refrigerated rooms, whizzing by on pallet jacks, getting hustled onto hand trucks, teetering beside a sales booth where someone nearby is on the phone telling Curtis, "I do not have a box of one-twenty-fives" (size-125 apples, so called because 125 of them will fit in a 40-pound box).

Everything is either on its way in or on its way out, or had better be. "You do not want to get caught with the product," says Joel Fierman, who represents the third generation of Fiermans to run Fierman Produce Exchange. "This is a perishable. This is not a sweater. This goes bad. Forty-eight hours-it's going bad, nobody's buying it." Fierman Produce Exchange is one of Hunts Point's 30 houses-distributors that buy from growers, then sell to restaurants, nursing homes, schools, jails, bodegas, street carts, and supermarkets, or the suppliers that stock them. Together, the houses handle 70 percent of the produce in the tristate area, feeding an estimated 25 million people each year.

From 6 a.m. on Sunday, when the week's first loads of inbound fresh arrive, until 5 p.m. on Friday, when most houses pause sales, the market hums. The phone rings all day-where are trucks, deliveries, orders? At 10 p.m., buyers flood in. Through 3 a.m., it's a madhouse, filled with the call-and-response of wholesalers pushing to sell for more while their customers needle for less. Workers assemble orders, stage produce, move so fast to load six-wheelers that they'll hop off their motorized pallet jacks and start running for the boxes before the jack rolls to a stop. Every distributor I spoke with constantly interrupted himself to have another conversation. When he answered the phone, the first thing Andrew Brantley, who oversees apples, grapes, stone fruit, citrus, and pears for S. Katzman Produce, said to me was "Hold on one second, all right?"

Nathan Glickberg, Fairway's patriarch, bought from Hunts Point when it was still Washington Market, in Tribeca. He'd venture downtown to pick out produce each morning, get it delivered, and have it in his stands by 7 a.m. (The market moved to the Bronx in 1967.) But Fairway was selling in larger and larger quantities as it grew, and began to self-supply, ordering trailers of produce directly from growers. Other large supermarket chains and cooperatives do the same, though, like Fairway, they still fill in at Hunts Point. "They need us for when a truck is late, a truck is frozen, a truck came in heated, or maybe the product just wasn't that good," Brantley said. "We negotiate a price. Of course, they're going to try to pay as close-Excuse me one second. Hello? Greg?"

By early April, the market's sales had cratered by about half. "We lost the restaurants. We lost the theater. We lost the arts. The museums. We lost the tourism trade. We lost the hotels," Fierman told me. People are still eating, but our tastes change when we dine at home, and supermarkets buy differently than restaurants. Romaine, not frisée. A modest potato, not the overstuffed Idaho spud that the Morton's steakhouse in Midtown serves for $8.80. Supermarkets demand fruit with curb appeal, while chefs don't mind irregular produce, since it'll be chopped before anyone sees it. "You go to a store and you want everything to look-we call it 'plastic,' " Brantley said. "Like you can buy at IKEA or Pier 1." Lately, his sales of bagged fruit and clamshell grapes had gone through the roof.

At the entrance to the market, an electronic sign blinked instructions to stay in your truck, but that did not apply to Hunts Point employees. They were being exposed to 40 or more people a day, Fierman said, despite new protocols. At least 20 people at the market had gotten sick. Some deliveries were taking longer to arrive. Before, loading a truck at a farm in California might have required four hours. "Now it's taking eight, 12, or maybe even 18 hours to do that same process," because of staffing shortages, Brantley said. And that's if the fields are picked. Produce-industry publications had developed a careening tone: One day, they'd report on a Florida farmer who let 250 acres of cucumber, zucchini, yellow squash, and bell pepper rot on the vine because there were no restaurants or cafeterias to sell to; supermarkets, the farmer noted, weren't compromising on their demand for "plastic" produce. Another day, growers would cheer spikes in demand for ginger, mushrooms, apples, oranges, grapefruit, or "hardware"-potatoes, onions, carrots. Shoppers were seeking groceries with a long shelf life.

Some produce had been ready and waiting for months. Apples are picked in the late summer and fall and stored in a cold room, with the oxygen removed, until someone like Ingrid Brown comes for them. "There might be a time in October when you're biting into an apple that was literally harvested that month, or sometimes you may be biting into an apple that was harvested back in November of the previous year," Brantley said. "You're still eating last year's crop. And it's no problem at all."

Produce is one thing Fairway has actually managed to keep in stock. "Every day I wake up and it's What disaster is going to happen today? " Rob Reinisch, a Fairway district manager, told me in mid-April. Reinisch's suppliers are rationing him, and he is rationing customers. Approximately half of what he orders from his suppliers is out of stock, and the eight stores he manages have been constantly running out of things: orange juice ("Everybody thinks Vitamin C is the immediate cure for the coronavirus"), yeast ("I'm basically not in stock ever"), even the free plastic produce bags ("They're flying off the shelves because people are using them to cover their hands as gloves"). A week after Reinisch and I spoke, the chairman of Tyson Foods wrote in an ad, "The food supply chain is breaking," sparking fears of more shortages to come. During the month of April, grocery prices increased more than they had in almost 50 years, even as more than 20 million American jobs disappeared. The lines outside grocery stores paled in comparison to those outside many food banks.

In Fairway's New York City stores, the panic-shopping had not subsided. "People continue every day to buy massive amounts of food," Reinisch said. In wealthy neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, where, he assumes, people have disappeared to second homes, grocery purchases have leveled off. Alcohol purchases, on the other hand, have " exploded," he said. "Wayyyyy, way up."

To get to her job as a cashier at the Fairway in Harlem, Elizabeth Miller takes the No. 27 or No. 39 bus from the apartment she shares with a roommate in the Bronx, transfers to the 6 train, and then transfers again to the No. 15 bus. The trip used to take an hour and a half each way. Now, because there is so little traffic, it takes about 45 minutes. Miller works five or six days a week, in six-to-eight-hour shifts. She wears jeggings, a black T-shirt that says fairway in orange, a beanie over a baseball cap, and orange-and-green sneakers with reinforced soles. Miller joined Fairway's Pelham Manor store last June, then transferred to Harlem because it paid $15 an hour rather than $12. When she first started working as a cashier, she had nightmares about memorizing produce codes. "Every cashier will tell you about the time they dream of being at work and they have a long line, and they're by themselves, and there's no manager to help them, and they're trying to remember all the numbers of all the produce," Miller told me.

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Stooping over the cash register all day and lifting heavy things from the belt make her back and shoulders sore, but to Miller, the hardest part of the job is not the long hours. It's the people. Less the chance that they'll get her sick-"I'm not as worried as most people," she said-than having to stay placid and polite in the face of their impatience, testiness, and sheer, incessant swarm. Recently, Miller was working her register when a new hire couldn't remember the produce codes and was mocked by customers. The cashier burst into tears and quit on the spot. "Honestly, being a cashier is not for the fainthearted," Miller told me. "You can't let someone get to you, because they'll be gone in a few minutes. You can't let them ruin your day." She's been cursed out, yelled at, called names. Just the other day, Miller asked a man to stay six feet away from her and another customer, and he started ranting and threw his money at her.

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Still, she has lately felt more appreciated, and is thankful to have a job. "It's kind of weird-a lot of people are showing their gratitude, even though they're the same people that just stand there when you're bagging their items. It's like, 'What, you're grateful now?' Oh, how the tables have turned!" she said. "We actually matter more than celebrities and politicians and lawyers. We're keeping everybody fed. We're important." She'd heard that two co-workers had gotten sick and were in quarantine. Around the time we spoke, The Washington Post reported that at least 41 grocery and food-processing workers nationwide had died from the virus.

Miller tries to lighten the mood-by competing with other cashiers to see whose customers spend the most ($1,139 is the current record), and teasing people who have waited an hour in line and just finished unloading their carts that she's closing the register to go on break. "They end up laughing, having a good time, getting a smile on their face," Miller said. "It won't help anybody if you show that you're scared or freaked out. It won't help the next person. So just smile a little bit."

Miller does her food shopping at the Family Dollar near her apartment, which lately has also had long lines just to get in. She tries to avoid buying groceries at Fairway, because even with a 20 percent employee discount, it's hard to leave without spending most of what she earned during the day's shift. "Sometimes I do shop at Fairway, but only for, like, meat or bread," she said. "Actually, no, not bread. It's a little expensive."

In 2009, I moved to New York and made a weekend ritual of seeing my grandmother for visits that inevitably revolved around Fairway. In 2013, the year of the company's public offering, a Fairway opened in my neighborhood. I looked forward to tasting my way through its hundreds of cheeses and developing the signature Fairway limp, cultivated through years of distracted shoppers ramming their carts into your ankles. But the store gradually stopped feeling like a Fairway. Prices ticked higher. The apples and lettuce no longer sat at attention, but slouched on displays, looking bored. The store, which I'd always associated with its totally arrogant, utterly New York motto "Like no other market," began to promote itself with a slogan I'd have bet good money was engineered in whichever lab invented pink meat goo: "The place to go fooding." Still, it stung to learn that the Fairway in Harlem, where my grandmother had spent so much time, had failed to sell in the bankruptcy auction in March, along with five other stores. Though Fairway said it planned to keep them open "for the foreseeable future," I found this less than reassuring.

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What went wrong? According to industry experts, after Fairway's longtime owners sold the lion's share of their company, Fairway took on too much debt, expanded too fast, and went into a vicious cycle of trying to boost revenue by raising prices, which alienated shoppers. What went wrong, according to Howie Glickberg? "The Ivy League geniuses decided they knew more about the business than I did," he told me. "They couldn't understand that when you raise prices and get away from what the store was based on-best prices, best quality-you lose customers." In 2016, Glickberg left the company. By then, his meetings with the Sterling executives were regularly devolving into heated fights because he disagreed with changes to the stores. (Sterling said that competition from Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and online grocers was responsible for the price pressures.) What went wrong, according to current Fairway Vice President Pat Sheils? "I'm not sure that I'm able to speak on that," Sheils told me. "Yeah," interrupted a publicist who'd been listening in on our call. "Yeah, agreed with you on that one, Pat."

For decades, Fairway felt like a store run by human beings, not calculators. Steven Jenkins, a longtime Fairway employee and eventual partner, started making irreverent signs as a way to look busy and avoid talking to customers (fresh black figs, raw sex-same thing, 79 cents each), but anything in the store with his signs sold like crazy, so he kept at them. He and Fairway's other managers stocked things for the simple reason that they were good to eat. While Jenkins and I were speaking, he got out an old notebook in which he'd kept a ledger of every item he'd shipped to the stores from Europe in December 2013. "Here's anchovies that I bought from the coast of Catalonia, the greatest anchovy in the world," he said, reading from his list. "There's some little mints from the village in France called Flavigny ... Oh my God, I brought in walnuts from the Périgord region ... Here's my vintage sardines from Brittany. These vintage sardines taste like a sardine that God made and gave to you, personally ... Olive oil, olive oil, olive oil. Mustards, vinegars, more French dried fruits ... There's my beets! I would bring in pallets and pallets of beets from just west of Paris, in Chatou ... You didn't have to peel the goddamn beet; they were ready to go and they tasted perfect and they were organic as well and they were cheap as dirt. I sold mountains of beets. Can you imagine such a thing? I was so proud of those beets." He continued like this for 15 minutes.

Not every supermarket stocks French beets, but Fairway was less exceptional than it might seem. Private-equity firms have lately devoured supermarkets; since 2015, at least seven other grocery chains have been bought by private-equity investors, then bankrupted. And Fairway was no luxury-food shop: Besides the beets, which my grandmother adored, it stocked Kraft Singles, which I adore, and it evoked that same feeling of possibility that exists in even the most ordinary supermarket. Stuffed to the rafters, supermarkets overwhelm with the cacophony of choice. Floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall Light 'n Fluffy, Ding Dongs, Donettes, CRAVE, Fabuloso, Juicy Juice, Crunch 'n Munch, Pup-Peroni, Enviro-Log-all yelling, cajoling, promising, winking. At the very least, you have to marvel: How did we take something built to satisfy the simplest human need and make it so utterly baroque? The supermarket does not "curate." It is a defiantly encyclopedic catalog of our needs and desires, each and every one of which it attempts to satisfy. With nothing but a can opener, you can get a "turkey dinner in gravy," "chicken shrimp and crab stew," "saucy seafood bake," "chicken and turkey casserole," "prime filets with salmon and beef," "bisque with tuna and chicken," "ocean whitefish dinner with garden greens in sauce," or a "natural flaked skipjack tuna entrée in a delicate broth." And that's just in the cat-food aisle.

While researching this story, I became obsessed with supermarket names, which are the antithesis of the sanitized, one-word titles favored by cool venture-capital-backed retailers-Roman, Winc, Away. Traditional supermarkets have names as unpretentious and moth-eaten as an old wool sweater: Save A Lot, BI-LO, Great Valu. They don't promise something as ambitious as Whole Foods. Just something edible, for an okay price: Food 4 Less, Price Rite, Stop & Shop. The supermarket is not an aspirational brand catering to who we want to be. It's just there for who we are: people who need Light 'n Fluffy, and Ding Dongs, and Donettes.

The names I came across were also largely unfamiliar to me, because, even now, supermarkets have stayed stubbornly regional. That may not be the case much longer, as national chains are poised to continue squeezing local players. The supermarket has always operated according to the principle of pile it high and sell it cheap, and the bigger you are-Kroger, Walmart, Albertsons-the higher, and cheaper, your pile. You can trim costs by running your own trucking fleets, creating your own products, even designing your own produce. Walmart pioneered a cantaloupe that supposedly tastes equally sweet in summer and winter. Americans now buy about a quarter of their groceries from Walmart, which has stores so gigantic, they are technically hyper markets.

Once upon a time, supermarkets were themselves the colossi putting small grocers out of business, and nostalgia for regional supermarkets in a sense seems risible. These Goliaths now look frail, as we've shifted to stocking up on groceries at places far beyond the super- and even hypermarket-gas stations, a onetime online bookseller. But until recently, you couldn't go too long without joining the people who live near you to ineffectively wander a supermarket's aisles, picking up toilet paper and milk and gossip. Supermarkets gather us together, and they reflect the particular appetites of our place. In speaking with the people who built Fairway, I perceived, despite the vastness of their stores, a neighborly sense of pride in focusing on the minute details of their shoppers' lives. Jenkins had been outraged that New Yorkers were eating cheeses and olive oils that, in his mind, were beneath them. "There wasn't a single bottle of olive oil worthy of anybody throughout the '80s!" he ranted. So he imported some that was.

Compared with inventing new cantaloupes, this was, arguably, a small act. But the result was not small. Once a week, my grandmother would put on her hat, scarf, gloves, and polished leather shoes, and pull her black-metal cart down the hill to Fairway, then back up to her apartment. When she could no longer pull the cart back up the hill, she'd make the pilgrimage to Fairway, do her shopping, and have her groceries delivered. When she could no longer negotiate the steep hill on her own, my aunt, or a neighbor, steadied her on the walk down. When my grandmother stopped going anywhere else in the city, she still went to Fairway, where the world came to her.
This article appears in the July/August 2020 print edition with the headline "Supermarkets Are a Miracle."
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Bianca Bosker is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of Cork Dork and Original Copies. She is the former executive tech editor at HuffPost.

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The Pandemic Shows Us the Genius of Supermarkets

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A short history of the stores that-even now-keep us supplied with an abundance of choices Fairway Market, which credits itself with introducing New Yorkers to clementines, radicchio, fleur de sel, and vine-ripened fruit, started off as a small grocery store at 74th Street and Broadway, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where it still stands.

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En 1962, après une guerre éclair, la Chine a annexé le territoire indien de l’Aksai Chin, repoussant ainsi la frontière de l’Inde. L’Inde revendique ce territoire en vertu de l’héritage frontalier légué par l’Empire britannique en 1947, tandis que la Chine récuse la légitimité des tracés issus de l’époque coloniale. Depuis plusieurs semaines, l’armée indienne accuse la Chine de procéder à des incursions illégales et l’armée chinoise conteste la construction d’une route militaire du côté indien. En 1996, les deux pays ont signé un accord interdisant l’emploi d’armes à feu par les soldats en poste de chaque côté de la LAC. Le dernier affrontement meurtrier dans cette région remontait à 1975.

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On my way from Washington DC to Nashville, Tennessee I drove about 2200 miles in 2 weeks. This trip gave me the chance to experience both - country and people. It seems that everything is about tradition and cars in the south. You will hardly find a village without a store for used tires or old pick up truck on the side of the road. Southern hospitality is not a cliché - it's one of the reasons that make the South one of my favorite places in the world.

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PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH - Robert Götzfried Photography

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On my way from Washington DC to Nashville, Tennessee I drove about 2200 miles in 2 weeks. This trip gave me the chance to experience both - country and people. It seems that everything is about tradition and cars in the south.

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[5] Secondary Infektion targeted sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, among other issues. To avoid confusion, this report refers to the Irish Republican Army as the "IRA," the Real Irish Republican Army as the "Real IRA," and the Internet Research Agency as the "Russian IRA."

[10] Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. United Kingdom: Profile, 2020.

[23] See page 8 and footnote 17.

; persona "AdkinsJan," "Ukraine started supplying Kurds with Javelins," homment.com, June 25, 2018, [49] Persona "MilDavid," "Ukraine puts Donald Trump on blacklist," homment.com, June 20, 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20200422232829/https://homment.com/yiPdDhuIJ2S44Lx0YEkX http://web.archive.org/web/20200418171255/https://homment.com/evApUNhtKfRrYuS6aAjX.

[109] The CPJ confirmed that they were approached by a journalist from Russian state channel Россия 24 to confirm whether the letter was fake, but there is no record of the channel running a story on it, a welcome sign of journalistic professionalism.

[118] Persona "StPatrick," "Macron moves in the Élysée Palace on shoulders of migrants and jihadists," Reddit, April 20, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20200318192454/https://www.reddit.com/r/eupolitics/comments/66gnnb/macron_moves_in_the_%C3%A9lys%C3%A9e_palace_on_shoulders_of/; defendingthetruth.com, April 20, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20200418161140/https://defendingthetruth.com/threads/macron-moves-in-the-%C3%89lys%C3%A9e-palace-on-shoulders-of-migrants-and-jihadists.60472/; politicsforum.org, April 20, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20200418161145/http://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=168877&sid=d395f44fff9b397979b01a2ccab4e3f8; homment.com, April 20, 2017, http://web.archive.org/web/20200418161147/https://homment.com/Macron-moves-in-the-Elysee-Palace-on-shoulders-of-migrants-and-jihadists.

[122] See www.io-archive.org

[179] Secondary Infektion's use of Twitter was a deviation from its normal behavior, in that it used the same accounts repeatedly between mid-2014 and mid-2016. These accounts shared a significant proportion of non-original content and reposted individual Secondary Infektion stories repeatedly, occasionally dozens of times per story. Representing the operation's Twitter usage by individual tweets over-represents the volume of the operation's Twitter activity compared with its activity on other platforms. For that reason, Twitter is not represented in the comparative graphs.

[249] See above, note 204.

[315] For transparency, one of the authors of this paper has been friends with one of the people whose name was one the forged letter for some 20 years.

; the equivalent English post was attributed to persona "Steven Laack," "Flight SK1755: Who needs false sensation?", blogspot.com, February 13, 2015, [358] Persona "Johan," "Flight SK1755: vem behöver en falsk sensation" ("Flight SK1755: who needs a fake sensation"), nyhetsverket.se, February 11, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20160407165422/http://www.nyhetsverket.se/nyhet/25851/Flight-SK1755-vem-beh%C3%B6ver-en-falsk-sensation http://web.archive.org/web/20200418135054/https://doubtingsteven.blogspot.com/2015/02/flight-sk-1755-who-needs-false-sensation.html.

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5] Secondary Infektion targeted sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, among other issues. To avoid confusion, this report refers to the Irish Republican Army as the "IRA," the Real Irish Republican Army as the "Real IRA," and the Internet Research Agency as the "Russian IRA." [10] Rid, Thomas.

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La Chine a développé des relations militaires et économiques avec le Pakistan. Elle y investit depuis 2015 pour développer des infrastructures dans le cadre de son projet de « nouvelles routes de la soie » et implanter un corridor économique entre sa frontière et sa mer. Ce corridor en construction passe notamment par la partie du Cachemire administrée par le Pakistan et revendiquée par l’Inde.

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En équilibre sur le mur d'enceinte surmonté de barbelés, un Chinois et un Pakistanais fixent un réservoir d'eau sur le toit d'un préfabriqué, à la périphérie de Tarnol, petite ville du Punjab pakistanais. Un semi-remorque se glisse dans la cour. Sous un hangar, trois contremaîtres chinois, lunettes de soudeur sur le nez, et une quarantaine de Pakistanais travaillent l'acier sur des machines-outils importées de Chine. L'entreprise Xinyuan fabrique ici, depuis un an, les baraquements dans lesquels logent les dizaines de milliers d'ouvriers qui construisent les routes, centrales électriques, barrages ou voies ferrées prévus dans le cadre du Corridor économique sino-pakistanais (CPEC), un accord historique signé entre Pékin et Islamabad en mai 2015.

Au Pakistan, où un quart des 190 millions d'habitants vit en dessous du seuil de pauvreté, le "sipek" est sur toutes les lèvres. Ce "plan Marshall" chinois promet 700 000 emplois d'ici 2030, l'installation de centaines d'entreprises dans 37 "zones économiques spéciales", la rénovation du réseau routier et ferroviaire, le raccordement à la fibre optique, la fin des coupures d'électricité qui paralysent le pays plusieurs heures par jour... "La Chine est une vieille amie, et nous sommes contents qu'elle ait décidé de prêter de l'argent aux investisseurs alors que la situation économique du Pakistan s'améliore, se réjouissait auprès de Libération, en décembre, le ministre pakistanais des Finances. Il est faux de penser que Pékin nous fait un don, ou que l'argent ne sert qu'à construire des routes." Sur les 46 milliards de dollars (42,5 milliards d'euros) prévus au départ, 35 milliards sont consacrés au secteur de l'énergie. Et fin décembre, 9 milliards ont été ajoutés.

En échange, la Chine s'offre un accès direct à l'océan Indien via le port en eau profonde de Gwadar, à l'extrême sud du Pakistan. Le "Corridor" est la plus importante des six "nouvelles routes de la soie" lancées par le président Xi Jinping en 2013. Depuis Kashgar, dans la province du Xinjiang, située de l'autre côté de la chaîne himalayenne du Karakorum, les marchandises chinoises seront bientôt acheminées par camion sur 2 500 km jusqu'à Gwadar, au lieu de rouler 3 500 km jusqu'à Canton et de contourner l'Inde en bateau. Surtout, les pays du Golfe livreront directement la Chine en hydrocarbures sans passer par le détroit de Malacca.

"Tout est opaque"

Zulfiqar Ali, 32 ans, diplômé en mandarin de la fac de langues d'Islamabad, travaille depuis dix ans comme consultant. Il nous offre un thé au lait brûlant dans la maison sans confort qui jouxte l'usine de Xinyuan. "Mon travail est de faire le lien entre les deux cultures. Depuis des décennies, les ponts et les routes du Pakistan sont construits par des Chinois. Mais avec le CPEC, tout s'est accéléré, explique-t-il. J'ai vu beaucoup d'entreprises chinoises se créer, mais j'en ai aussi vu beaucoup faire faillite, même s'ils travaillent dur." Les ouvriers de l'usine viennent de tout le pays. Trois Pakistanais et cinq Chinois les encadrent. L'un d'eux lui lance, en mandarin : "Ne parle pas trop." Ici, les Chinois n'aiment guère qu'on s'épanche dans la presse.

A Lahore, deuxième ville du pays, des affiches vantent sur de hauts piliers de béton le "Train orange", un projet de métro aérien automatique. Ce jour-là règne un silence de mort : le chantier est à l'arrêt depuis que sept ouvriers, employés par Habib Constructions Services, géant pakistanais du secteur qui se vante de livrer ses projets "à l'heure et sans surcoût", ont brûlé vif dans l'incendie de leur baraquement. En quinze mois, 50 ouvriers sont morts sur ce projet. Les syndicats dénoncent la violation des règles de sécurité par les sous-traitants et les indemnités jamais versées aux familles. Le Train orange a pourtant un budget de 2 milliards de dollars (1,8 milliard d'euros), financés en grande partie par un prêt de Pékin, et vient d'être intégré au CPEC pour bénéficier des exemptions fiscales. "Je ne vois aucune preuve pour l'instant que le CPEC va bénéficier au peuple, regrette Ahmed Ijaz Malik, professeur d'économie à l'université Quaid-i-Azam d'Islamabad. Tout est opaque. On entend que Gwadar va concurrencer Dubaï, mais les bases du modèle économique n'ont même pas été définies. Certes, les milliards vont arriver, Nawaz Sharif [le Premier ministre pakistanais, ndlr] et ses amis vont couper des rubans. Mais comment l'argent va-t-il être réinvesti ? Il risque d'être juste réinjecté dans les marchés financiers chinois." Les réformes structurelles qui assureraient des retombées concrètes pour la population n'ont pas été annoncées.

"Sans réfléchir"

Dans une grande salle de la capitale, Shao Liyiing assiste d'un œil distrait à un spectacle folklorique. A la tête de trois entreprises d'immobilier, cette Chinoise est au Pakistan pour trois mois et demi : "Il y a beaucoup d'opportunités ici, même si entre le gouvernement, le Parti, l'entreprise, les normes varient de manière imprévisible, explique-t-elle via un logiciel de traduction sur son smartphone. Mais on est très bien accueillis. Hier soir, l'armée pakistanaise a envoyé des véhicules militaires et huit soldats pour nous escorter, alors qu'on était trois."

La sécurité et la stabilité politiques sont des points clés du dispositif dans un pays déchiré par le terrorisme. La puissante armée pakistanaise, directement intéressée dans l'affaire via les très nombreuses entreprises qu'elle possède, a créé une unité spéciale de 15 000 soldats pour la protection des ressortissants chinois. Selon d'autres sources, pas moins de 40 000 hommes seraient occupés à sécuriser les intérêts du CPEC et à mater la rébellion indépendantiste du Baloutchistan, immense province désertique qu'il faut traverser pour atteindre Gwadar. Pékin compte de son côté sur la coopération d'Islamabad dans la répression de ses propres indépendantistes, les Ouïghours musulmans vivant au Xinjiang voisin.

Le Corridor a déjà réussi à mettre d'accord les quatre partis de chaque province, religieux compris. Alors que le Premier ministre et sa famille sont empêtrés dans les révélations des "Panama Papers", aucun scandale de corruption n'a encore éclaté sur le CPEC, "ce qui, selon les standards pakistanais, est remarquable", sourit Ali Haider, chercheur au China Pak Study Center. La construction à marche forcée de centrales à charbon (70 % des investissements en énergie) a déjà permis de réduire la pénurie d'électricité. C'est aussi un moyen pour la Chine de délocaliser sa pollution chez son voisin. "Le Pakistan n'a pas vraiment les moyens d'imposer son point de vue, constate Ali Haider. Les projets hydroélectriques vont prendre des années. Et la priorité n'est clairement pas l'environnement."

Attaulah Khan, guide de haute montagne du Gilgit-Baltistan, région qui abrite 160 sommets de plus de 7 000 mètres, parle même d'un "désastre". Pour passer le col du Khunjerab, frontière avec la Chine à 4 800 mètres d'altitude, et parcourir les premières centaines de kilomètres, la seule route possible traverse la vallée de Hunza, paradis touristique avec ses glaciers, ses cultures en terrasses, ses passerelles au-dessus des eaux furieuses de l'Indus, et sa population paisible, réputée pour son vin artisanal. "Ils parlent d'autoroute à six voies, de pipelines, de chemin de fer, mais je n'ai vu aucun document qui se soucie de préserver la nature et notre civilisation vieille de 5 000 ans, s'énerve le guide. Les deux pays foncent sans réfléchir."

Cartes rebattues

D'autres questions se posent. A Gwadar, zone ultrasécurisée sur laquelle reposent tous les espoirs d'un Pakistan ouvert sur l'Afrique et l'Europe, le chantier n'avance pas. "Le terrain a été loué pour quarante ans par la Chine, mais il n'y a toujours que quelques bâtiments et 150 employés, témoigne un des rares visiteurs qui s'y est rendu fin janvier. Quand les habitants entendent parler des plans merveilleux du gouvernement, ils demandent s'il n'y a pas un autre Gwadar. La seule chose qu'ils voient, c'est que la bouteille d'eau potable vaut désormais 450 roupies", soit 4,50 euros. Le professeur Ahmed Ijaz Malik, qui a des informations concordantes, soupire : "Ce qu'on voit surtout en ce moment, c'est qu'ils construisent une infrastructure juste pour faire venir le pétrole du Golfe." Quant à l'éventuelle utilisation du port par l'armée chinoise, qui vient d'offrir deux bâtiments à la marine pakistanaise pour en "assurer la sécurité", on nage en pleine zone grise, nul ne connaît les termes du contrat.

En quelques mois, toutes les cartes semblent rebattues en Asie. En décembre, Islamabad a proposé à ses voisins indiens et iraniens de coopérer au sein du CPEC en interconnectant leurs réseaux de pipelines. New Delhi n'a pas répondu mais laisse faire les travaux dans le Gilgit-Baltistan, une zone du Cachemire théoriquement disputée par les deux puissances. Moscou est entré cet hiver dans le jeu en demandant l'autorisation d'utiliser Gwadar. En mars, 200 délégués russes assisteront, pour la première fois, au forum d'affaires Pakistan-Chine de Lahore.

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Au Pakistan, un corridor chinois à prix d'or

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Financé par Pékin à plus de 50 milliards d'euros, un accord économique permettra à la Chine d'acheminer directement ses marchandises jusqu'à l'océan Indien et de s'approvisionner en hydrocarbures. Une manne pour Islamabad, mais qui ne profitera sans doute pas à tous.

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A lire

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Ce matin en me levant, j'étais déjà brisé. Il y a eu tant de matins comme celui-là.

Et chacun de ces matins laisse des traces. Des traces qui s'accumulent. Puis, ces cauchemars en sommeil, qui reviennent à chaque déflagration.

Ce qui se passe en ce moment aux États-Unis me trouble à la nausée. Ce n'est cependant pas de l'Amérique dont je désire vous parler. Mais de la France.

Par quelle extraordinaire magie celle-ci pourrait-elle rester en dehors de ce grand déballage ?

Car ce matin, en me levant, je me suis mis à pleurer. Sans contrôle, sans pouvoir reprendre mon souffle. Quelque chose venait de se briser. Je venais de comprendre que mon histoire avec la France venait de se terminer. Ce pays qui m'a accueilli il y a déjà plus de cinquante ans, qui m'a accompagné durant toute ma vie professionnelle, qui m'a donné de formidables récompenses, de difficiles responsabilités, de vrais accomplissements individuels et parfois même collectifs. Ce pays avec lequel j'ai toujours entretenu des rapports subtils entre méfiance désabusée et confiance réaliste, entre tolérance constructive et incrédulité atterrée. Un pays dans lequel, pourtant, je n'ai jamais mâché mes mots. Ma conception de ce pays venait de se liquéfier.

Trop de silence, trop d'ignorance, trop de mépris de l'autre, trop d'égoïsme, et surtout trop de déni ont eu raison de cette " construction ", en fin de compte purement théorique, que je croyais maîtriser.

Oui, la France est dans le déni d'elle-même. Car la France se pense encore tout aussi glorieuse, tout aussi sereine, tout aussi vaillante que dans le passé qu'elle se raconte. Il y a quelques jours, l'historien Marcel Gauchet écrivait dans le journal Le Monde : " La France se pense comme étant au centre du jeu et les Français vivent largement sur cette idée. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, le malheureux, avait un jour osé dire, dans un moment de sincérité mal inspiré : "La France est une puissance moyenne." Ce fut un tollé ! C'était pourtant prophétique. Depuis, personne n'a osé aller dans ce sens. Notre pays a un problème d'image de lui-même et d'appréciation réaliste de sa position dans le monde. "
" Notre " France (puis-je encore ?) n'arrive pas à lâcher prise sur sa gloire passée, ô combien héroïque en effet. Elle qui a enflammé les révolutions dans le monde entier. Elle qui reste, malgré tout ceci, le pays symbole des droits de l'homme. Mais l'empire s'est rebellé et l'emprise a dû céder. Et l'entretien du mirage commence à coûter cher à tout le monde.

Incapable d'apporter des réponses constructives à cette nouvelle réalité, paniquée devant une décadence qu'elle ne peut plus dissimuler, enivrée par les cris de sirène éplorée de quelques philosophes qui s'apitoient sur une possible " fin de civilisation ", voire, cauchemar ultime (!), la " disparition de l'homme blanc " ( sic ! Je vous jure ! À la télévision française). Alors qu'il faut juste faire l'effort de comprendre qu'on est simplement arrivé à la fin d'un bien trop lourd héritage d'injustice, de déni et de profits, construit sur la misère des autres.

La France est dans le déni, car elle refuse d'accepter d'avoir perdu sa place prédominante et son empire. Son titre symbolique de nation des droits de l'homme, elle l'a aussi perdu (les condamnations à la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme en font foi). Une place - il faut quand même le préciser - que la " racaille " de l'époque, affamée, délaissée et ignorée, aura imposée par le feu et par le sang en prenant la Bastille puis, au moment opportun, en stoppant le roi en fuite, à un rond-point de Gilets jaunes à Varenne. Cette partie-là, on préfère l'oublier. Ce sont les gueux qui commencent toujours à construire l'histoire ! Ce n'est qu'ensuite qu'elle est récupérée - comme d'hab ! - par le nouveau pouvoir, la nouvelle bourgeoisie, voire l'ancienne dynastie, après avoir modifié le nom du parti, pour " remettre en route l'économie " (slogan clé pour comprendre le capitalisme).

Cela fait plus de cinquante ans que je vis en grande partie en France. Cela fait plus de cinquante ans que j'anticipe cette fracture un jour ou l'autre. Cela fait plus de cinquante ans que, oscillant selon le moment entre témoin, observateur ou acteur, je constate, éberlué, les outrances, les mots racistes, les gestes racistes, les décisions racistes, les lois racistes, sans que personne ne brûle les Champs-Élysées ou, au moins, par dépit, le Café de Flore, au lieu du Fouquet's pour changer (note aux trolls : ceci est une image).

Dans un film que j'ai réalisé en 2000 (!), Le Profit et rien d'autre (Arte), à la question rhétorique : " Pourquoi je fais des films ? " j'ai répondu : " Parce que c'est beaucoup plus convenable que de brûler des voitures. " Des amis ont cru que c'était un trait d'esprit.

La concentration de colère accumulée tous les jours dans le cœur de ceux qui " ne vous ressemblent pas ", de ceux qui vous regardent du dehors à travers la vitre embuée, est incommensurable. Il est important de noter en toute transparence que j'écris tout ceci de la position d'un homme noir absolument privilégié à tout point de vue dans ce pays.

Imaginez un seul instant ce que ressentent les autres ?

La France est dans le déni et ses enfants n'ont plus le temps. Ses enfants " adultérins " ne veulent plus attendre. Ses enfants noirs, blancs, jaunes, arc-en-ciel s'agitent. " The native are restless ", dirait le colon. Ils n'ont plus toute la vie devant eux. Ils voient bien que vous n'avez rien foutu de bien notable ces soixante dernières années, rien d'autre que gérer en pépère le patrimoine légué. Ils ont déjà vu bien trop de malheurs s'empiler devant eux. Et ils ont bien constaté quelque part que les " responsables " ne faisaient rien, que les " responsables " ne s'estimaient pas " coupables ", et peut-être même, pire, que les " responsables " ne seraient même pas les " vrais " responsables, mais des exécutants. Ses enfants ont compris que ce sont les 1 % des 1 % des plus riches qui décident. Et ils n'ont même pas à lever un seul petit doigt pour le faire, car la machine fonctionne très bien toute seule. Les politiques zombifiés, soumis aux puissants, ne sont plus que des mini-capitaines essayant de rassurer les bonnes gens des premières et secondes classes sur le Titanic, quant au fait qu'ils maîtrisent bien la troisième classe et qu'il n'y aura pas d'émeutes - promis - pendant que le bateau s'enfonce de plus en plus vite dans la mer froide.

Qu'est-ce que tout ceci a à voir avec le racisme ? Un peu de patience. Avoir un peu de " contexte " permet de mieux assurer la cible.

Depuis la crise pétrolière des années 1970, le monde est rentré dans un nouveau cycle capitaliste. Cela a remis en question les rapports de force existants. Les anciens empires perdent leur exclusivité et refusent d'assumer que la gloire est (dé)passée et qu'il faut renoncer à l'idée de toute-puissance.

Alors, on fait porter les conséquences sur les autres. La majorité. On décide de faire des " réformes " vers le bas, de détricoter les acquis " trop coûteux ", on invente un nouvel euphémisme : " rationaliser ". On dépouille les protections sociales, on rémunère les hôpitaux à l'acte, on " désosse " les écoles, on privatise à tout-va et on vend les bijoux de la reine, on bloque les salaires, on pille les pensions, on désocialise les plus faibles et délocalise les moins " performants ".

Pendant ce temps, les plus-values financières augmentent de manière exponentielle et se concentrent encore davantage entre les mains de quelques-uns. Au point que ceux-ci ne savent plus où cacher leur magot, face à des politiciens et à des parlementaires hébétés, ne pensant qu'à survivre à une ultime élection.

Ils ont raison de se soulever, ces jeunes. Ils ont raison de manifester, ils pourraient même avoir raison de tout casser (voilà, je l'ai dit !). Car l'État profond est sans tête (pensante), sans bras (actifs). L'État est paralysé et lui aussi démembré. Voici venir le temps des apprentis sorciers, des opportunistes, des populistes.

On a dit à la foule que l'État ne peut pas tout, que l'État est pauvre, qu'il fallait tenir-relancer-préserver-pousser-relever (au choix) la croissance. Comme il ne fallait pas toucher aux profits, les seuls paramètres restants étaient les salaires, les pensions, les services. Il fallait se " serrer la ceinture " pendant que d'autres (des boursicoteurs, des traders, des parlementaires, des ministres, des présidents, des hommes d'affaires, des patrons du CAC, des grands parfumeurs, des grands couturiers, des rois... et même des reines et des princesses) se goinfraient à l'étage.

Il fallait être " compréhensif " pendant que d'autres planquaient leurs revenus à la Bourse, au Luxembourg, au Panama et dans ces milliers d'autres fonds illicites. Ce qu'on appelle pudiquement l'optimisation fiscale est devenu une branche légitime de tout cabinet comptable qui se respecte.

Aujourd'hui, des milliers de milliards de capitaux flottent dans ces réseaux ; un argent devenu fictif, dont on ne sait plus très bien à quoi il sert. Mais les gens ne sont pas sots. Ils voient bien que quand la crise devient dangereuse pour le capital, des centaines de milliards surgissent de nulle part pour sauver les banques (2008) ou, plus anecdotique, la cathédrale Notre-Dame. Ils voient bien que l'impossible devient possible, lorsque les profits sont en danger. (Ils ne disent pas " les profits ", bien sûr, mais " l'économie ".)

Les soignants manifestent depuis des années pour dire combien nos vies sont en danger. On les admoneste et on leur reproche d'être alarmistes et " paresseux " (!).

Les " gens " percent bien la rhétorique bancale. Quand il s'agit des banques, des fabricants d'automobiles, de l'industrie pharmaceutique, des Bourses, des spéculateurs, tout devient soudain possible : l'abandon des principes, la suppression des protections fiscales, environnementales, médicales, la déréglementation à gogo, la modification accélérée des barèmes, l'élimination ou l'amendement des normes de sécurité, les votes express au parlement, les mesures d'urgence, la loi martiale, et même : " laisser filer le déficit ". " Il faut relancer l'économie ! " s'époumonent-ils. Mais laquelle ?

Le pape Jean-Paul II, lors d'une visite dans " mon pays ", en Haïti, en mars 1983, face à la dictature de Jean-Claude Duvalier déclare : " Il faut que les choses changent ici. " Comprenant parfaitement le message, les écoliers sont descendus dans la rue et, au péril de leur vie (que certains ont perdue !), ont fait partir le dictateur qui, pour l'anecdote, sera sauvé par ses amis américains et récupéré par un gouvernement français à qui on aura forcé la main. Pour raisons humanitaires, nous dira-t-on. Autant pour la souveraineté. On est plein d'humanité pour ses complices, moins pour ceux qui bravent le désert, la guerre, la Méditerranée, pour rejoindre un peu de paix et de survie.

Je mélange les genres, direz-vous ? Et le racisme dans tout cela ? J'y viens. Je veux simplement établir comment tout cela est lié. Et qu'il ne s'agit pas juste d'une question de " détestation " de " l'autre ". Tout est connecté. Je ne fais que raccorder les fils.

Car, comprenez-vous, le racisme brutal, laid, malveillant, n'arrive pas ainsi du vide. Il fait partie d'une histoire bien orchestrée. Une histoire qui commence dès le xi siècle, quand l'Europe (catholique) part en croisade vers l'est, pour exterminer les juifs et les musulmans (déjà !) ; puis vers l'ouest, pour décimer les Indiens d'Amérique ; puis vers le sud, pour violemment amputer l'Afrique de plus de 20 millions de ses habitants et fabriquer la plus vaste arnaque humaine qui soit et qu'on a pudiquement appelée le " commerce triangulaire ".Un triangle de la mort qui va littéralement construire Nantes, Bordeaux, La Rochelle, Saint-Malo, Le Havre, et j'en passe. Cette phénoménale accumulation de richesse lancera définitivement le système capitaliste moderne, tel qu'on le connaît aujourd'hui.

Oui, tout est lié, voyez-vous. C'est bien la même histoire. Il n'y en a qu'une seule, malheureusement contée par ceux qui en sont sortis riches. Plus rarement racontée du point de vue de ceux qui en ont payé le prix.

Tout est donc lié.Les policiers qui ont mutilé l'anus de Théo L. ne connaissent probablement pas les détails de cette " grande histoire ", mais, intuitivement, ils ont compris qu'il fallait taper fort.Les policiers qui ont étouffé Adama Traoré ne savent pas vraiment d'où vient la France, mais ils sentent diffusément, quelque part, au fond d'eux-mêmes, qu'ils font partie des " vainqueurs ", alors ils frappent. Les policiers qui ont traqué comme des biches dans une chasse à courre deux adolescents, Bouna Traoré (15 ans) et Zyed Benna (17 ans), pour que, transis de peur, ils meurent électrocutés à l'intérieur d'une armoire de transformateur électrique, n'ont pas la moindre idée des ramifications de la " grande " histoire avec leur hallali suburbain. Mais, qu'à cela ne tienne : " Nom de Dieu, faire partie des gagnants ! Y a que ça ! " Ils soupçonnent vaguement qu'ils font le travail pour ceux qui ont planqué leur argent aux îles vierges, mais ils ne sont pas sûrs.

En fait, cette longue chaîne d'histoires apparemment dispersées, on voit bien d'où elle vient, pour peu qu'on se donne un peu de mal et qu'on fasse preuve d'un soupçon de jugeote. On voit bien qui en profite, on voit bien qui sert de chair à canon et qui sont " les travailleurs en seconde ligne ", et ceux de toutes les autres lignes plus bas dans la hiérarchie. En allant plus loin et en essayant d'être un brin plus honnête, on voit bien que le racisme, ce n'est pas vraiment qu'on déteste les Noirs, qu'on déteste les Arabes, qu'on n'aime pas les Chinois, qu'on a peur des " racailles " de banlieue. Tout cela on le sait, bien sûr, et on le vit. Mais on voit tout aussi bien que, pris un à un, ils sont bien comme vous, ces braves beurs/blacks. Surtout lorsqu'ils gagnent des médailles bleu/blanc/rouge, nous font rire sur la scène, à la télévision, au cinéma et pleurer quand il/elle chante " si bien " le spiritual, le blues, la soul, même le rap. Tout ça, vous le savez. La question est maintenant de savoir ce que vous allez en faire. Réfléchissez bien avant de répondre. Car ceux qui arrivent ne sont plus aussi patients. Ni aussi pacifiques.

Lorsque les " déclarations " incendiaires proviennent - mine de rien - directement du sommet de l'État, la blessure n'est que plus profonde. De ces blessures spécifiquement françaises, j'en porte un sacré paquet depuis un temps. Et je n'en ai oublié aucune : les outrages grotesques de toute la famille Le Pen et associés, certes attendus, mais cela fait quand même mal ; les vociférations d'un Charles Pasqua ; le silence de Mitterrand ; les " odeurs " d'un Chirac ; les " glissements " d'un Jospin ; les insultes bonhommes d'un Sarkozy ; les " sans-dents ", d'un François Hollande ; les " virevoltes " précieuses d'un Macron. Vous imaginez-vous comment cela est interprété par les sous-fifres ? De ministère à parlements, à préfecture, à commissariat ?

Les mots éclatent en mille morceaux létaux lorsqu'ils arrivent sur le terrain.

C'est ici, en France, que j'ai eu envie de dire ces paroles. Car à ce pays, j'ai consacré une part importante de mon énergie, de mon travail. Ne vous méprenez pas, ceci n'est ni une mise en discussion, ni une tribune, ni l'ouverture d'un forum quelconque. Je n'ai aucun dialogue à initier. Le temps pour cela est passé. Je ne suis plus disponible. Arrêtez une bonne fois de demander aux victimes de résoudre vos problèmes.

La France a contribué à la construction de la personne que je suis. À travers mes engagements dans et pour ce pays, j'ai essayé de redonner ce qu'elle m'avait apporté. Je ne pense pas avoir fait preuve d'ingratitude, me semble-t-il. Malgré l'aveuglement de cette élite, et plus particulièrement du monde culturel et politique que j'ai fréquenté.

Pardonnez-moi d'avance, mais je ne vois pas comment dire ces choses, autrement que brutalement. Je ne vois pas comment faire front à la paresse intellectuelle, au déni, à l'incapacité d'empathie, sans dire les choses crûment.

Je suis fatigué d'éduquer, d'être patient, de faire bonne mine contre mauvaise fortune, alors que je suis confronté à un racisme dégradant (conscient ou inconscient). Je suis fatigué d'être pédagogue ; je suis fatigué de retenir ma réponse brutale, alors qu'une apostrophe censée être drôle vient d'être émise, énième microagression déguisée sous une " bonne foi " infantile. Je ne veux plus gérer l'inconfort de la stupidité d'un moment.

Je suis fatigué d'être celui qui DOIT faire l'effort de compréhension, l'effort d'explication, l'effort de magnanimité devant votre " innocence ".

Oui, la France m'a beaucoup donné à titre individuel. Mais elle a tout repris à mon collectif. Combien de fois, en France, n'ai-je pas eu à répondre à un journaliste ou à un spectateur bien-pensant que mon film I Am Not Your Negro n'était pas un film sur les États-Unis. Je voyais bien comment cela rassurait que cela se passe là-bas, très loin, chez les affreux Américains, résolument d'épais racistes sans éducation et sans manières.

Que ce genre d'abus puissent se passer en France n'est pas imaginable. Je voyais bien dans leurs yeux qu'il fallait que je les rassure, qu'il fallait que je confirme que ÇA, c'est l'Amérique, PAS la France. Parfois, par politesse ou par fatigue, je me taisais. Je renonçais à expliquer, une énième fois, que c'était également la réalité française, tous les jours, systématiquement. Aussi brutale. Aussi vulgaire.

Mais il ne s'agit pas de dosage ici. Le racisme " light " est aussi du racisme. Il fait tout aussi mal. Surtout lorsqu'il perdure innocemment et s'accumule. Le raciste qui s'ignore remplit tout aussi bien sa tâche. Même caché derrière un paternalisme de bon aloi, il reste tout aussi brutal et efficace.

J'aimerais toutefois préciser que quand je parle de racisme en France, je ne parle ni de M. Zemmour, ni de M. Ménard, ni de Marine et consorts, faciles à identifier et qui sont là pour dire tout haut ce que d'autres disent en privé et pour servir de défouloir sociétal. Ce serait trop facile. Ils servent parfaitement bien à cacher la laideur envahissante et le silence de la majorité...

Certains, même dans la bien-pensante gauche française, sont passés maîtres dans l'artifice raciste sublimé, dans un langage nappé de sympathie coupable, qui désarçonne tout autant : " Ne sois pas parano, tu vois le mal partout, sois patient, pardonne-lui, il ne comprend pas, il est en colère, calme-toi, on t'aime beaucoup tu sais, mais tu devrais être plus reconnaissant, je n'étais pas obligé de t'aider, tu pourrais sourire, tu pourrais dire merci, et puis après tout, ce n'est pas si grave, tu t'en remettras, et puis tu es intelligent, tu en as vu d'autres, ce ne sont que des grands enfants, il faut les comprendre ", etc.

Et ceci, tout le temps, sans discontinuer...

La France est dans le déni. James Baldwin dit que l'Amérique aimerait que Birmingham soit sur Mars. Les Français, eux, auraient aimé que le racisme, ça ne soit qu'aux États-Unis. Un jour, il y a déjà longtemps, j'écoutais d'une oreille distraite, un des amis de ma fille, raconter goguenard, un incident avec la police. Du haut de ses 14 ans, frimeur, il raconte comment il avait été gardé dans un commissariat pendant qu'un policier jouait à la roulette russe avec son pistolet pointé sur sa tempe de gosse. Il raconte l'histoire en rigolant. Mais je vois bien dans ses yeux d'enfant que cela laissera des traces. Pour sûr, le policier, lui, ne voit pas un enfant, mais un " délinquant ". Au mieux. Vingt ans après, je me demande encore ce qu'est devenu ce garçon.

C'est facile d'être du bon côté. Quel privilège de pouvoir juger les autres. De pouvoir dire combien " les réfugiés exagèrent ", comment les sans-abri " pourraient faire un effort ", qu'il y a " trop d'étrangers " et qu'on ne porte pas le " bon " prénom. Cela doit même être jouissif. Le pouvoir de dire " ce qu'on veut " sans aucune censure.

Toute ma vie, j'ai toujours dû faire attention à ce que je disais, comment je le disais, à qui je le disais. Cette " liberté de parole " dont on se délecte ici si friamment, j'en connais le prix. Je ne l'ai jamais tenue pour acquise. Face au cynisme ambiant, personne ne risque plus vraiment sa vie pour une cause, à part quelques anarchistes d'une autre époque.

La démocratie, c'est la paix en Europe, mais la guerre ailleurs. Confortablement installés dans un arrondissement sécurisé, nettoyé quotidiennement par des éboueurs " étrangers ", alors que le reste du monde gémit. Ignorez-vous vraiment le prix de votre bien-être ? Ou faites-vous semblant ?

Le racisme ? Juste une partie de la topographie. Car tout est connecté. La recherche de superprofits qui écrase forcément un autre ailleurs, la destruction de la planète, l'exploitation des plus faibles, la haine de l'autre, la consommation à outrance, quel qu'en soit le prix (encore une fois payé par d'autres), tout cela, comme le miroir est brisé, rend négligent et indifférent.

" Jusqu'ici tout va bien ", vous dites-vous, alors que le monde dévale étage après étage vers le fond.

La France, donc, est dans le déni. Et il est temps d'arrêter. Pas demain. Aujourd'hui. Que chaque citoyen prenne sa part du fardeau et arrête d'observer à distance. À l'instar de ces chroniqueurs silencieux regardant une jeune journaliste noire (Hapsatou Sy) se faire insulter et humilier publiquement, comme s'ils n'avaient humainement rien à dire sur le sujet et que la " Noire " était la meilleure " spécialiste " de la question. Ils regardent, circonspects, incapables de solidarité, incapables d'empathie, incapables de décence même, un lynchage public à la télévision française.

" God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time ! "

(" Dieu donna à Noé le signe arc-en-ciel, plus d'eau, le feu la prochaine fois ! ")

L'écrivain James Baldwin a dit tout cela, il y a déjà plus de cinquante ans ! Le même temps que j'ai passé en France. Et ce sont les mêmes qui continuent à payer ! Le coronavirus a rendu visible une part de ces vérités. Mais on est loin du compte. Les orphelins de la République descendent dans la rue, profitant de la vague qui dévaste les États-Unis. Alors qu'une autre jeune femme, Assa Traoré, demande justice depuis plus de quatre ans pour l'assassinat par des policiers de son frère Adama.

" I can't breathe ! " " J'étouffe ! " a également crié Adama. Les policiers étaient français, comme l'est le dispositif mis en place pour étouffer la vérité. Les conjurés locaux n'ont rien à apprendre de leurs collègues américains. Je n'ai jamais cru à la " virginité " de la République, même si je la savais théoriquement capable de grandeur. Elle dépend toujours de la sincérité, du courage, de la clairvoyance des hommes et des femmes qui la servent. Or pour le moment ils sont tétanisés.

Pour finir, comment sortir de cette situation ?

L'État ? Défaillant.

Les partis ? En guerre entre eux, avec de moins en moins de convictions. Inaudibles. Laminés.

Les syndicats ? Chahutés sévèrement depuis cinquante ans, ils ont du mal à trouver la bonne parade.

Les élus ? Certains ont compris. Ils se battent. Mais ils sont isolés. Les maires et les " gens de terrain " ? Peut-être nos seuls espoirs. Car eux, au moins, ils sont obligés de se confronter à l'humain au quotidien. Ils sont dans le réel, dans la vie, la mort, les naissances, le malheur, les fêtes, les enterrements. Dans les bons et les mauvais moments, ils n'ont d'autres choix qu'être présents. Père, mère, confesseur et soignant à la fois. Eux, ils savent. Il faut tout reprendre à la racine. Tout mettre sur la table, pour tout reconstruire. Aucune institution ne doit y échapper. C'est le problème de chaque citoyen, de chaque institution, la presse comprise, de chaque conseil d'administration, de chaque syndicat, de chaque organisation politique, partout il faut ouvrir ce chantier car c'est à vous de résoudre ce problème, pas aux Noirs, ni aux Arabes, ni aux femmes, ni aux homosexuels, ni aux handicapés, ni aux chômeurs. On saura vous rejoindre en temps voulu. Une discussion locale, régionale puis nationale, en totale indépendance du pouvoir. Organiser des états généraux sans avoir à brûler la Bastille ? Un impossible rêve de citoyen ? La République tolérera-t-elle sa remise en question ?

" And here we are, at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands [...]. If we [...] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able [...] to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us : God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time ! "

" Et nous voilà au milieu de la courbe, pris au piège dans le plus voyant, le plus coûteux, le plus invraisemblable toboggan que le monde ait jamais connu. Il nous faut agir maintenant comme si tout dépendait de nous [...]. Si nous nous montrons dignes [...] peut-être la poignée que nous sommes pourra-t-elle mettre fin au cauchemar racial, faire de notre pays un vrai pays et changer le cours de l'histoire. Si nous n'avons pas, et dès aujourd'hui, toutes les audaces, l'accomplissement de cette prophétie, reprise de la Bible dans une chanson écrite par un esclave, est sur nos têtes : Et Dieu dit à Noé / Vois l'arc en le ciel bleu / L'eau ne tombera plus / Il me reste le feu*... "

Ce matin, en me levant... j'ai pleuré. J'ai pensé qu'un autre monde était possible, sans qu'on ait à mettre le feu partout. Maintenant, je ne suis plus sûr du tout.

* James Baldwin, La prochaine fois, le feu (1963), traduit par Michel Sciama, Gallimard, 1963.

Numéro " Être noir en France ", disponible en kiosque et librairie.
Pour s'abonner au 1, rendez-vous ici.

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Ce matin en me levant, j'étais déjà brisé. Il y a eu tant de matins comme celui-là. Et chacun de ces matins laisse des traces. Des traces qui s'accumulent. Puis, ces cauchemars en sommeil, qui reviennent à chaque déflagration. Ce qui se passe en ce moment aux États-Unis me trouble à la nausée.

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Deux sources d'inspiration portent le travail de Maurice Béjart : la musique et ses danseurs. La première, toujours renouvelée, puise dans Wagner, Bach, Berlioz, mais aussi les groupes U2 ou Queen, les chansons de Jacques Brel ou de son amie Barbara. Il citait les compositeurs Pierre Boulez et Pierre Henry comme des socles de sa pensée. Sa collaboration avec ce dernier, qu'il rencontre en 1955, aboutit à un énorme succès, en 1967, Messe pour le temps présent. Ses interprètes, eux, s'appelaient Tania Bari, Paolo Bortoluzzi, Patrick Dupond, Sylvie Guillem, Rudolf Noureev. Jorge Donn, fidèle complice qui fit toute sa carrière de danseur auprès de lui, jusqu'à sa mort, en 1992, reste une icône béjartienne.

Rosita Boisseau, Le Monde du 23 novembre 2007

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Symphonie pour un homme seul
Une "naissance chorégraphique", c'est ainsi que Béjart parle de Symphonie pour un homme seul, son premier succès, présenté à Paris en 1955, et dans lequel il impose son style physique et expressif. Sur une partition des compositeurs d’avant-garde Pierre Henry et Pierre Schaeffer, le chorégraphe s'y met seul en scène.

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Messe pour le temps présent est présenté pour la première fois au Festival d’Avignon. Un franc succès pour cette vingtaine de danseurs portant des jeans et qui interprètent la partition électroacoustique commandée à Pierre Henry, fidèle collaborateur de Maurice Béjart, et Michel Colombier.

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Flying Lamppost Boats: The Beautifully Bonkers 1880s Plan For The Paris Métro

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"great men and their environment" 1880 - william james

HOW TO STRAY FROM HABITUAL SUGGESTION:

take
the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another,

the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations,

the most unheard-of combinations of elements,

 the subtlest associations of analogy;

in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzing and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, t readmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.

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Où en est le conflit syrien ?
La Russie, qui soutient le régime de Bachar el-Assad, a mené des raids aériens près de la province d’Idleb dans le nord-ouest de la Syrie le 3 juin après trois mois de trêve, selon l’Observatoire syrien des droits de l’homme (OSDH), une organisation proche de l’opposition syrienne et disposant d’un réseau d’informateurs sur le terrain. La trêve avait été conclue début mars entre la Russie et la Turquie, qui soutient certains rebelles syriens. Le ministre russe des Affaires étrangères, Sergueï Lavrov, a annoncé hier la tenue d’un prochain sommet avec la Turquie et l’Iran sur le conflit syrien, sans en préciser la date. Les trois pays avaient signé en 2017 l’accord d’Astana, portant sur la création de zones de cessez-le-feu en Syrie. Selon un bilan du mois de mars de l’OSDH, la guerre en Syrie a fait au moins 380 000 morts et 12 millions de déplacés depuis son début en 2011

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Quelle est l’ampleur de la crise économique en Syrie ?
La Banque centrale de Syrie a révisé aujourd’hui le taux de change qu’elle fixe entre la livre syrienne et le dollar. Il est passé de 704 livres à 1 256 livres pour un dollar. Déjà fragilisée par neuf années de guerre, l’économie syrienne l'est aussi par la crise économique au Liban voisin. Selon le Programme alimentaire mondial, une agence de l’ONU, les prix des produits alimentaires de base ont plus que doublé entre avril 2019 et avril 2020 et 9,3 millions d’habitants sont en situation d’insécurité alimentaire, soit environ un sur deux. Depuis le 7 juin, des manifestations ont eu lieu dans trois villes contre la vie chère. Le président syrien, Bachar el-Assad, avait pris au cours des mois précédents des mesures instaurant par exemple un rationnement des denrées subventionnées comme le sucre ou le riz. Le 11 juin, il a limogé son Premier ministre, Imad Khamis.

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y'avait un gars qui se faisait appeler "tikka masala" par ses potes

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La première conférence sur le climat a réuni, en 1979, des spécialistes qui ont principalement appelé à intensifier la recherches et à prévenir le changement climatique d'origine humaine. Le rapport Charney a été publié la même année : il s'agit du premier document consensuel dans laquelle la science moderne prédit un réchauffement en raison du renforcement de l'effet de serre.

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"How dare you?" - Emotional Greta Thunberg attacks world leaders

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Le Passant

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Une journée dans la vie de deux garçons qui n'ont apparemment rien en commun. Pour l'un, c'est son dernier jour, l'autre a encore toute une vie devant lui. Ils se croisent dans la rue...
Courts métrages en compétition, Festival international du film d'animation d'Annecy 2020

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Une journée dans la vie de deux garçons qui n'ont apparemment rien en commun. Pour l'un, c'est son dernier jour, l'autre a encore toute une vie devant lui. Ils se croisent dans la rue... Courts métrages en compétition, Festival international du film d'animation d'Annecy 2020

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Preventing pedophilia / sexual reconditioning

We say we’re really concerned about sex offending and we really don’t want children to be sexually offended and we don’t want adults to be raped, but we don’t do anything to prevent it. We put most of our energy into criminal justice, which means that the offense has already happened and often many offenses have already happened.

A primary interest means a person is sexually focused on children but can also be aroused by those who are more age-appropriate. Exclusive attraction is when someone feels no sexual desire for anyone but prepubescent kids. Letourneau is curious if young pedophiles who show even a slight interest in their peers might respond to treatment that attempts to redirect their attention into that corner. For most people, our age of attraction increases as we mature, suggesting that it is variable. She wonders if pedophilic adolescents can be encouraged to develop acceptable sexual desires, but acknowledges that it wouldn’t be effective for those with exclusive attraction.

Historically, attempts to change sexual impulses have included arousal reconditioning, which involves, essentially, getting men to masturbate to fantasies of their preferred target and then switching to something more socially acceptable right before climax

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There's no helpline for pedophiles who want treatment before they act. So a teen with a terrible secret had to find his own way to save himself and others like him.

By Luke Malone
Illustrations by Simon Prades

Adam was at his desk in the second-story bedroom of his family's suburban home when he came across it. He had recently switched file-sharing programs to one that offered more content and faster browsing, and his downloading habit had increased in kind. There was now a constant stream of files whose names included acronyms such as PTHC, or pre-teen hardcore.

The boy in this video was fair-haired and looked to be about one and a half, his small, naked body tied up to restrict movement. A man's torso entered the frame and the child began to scream. As he watched the scene unfold, Adam was transfixed, and then quickly revolted; he reached over and stopped the video. It wasn't like anything he'd witnessed in the two years he'd been viewing child pornography. Until now everything he'd seen seemed to suggest that the kids liked it, but this toddler was clearly in pain.

He moved over to his bed, a twin with a sturdy, wooden frame, and lay down on the crumpled blue and white cloud-print sheet. Band posters clung to the surrounding walls. Directly across from the foot of the bed was a bookshelf housing an impressive collection of horror novels. Atop the shelf sat several chess and baseball trophies whose silver sheen had been dulled by dust, and he stared up at them as he tried to process what he had just seen. He felt, he told me later, a combination of anger, sadness, and confusion.

Seeing that toddler trussed up and in pain confirmed something he'd long suspected but now had to acknowledge. The man in the video was one of those guys they sometimes talked about on the news. Though Adam didn't want to hurt anyone, he knew that, on some level, he was just like him. He was 16 years old, he was a pedophile, and he had to do something about it.

We have a few go-to archetypes when it comes to pedophilia: There is the playground lurker, the chat-room predator, and the monstrous (often religious) authority figure. These men are usually middle-aged, unrepentant serial abusers who are caught only after remaining undetected for years. But what about the preceding decades? When do these urges first begin to manifest?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines a pedophile as an individual who "over a period of at least six months" has "recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children." This person also has to have "acted on these sexual urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty," and be "at least age 16 years and at least five years older than the child or children" involved.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that most pedophiles first notice an attraction toward children when they themselves are between 11 and 16, mirroring that of any other sexual awakening. It can be a confusing time for any of us, but imagine realizing that you're attracted to little kids. How do these young men and women negotiate that with no viable role models or support network? There is no It Gets Better for pedophiles. Are they all fated to end up as child molesters? Or is it possible for them to live a life without hurting children at all?

I spoke with experts and asked around online. I came across a site for self-described pedophiles who acknowledged their attraction and wanted help dealing with it. But the men I met were in their 50s and 60s, and I'd hoped to speak with someone younger, someone still coming to terms with what he was learning about himself. I asked them if they knew anyone like that, and a few weeks later I received an email.

"My name is Adam," it read. "I'm 18 and non-exclusively attracted to boys and girls of all ages (particularly very young ones). I am the leader of a support group for non-offending pedophiles around my age... I would be very happy to talk with you."

Adam is now 20 (his name, like those of other young men in this article, has been changed). He has a slightly chubby build and messy, medium-brown hair. The first time we spoke at length about his attractions, we were sitting in his old, beat-up car, in the lot of a park near the house he shares with his parents and two older brothers. It had become our regular meeting place. Outside the car, locals chatted among themselves while herding frisky Labradors and Weimaraners into the backs of jeeps; two kids roughhoused in the dirt next to us until their father asked them to stop.

Talking about his pedophilic urges, Adam refused to look me in the eye, though he often stole glances when he thought I wasn't looking. He first noticed his attraction toward young children when he was 11. He'd developed a crush on a kindergartener at school, a boy, his desire fueled by brief, furtive glimpses of him in the halls. By the time he reached 16, his sexual interest in kids had become more defined. He found himself attracted primarily to boys between three and seven and girls aged five to eight.

When I pressed him about what he finds most attractive in a child, he shifted in the car seat from side to side, and eventually managed to say: "Small body, hairless legs, you know, things like that... like small genitalia." But there is a strong emotional pull, a potent idea of innocence that, he explained, is far more intoxicating than anatomy. "A lot of us tend to have, I think, unrealistic views of kids," he said. "To the point that they're kind of angelic." This purity, he told me, is what keeps in check his urge to act on his desires. "I see an innocence in children that would be violated," he said.

It is why the video of the toddler, out of everything he'd seen, rattled him. There was no denying that the boy was being debased. The bound child was wailing as the man defecated on him, though his cries were soon replaced with choking splutters as his abuser began urinating in his mouth. "I wanted to reach through the computer screen and kill the person," Adam said. "I was just so horrified at what I saw."

I asked him what happened in the days and weeks after he'd watched the video, and he admitted he didn't stop downloading child porn straight away. He tried his best to abstain, often going weeks, but would end up back in front of the computer. He scoured the internet looking for a way to help him break his porn "addiction" and deal with his attraction to children, and ended up at a general mental health forum. This site stated that new visitors must offer an introductory message. "I know that pedophiles don't choose to be pedophiles," he wrote. "I didn't want my attraction. I don't want my attraction. But the attraction is there, and all I can do is try to curb it."

Instead of posting it right away, he went to bed and masturbated to child porn. "I actually felt okay about that because I reasoned that I was taking the first step toward getting help," he said. "I guess like a drug addict enlisting in rehab and then using one last time before it starts." He published it the following morning.

The response to his post was mixed. Some commenters were working through their own abuse history, and couldn't stomach the idea of helping a self-confessed pedophile. But two female sexual-abuse survivors eventually came forward, convinced that he was of an age where a change could still be made. One of them, Adam believes, had suffered particularly brutal abuse, abuse that was filmed, and their conversations about the evils of child pornography would often trigger her past traumas. "She cared about me," he said. "But she made it known that she felt I deserved whatever the law decided to do with me if I were caught for the CP [child porn]."

More than once she kept him distracted from watching porn until the early hours of the morning, when he was tired enough to go to sleep.

His pornography habit, of course, was merely symptomatic of a larger issue. It took him a long time, he told me, to accept that his desire for young boys wasn't simply going to evaporate just because he'd stopped downloading and watching videos, and he grew increasingly despondent trying to suppress these feelings. "I was passively suicidal for a long time. I went six months without seeking actual help aside from online," he said.

One night, while his father was out, Adam walked into his parents' room and handed a note to his mother as she was lying in bed. "Read this," he said. Paula (whose name has also been changed) looked up at him and opened her mouth to speak but changed her mind when she saw the expression on his face. He slipped back out of the room and she considered the letter for a moment, turning it over in her hands. She got up and walked down the hall to Adam's bedroom, and found him curled up in bed with his back to the door. She called out to him, but he pretended he was already asleep.

Not knowing what else to do, she walked back to her room and unfolded the note. When Adam sent me a copy of it years later, he told me he couldn't read past the first few lines, the memory of this time still so raw for him.
Dear Mommy, I am writing this letter to you as I cannot bring myself to say what I need to say to you to your face. It would simply be too painful for me, and I don't want you to see me cry and struggle, nor do I want you to be pained by seeing me do so... I find that I am seldom happy, and very rarely go through days when I am entirely happy... I am always overshadowed with feelings of depression, guilt and shame. I'm really sick and tired of covering these feelings up... I want you to let me see a psychologist, and for both your and my own privacy, I don't want you to be in any way acquainted with him/her... I understand that you probably have a lot to ask me, but I need some time to get my head wrapped around things. I thank you in advance for my privacy. Love, Adam.
He didn't explain the source of his depression and his mother decided not to ask. The next morning, she pulled him aside and told him she would find him a local therapist who took their insurance.

It was a Friday morning when Adam went to see her. As he sat with his mother in the waiting room, the reality of what was about to happen washed over him. He was overwhelmed. He was about to vocalize a secret he'd only ever previously admitted to strangers on the internet.

He was called into her office, his heart racing as he stepped toward the door. She closed it behind them, offered him a seat, and began the session with questions familiar to anyone who has been in therapy, "family history, how many siblings I have," that kind of thing. She scribbled his answers down in a notepad, and then asked why he had come to see her. Adam had never in his life felt such dread. His body began to shake as he explained that he suffered from anxiety. She asked what was making him anxious, and he just blurted it out: "I'm a pedophile and I'm addicted to child pornography."

She blinked at him for a moment and then asked him to repeat himself. When he did, her mood changed. "She just became extremely cold and harsh," he said. "She even, a few times, almost got to the level of shouting." She suggested that he was simply nervous around kids his own age - a reaction I've learned is common among therapists with limited experience in this area. She told him she wasn't trained to deal with the situation, but she would ask around for information on how to help him and scheduled a second session for a couple of weeks later.

I asked Adam why he agreed to see her again, and he said he felt he had no choice: "I didn't have anything else, you know?" He soon found himself back in the waiting room with his mother. "I walk in, she asks how I'm doing, and she seems a little bit more sympathetic," he said. "But she told me pretty much right away, 'I can't do this. I have to tell your mom.'"

There is currently no mechanism for treating someone who has pedophilic urges and hasn't acted on them. A major roadblock is the existence of mandatory reporting laws, which dictate that people in certain professions must report suspicion of child abuse and neglect to Child Protective Services. (The individuals required to make a report varies from state to state; it can include all citizens but is usually restricted to those whose work puts them in regular contact with children, such as teachers, police, and psychologists.)

Mandated reporting revolutionized the way child abuse is handled in the U.S. and has brought many incidents to light, but it can be problematic for young men like Adam who haven't abused children. The civil and criminal liabilities facing those who fail to report someone who goes on to molest a kid, combined with the fact that it need only be based on suspicion and not probable cause, means a report could be triggered when well-intentioned individuals reach out for help. The overwhelming number of minor-attracted men I spoke with said this was too much of a deterrent. Which also makes it harder to learn more about them.

There is a lot we still don't know about pedophilia-one researcher described our scientific understanding of it as a series of "pretty big black holes." We don't know, for example, how someone comes by an attraction for prepubescent children in the first place. The research we do have, and this is derived from very small sample sizes, suggests that those attracted to kids tend to be shorter, left-handed, and have a lower IQ than the broader population. Another study found that being knocked unconscious before the age of 13 might be a factor. This may sound like quackery, but it points toward biological causation. In other words, it's likely that pedophiles are born this way.

Things are a little clearer when it comes to the numbers. Studies suggest that up to 9 percent of men have fantasized about having sex with a prepubescent child, and 3 percent of all men have gone on to sexually offend. (Not all of them would meet the diagnostic criteria for pedophilia. The latter figure includes situational offenders, men who abuse children if the opportunity arises but who otherwise have no pre-existing attraction to kids.) Michael Seto, director of the University of Ottawa's Forensic Research Unit and associate editor of Sexual Abuse: A Journal of Research and Treatment, believes that the prevalence of male pedophiles sits closer to 1 percent of the population, which would equate to at least 1.2 million in the U.S. alone. (Female pedophiles exist, but in smaller numbers.)

The distinction between fantasies and behavior is an important one to make. Our failure to acknowledge the existence of pedophiles who choose not to act on their desires not only prevents them from coming forward to seek help but is also an obstacle when it comes to gaining support for therapeutic intervention. Seto told me there is evidence to suggest that there are a significant number of men who are sexually attracted to children and struggling, often alone, to keep their urges in check. "If you did a survey of the general public," Seto said, "I think a large majority would assume that anyone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children has acted on it."

"The first thing that I recall the therapist saying is 'We've got a problem,'" said Adam's mom, Paula. She knew something was up when she first entered the room. She saw her son staring at the floor, "not speaking... practically not breathing, he wasn't moving a muscle, other than he was shaking." And then the therapist told her why she was there.

"I was really, really shocked. I thought we were going to be talking about depression. That wasn't even on my radar of what I thought could even come up as part of the problem," she said. "It immediately entered my mind that perhaps somebody had abused him. How else could this have happened? How else could he have even thought to do that if he wasn't abused?"

But while victimization is a risk factor for perpetration, it's not a given, and the majority of abused children do not go on to offend. Paula believes her son when he says it's not the case. "If it had already come out that he was engaged in looking at child pornography, why would he then hold back on the other component?" she said. "It would have been easier, I think, from his position to say that something had happened to him and then he is considered a victim."

Paula hasn't told anyone about what she learned about her son - not a friend, not a therapist of her own, not her husband. Our conversations were the first she's had about it since finding out. "Nobody," she said, with a melancholic laugh, when I asked who she turns to for support. "I can be certain that his dad would not have, I don't think could have, handled it in a similar way as myself. He's just much more emotionally reactive."

But it doesn't mean she hasn't been thinking about it. I was surprised by how eager she was to talk about Adam, and so directly. In fact, discussing her son's attraction to children seemed to come as a relief. "It is something I'm aware of when I lay down to sleep and I'm aware of it when I get up," she said. "It's always on my mind."

Paula copes by being pragmatic. She helped her son find a new therapist, one better equipped to help him deal with his attractions. And when that new therapist suggested he remove all information on the two computers he used to access child porn, so as to reduce temptation and possible legal ramifications, she led the charge. "Adam told me that the only way to do that would be to actually replace the hard drives, because writing over them or just deleting information does not actually get rid of it-it's still embedded, it's still there," she said, adding that they destroyed the originals. "I didn't want him to be at any risk whatsoever, and I felt the thing to do was to immediately get rid of it."

Her concern was hardly disproportionate to the potential repercussions. Possession of child pornography carries statutory penalties under federal and state law. These penalties can be so severe that those caught with child porn can receive longer sentences than those convicted of child abuse. Because the videos he downloaded included children under 12 years old, a first-time offender like Adam might have been fined $100,000 and sentenced up to 20 years in prison; the maximum term can be increased to 40 years for those with prior convictions.

Paula said her greatest fear is that he might one day go back to viewing child porn, but, after a little pressing, she acknowledged a larger concern. "I know that he has had thoughts, I know that he's had urges... I know that when people have urges and thoughts that they can progress to actions, and of course I worry that could happen," she said. "I don't want there to be any victims. I mean, every child is very important. My son is important to me, and I would feel horrible if he was abused and I would feel horrible if he abused, so there's no winners there."

She and her son hadn't spoken directly about that day at the therapist's office, much less the underlying issue, in the intervening three years. They only recently resumed the discussion when I persuaded Adam to ask if she'd be willing to speak with me. This has forced Paula to come to terms with things she was able to avoid before. He told her he identifies as a pedophile and "it is his expectation that this is going to be a very long, lifetime struggle." It was painful to hear, though, important. But she remains hopeful for his future.

"Best-case scenario is that this never happened and this never could happen to my son or anybody's son, but that bubble has already popped because bad things do happen to good people and good sons and good mothers," she said. "The next best-case scenario would be to be able to live with this burden and live a normal and happy and productive life... I want him to be happy, to not feel depressed about this, and to be able to fulfill all of his dreams that were there before and that should continue to be available to him even living with this."

Adam's new therapist put him on Zoloft and taught him to resist the urge to identify with the child molesters he encountered in the media. "A lot of it was, 'I'm a monster' for having viewed that stuff but also just for having these attractions," he said. "What you hear in the media and online and how people talk, it sinks in, you know? You don't even question it. It's just kind of a fact."

But his sense of social isolation wasn't so easily remedied, and his thoughts about young children were as strong as ever. He had maintained an active presence on the mental health message boards, but said most of the members he knew were abuse survivors, depressives, or alcoholics - no one who could truly understand what he was struggling with on a daily basis.

One day he typed the words "young pedophile" into Google, and his original thread on the mental health board was the first entry to come up. But when he started to scroll down he saw similar entries on other boards, ones with headlines like "I'm a young pedophile and I need some help" and "How can I get free counseling? I'm a teenage pedophile." Desperate for someone to relate to, he started reaching out. "I'd say, 'I'm a pedophile. I used to have a child porn addiction. I know what you're going through,'" he said. "'You obviously need help, and I know someone else around our age who's like that. I think we could be a good support for you and vice versa.'"

This is how he began communicating with other young pedophiles around the world. In turn, they introduced him to those they had managed to find. Distinct from the idea of a malevolent pedophile ring, these young men - and occasionally young women - said they didn't want to hurt children and were trying to find a way to make sure they never would. Some messaged back and forth before dropping off ("They probably got scared that it was a sting operation," said Adam), but one by one a cluster of regulars formed. Before long Adam had inadvertently established an informal online support group for pedophiles in their teens and early 20s who want help battling their attraction toward children.

Speaking with members of the group, it's apparent their concern about detection sits close to the surface - each citing a fear of rejection by family and friends, and the unwanted attention of law enforcement. Yet, Adam explained that many are willing to risk it rather than continue to battle their demons alone. "For a pedophile, there is almost no place to go and get information or any sort of help," he said. "I'm sure that there are pedophiles who kill themselves who never come out as that. Who never admit to it, even in a suicide letter. I think there's probably a lot more than people would realize."

There are currently nine members, ranging in age from 16 to 22, eight men and one woman, though Adam said others have come and gone over the years. Some members hail from as far abroad as the Philippines, but language barriers confine most participants to the U.S. and the U.K. His group has two rules. The first is that you can't have offended or harbor any intention to do so; those who question the concept are banished if they can't be convinced otherwise. The second is a commitment to stopping the use of child pornography. Adam told me it's okay if you come into the group as a user, but you must be devoted to quitting.

Adam's mom recently found out about the group. Realizing that support is elusive to those in his situation, she accepts it. But she also harbors reservations about them operating without the oversight of professionals. "We need to understand the problem so that we can find appropriate ways to fix it. The way to help is to identify anyone that wants help," Paula said. "We have to make connections. Just as they have things like hotlines for people to come forward and get help with problems they're having, there has to be something available and advertised for young people that may be having these thoughts and these urges."

"Anyone that's done treatment with people who have sexually offended know that many of them are horrified by their behaviors," Elizabeth Letourneau, founding director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at Johns Hopkins University, told me. "A lot of these guys don't want to be sexually abusing children."

We first met at her office one dreary afternoon last February. Out the window, whose sill was flanked by framed photos of her two sons, you could see rain gently blanketing downtown Baltimore. The center's core mission is "to try to change the way the nation views child sexual abuse, as something that is preventable." From a desk piled high with books and manila folders full of journal articles, she continued: "We say we're really concerned about sex offending and we really don't want children to be sexually offended and we don't want adults to be raped, but we don't do anything to prevent it. We put most of our energy into criminal justice, which means that the offense has already happened and often many offenses have already happened."

Letourneau is the only U.S. researcher developing science and policy in the field of primary prevention. She wants to implement a program, separate to her work at the center, that provides preventive therapy for non-offenders and offenders alike. Her focus will be on adolescents, at least initially. She believes that early intervention is more effective and that teenagers pose less of a threat to potential funders and review boards. She would also like to get parents involved, though this would present its own challenges. "The risk that you face when you have to pull in a parent and a kid is that you're going to lose some kids who are not able to talk about this to their parent, out of fear or shame or embarrassment," she said. "We will miss some important subgroups."

Adam told me that, when it comes to pedophilia, there are other distinctions beyond age and gender preference - most notably, primary and exclusive attraction. A primary interest means a person is sexually focused on children but can also be aroused by those who are more age-appropriate. Exclusive attraction is when someone feels no sexual desire for anyone but prepubescent kids. Letourneau is curious if young pedophiles who show even a slight interest in their peers might respond to treatment that attempts to redirect their attention into that corner. For most people, our age of attraction increases as we mature, suggesting that it is variable. She wonders if pedophilic adolescents can be encouraged to develop acceptable sexual desires, but acknowledges that it wouldn't be effective for those with exclusive attraction.

Historically, attempts to change sexual impulses have included arousal reconditioning, which involves, essentially, getting men to masturbate to fantasies of their preferred target and then switching to something more socially acceptable right before climax. But there is also the opposite, like satiation training, where patients masturbate to fantasies over and over again until they are drained of desire.

I suggested to Letourneau that talk of sexual reconditioning strongly echoes the tactics of gay conversion therapy, a harmful and wholly unsuccessful pseudoscience, and she was quick to distance herself. "It's a horrible legacy of psychology and psychiatry," she agreed. "It seems kind of archaic, actually. And, frankly, ethically challenging to do with kids. So coming up with a viable way that is respectful of the person, the child and the parent, but also effective... I don't know what that's going to look like. I have no idea. I don't want it to look like arousal reconditioning, I can tell you that."

Dr. Klaus Beier doesn't believe in sexual reconditioning. He leads the team behind Prevention Project Dunkelfeld, a therapeutic program based in Germany that targets potential offenders. He believes that minor attraction is a fixed part of someone's makeup, that it's "fate and not choice." His program is considered the global gold standard of preventive treatment, and its practitioners help adults manage their attraction to children rather than try to change it. "In my view, it's not the inclination that's a problem," he said. "And I wouldn't condemn the inclination, I'd condemn the behavior." The program consists of weekly therapy sessions for up to 12 months. They favor cognitive behavioral therapy, but also offer libido-reducing medication, otherwise known as chemical castration, if a patient needs to reduce his sexual drive in order to benefit from treatment.

The cornerstone of the program, according to Beier, is confidentiality. Germany doesn't have mandated reporting, and that, he said, makes it easier for men to seek treatment. The project's aim is to bring as many undetected men forward as possible, which is more easily achieved when you remove the threat of punitive action. This includes men who have already molested a child in addition to non-offending pedophiles. In English, Dunkelfeld translates to "dark field." Beier said most cases of child sexual abuse go unreported, and though it can be ethically challenging to suggest that sex offenders evade immediate prosecution, he and his colleagues believe that it's better to bring them into the light for the sake of preventing further instances of abuse.

"Telling the police would not be the first step we would choose," said Dunkelfeld's research coordinator, Gerold Scherner. "If we know about this, we will talk about it frankly and openly: What happened? What can you do? How safe is the child?"

In the United States, researchers can apply for a Certificate of Confidentiality. These federal certificates, if granted, protect the privacy of research study participants and can offer temporary exemptions from mandatory reporting laws. But there has been only one certificate granted in the area of pedophilia research. Between 1977 and 1985, Dr. Gene Abel interviewed 561 unidentified sex offenders in order to better understand this under-researched population. No one has been given one since.

It's a hard ask, but Letourneau is considering applying for a certificate when she launches her new program. She doesn't know if she'll have much luck. "I'd like to be able to include youth who have offended but who are undetected, and the reason for that is that if they're undetected they're gonna stay undetected," she said. "Do you want them to get help or not? For my money, you really want to be working with the kids who have already started offending, because those are the ones most likely to offend again."

"It's not that I don't want to see a therapist," said Mike, a 21-year-old on the West Coast. "It's just that I don't feel that I can see a therapist."

I had been speaking with Mike online for two months before he agreed to let me fly out and meet in person. We met in the parking lot of a local supermarket and wound up talking in front of a Starbucks. He is pale and slight, and has a long face dominated by high cheekbones, wide brown eyes and dark, curly hair.Unlike Adam, he is outwardly confident and unguarded; he talks fast, casually jumping from one topic to the next, and has no reservations about discussing his attraction to children. He explained that he maintains a clear distinction between those he feels sexually attracted to and those with whom he feels a close paternal bond. He told me he only feels an erotic pull to girls aged seven to 12, and that for two-to-six-year-olds it's more of a protective, almost brotherly instinct. He said this is what makes him such a good preschool teacher.

He is currently studying child development, and substitute teaches part-time for a pre-kindergarten program. He plans to continue working with kids up to six when he graduates from college, and said his connection to children helps him relate to them better. "I've had people say, 'If you don't go into teaching you're doing the world a disservice. Like, you're brilliant, why would you not?'" he said. "I never felt like I shouldn't be here, this is dangerous... Long-term maybe this is a bad idea, but in the moment, right now where I'm at, I'm fine."

Mike first noticed his sexual interest in children at 13, when he developed a crush on a girl he used to babysit. She was around three at the time and would strip naked and run around the house. "I was aware of it but it was like, well, it will go away," he said. "I'm 13, so I'm transitioning from girls without boobs to girls with boobs." He said he never acted on it, but that doesn't mean he wasn't tempted, admitting that he would find himself overcome with curiosity when he changed her diaper. "I'd want to touch her and that's kind of as far as anything went," he said.

When he started his teaching placement, he created a strict set of rules: staying away from the bathroom area where possible and avoiding any physical contact with the children. He said he would tense up when the more playful kids approached him for a hug. This wasn't so much to keep the children safe, he told me, as to ensure people wouldn't become wary of him. Which was something his dad warned him about when he first started. "He's like, 'People are going to be suspicious of you simply because you're a guy. Don't do anything stupid,'" he said. "And, honestly, I wonder if that had anything to do with it, because that kind of freaked me out."

Adam asked Mike to be the first one to join the group in mid-2011, and they've communicated almost daily since. He said he's not worried that Mike will abuse the children in his care, but he does wonder why he would leave himself open to temptation. "As much as I support Mike, and I'm definitely very close with him, his becoming a teacher is never something I've supported," he said. "And not because I think he'd slip up, because I honestly believe very firmly that he wouldn't, but I think he's going to torture himself a lot in that position. I think that's not going to make him very happy."

Like Adam, Mike grew increasingly depressed while grappling with his desires. He never made active plans to commit suicide, but told me that he thought about it and knew what to do if the time came. "If I had a sawn-off shotgun, that would be it," he said. "I don't want to take pills because I could come back from that." Ultimately, he felt he couldn't kill himself and leave his family with no context for what he had done, and instead hoped that God would take care of matters for him. "But at the same time, I was still... It would be nice if I got hit by a car or I got really sick," he said.

More than anyone else I spoke with, Mike seems like he could benefit from having a professional to talk to, and not just because of his proximity to children. I was taken by his urgent need to disclose information others might have a hard time expressing. Late one afternoon we were sitting in his car in the parking lot of a different shopping mall. After hours of conversation, I suggested that we wrap for the day and he flat-out refused, telling me in an uncharacteristically abrupt tone that he had to get it out. We continued speaking until the encroaching shadows finally met and turned to darkness, stopping only when the center's cleaning staff began arriving for their night's work.

In place of therapy, Mike leans on Adam and the group. They talk via email, text, telephone, and Skype, but their primary tool of communication is Gchat, where they can speak in groups or have multiple conversations at the same time. If arguments break out among members they look to Adam, their default leader, for advice.

In the beginning they were all pretty fragile, wrestling with this dark secret and what it meant for their futures. But once they'd exhausted talk of their attraction to children and the unique set of issues that come with it, they turned to far more routine topics: chatting about computer games or The Walking Dead, or sharing random YouTube clips.

Adam told me that sometimes they'd tease each other about peer-aged crushes, offering relationship advice and egging each other on to ask people out. "I talked to Mike a fair bit about dating. Partly about the guy I dated for a little while and partly about this girl in his class who he wanted to ask out. He'd find every excuse in the world not to do so, and I'd be supportive by trying to push him to take the leap," he said. "We did talk about everyday things that most everyone else in the world has to deal with."

James, 22, is another member of the group, and the only registered sex offender. In May 2011 he was convicted of indecent liberty with a minor and sent to prison. Adam was reluctant to break the group's most fundamental rule by letting him join, but eventually became convinced of his commitment not to reoffend. Since then, they've grown close. " We talk about the obvious subject of being a pedophile, you can't get around that," James said, adding that it's lost some of its urgency over the years. "We just think about it as if we're both fans of this sports team. We sit there and talk about it in that same direction, but we can immediately turn around and talk about something else. To other people it's a huge deal, but to us it's just life. Life as it is. We've been living with it our whole lives."

When I asked Adam to show me examples of their chats, he said they no longer keep records for security reasons. But, after some digging, he eventually found a handful of logs from the early days. The conversations in the documents he sent me veered from mundane to earnest, among them a discussion of whether shotacon or lolicon - manga and anime depictions of intergenerational sex - are morally acceptable alternatives to child porn. On several occasions it seemed like they were testing the waters with each other, admitting suspect behavior and then waiting for the other one to respond.

1:46 PM Mike: so you're right  i do have a problem i've started googling pictures of girls in their underwear and such on a regular basis so fucking awful 1:47 PM Adam: ...you need to stop this before it's too late if I can, so can you Mike: yeah ive even seen some CP show up in the results Adam: :o Mike: that was really disturbing it wasn't serious Adam: did you look at it? Mike: no admittedly I kinda wanted to though 1:48 PM Adam: you need to stop

Adam's group of young pedophiles isn't the only such self-help resource on the internet. There is B4U-ACT, a Maryland-based outfit with around 100 subscribers, which offers peer support services to pedophiles and guidelines for accessing mental health providers who might be willing to help. However, the moderators of B4U-ACT claim that because they're not a research organization they can't say whether all instances of adult-child sex are intrinsically harmful. "But we do support and would advocate for minor-attracted people to live law-abiding lives," said Matthew Hutton, the group's spokesperson, who uses a pseudonym to protect his identity. "Even though we acknowledge the existence of research in the past that might say that some sort of contact between teenagers and older people might not be so harmful."

This ambiguity made Adam and some others uncomfortable, and it's why he didn't stick around for long after signing up. A splinter group was formed, named Virtuous Pedophiles. Now the largest pedophile support group in the U.S., its 318 active members are clear in their belief that sex with children is wrong. The founders, Ethan Edwards and Nick Devin (also pseudonyms), both family men with children, enact this policy with tight moderation. If someone is seen to be voicing the opinion that minor sex is acceptable, he gets a warning. Repeat offenders are ousted from the group. The membership list is also restricted to those aged 18 and over, lest they be accused of wrongdoing.

While Adam contributes to discussions there from time to time, his focus remains on the young men who come to his own group for help. James, for one, speaks with a clear reverence for Adam. Though his status as a sex offender means he must attend court-mandated therapy, it is Adam and the others that he credits with helping keep him on the right path. It's also not lost on him that, for everyone else, it is the only lifeline they have. "If they want help, if they want to be better, to try and fix their behavior and be a better person, he's never given up on them," he said. "He didn't give up on me, he didn't give up on Mike, he never gave up on any of us."

When I told Professor Letourneau that I was in contact with a group of young, non-offending pedophiles, she seemed taken aback. In her 25 years in the field she's had plenty of experience with juveniles who have abused children, but she had never met a pedophile who hasn't. It seemed strange to me considering her line of work, but she explained that, because such pedophiles rarely come forward, researchers have no way of accessing this particular segment of the population. "I don't know anyone else who has made it a goal to talk to young people who have an attraction to younger people," she said.

I asked her if she'd like to be put in touch with the group, and she jumped at the chance. After speaking with four of them over the phone, which she described as "kind of a life-altering experience," she flew out and met Adam face-to-face, and has been speaking with him regularly ever since. She said they have taught her things about pedophilia that she didn't know before, and it's giving her a clearer understanding of how these attractions develop. She's now using this information to modify her proposed treatment plan and has brought Adam on as an official advisor.

"I'm not a teenage boy attracted to children, and so I don't know what that experience is like," she said. "They all describe years of just agonizing self-hatred, agonizing fear of being detected as having sexual interest in children, viewing themselves as monsters, being afraid to look for help... If they could have just turned to someone to talk about this, a professional who's going to treat this objectively and see them as a person of worth, who's going to know that they're not bad kids, that they're good kids but they have this aspect of them that they really need help controlling. That's what they're looking for and that's what I hope we can provide."

Adam's input has helped expedite the pilot program she's putting together, aimed at pedophiles aged 17 and under. If successful, it will provide the foundation for a comprehensive preventive model, which she hopes to eventually expand to include pedophiles of all ages, that will be rolled out online and to therapists across the country. Though it's in the early planning stages, Letourneau imagines it will involve disabusing them of the notion that sex with children is ever appropriate, improving self-esteem in light of a situation that might not change, and strengthening social interaction with their peers. In many ways, it's an extension of what Adam has been doing with his group for the past three years.

The last time I saw Adam in person we found ourselves sitting, once again, in his car. We had been talking for a few hours and were about to finish up when I asked him what it feels like to be not only a pedophile, but something of a pioneer. He paused for a moment before answering. "It's one part of what defines me. You know, a small part of the puzzle," he said. "Part of me is a pedophile but that's not all I am. I'm also, I think, a very decent person in a lot of other ways. I'm definitely a very caring person... I have hobbies, I have interests, I have studies, and things like that all put together define who I am."

This story was written by Luke Malone. It was edited by Mark Lotto, fact-checked by Hilary Elkins, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi. Illustrations by Simon Prades. A version of this story first appeared on This American Life.

Read more: Editor Mark Lotto discusses the graphic nature of this story, and art director Erich Nagler talks about how to illustrate the most horrifying piece in the world.
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You're 16. You're a Pedophile. You Don't Want to Hurt Anyone. What Do You Do Now?

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By Luke Malone Illustrations by Simon Prades Adam was at his desk in the second-story bedroom of his family's suburban home when he came across it. He had recently switched file-sharing programs to one that offered more content and faster browsing, and his downloading habit had increased in kind.

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Martin Parr "Real food"

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Martin Parr’s Real Food • Magnum Photos Magnum Photos

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English photographer Martin Parr documents the notion that we are what we eat, capturing a kaleidoscope of foods from around the globe for ‘Real Food’

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Lateral thinking is classic pseudoscience, derivative and untested

To demonstrate the limitations of orthodox hole-digging, de Bono proposed this dilemma.

/A London merchant owes a large sum to a moneylender, and is in danger of being imprisoned for his debts. The moneylender, who has designs on the merchant’s daughter, suggests a bet. He will take two pebbles from his garden path, one black and one white, and place them in an empty money-bag. The young woman will pick out one of the pebbles. Black: she’ll become the moneylender’s wife, and the debt will be cancelled. White: she’ll stay with her father, and the debt will still be cancelled. Reluctantly, father and daughter accept the bet. However, as they stand in the moneylender’s garden, the young woman notices that the two pebbles that he picks up, placing them quickly in the money-bag, are both black. What should the young woman do? How can she think her way out of her predicament?

According to de Bono, logic demands that she either refuses to take a pebble, or take the black pebble and sacrifice herself. What this situation requires, he maintains, is the wide beam of lateral thinking, which will shift attention from the pebble that is selected to the one left behind. Through lateral thinking, the woman will discover that she has a counter-ruse at hand. Pick a pebble from the bag, fumble and drop it on the path, and while cursing her clumsiness, declare ‘Never mind – if you look into the bag, you will be able to tell which pebble I took.’

///
Lateral thinking proposes four vague principles for problem-solving and creativity:

the recognition of dominant polarising ideas;

the search for different ways of looking at things;

a relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking;

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At the very end of the 19th century, Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at Harvard University, warned the American public not to expect too much from his laboratory colleagues in the way of life lessons. The message fell on deaf ears. From lessons in personality types to new strategies for effective thinking, the promise implicit in the coming deluge of popular psychology - or 'yellow psychology', as its early critics preferred - was a secular version of what the Greeks called metanoia: a change of mind, a new way of looking at oneself and the world.

The market in popular psychology in postwar Britain was led by Penguin books, whose blue-spined Pelican imprint brought the insights of Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, B F Skinner, R D Laing and a roll call of clinical and laboratory experts to a mass readership. Among the purveyors of new psychological knowledge, there was, however, one 'expert' who stands conspicuously apart: Edward de Bono, a Maltese physician and medical researcher who turned his back on academia to become a student of creativity.

Eschewing experiment, ignoring all existing studies and scholarship, de Bono's reputation as a thinker and proponent of lateral thinking is founded on nifty puzzles, a storehouse of anecdotes, an abundance of imperial generalities, no end of clunking analogies and neologisms, and a toolkit that was by no means as novel as his publishers or readers might have assumed. Beginning with his bestseller The Use of Lateral Thinking (1967), de Bono's quixotic brand of psychology takes aim at traditional logic, identifying it as the enemy of insight and invention:

By far the greatest amount of scientific effort is directed towards the logical enlargement of some accepted hole ... Yet great new ideas and great scientific advances have often come about through people ignoring the hole ... This hole-hopping is rare because the process of education ... is designed to make people appreciate the holes that have been dug by them ... Many great discoverers like Faraday had no formal education at all, and others like Darwin or Clerk Maxwell had insufficient to curb their originality.

To demonstrate the limitations of orthodox hole-digging, de Bono proposed this dilemma. A London merchant owes a large sum to a moneylender, and is in danger of being imprisoned for his debts. The moneylender, who has designs on the merchant's daughter, suggests a bet. He will take two pebbles from his garden path, one black and one white, and place them in an empty money-bag. The young woman will pick out one of the pebbles. Black: she'll become the moneylender's wife, and the debt will be cancelled. White: she'll stay with her father, and the debt will still be cancelled. Reluctantly, father and daughter accept the bet. However, as they stand in the moneylender's garden, the young woman notices that the two pebbles that he picks up, placing them quickly in the money-bag, are both black. What should the young woman do? How can she think her way out of her predicament?

According to de Bono, logic demands that she either refuses to take a pebble, or take the black pebble and sacrifice herself. What this situation requires, he maintains, is the wide beam of lateral thinking, which will shift attention from the pebble that is selected to the one left behind. Through lateral thinking, the woman will discover that she has a counter-ruse at hand. Pick a pebble from the bag, fumble and drop it on the path, and while cursing her clumsiness, declare 'Never mind - if you look into the bag, you will be able to tell which pebble I took.'

The Use of Lateral Thinking is a short book with a long reach. Providing no more than a few slight examples of how lateral thinking might work in practice - largely on the perception of shape and function in geometric forms - it proposed four vague principles for problem-solving and creativity: the recognition of dominant polarising ideas; the search for different ways of looking at things; a relaxation of the rigid control of vertical thinking; and the use of chance.

Lateral thinking was not, de Bono conceded, 'a magic formula' to be learned and used at will. 'No textbook could be compiled to teach lateral thinking,' declared the future author of Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity (1970), as well as The Five-Day Course in Thinking (1968), Practical Thinking (1971) and Teach Yourself to Think (1995). For now, the would-be lateral thinker would have to make do with a few suggestive leads. Try using visual images as your 'material of thought'. Think by analogy. Adopt a random position. Unthinkingly select an object to stimulate association.

For readers who were wondering what science lateral thinking was based upon, de Bono's book The Mechanism of Mind (1969) left the matter unresolved. Nerve networks in the brain, he declared - omitting to mention any neurological research or cognitive studies - permitted information to organise itself into sequences or patterns that were usually asymmetric, like rain channelled into streams and rivers. As efficient as this self-organising system was at setting up patterns, the asymmetry caused thinkers to proceed only along the main channels:

The purpose of the brain is to establish and use routine patterns. That is why creativity is not a natural process in the brain. In fact, it goes against the natural process of following patterns.

This was, at best, a very elementary guide to the psychology of schemata - its main insights doused in water analogies rather than the language of mental software.

Lateral thinking left academics from all disciplines nonplussed. For philosophers, formal logic didn't equate to the actual processes in which a thinker is engaged when reasoning: it was a means of testing the validity of conclusions already reached. Historians of science questioned why de Bono invested so much in the genius 'eureka' moment, when invention and paradigm shifts were more commonly the work of communal endeavour and disputation. Intellectual historians wondered how Greek philosophy had stymied lateral thinking (the alphabet and literacy had, surely, played an altogether more vital role in the cognitive retooling of the modern mind), and reminded de Bono that the Ancient Greeks had many 'irrational' byways for pursuing insight and inspiration.

Psychologists had more questions than most. Lateral thinking clearly overplayed the importance of the creative breakthrough at the expense of trial and error, feedback and reflection, not to mention unconscious incubation. Moreover, evidence from Gestalt and cognitive psychology, pointed to multiple types of insight and intuition: problems that required a quick solution, such as the pebble dilemma, deployed a variety of mental shortcuts or heuristics, dependent on context and motivation.

Though de Bono's attack on Western logic and traditional pedagogy chimed with the countercultural zeitgeist, lateral thinking was destined to find its most starry-eyed acolytes in a world that the New Age had quietly passed by: business management, where de Bono soon acquired a reputation as a consultant and lecturer. Doing the rounds of Shell, IBM and DuPont, he seized his moment, unleashing a stream of books and courses that were as notable for their unabashed upselling as their signature bombast and newly minted terms. 'Operacy': the skill of thinking leading to action. 'Fractionation': taking an existing idea and breaking it into parts to be rearranged to spark new ones. 'Random-input method': selecting a random word or object and applying it to the problem at hand. 'PO': a provocation used to move thinking forward. The neologisms kept on coming, lending a shiny gloss to every new iteration of lateral thinking.

From the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies to schools and government ministries, few concepts in popular psychology travelled as far and wide as lateral thinking. Garnering in excess of 20 million readers across almost 40 countries, a BBC TV series, hundreds of paid-up and certified 'Master Thinkers', a network of educational and business champions, de Bono had, by the 1980s, become a peculiar type of public intellectual: one who refused to engage with critics and detractors. Criticism was, according to the father of lateral thinking and founder of the Cognitive Research Trust, a vestige of the adversarial and 'intrinsically fascist' Socratic method. 'The vertical thinker is more interested in seeing on what basis he can pull things apart,' he maintained, 'the lateral thinker is more interested in seeing on what basis he can put things together.'

The lateral thinking movement was equally silent when it came to questions about the provenance of its theory and methods. In every one of his books, de Bono approached the field of creativity and problem-solving as a virtual scientific terra incognita: no philosopher or serious thinker had apparently thought to consider the mental processes, conscious or unconscious, that were the wellspring of left-field thinking and heterodox ideas; no experimental work had been undertaken on cold cognition, bounded rationality and the heuristic shortcuts that decision-making relies on. In the same way that Freud had feigned ignorance of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, fostering the impression that he was the true 'conquistador' of the unconscious, de Bono places himself in a class of one. An outsider scientist in search of a 'more creative way of using the mind', the only meta thinker to have escaped the 2,000-year stranglehold of Greek philosophy, de Bono could find no shoulders to stand on.

Behind this pioneer fiction there was, of course, a long history of research into creativity, a rich treasury of thought and experiment that had almost certainly provided lateral thinking with most of its magpie principles and pre-owned methods. In his lecture 'Great Men and their Environment' (1880), William James observed that the 'highest order of minds' had a knack for straying from the 'beaten track of habitual suggestion', and entering into a state of mind characterised by

the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rarefied abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements, the subtlest associations of analogy; in a word, we seem suddenly introduced into a seething caldron of ideas, where everything is fizzing and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.

Known to some Enlightenment philosophes as 'negative imagination', this mercurially creative sensibility remained in the shadow of pathology and degeneration for much of the 19th century, and it fell to a new wave of French psychologists to push for its study and rehabilitation. In 1900, Théodule-Armand Ribot proposed that all forms of the 'constructive imagination', including the mystic and the utopian, were grounded in our 'needs, appetites, tendencies and desires'. His contemporary Henri Bergson went further, positing an élan vital, a creative impulse as the motor of evolution itself.

Meanwhile, the mathematician and polymath Henri Poincaré dug deep into the 'sudden illuminations' that punctuated his research. The unbidden insights that had propelled him to make discoveries across various fields were, Poincaré insisted, evidence of complex work being undertaken subliminally, over days and weeks, as he busied himself with unrelated issues. For Poincaré, the role of the unconscious in the creative process was far more significant than psychologists realised: 'it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine.'

Insight and breakthrough needed the irruption of 'productive thinking', the ability to look at a situation or problem from a new perspective

It was the Gestalt school of psychology that took research into creativity and problem-solving from armchair to laboratory. Building on Wolfgang Köhler's groundbreaking experimental work on food-gathering problems with apes, psychologists such as Max Wertheimer and Karl Duncker - US-based exiles from Nazi Germany - homed in on the mental blocks that typically impeded the solution to thought problems. In other words, insight was studied by way of blindness.

The so-called Einstellung effect (from the German for 'attitude' or 'setting') - discovered by Wertheimers's Brooklyn-born collaborator Abraham Luchins - was one of the Gestalt school's best-studied phenomena. In his paper 'Mechanization in Problem Solving' (1942), Luchins reported on an experiment in which volunteers were asked to do simple arithmetic by visualising water jugs of varying capacity. Luchins found that all his volunteers made fairly easy work of the problem when primed in a simple three-step solution. Yet having employed the method successfully on repeated tasks, he then presented them with an altogether simpler problem, and this is when things got interesting. When given a water task that required only two steps, a significant number came unstuck, suggesting that the task was impossible. Further studies by experimental psychologists have confirmed the same effect: the familiar features of a problem seem to obscure the best solution.

The Einstellung effect, sometimes known as entrenchment or the mental-set effect, was the close cousin to another form of mental block identified by Duncker's candle experiment. His volunteers were presented with a candle, a stack of matches and a box of thumbtacks, and asked to figure out a way of mounting the candle to the wall so that the wax would not drip on the floor when lit. The solution to the task - to take the tacks out and use them to fix the box onto the wall - eluded many subjects due to what Duncker termed 'functional fixedness', the tendency for an object's established purpose to obscure makeshift applications. When subjects were presented with the empty tack box with tacks to its side, Duncker found they were twice as likely to arrive at the mounted solution.

Anticipating de Bono's assertion that it 'may be more useful to study stupidity in order to understand intelligence', Gestalt psychology also identified the very notion of lateral thinking in all but name. In Productive Thinking (1945), Wertheimer noted that logical-analytical thinking, or reproductive thinking, was hostage to repetition, habit and intellectual precedent. Insight and breakthrough, in science and everyday life, needed the irruption of 'productive thinking', the ability to look at a situation or problem from a new perspective. For example, in his own research with young schoolchildren asked to calculate the area of a parallelogram, Wertheimer observed one young girl excitedly ask for a pair of scissors. She then cut off a triangle from one end, and moved it around to the other side, turning the parallelogram into a rectangle. This was productive thinking at work. Intractable problems invariably required a change of vision.

While the Gestaltists had mapped the territory on which lateral thinking set out its proprietary wares, the concept of productive thinking was not its only mid-century analogue. In 1950, the psychologist J P Guilford, a pioneer in the field of psychometric testing, used his presidential address to the American Psychological Association to inform colleagues of a cohort of creative subjects that had demonstrated what he soon called 'divergent thinking'. Unrelated to any current measure of intelligence, divergent thinking had, Guilford suggested, four principal characteristics: the ability to produce a great number of ideas or problem solutions in a short period of time; to simultaneously propose a variety of approaches to a specific problem; to produce original ideas; and to organise the details of an idea in one's head and carry it out.

Creativity research in the US had by this time shifted its attention from the individual to the group. How could commercial and industrial problems be best approached collectively in the workplace? What procedures and protocols might be applied to stimulate group innovation? The central figure in this emerging field was Alex Osborn, a partner in the BBDO advertising agency (the inspiration for the TV series Mad Men) and the originator of the concept of brainstorming. A former journalist, Osborn coined the term in 1938, after leading team meetings in which problems and issues were approached 'in commando fashion, with each stormer attacking the same objective'.

In his book Your Creative Power (1948), Osborn laid out the basic tenets of brainstorming, the most important of which was that no idea should be discouraged or judged. The objective of brainstorming, best practised in meetings of between five and 10 people, was to simply generate as many ideas or suggestions around one specific issue as possible. Osborn warned:

When you're through, your sheet of paper may be so full of ridiculous nonsense that you'll be disgusted. Never mind. You're loosening up your fettered imagination - making your mind deliver.

The supplementary techniques that Osborn offered to assist in brainstorming might sound familiar. They include randomly selecting a word and applying it, however obliquely, to the problem at hand, and bringing ideas together to form novel constructions.

The list of lateral thinking's apparent borrowings doesn't end here. As other commentators have pointed out, de Bono's emphasis on jokes and puns as examples of the lateral thinking process seems to have been lifted straight from the pages of Arthur Koestler's The Act of Creation (1964). Published three years before The Use of Lateral Thinking, Koestler's sweeping synthesis of Gestalt, cognitive psychology, ethology, literary theory and the history of science proposed that the hidden codes that automate our perceptions, judgments and behaviour could be countermanded through bisociative thinking, a hallmark of aesthetic insight, intellectual breakthrough and humour. De Bono clearly agreed: his concept of the 'insight switchover', the punchline moment of lateral insight, was no more than a rebranding of the act of bisociation.

The lateral thinking movement still opts to festoon itself in anecdotes, hearsay and testimonials

To be charitable to de Bono, one might suggest that his selective amnesia has been a side-effect of his working methods. Not fond of researching any subject too deeply, most of his books seem to have been dictated over a couple of days, partly from notes, allowing ideas that might have been picked up along the way to alchemically emerge under his imprimatur (his books have no references or bibliography).

This freewheeling attitude has also extended to the question of evidencing the putative effects of lateral thinking in the classroom and workplace. Rather than accumulate independent empirical evidence of its efficacy, the lateral thinking movement still opts to festoon itself in anecdotes, hearsay and testimonials. 'Research tends to be so artificial,' de Bono told David Gonzáles in The Art of Solving Problems (2001), parrying the question of data and measurability. '[Besides,] nobody has been able to prove that literature, history or mathematics classes have prepared people for society.'

In The Routledge Companion to Creativity (2008), the Maltese philosopher Sandra Dingli commends de Bono for having 'raised awareness of the benefits to be derived from deliberate efforts for instigating creative thinking'. The criticism levelled at lateral thinking for its failure to accumulate an evidential base should not, she suggests, 'detract in any way from the practical positive effects that are regularly reported as a result of the efficient use of de Bono's lateral thinking tools'.

This is a generous yardstick: one that helped brainstorming to prosper to the point that, by the 1950s, it was employed in planning and research in eight out of 10 of the largest companies in the US. But when brainstorming was subject to its first empirical study, at Yale University in 1958, groups were found to work far less effectively than individuals on a series of creative puzzles. In the 60 or so independent studies that have since been conducted, the evidence has stacked up firmly against the febrile claims made by Osborn and others. Brainstorming, like lateral thinking, neglects to harness the productive spark of debate, friction and constructive conflict - elements that Koestler also came to believe he had overlooked in The Act of Creation.

Pseudosciences feed on a diet of uncorroborated facts and wild speculation, and lateral thinking lacks neither. Consider the much-touted claim that the concept of horizontal drilling for oil - first attempted in US oil fields during the Depression - came to de Bono in a meeting he chaired at the London offices of Shell in 1970. Think for a moment about his suggestion that 'in a democracy, if your party lost the election, you should pay 10 per cent less tax than the other party'. And what of the idea that de Bono once gifted the UK Foreign Office for brokering peace in the Middle East: shipments of Marmite, to counter aggression caused by low levels of zinc in a region that favours unleavened bread. In their wilful oddity, de Bono's lateral speculations could be adverts for G K Chesterton's maxim 'There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.'

Almost a century ago, the acerbic American journalist H L Mencken observed that psychology was becoming lost in a fog of its own making. 'The one way to make a splash in psychology is to come out with a new and revolutionary theory.' Given that the lateral thinking movement has had almost 50 years to put its evidential house in order, to test whether its mental tricks are any more effective than, say, a short nap or concentrated effort, it's surely time to put it back in the box and file it under what Mencken would have baldly called flim-flam.

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Lateral thinking is classic pseudoscience, derivative and untested - Antonio Melechi | Aeon Essays

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At the very end of the 19th century, Hugo Münsterberg, a psychologist at Harvard University, warned the American public not to expect too much from his laboratory colleagues in the way of life lessons. The message fell on deaf ears.

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(philippines)

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Pilita Corrales - 04. Tima-an Sa Gugma (Maalaala Mo Kaya)

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Né à Marseille, en 1927, Maurice Béjart est chorégraphe

Fils du philosophe Gaston Berger, il crée les Ballets de l'Etoile le Ballet du XX e siècl e , sa plus célèbre compagnie, en 1960.

Venu enfant à la danse classique pour corriger une scoliose et une silhouette chétive, Maurice Béjart décide d’en faire son métier à l'âge de 18 ans. Son goût pour la mise en scène, sa petite taille et son manque de virtuosité classique le dirigent vers la chorégraphie dès le début des années 1950.

Gaston Berger (1896-1960) était philosophe, l’un des fondateurs de la prospective. Son épouse étant décédée prématurément, il élève seul ses fils et sa fille cadette, dans une ambiance intellectuelle et chaleureuse.

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: Maurice Béjart crée le Ballet du XX e siècle en 1960 à Bruxelles. En résidence au Théâtre royal de la Monnaie, la compagnie sera active jusqu’en 1987 et interprètera les chorégraphies mythiques : Boléro en 1960, Messe pour le temps présent en 1967, La Flûte enchantée en 1981. Maguy Marin, Jorge Donn, Paolo Bortoluzzi figurent parmi la soixantaine de danseurs qu'a comptés la compagnie.

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Passionné de théâtre depuis l’enfance, Maurice Béjart, né Maurice Berger, choisit son pseudonyme au début de sa carrière, en lien avec Molière qu'il admire et dont Armande Béjart était l’épouse. En 1976, le chorégraphe lui rend également hommage avec une comédie-ballet, Le Molière imaginaire.

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Raji was interning at the machine--learning startup Clarifai after her third year of college, working on a computer vision model that would help clients flag inappropriate images as “not safe for work.” The trouble was, it flagged photos of people of color at a much higher rate than those of white people. The imbalance, she discovered, was a consequence of the training data: the model was learning to recognize NSFW imagery from porn and safe imagery from stock photos—but porn, it turns out, is much more diverse. That diversity was causing the model to automatically associate dark skin with salacious content.

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The spark that sent Inioluwa Deborah Raji down a path of artificial-intelligence research came from a firsthand realization that she remembers as "horrible." Raji was interning at the machine-learning startup Clarifai after her third year of college, working on a computer vision model that would help clients flag inappropriate images as "not safe for work."...

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Maurice Béjart s'est inscrit dans l'histoire de la danse par…
des chorégraphies physiques et expressives
Acrobaties, sauts, arabesques en extension, bras dressés et poings serrés : dans les chorégraphies de Maurice Béjart, les corps athlétiques des danseurs s'arc-boutent pour jaillir comme des ressorts.
des sources d'inspiration très diverses
Baigné de culture depuis l'enfance, Maurice Béjart s'est toujours nourri de littérature, de théâtre, de tous types de musique et de philosophie orientale ou occidentale pour alimenter ses spectacles. Quant à ses danseurs, comme ses élèves, ils étaient originaires de tous les pays.
la place accordée au danseur
Maurice Béjart remet la danse masculine à l'honneur. Le danseur s'impose, il n'est plus le compagnon falot de la ballerine classique. Il est torse nu, parfois vêtu d'un jean. Une gestuelle physique, virile, exacerbe son érotisme.

C’est à Bruxelles que Maurice Béjart passe la plus grande partie de sa carrière. Il y fonde le Ballet du XXesiècle, en 1960, et y crée, dix ans plus tard, l’école Mudra, qui formera de nombreux danseurs, dont Maguy Marin et Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. En 1987, en conflit avec le directeur du Théâtre de la Monnaie, il quitte la Belgique.

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Il ne faut évidemment pas détruire les statues des personnages qu'on jugera contestables, mais les déposer dans des musées ou des lieux de mémoire, car ce sont des objets à valeur historique, sinon, parfois, esthétique. Aucune nation ne peut, par ailleurs, former une communauté unie et consensuelle, traversée qu'elle est par des contradictions et des inégalités historiques : il ne peut sans doute y avoir donc de consensus définitif et l'iconoclasme a certainement encore de beaux jours devant lui. Mais il faut, surtout, ouvrir des débats publics les plus larges possibles avec des personnalités légitimes, en premier lieu des historiennes et historiens – loin des personnages médiatiques des talk shows télévisuels, qui relèvent en général des discussions de comptoir, du moins le temps d'un " buzz ".

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Ce texte de l'archéologue Jean-Paul Demoule (voir sa "bio express", plus bas) est le nouveau témoignage que nous publions dans notre série "Des statues et des hommes". A lire, nos articles précédents, François-Xavier Fauvelle : "Etre Français, c'est aussi être descendant d'esclaves" et Jacqueline Lalouette : "Il faut davantage de statues de personnalités noires".
Le déboulonnage, la destruction ou la dégradation de statues liées à l'histoire de l'esclavage, des généraux sudistes au roi Léopold II de Belgique et jusqu'à Victor Schœlcher, viennent de replacer à nouveau, dans le temps court de l'actualité, le débat sur l'iconoclasme, une pratique de tous les temps. Ainsi, il y a six mille ans environ, furent brisées du côté de Locmariaquer des stèles cérémonielles gravées, représentant notamment des haches et des bovidés, et leurs morceaux furent réemployés dans des constructions funéraires.

Des diverses formes d'iconoclasme

Si des représentations, statues de dieux ou de dominants, sont censées, d'une manière magique en quelque sorte, rendre présents (re-présenter) des êtres absents, leur destruction, tout aussi magique, vise à les effacer de la mémoire humaine. De fait, à chaque grand changement historique, la population concernée s'est livrée à de tels actes publics. La chose se pratique tout autant dans la sphère privée, lorsque l'on va déchirer, brûler ou découper en partie les photographies de personnes que l'on souhaite bannir de ses souvenirs.

Il existe aussi des destructions à des fins rituelles, comme le verre que doit briser le marié lors d'un mariage traditionnel juif ou arménien, ou lorsque l'on casse une bouteille (de champagne) contre la coque d'un navire neuf à baptiser. Il y a 8.000 ans, on fabriquait dans les Balkans néolithiques de petites statuettes féminines prévues pour être brisées, et leurs morceaux dispersés dans les habitats - sans que la signification en soit assurée. Il existe aussi des mises à l'écart sans bris, d'objets que l'on suppose chargés d'une certaine force surnaturelle, sinon dangereuse. Il y a 11.000 ans, sur le site de Göbekli en Turquie, des constructions circulaires contenant de nombreux bas-reliefs d'animaux sauvages ont été au terme de leur utilisation cérémonielle soigneusement remplies de terre et, devenues invisibles, abandonnées. Lorsque furent détruits les temples élevés par le pharaon Akhenaton lors de son éphémère réforme religieuse du XIVe siècle avant notre ère, les bas-reliefs n'en furent pas brisés, mais au contraire réemployés, soigneusement rangés, pour servir de bourrage à l'intérieur de vastes portiques - pour le bonheur des archéologues à venir. C'est aussi le principe des genizahs de la tradition juive, lieux où l'on met pour toujours à l'écart des objets pourvus d'une valeur sacrée, dont des écrits pouvant comporter le nom de Dieu.

On pourrait aussi évoquer les pratiques de bris et d'enterrement dans l'art contemporain, lorsque Arman détruisait des meubles à coups de masses, que Ai Wei Wei laisse s'éclater par terre des vases de la dynastie Han, ou que Grisha Bruskin fabrique des pastiches de statues de style soviétique, les enterre puis les fouille.

BIO EXPRESS
Jean-Paul Demoule : Archéologue et préhistorien français. Professeur émérite de protohistoire européenne à l'université Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, il est membre honoraire de l'Institut universitaire de France (IUF), et à l'origine de la création de l'Institut National de Recherche Archéologique Préventive (INRAP). Jean-Paul Demoule a obtenu en 2015 le prix d'histoire Eugène Colas de l'Académie française ainsi que le prix Roger Caillois de l'Essai pour son ouvrage " Mais où sont passés les Indo-Européens ? Le mythe d'origine de l'Occident ", publié au Seuil en 2014. Il a dirigé avec Alain Schnapp et Dominique Garcia, " Une histoire des civilisations ", La Découverte - Inrap, 2018

C'est souvent pour des raisons religieuses que des figures divines ont été détruites, soit par les tenants d'autres religions, soit lors de réformes internes à une religion particulière, dont certaines interdisent radicalement les images, comme dans le judaïsme ou l'islam. Le terme d'iconoclasme (destruction des images en grec ancien) apparut au VIIIe siècle de notre ère dans l'empire byzantin, lorsque les représentations divines parurent blasphématoires au plus haut niveau de l'État, provoquant destructions et conflits durables. La Réforme protestante fit de même en Europe occidentale, et les mouvements islamistes, sinon terroristes, contemporains s'acharnèrent, comme à Bamian, Palmyre, Mossoul, Tripoli ou Tombouctou, le plus souvent contre des monuments islamiques anciens mais jugés hérétiques.

L'iconoclasme politique

Mais le plus souvent, de telles destructions sont inséparables de changements politiques, qu'ils soient ponctuels ou massifs. Ponctuels dans le cas de la damnatio memoriae d'un individu particulier désormais non grata, normalement après sa mort, naturelle ou non. Ainsi ont été martelées après son décès les inscriptions à la gloire de la souveraine égyptienne Hatchepsout, ou détruites les statues d'empereurs romains contestés, comme Héliogabale ou Commode. Ou fut remplacé par un drap noir peint, dans la salle du Grand Conseil du palais des doges à Venise, au milieu des portraits de tous les autres doges successifs, le visage de l'un d'eux, Marino Faliero, coupable de tentative de coup d'État et exécuté en 1355. Plus récemment, fut retiré à des rues et à un hôpital le nom d'Alexis Carrel, médecin eugéniste, prix Nobel et sympathisant de Vichy.

La plupart du temps cependant, les destructions accompagnent des changements historiques radicaux, même éphémères, et veulent marquer des ruptures. Parmi les plus célèbres, celles de la Révolution française, pour lesquelles l'Abbé Grégoire créa en 1793 le terme de " vandalisme ", en référence aux Vandales de l'Antiquité, censés avoir été peu recommandables (mais ce serait un autre débat). De nos jours, d'ailleurs, le terme désigne souvent des actes gratuits de dégradation, sans mobile apparent, tout au contraire de la démolition révolutionnaire de la Bastille et d'un certain nombre d'églises, de leurs statues, voire de la nécropole royale de Saint-Denis. Beaucoup d'églises furent néanmoins rendues au culte à la Restauration, de même que fut redressée la colonne Vendôme couronnée d'une statue de Napoléon en empereur romain, abattue sous la Commune.

Si on peut maintenant, avec le recul de l'histoire mais aussi avec un compréhensible souci d'historien, regretter ces destructions patrimoniales, des gestes identiques, mais cette fois contemporains, nous ont paru plus facilement légitimes. Avec la chute du Troisième Reich, les nombreuses statues d'Aryens virils dues au sculpteur Arno Breker furent un peu partout détruites, même si l'infortuné artiste put sur le tard se faire construire un musée pour les œuvres survivantes. Le bunker du Führer, retrouvé au moment du réaménagement de Berlin après la Chute du Mur, fut volontairement détruit pour ne pas devenir lieu de pèlerinage - ce qui se discute.

De même qu'on discute aussi pour conserver, ou non, la maison natale de Hitler à Braunau am Inn en Autriche, actuellement prévue pour un poste de police, mais lieu régulier de manifestations de bords opposés. De même, au moment de la fin du Bloc soviétique, ont été partout démontées ou abattues les statues emblématiques de Marx, Lénine ou d'autres dirigeants. Seule la Hongrie a créé à Budapest un parc de sculptures (le Memento Park) pour les rassembler et les conserver, dans un but mémoriel, sinon patrimonial. L'Allemagne orientale en a conservé fort peu même si, paradoxe, la ville de Trêves, ville de naissance de Karl Marx, lui érigea en 2018, deux cent ans après sa naissance, une statue en bronze de plus de cinq mètres de haut offerte par la République populaire de Chine. Le président (social-démocrate) de la République fédérale, Franck-Walter Steinmeier, déclara à cette occasion : " En tant qu'Allemands, nous ne devons ni surestimer Karl Marx ni le bannir de notre histoire. Nous ne devons ni avoir peur de lui ni lui ériger des statues dorées".

L'armée américaine détruisit sous l'œil des caméras les statues de Saddam Hussein lors de l'invasion de l'Iraq en 2003. Dans les années 1980, lorsqu'un certain nombre de mairies communistes de l'ancienne " ceinture rouge " de Paris furent conquises par des maires conservateurs, de nombreuses rues portant des noms associées à l'histoire soviétique, voire à des résistants communistes ou assimilés (Nelson Mandela par exemple), furent débaptisées. Quant aux déprédations de l'Arc de Triomphe (ou plutôt de son musée des plâtres) commises en décembre 2018 au moment de la crise des Gilets Jaunes, bien que les motivations n'en soient pas explicites, certains y ont vu un geste antimilitariste contre un monument célébrant les guerres françaises.

Les trois aspects du débat

Beaucoup a déjà été dit sur les dégradations ou déboulonnages actuellement en discussions qui, s'ils ne relèvent pas de révolutions politiques au sens usuel, expriment toutes les tensions qu'ont provoqué et continuent à provoquer de graves traumatismes historiques. Compte tenu de ce qui précède - de cette "recontextualisation", comme on dit maintenant -, on peut distinguer trois aspects au débat, l'un patrimonial, le second historique, et le dernier mémoriel.

Patrimonial, car un archéologue ou un historien (voire un historien d'art) ne peut se réjouir de la destruction d'objets anciens, tous témoignages d'événements du passé - sans parler de leur aspect éventuellement décoratif, sinon esthétique. Il convient donc de mettre dans des musées les objets qu'on ne veut plus voir dans l'espace public ouvert. C'est ce qui est envisagé à Bristol pour la statue de bronze du marchand d'esclaves Edward Colston, du moins lorsqu'elle aura été repêchée dans le canal où les manifestants l'ont précipitée le 8 juin 2020. Ce n'est pas toujours simple. Le chapitre de la cathédrale de Saint Jacques de Compostelle avait voulu retirer du lieu une statue en bois de Saint Jacques lui-même, où le saint, très lié à la Reconquista, piétinait de son cheval blanc des Maures enturbannés et effrayés : n'était-il pas Santiago Matamoros, le Tueur de Maures ? Devant les protestations, on dut renoncer au déménagement.

Si l'on remontait encore dans le temps, il est peu de souverains dont on pourrait laisser la statue, et il faudrait alors raser nos musées. Ainsi une statue (récente) de Jules César vient d'être dégradée sur une place de Zottegem en Belgique, avec le qualificatif flamand de " Krapuul " peint sur son socle en lieu et place de son nom. De fait, la conquête de la Gaule par le futur dictateur s'est faite au prix d'un demi-million de morts et d'autant de prisonniers réduits en esclavage, ce qui relèverait pour le moins, dans nos critères (anachroniques) actuels d'un crime de guerre. Plus près de nous, que dire des innombrables rues et avenues Thiers, le responsable de la répression de la Commune de Paris et des quelque vingt mille morts de la Semaine Sanglante. Un buste orne le Sénat, une statue sur la place Thiers à Nancy a été remisée dans les locaux communaux au moment du réaménagement de ladite place, et une autre, rapatriée en 1962 de Bône en Algérie, se dresse désormais sur une place de Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe dans la Vienne, ville plus connus par les fresques de son église romane.

L'aspect historique est celui qui s'attache à l'histoire réelle du personnage, telle que peuvent l'établir aujourd'hui les historiens. On reproche à Jules Ferry, à qui l'on doit l'école publique, laïque et obligatoire, son passé colonial, mais on peut en discuter. Comme vient de le rappeler l'historienne Mona Ozouf, il était colonisateur, mais pas colonialiste, au sens où il souhaitait développer l'instruction auprès des enfants des colonies - ce qui ne retire rien aux méfaits destructeurs de la colonisation française en général. De même, on crédite Victor Schœlcher de l'abolition de l'esclavage en 1848 - et François Mitterrand avait déposé une rose devant sa tombe au Panthéon, lors de sa théâtrale intronisation. Aimé Césaire lui a rendu tout autant hommage, mais ses statues viennent d'être dégradées par ceux qui rappellent que les propriétaires d'esclaves furent largement indemnisés (et les esclaves libérés laissés sans ressources et souvent affublés de noms de famille ridicules) ; il en fut d'ailleurs de même pour la République de Haïti qui s'était libérée toute seule mais qui dut verser, sous la pression française, de lourdes indemnités aux propriétaires d'esclaves, et ce jusque dans les années 1880. Chaque cas particulier mérite donc des débats approfondis. La statue de Joséphine de Beauharnais, qui fit rétablir l'esclavage par Napoléon au profit des colons (dont ceux de sa famille) avait déjà été décapitée et souillée en 1991 sur une place de Fort-de-France en Martinique.

Ainsi le cas du général Bugeaud, enfumeur de fugitifs lors de la conquête de l'Algérie, paraît peu défendable, et son avenue parisienne peut-être en sursis. On reproche à Colbert le Code Noir ; on pourrait lui reprocher aussi son enrichissement personnel, tout en dressant le bilan de son action gouvernementale, constamment grevée par le coût des conquêtes de son souverain. Tout cela relève donc, à chaque fois et au coup par coup, d'un travail serein des historiens, établissant les faits, et rien que les faits. Et ces faits peuvent être exposés et rappelés au public par tous les moyens et supports adéquats.

Enfin, le dernier aspect est l'aspect mémoriel, c'est-à-dire la fonction de célébration qu'ont ces statues par rapport au récit national, à l'histoire que, à un moment donné du temps, une nation veut se donner à elle-même. C'est en général un point de vue majoritaire, mais les débats actuels montrent qu'il ne saurait être définitif. Il est frappant, comme l'a noté l'historien Emmanuel Fureix, auteur d'un livre sur les Politiques de l'iconoclasme après la Révolution française, qu'il n'y ait, parmi les milliers de statues de nos places et squares, que 7% de femmes et seulement deux ouvriers. L'histoire de la colonisation française reste un sujet sensible et loin d'être apaisé. Ainsi le futur président de la République avait affirmé, lors de sa campagne électorale, qu'elle constituait bien un crime contre l'humanité, ce qu'il a ensuite confirmé, par exemple en reconnaissant la responsabilité de l'armée française dans la torture et l'assassinat à Alger en 1957 du militant communiste Maurice Audin par les parachutistes français. Comme vient de le faire remarquer l'historien de la colonisation Pascal Blanchard, il est frappant que notre ancien Musée des Colonies de la Porte Dorée à Paris n'ait finalement laissé la place qu'à un Musée de l'Immigration, très tardivement inauguré, mais sans qu'il y ait nulle part en métropole de musée de la colonisation et de l'esclavage, susceptible d'éclairer les citoyens, à l'aide de tous les débats possibles, sur cette page essentielle de notre histoire. Le Mémorial ACTe en Guadeloupe, sur la mémoire de l'esclavage, n'a été ouvert qu'en 2015 et seul, en métropole, le Musée d'Aquitaine à Bordeaux dresse de la traite négrière une image détaillée et pédagogique - et la ville de Bordeaux vient, sans les débaptiser, d'apposer des panneaux explicatifs dans cinq rues qui portent les noms de trafiquants d'esclaves (dont 150.000 furent déportés durant la traite qui fit la fortune de la prospère cité).

Que conclure, à ce point ? Il faut, d'une part, distinguer soigneusement ces trois aspects, qui ne relèvent pas des mêmes enjeux. Il ne faut évidemment pas détruire les statues des personnages qu'on jugera contestables, mais les déposer dans des musées ou des lieux de mémoire, car ce sont des objets à valeur historique, sinon, parfois, esthétique. Aucune nation ne peut, par ailleurs, former une communauté unie et consensuelle, traversée qu'elle est par des contradictions et des inégalités historiques : il ne peut sans doute y avoir donc de consensus définitif et l'iconoclasme a certainement encore de beaux jours devant lui. Mais il faut, surtout, ouvrir des débats publics les plus larges possibles avec des personnalités légitimes, en premier lieu des historiennes et historiens - loin des personnages médiatiques des talk shows télévisuels, qui relèvent en général des discussions de comptoir, du moins le temps d'un " buzz ". L'exemple du musée d'Aquitaine, qui relate toute l'histoire de cette région des origines à nos jours, devrait être un exemple pour qu'un lieu cette fois national, lieu d'exposition, de pédagogie et de débat, permette de réfléchir sur l'histoire de notre territoire, sous toutes ses formes et dans toute sa complexité. Nous sommes un certain nombre à proposer que l'emblématique île de la Cité, qui se vide de ses diverses administrations, en soit le lieu central, nœud d'un réseau qui devrait, à terme, irriguer l'ensemble du pays.

Par Jean-Paul Demoule

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Déboulonnage des statues : Jean-Paul Demoule dresse une brève histoire de l'iconoclasme

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Ce texte de l'archéologue Jean-Paul Demoule (voir sa "bio express", plus bas) est le nouveau témoignage que nous publions dans notre série "Des statues et des hommes". A lire, nos articles précédents, François-Xavier Fauvelle : "Etre Français, c'est aussi être descendant d'esclaves" et Jacqueline Lalouette : "Il faut davantage de statues de personnalités noires".

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Le Memento Park ou Parc des statues (Szobor park) de Budapest, en Europe centrale, regroupe toutes les anciennes statues érigées à la gloire du communisme dans la capitale hongroise : il est considéré comme un musée en plein air de l'art totalitaire mais attire aussi les « ostalgiques » du bloc de l'Est.

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Il n'existe aucune corrélation entre le taux de tétrahydrocannabinol (THC) et la faculté psychotrope du cannabis. Une récente étude prouve que cette croyance fermement ancrée dans les mentalités est en fait erronnée. Le cannabis est composé d'un mélange de différentes substances, il ne se limite pas au THC.

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Resources for Accountability and Actions for Black Lives

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Navigation et communication chez l'abeille ( animation )

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Connue depuis les travaux de l'Autrichien Karl von Frisch dans les années 1940, la danse des abeilles est un langage au sens biologique du terme : en se trémoussant de l'arrière-train, l'insecte fournit à ses congénères plusieurs informations.
une éclaireuse rentre au nid après avoir trouvé une source d'eau ou un coin densément fleuri. Elle régurgite le nectar qu'elle a stocké dans une poche interne de sa bouche, ou se laisse décharger du pollen qu'elle a rangé le long de ses pattes.

Si les ouvrières qui l'accueillent montrent beaucoup d'enthousiasme, l'éclaireuse peut se mettre à danser pour leur indiquer le chemin à suivre vers le lieu de dégustation. C'est là que le code intervient.

La danse en rond

Si le lieu de butinage est proche du nid, l'éclaireuse danse simplement en rond.

La danse en faucille

Pour des distances un peu plus grandes, la guide passe à un second type de danse, dite en faucille. Elle parcourt désormais deux ellipses allongées, symétriques l'une de l'autre par rapport à un axe. La danse comporte ici une information sur la direction à suivre : l'angle formé entre son axe de symétrie et la direction verticale est le même que celui, dehors, entre la direction du soleil et celle vers laquelle il faut voler pour trouver le lieu de butinage.

La danse frétillante

Ce flou sur la distance est réglé avec la troisième danse, pratiquée si la source se trouve loin du nid, à plusieurs dizaines voire centaines de mètres. Cette danse est appelée frétillante car l'abeille y décrit une forme de « 8 » aplati dont la partie centrale est en ligne droite, ligne que l'abeille parcourt en faisant frétiller son abdomen. Cette fois, la danse permet de coder au moins trois informations :

La direction est donnée comme lors de la danse en faucille : l'angle entre la ligne droite du « 8 » et la verticale est le même que celui entre la direction du soleil et celle de la source.

La distance est précisée : il existe un lien direct entre la durée du frétillement, lors de chaque ligne droite, et la distance à parcourir. Plus on se trémousse le popotin, plus il faudra voler loin. La relation est presque mathématique, proportionnelle : si la danseuse frétille pendant 0,8 seconde pour coder 200 mètres et 1,2 seconde pour en coder 300, elle frétillera 1,6 seconde pour indiquer 400 mètres, etc.

La danse fournit enfin une indication sur la richesse de la source : plus on y trouve de quoi se régaler, plus la guide exécute un grand nombre de tours de danse, et plus elle frétille vigoureusement son abdomen lors des passages en ligne droite.

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1.
HISTOIRE
Partisan des empereurs byzantins qui s'opposèrent à l'adoration et au culte des images (viiie et ixe siècles).
2.
(Personne) qui interdit ou détruit les images saintes, et par extension les œuvres d'art.
3.
AU FIGURÉ
(Personne) qui est hostile aux traditions et cherche à les faire disparaître.
Qui s'attaque aux idées reçues.
Des déclarations iconoclastes.

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Karl von Frisch "Le langage des abeilles" [The Dancing Bees] (1934)

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KOHLANTA DE OUF

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Koh lanta 2020 résumé saison  KOHLANTA DE OUF

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la loi incitait « les opérateurs de plate-forme en ligne à retirer les contenus qui leur sont signalés, qu’ils soient ou non manifestement illicites ». Le texte portait donc « une atteinte à l’exercice de la liberté d’expression et de communication qui n’est pas nécessaire, adaptée et proportionnée ».

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La loi Avia contre la haine en ligne largement retoquée par le Conseil constitutionnel

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Les obligations pesant sur les réseaux sociaux de retirer en vingt-quatre heures les contenus illégaux n’ont pas été jugées compatibles avec la liberté d’expression.

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Le sikhisme est une religion monothéiste fondée dans le nord de l'Inde au xve siècle par le Gurû Nanak.
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Le sikhisme considère que toutes les religions peuvent mener vers Dieu⁷. Si la religion sert à se croire supérieur aux autres, il ne s'agit pas de religiosité – mais de vanité humaine, orgueil ou démon que le sikhisme demande de détruire (les symboles physiques sikhs sont là pour rappeler cet ordre à la conscience : combattre, vaincre et tuer l'ego, qui empêche la communion avec Dieu-Un)⁷.
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Le sikhisme considère que toutes les religions peuvent mener vers Dieu⁷. Si la religion sert à se croire supérieur aux autres, il ne s'agit pas de religiosité – mais de vanité humaine, orgueil ou démon que le sikhisme demande de détruire (les symboles physiques sikhs sont là pour rappeler cet ordre à la conscience : combattre, vaincre et tuer l'ego, qui empêche la communion avec Dieu-Un)⁷.

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Un sikh ne doit pas se perdre en verbiage inutile, idéalisme aveugle, attitude amenant à oublier la présence du Dieu-Un ; l'enseignement du sikhisme rappelle qu'un musulman qui méprise le Brahman des Sages hindous, est en fait ignorant du Dieu coranique – « Allah » ; et un hindou qui méprise l'unique Allah des sages musulmans, est en réalité ignorant de l'Être suprême védique – « Brahman ». Cela est vrai aussi pour les autres religions.
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Un sikh ne doit pas se perdre en verbiage inutile, idéalisme aveugle, attitude amenant à oublier la présence du Dieu-Un ; l'enseignement du sikhisme rappelle qu'un musulman qui méprise le Brahman des Sages hindous, est en fait ignorant du Dieu coranique – « Allah » ; et un hindou qui méprise l'unique Allah des sages musulmans, est en réalité ignorant de l'Être suprême védique – « Brahman ». Cela est vrai aussi pour les autres religions.

Les Sikhs sont installés principalement au Punjab, pour 80 % d'entre eux17, mais aussi dans la région de Delhi. En Inde, on estime la communauté Sikh à quelque 20 millions de personnes, soit environ 2 % de la population indienne.

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Stupid production team!

This cheap production team, because of them i didn't get anything to eat, except dal roti which is very tasty but its 4:30pm and it's all they have left now.
They serve again at 7:30pm but we can't wait till then.
Basically, because of you, i can't say what i feel because there are people around. I have been saying let me eat, let me eat for so long, but you're like no, take this shot, take that shot!

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Delhi's Biggest Langar at Gurudwara Bangla Sahib | Best Indian Food | Served #14

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Le Langar, (Punjabi : ਲੰਗਰ , Hindi : लंगर), est un concept de restauration retrouvé dans le sikhisme et dans l'hindouisme. Dans la langue perse, le mot langar signifie hospice, ou, asile pour pauvres ¹. Pour les sikhs, il s'agit de la cuisine commune placée dans un temple, le gurdwârâ où mange tout un chacun gratuitement. Le mot cantine convient aussi en français. La nourriture est végétarienne car elle permet à tous de manger sans distinction. C'est par principe d'égalité. Le langar est ouvert aux sikhs comme aux non-sikhs.

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The Free Breakfast for School Children Program was a community service program run by the Black Panther Party as an early manifestation of the social mission envisioned by founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale along with their founding of the Oakland Community School, which provided high-level education to 150 children from impoverished urban neighborhoods. Inspired by contemporary research about the essential role of breakfast for optimal schooling, the Panthers would cook and serve food to the poor inner city youth of the area. Initiated in January 1969 at St. Augustine's Church in Oakland, California, the program became so popular that by the end of the year, the Panthers set up kitchens in cities across the US, feeding over 10,000 children every day before they went to school.[1]

The Free Breakfast Program became the central organizing activity of the group.

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Kosmonaut

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Un cosmonaute dans son satellite, sort dans l'espace. Nous retrouvons ce cosmonaute avec 40 ans de plus, il n'a plus de cheveux, c'est un vieil homme recroquevillé en boule dans son lit. Sa fille vient lui rendre visite avec son bébé, celui-ci fait les 400 coups mais elle ne fait que ranger l'appartement qui est en désordre et vérifier que son père n'est pas mort.

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Un cosmonaute dans son satellite, sort dans l'espace. Nous retrouvons ce cosmonaute avec 40 ans de plus, il n'a plus de cheveux, c'est un vieil homme recroquevillé en boule dans son lit. Sa fille vient lui rendre visite avec son bébé, celui-ci fait les 400 coups mais elle ne fait que ranger l'appartement qui est en désordre et vérifier que son père n'est pas mort.

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Le boycott des bus de Montgomery est une campagne politique et sociale entamée en 1955 à Montgomery, dans l'État américain de l'Alabama, pour s'opposer à la politique municipale de ségrégation raciale dans les transports publics1. Le déclencheur est l'arrestation de Rosa Parks, femme afro-américaine qui refuse de céder sa place d'autobus à un passager blanc comme elle était tenue de le faire selon la législation en vigueur de l'époque. Ce boycott est l'un des événements majeurs du mouvement des droits civiques aux États-Unis. Il se déroule du 5 décembre 1955 au 21 décembre 1956 et aboutit à une décision de la Cour suprême déclarant anticonstitutionnelles les lois de l'Alabama imposant la ségrégation raciale dans les bus.

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GEORGIA GILMORE AND THE CLUB FROM NOWHERE

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GEORGIA GILMORE AND THE CLUB FROM NOWHERE

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In the 1950s, a group of Montgomery, Alabama women baked goods to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott. Known as the Club from Nowhere the group was led by Georgia Gilmore, one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era. This story comes from Can Do: Portraits of Black Visionaries, Seekers, and Entrepreneurs, hosted by Alfre Woodard.

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Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes | Stitcher | RSS

In the 1950s, a group of Montgomery, Alabama women baked goods to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott. Known as the Club from Nowhere the group was led by Georgia Gilmore, one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era. This story comes from Can Do: Portraits of Black Visionaries, Seekers, and Entrepreneurs, hosted by Alfre Woodard.

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A Secret Civil Rights Kitchen: Georgia Gilmore and the Club From Nowhere

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Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes | Stitcher | RSS In the 1950s, a group of Montgomery, Alabama women baked goods to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott. Known as the Club from Nowhere the group was led by Georgia Gilmore, one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era.

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"y'a même un mec avec une chicha"

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Cohue ce matin devant un magasin Lidl qui propose une PS4 à 95 euros, avant de faire marche arrière - La gendarmerie fait usage de gaz lacrymogène pour disperser les clients - VIDEO

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A l'occasion de l'ouverture de son nouveau magasin situé à Orgeval (Yvelines), Lidl a souhaité vendre plusieurs produits en promotion. L'enseigne devait proposer notamment la Playstation 4 pour un prix de... 95 euros.Très vite, hier dans la journée, l'information

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Nathalie Heinich a publié en mars dernier Le Pont Neuf de Christo : ouvrage d'art, œuvre d'art ou comment se faire une opinion (Editions Thierry Marchaisse). Sophie Duplaix est commissaire de l'exposition Christo et Jeanne-Claude, qui se tiendra du 1er juillet au 19 septembre prochain au Centre Pompidou.

Christo, de son nom complet Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, est célèbre pour ses empaquetages de monuments et pour ses gigantesques œuvres in situ. Il signait ses œuvres, depuis 1994, en ajoutant le nom de sa femme et collaboratrice Jeanne-Claude, décédée en 2009 à l'âge de 74 ans. Le couple a notamment empaqueté le Pont-Neuf à Paris en 1985, le Reichstag en 1995, entouré les îles de la baie de Key Biscayne (Floride) de tissu en polypropylène rose en 1983 ou posé des milliers de portiques couleur safran à Central Park en 2005.

Né en Bulgarie, pays qu'il fuit en 1957, Christo s'installe à Paris en 1958. D'abord portraitiste pour gagner sa vie, il commence rapidement à poser les bases de ce qui sera plus tard une oeuvre mondialement reconnue. Il empaquette des objets et entame un travail sur la matière.

Grâce à ses portraits, il arrive à créer tout un réseau de personnes très importantes qui vont l'aider par la suite. Il continue les portraits tout en essayant de trouver son geste artistique. Il va faire des tentatives de peintures matiéristes, et, parallèlement, il empaquette des petites boîtes, qu'il enroule avec de la ficelle.
(Sophie Duplaix)

Dans l'empaquetage, il cherche à retrouver les lignes de force des objets ; il a un regard très sculptural et déjà architectural.
(Sophie Duplaix)

Le 27 juin 1962, il installe rue Visconti à Paris une barrière de barils de pétrole pour protester contre la construction du mur de Berlin : une de ses premières oeuvres d'envergure.

Cette oeuvre est emblématique de ce qu'est l'art contemporain. Dans l'extrait que vous avez passé, on l'entend dire que l'oeuvre, ce n'est pas simplement les barils mais aussi les immeubles environnants, la rue... Et ça, c'est typique du paradigme de l'art contemporain, le fait que l'oeuvre ne réside pas dans l'objet proposé par l'artiste mais dans toutes les conséquences que cette proposition peut avoir autour, et, notamment, dans la redéfinition des frontières visuelles et des frontières de l'art.
(Nathalie Heinich)

Christo s'installe à New-York en 1964 avec Jeanne-Claude, devenue sa femme, qui sera toute sa vie durant sa collaboratrice, sa muse et sa critique, celle sans laquelle ses projets faramineux n'auraient sûrement jamais pu voir le jour.

Le travail de Christo et Jeanne-Claude porte en lui un contraste saisissant, à savoir que leurs œuvres émanent d'une longue réflexion et d'un travail échelonné sur plusieurs années ou décennies. Ils doivent ainsi récolter de l'argent, obtenir les autorisations, batailler pour expliquer leurs projets, parvenir à les faire accepter. Des efforts considérables, alors que la durée de vie de leurs œuvres n'est à chaque fois que de quelques semaines.

Du 22 septembre au 7 octobre 1985, le couple d'artistes recouvre le Pont-Neuf à Paris d'un voile et propose ainsi aux parisiens et aux touristes une expérience visuelle inédite de ce bâtiment historique.

On était dans quelque chose de très problématique pour beaucoup de gens. L'oeuvre de Christo était connue par les spécialistes d'art contemporain, mais c'est un tout petit monde. Et ce qui était passionnant, c'était de voir l'espace public investi et du même coup le grand public sollicité pour réagir, se demander de quoi il s'agissait. (...) Ce qui est formidable avec l'oeuvre du Pont-Neuf, c'est qu'à la fois elle déplace une frontière physique, mais aussi et surtout les frontières mentales, qui font la différence pour le sens commun entre ce qui est de l'art et ce qui n'en est pas.
(Nathalie Heinich)

En mettant en place des oeuvres d'envergure dans l'espace public, qui ne coûtaient rien au contribuable, visibles en dehors des musées, et en proposant une expérience esthétique plus que conceptuelle, Christo et Jeanne-Claude inscrivaient leur travail dans une démarche populaire. Ainsi, en 2016, ce sont plus d'un million de visiteurs qui ont foulé en quelques jours le sol de l'œuvre The Floating Piers, sur le lac d'Iseo, en Lombardie.

Mais ces œuvres, par leur aspect massif, et par leur existence dans la sphère publique, n'ont jamais fait l'unanimité. Ainsi, durant toute sa vie, Christo a dû batailler pour faire accepter ses projets, répondre aux critiques, convaincre, prévenir, faire de la pédagogie. Il a ainsi abandonné en 2017 son projet Over the river entamé dès 1992 à cause de poursuites judiciaires lancées par des habitants du Colorado. Mais pour Christo, dans ces discussions qui pouvaient durer parfois des années, l'art reprenait et retrouvait une place centrale dans le débat public.

L'empaquetage de l' Arc de Triomphe qui devait avoir lieu en septembre 2020 aura finalement lieu du 18 septembre au 3 octobre 2021. Ce sera une oeuvre posthume, sa dernière, l'aboutissement d'un rêve qu'il avait eu lors de sa période parisienne au début des années 1960.

À RÉÉCOUTER

Réécouter Penser l'après (5/5) : Christian de Portzamparc "Il faut savoir inclure dans les villes la diversité du monde" écouter (29 min) 29 min

Extraits sonores:

Extrait reportage Antenne 2 midi, Christo et Jeanne-Claude à propos de leur oeuvre du Pont Neuf, 13/09/1985

Extrait d'un reportage de 1971 où Christo parle de son oeuvre rue Visconti

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Comment Christo a-t-il emballé le monde ?

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Retour sur l'oeuvre de l'artiste plasticien Christo, décédé le 31 mai dernier à l'âge de 84 ans. Pour en parler, la sociologue et spécialiste de l'art Nathalie Heinich, et la conservatrice en chef des collections contemporaines au Musée national d'art moderne, Sophie Duplaix.

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j'espérais juste que ça tourne en porno à un moment :(

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My Father's Fanatical Feud With the Bullies Next Door Became an All-Out War

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When the neighbor boys harassed me, my dad grabbed his rifle and set booby traps. Cops were called. Death threats were made. One thing was certain: He would never let them win.

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j'ai proposé qu'on achète un aquarium à la bibliothèque

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As someone with very low tolerance for racist bullshit, I've managed to surround myself with white people who are cognizant of their privilege and strive to make the world a less terrifying and frustrating place for people of color. This means that I often deal with said white people asking me what they can actually do to affect change. So here, anxious allies of the world, are 100 simple ways to be the change. It's not nearly comprehensive, but it's somewhere to start. Go forth and disrupt our harmful racial paradigm!

1. Just because you can't see racism around you doesn't mean it's not happening. Trust people of color's assessment of a situation.

2. Don't assume that all people of color share the same views. We are not a monolith.

3. Don't assume or guess people's races. This is NOT a fun game for us.

4. If someone tells you they're from Uganda, don't say, "I went to Nigeria once!" Just, please.

5. Related: Don't refer to Africa as a country. It's a continent and it's wildly varied. Yes. Take a moment.

6. Oh, and rest assured that literally no person of color ever wants you to get back from holiday, show off your tan and excitedly exclaim, "Look, I'm almost as dark as you!" Cease and desist.

7. Don't assume that a person of color knows everything about their country of heritage. Do you know everything there is to know about America? Germany? Sweden? That's what I thought.

8. Don't assume we can run if we're Black, do math if we're Asian, have drinking problems if we're indigenous...

9. Regard us as autonomous, unique individuals, not as representatives of our race.

10. Don't make embarrassing jokes to try and be "down" with people of color. We'll laugh at you, not with you.

11. Don't rinse our culturally specific memes. They're ours. Go enjoy that weird one about the plums.

12. If you're at my house party, don't turn off the Weeknd to put on Arctic Monkeys. (Okay this one is very specific but it happened to me once and I'm not over it. The audacity!)

13. Avoid phrases like "But I have a Black friend! I can't be racist!" You know that's BS as well as we do.

14. When you endlessly complain about how terrible white people are, you are being that terrible white person. Jeez.

15. Don't say shit like, "I know what it's like to be a person of color...I'm a ginger!"

16. Don't question someone's Blackness if they're light-skinned. It's not your place. Other Black people can make sure that light-skinned Black people are cognizant of their privilege.

17. Never try and tell a person of color what is or isn't racist.

18. When you find instances of racist bullshit online, please don't send it to us. We know racism exists, thanks.

19. Read something already written about it rather than coming to your friends/acquaintances of color looking for hot takes on anything and everything appropriative a Kardashian/Miley Cyrus does. We don't wanna think about this shit 24/7!

20. Understand that some days are even more mentally exhausting for people of color thanks to the news cycle. Try not to badger us for our opinions on the latest atrocity that has occurred. Leave us to grieve.

21. But when we do have something to say about it, listen.

22. Share articles relating to the everyday experiences of race and racism written by people of color.

23. But don't be that person who is weird and sycophantic and loves to demonstrate their wokeness constantly to the people of color around them. Be thoughtful.

24. Read books by people of color. I recommend Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and literally everything that Junot Diaz writes for great insights into Blackness.

25. Watch shows that are created by people of color i.e. Atlanta or Insecure. (Seriously, if you haven't seen Atlanta, you need to watch it. Now.)

26. Have a critical eye when watching TV and movies. How are they portraying people of color and why? What purpose does it serve?

27. If you go to an art gallery, notice how many works are by people of color. If it's lacking, make some noise, send an email, query the curator. White people shouldn't have a monopoly on what can be considered art.

28. If a character you assumed was white in a book is portrayed by an actor of color in the movie, embrace it. Whiteness is not the default.

29. Support plays written by and acted in by people of color. The world of theater is overwhelmingly white.

30. Refuse to go to club nights or drag shows or burlesque nights that use culturally appropriative acts.

31. If you have kids, buy them dolls of color and books with characters of color.

32. Support crowdfunding campaigns for cultural products created by people of color if you can.

33. Donate money to grassroots movements around you that are run by and support people of color.

34. Support small businesses owned by people of color.

35. If you're upper or middle class try to avoid moving into an area that has historically been populated by low-income people of color. Gentrification tears communities apart.

36. Don't assume people of color can't speak English.

37. But also be patient if our English isn't perfect. Are you bi/tri/multi-lingual? Probably not. It's hard.

38. In general, just don't assume we want to be white or want to assimilate. And don't pressure us to do so.

39. Recognize that you can't assume someone's religion based on how they look. Not all South Asians and Middle Eastern people are Muslims, not all Black people are Christian, not all East Asian people are Buddhist. You get the idea.

40. Remember that not all people of color are straight.

41. Remember that people of color are not inherently more homophobic than white people.

42. People can be Black and gay and disabled and trans and middle class. Blackness is expansive. It doesn't look one way. Keep this in mind.

43. When we talk about race, we're not just talking about men! Repeat after me: Intersections of race and gender exist.

44. Remember that it is Black women and Native women and mixed race women who are most likely to be raped in their lifetimes in America. You cannot be an advocate against sexual violence without considering the impact of race.

45. Don't ask Black women if it's our "real hair." And don't judge Black women for wearing wigs or weaves or having relaxers.

46. Don't touch our fucking hair.

47. If you have a Black girlfriend, please make sure that your shower is always adequately stocked with conditioner. Never that 2-in-1 stuff!!! We beg you.

48. Never try and pull any uninvited "race play" shit in the bedroom. Seriously, what the fuck?

49. Actively try to identify and unsubscribe from orientalist tropes i.e. believing that East Asian women are naturally more submissive or docile. People of color are people, not characters.

50. If you call a woman of color "exotic," you deserve to stub your toe every day for a year. Do. Not. Do. This.

51. Also, saying "I've never fucked a Black/Asian/Native etc. person" to someone you're trying to hook up with is a one way ticket to hell.

52. If you have such fetishistic thoughts, just don't even bother coming near a person of color.

53. Remember that having mixed race children is not a cure for racism or a way to live out weird racial fantasies.

54. If you're trying to start a mixed raced family, sit down and deeply interrogate your intentions.

55. If you do have mixed race children, make sure that they have access to people who look like them and who understand their experiences.

56. If you have a partner of color or children of color, trust and believe that you can still be racist. You're not exempt. If anything, you have even more of a duty to examine your behavior for the benefit of your loved ones.

57. Take your racist family members to task for the shit they say over the dinner table or via social media.

58. Confront your colleagues who say racist shit unchecked at work.

59. Look around your workplace-are the only people of color cleaners or assistants? What can you do to change that? (The answer is almost never "nothing.")

60. If someone asks you to fill a role that you think a person of color would be better suited for, recommend a talented person of color who you know and forego the position yourself.

61. Don't make us be the de facto diversity guy at work. Or at least pay us extra to do the labor of diversifying the workplace.

62. Refuse to speak on an all-white panel. Regardless of the topic.

63. If there are only a couple of people of color in your seminar, don't weirdly stare at them when the lecturer poses questions about race and expect them to answer everything.

64. If you're in charge of making curricula, make sure there is work by people of color, especially women of color, on the reading list. And not just in the weeks dedicated to race.

65. Commission people of color to make work about race.

66. Commission people of color to make work that has nothing to do with race.

67. Don't say things like "there are two sides to every story!" or play devil's advocate when it comes to conversations about race.

68. In those situations, just listen.

69. It's never useful to say stuff like, "But what about the white working class!!!" Have you thought about non-white working class people's needs?

70. Don't? Vote? For? Racist? Politicians? Can't believe I need to say this one but it seems like possibly, maybe, some of y'all did not get this memo.

71. Research your candidates. Who has progressive policies that won't needlessly criminalize people of color? Vote for them.

72. Remember that Black women are not here to save you from yourselves. You've gotta put in the work, too.

73. Be cognizant of how your whiteness could be weaponized against Black people. i.e. white women, don't play into stereotypes about Black men being inherently threatening to you. It gets Black men killed. See: Emmett Till.

74. Use your white privilege to be on the frontline between people of color and the police at protests. You're at much less risk than us.

75. Record police encounters you see involving Black people.

76. Share alerts when ICE is planning a raid.

77. Stand up to Islamophobia wherever you see it.

78. If you have ever thought a phrase like "Black lives matter" is too assertive, consider why you're so uncomfortable with Black people standing up for our humanity.

79. Listen when Black people say, "I'm not comfortable in this situation." You've seen Get Out, haven't you?

80. If you haven't seen Get Out, watch Get Out. Understand that the everyday horror is real.

81. Question whether you have double standards when it comes to drugs. Do you think it's cool when white weed entrepreneurs make tons of money but think that Black people who are found to have traces of marijuana in their systems deserve to be thrown in prison?

82. Don't have dreadlocks if you're not Black, just don't. Beyond being offensive, it's just not suited to your hair type. Do literally anything else with your hair.

83. Don't refer to things as your "spirit animal" if you're not Native. There are other ways to express affinity with something.

84. Do not compare the exploitation of animals to racism. Ever. I'm deadly serious.

85. I can't believe I even need to say this in 2018 but here we go: Don't wear Blackface.

86. Don't even think about saying the N word. Even if you're alone. Even if you're listening to rap. Even if you're alone and listening to rap.

87. Similarly, don't use the word "g*psy" or "p*ki" or "r*dskin" or any other racial slur. Even if you're repeating what someone else said or reading from a text.

88. That includes the word "colored." "Person of color" and "colored" are not the same. Trust me.

89. Understand that America has what it has because it stole land from indigenous people and stole people from Africa.

90. Care about race on the 364 days that aren't Martin Luther King Jr. day.

91. Also, don't whitewash his legacy and use it to argue that Black people should just take what they're given lying down.

92. Think about how race is operating even when people of color aren't around. Be cognizant of it wherever you are, whichever situation you're in. People of color have to, so should you.

93. Remember that your queerness/womanhood/transness/class background/disability doesn't exclude you from white privilege.

94. Make your feminism useful to all women rather than calling yourself an 'intersectional feminist'. Show, don't tell.

95. Don't assume, full stop, that you can understand what it's like to experience racism. You can't. That's the whole point.

96. Understand that nothing in your life has been untouched by your whiteness. Everything you have would have been harder to come by if you had not been born white.

97. Be grateful for the lesson when you're called out on racism, getting defensive won't help.

98. Move past your white guilt. Guilt is an unproductive emotion. Don't sit there mired in woe, just be better.

99. Recognize that fighting racism isn't about you, it's not about your feelings; it's about liberating people of color from a world that tries to crush us at every turn.

100. And remember: Being an ally is a verb, not a noun. You can't just magically be an ally to people of color because you say you're one, it's something that you must continually work on.

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100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating for People of Colour

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As someone with very low tolerance for racist bullshit, I've managed to surround myself with white people who are cognizant of their privilege and strive to make the world a less terrifying and frustrating place for people of color. This means that I often deal with said white people asking me what they can actually do to affect change.

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Long format sur l'élaboration d'une assurance pandémie qui ne s'est jamais vendue.
Plongée absolument fascinante dans le secteur de la réassurance.
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Kraut's team began attempting to quantify and price this incredibly remote, unpredictable risk. If they managed to do that, they would then need to sell part of that risk—to find someone willing to insure the reinsurer. “No one really had tried to do a transaction at a one-in-500-year return period,” Kraut said. His boss gave it a 50–50 chance of success.

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"It's really a 100-year thing," Nathan Wolfe said. It was 2006, and Wolfe, then a 36-year-old virologist with an unruly nest of curly hair, was sitting across a table from me at a bustling restaurant in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. An epidemiology professor at UCLA, he had been living in West Africa for six years, establishing a research center to identify and study viruses as they crossed over from wild animals into humans.

That night Wolfe told me he was forming a network of research outposts around the globe, in hot spots where potentially devastating viruses were poised to make the jump: Cameroon, where HIV likely passed from chimpanzees into local hunters; the Democratic Republic of Congo, which had seen human outbreaks of monkeypox; Malaysia, home to a 1998 emergence of the Nipah virus; and China, where SARS-CoV had crossed over, likely from bats, in 2002. Wolfe's hope was that by understanding what he called the "viral chatter" of such places, it would be possible not only to react more quickly to outbreaks but to forecast their arrival and stop them before they spread. The "100-year thing" he was thinking about was a global pandemic, and how history would judge humanity's efforts to prepare for it. His biggest fear, he said, was a virus unknown to human immune defenses starting a human-to-human transmission chain that would encircle the globe.

As we knocked back Cameroonian beers and talked between sets of a local band, he admitted his project could fail. "It could be that we look at this and it's stochastic-you can't predict it," he said. "Or, it could be that we are on the edge of a paradigm shift." The ultimate question, Wolfe added, was "Will people look back and say you did a good job responding to epidemics, but you didn't do anything to prevent them?" The 100-year notion so captivated me that I used it as the last line of a story I wrote in 2007, in this magazine.

Thirteen years later, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus burned across the globe this March, it appeared that the 100-year judgment had arrived. We'd failed both at preventing the exact danger Wolfe had warned us about and at responding when it emerged. He wasn't the only pandemic Cassandra, of course. Not even close. Scientists, journalists, and public health experts had sounded the alarm for decades, filling journals, government reports, and popular books with their pleas. There were conferences, commissions, hearings, exercises, consortiums. Every few years another near-miss epidemic emerged that cried out for long-term preparation.

But Wolfe was the Cassandra I'd known, and I couldn't help wondering what it felt like to be living through the pandemic you predicted. We had corresponded a few times since 2007, and I'd followed his career sporadically as he started a company called Metabiota. As best I could gather, he had transferred his original idea of a disease surveillance network into a kind of epidemiological data company.

I dug up his email and wrote to him. "It must be a strange sensation," I said, "to have been terribly right about something you didn't want to be right about."

When he called me the next afternoon, the US had just passed 4,000 cases of Covid-19, and Wolfe sounded beleaguered. "Right now I'm a little bit-what's the right word for it-overwhelmed," he said. But he seemed decidedly unenthusiastic about discussing his own prescience. "I'm not interested in Monday morning quarterbacking," he said. "If you are the person who says the sky is falling and it falls, you definitely feel like saying 'Why didn't people listen to me?' But there are a lot of people saying the sky is falling about other things, and it doesn't."

Nor was he particularly interested in casting blame-in offering an I-told-you-so from the intrepid virus hunter. "Plenty of people can speak to that," he said. "It's like Good Vibrations: I don't want to play that anymore. I have a new record." Now 49, Wolfe had traded the Cameroonian jungle for the conference rooms of Silicon Valley. When I saw him on Zoom, his shoulder-length locks were gone, and his quarantine beard was shot through with gray. But he had the same glow of enthusiasm I remembered. His new preoccupation, he told me, was pandemic insurance.

I'll confess this didn't immediately pique my interest. The word insurance evokes in me feelings of tedium and loathing. Like many Americans, my personal interface with the industry has, let's just say, been less than positive. But then Wolfe began to explain the unexpected direction his career had taken. After years of thinking about epidemics in terms of the symptomatic and the dead, he'd begun considering their economic ramifications. A global pandemic, and the steps we would take to stop it, would mean business closings, layoffs, and mass unemployment. Preparing to face an outbreak, he'd come to believe, required anticipating those impacts.

This was where insurance came in, specifically a kind of pandemic insurance policy-for businesses, and perhaps even for countries-that would pay out as soon as an epidemic reached a certain threshold. In 2015, Metabiota had partnered with German reinsurance giant Munich Re and American insurance brokerage Marsh to develop and sell a policy specifically to guard large businesses against pandemics-to stanch the financial losses and keep them afloat. They'd launched it in mid-2018, a year and a half before the first Covid-19 cases appeared in China.

My sense of tedium evaporated. As Wolfe and I were talking, a total economic lockdown was in place, with millions of jobs disappearing by the week and lines at food pantries stretching by the hour. And here he was saying that they had come up with a kind of financial vaccine for exactly this scenario, released not long before the worst pandemic in a century. It wouldn't stop the virus, of course, but it could help alleviate some of the misery that flowed from it.

How must those CEOs feel, I wondered aloud, who had the foresight to buy the world's first pandemic business insurance? What a story they would have to tell.

There was just one problem. "By and large we failed," Wolfe said. "Not because we didn't do the models well. We enabled the first business-disruption insurance for pandemics. But nobody bought it."

I was so stunned I called him up a few days later to ask him again. Did he mean literally nobody bought it?

"As far as I know, nobody bought the policy," he said.

It was a life insurance quandary that first got Gunther Kraut thinking about pandemics, nearly a decade ago. A mathematician by training, Kraut was working at Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurers. As it sounds, reinsurance is the business of insuring insurers. The local and national insurance companies that you and I buy life or auto coverage from-the Geicos and Allstates of the world-need their own protection against rare but catastrophic events that might create enough claims to bankrupt them. Reinsurance companies provide that backstop on insurance for everything from homes and infrastructure projects to business losses and individual lives. Reinsurance is a staggeringly lucrative endeavor: Munich Re had $56 billion in revenue and $3 billion in profit last year. The market is large enough that its perennial competitor, Swiss Re, took in $49 billion itself.

Kraut, sandy-haired and still slightly boyish-looking at 39, grew up near Munich, where the eponymous company has dominated the economic landscape since its founding in 1880. He talks about the intricacies of underwriting with a friendly patience that implies he has done so countless times before, none of which have dimmed his passion. He gravitated toward math at university, and, he told me, "it's hard to study mathematics in Munich without ever learning about the existence of reinsurance companies." After completing his PhD in risk management and insurance at Ludwig-Maximilians University, he took a job as a quantitative analyst in Munich Re's life insurance division in 2007. "Reinsurance is sometimes called the business of a hundred professions," he said. "Because you don't just have mathematicians and lawyers and businessmen. You have former mining engineers. You have former captains who steered ships across the ocean. You have art experts who are specialized in art insurance. It is, if you like, always close to life. Admittedly with a little bit of this negative view on it."

Munich Re-a company built to absorb the risk of others-had a risk problem of its own: namely, the possibility of a global pandemic. Insurance is essentially the business of quantifying risk and then smoothing it out. But for a worldwide outbreak, the math in its life insurance portfolio looked worrying even to Kraut and his colleagues, who spent their careers pondering the darkest risks. In late 2011, Kraut's team decided to try to do something about it.

"Let's take the example of Munich and car insurance," Kraut told me. "That's a very, very stable business." A local company might insure tens of thousands of cars, each with a certain probability of having a small accident. "You can predict very well how much money you will have to pay on the claim settlements, and hence how much premium you will need to collect," he said. But let's say that one year there is a freakishly large hailstorm in Bavaria, damaging half the cars in the portfolio. The resulting claims could be an extinction-level event for an insurance company. Such storms may occur statistically only once every three decades-a one-in-30-year event, in risk parlance-but every car insurance company would have to keep enough cash on hand to pay out on claims on half its cars, just in case. "That's a lot of money you need to put aside for something that happens very rarely," Kraut said.

Now consider an auto insurer in Paris with the same problem: a fleet of cars, a predictable number of accidents, the threat of a one-in-30-year hailstorm event. Herein lies the mathematical advantage of reinsurance. If Munich Re pledges to cover both companies against freakish hailstorms, "what we can assume with a high chance is that there will be hailstorms in Paris, there will be hailstorms in Munich, but most likely they will not happen in the same year," Kraut said. That means Munich Re can set aside less money to prepare for a rare event. Even better: The more car insurers that Munich Re adds to its portfolio, in more geographical regions, the more it can convert a rare and expensive risk into a predictable and cheaper one for itself. In insurance it's called diversification. "The more that you can spread the risk, the better for making it insurable," Kraut said. "That's why reinsurance companies are global companies."

The math applies to other insurance "perils," as they're known-earthquakes, floods, wildfires. And ordinary deaths, most of the time. But therein lay the problem for Kraut, who was partly responsible for making sure the company's life insurance division didn't shoulder unsustainable risks. Local disease outbreaks were like the hailstorms of life insurance: rare and devastating regional events that could be counted on to happen at different times in different locales. "Now you quickly see the problem with insuring pandemic risk, because a pandemic is by definition a global event," Kraut said. Imagine a hailstorm spreading from town to town, across the globe, in a cataclysmic chain: "The whole concept of global diversification doesn't work out anymore." An outbreak on the scale of the 1918 flu-50 million dead worldwide-might be a one-in-500-year risk, an event way out on the tail of a probability curve. But a pandemic at that scale, or even one considerably smaller, could not only overwhelm life insurance companies but Munich Re too.

To tackle Munich Re's exposure, Kraut's team began attempting to quantify and price this incredibly remote, unpredictable risk. If they managed to do that, they would then need to sell part of that risk-to find someone willing to insure the reinsurer. "No one really had tried to do a transaction at a one-in-500-year return period," Kraut said. His boss gave it a 50-50 chance of success.

But over the course of two years, the group gradually built up a list of potential buyers. It turned out that there were a few large institutional investors looking to diversify their own portfolios, and a little bit of pandemic risk was just the thing. Munich Re would provide them with annual payments, year after year. In the rare event of a pandemic, they would have to cover Munich Re's losses. One interested class of investor-if a macabre one-was pension funds, which typically grapple with something called longevity risk: the chance that people will live longer than expected. "It's not really good terminology to call it a 'risk,' " Kraut said. "It's a good thing, technically! But if people live a lot longer than expected, then a pension fund needs to pay out a lot more pensions than they originally calculated." A deadly pandemic that takes the lives of pensioners, to put it in the most clinical terms, means fewer years of pension payouts, canceling some of the longevity risk. Should no pandemic arise, they would pocket payments from Munich Re. By 2013, Kraut and his team had put together enough investors-starting with a large Australian pension fund-to take some of the pandemic problem off of Munich Re's books. But he soon encountered an unexpected hitch: The mechanisms written to trigger the deal relied on a series of "pandemic phases" monitored by the World Health Organization. (Phase 1: Virus is circulating in animals. Phase 2: Reports of human infection. Phase 3: Human-to-human transmission. And so on up to Phase 6: Sustained outbreaks in multiple regions.) Sometime in 2013, however, the WHO abandoned this system for a less specific four phases. Kraut suddenly needed some other organization to delineate the stages of epidemics reliably enough to write into an insurance policy. And he needed someone to monitor epidemics closely, to know when they hit agreed upon triggers-illnesses, deaths, spread. "But you can't just hire the WHO," he said.

In studying up on the world of epidemiology, Kraut happened to have picked up a book called The Viral Storm. It was written by Nathan Wolfe. Part memoir, part prescription, the book laid out a vision for how to counter the threat that novel viruses represent to humans. Kraut looked up Wolfe and saw that he'd formed a company. "I thought, oh, maybe these guys actually can do it," he said. He sent an email to info@metabiota.com. "Hello, have you ever heard of a reinsurance company? I might have a good reason to talk to you."

As it happened, Wolfe was already thinking about the business shocks of pandemics when Kraut's email arrived in Metabiota's inbox in 2013. By this time, Wolfe's public profile as an Indiana Jones-like virus hunter had been well established. He'd been featured on CNN and had given the obligatory TED talks. He'd walked away from his tenured position at UCLA, moved to San Francisco, and founded Metabiota. Wolfe leveraged his academic work into the private sector, using the data from his network of research stations to conduct disease surveillance for clients. For years, the company subsisted largely on government contracts, including more than $20 million from the Department of Defense and aid agencies involved in managing epidemic outbreaks. Metabiota also partnered with the foreign assistance agency USAID on a project called Predict, helping to build a database cataloging viruses in their animal reservoirs and forecasting which ones might jump to humans. "There was some success," Wolfe told me. "Some money was put into prediction and prevention. Not enough, obviously."

As Wolfe started to appear on stages alongside business leaders, he became convinced that the commercial sector had seriously underestimated epidemic risk. In 2010 he sat on a panel at Davos called "Prepare for a Pandemic." In advance of the talk, the organizers circulated a survey showing that while 60 percent of CEOs believed the threat of a global outbreak was real, only 20 percent had an emergency plan in place. That same year he'd been invited to a cruise industry conference. He'd tried, without luck, to convince executives that Metabiota could help them avoid the havoc of an epidemic. "I felt like nobody was paying attention to it," he said.

Then Gunther Kraut's email arrived. Kraut and Wolfe met up at a conference in Munich and began riffing. Soon Metabiota was providing disease monitoring for Munich Re's life insurance division.

"There is a bit of financial alchemy to the whole thing," Wolfe said. "You really are creating something from nothing."

Kraut, however, had an even more ambitious idea in mind. What if, instead of simply hedging its own life insurance business in the case of a pandemic, Munich Re could use the same concept to insure other businesses against them? Business interruption insurance, the policies that protect companies against income losses from disasters like fires or hurricanes, often explicitly excluded disease. (And when it didn't, insurers could still use the ambiguity to deny claims.) The risk was thought to be too large, too unpredictable to quantify. But Munich Re had already proven it could cover its own life insurance risk in pandemics, and now it had a partner in Metabiota that specialized in seemingly unpredictable outbreaks. What if they could create and sell a business interruption insurance policy that covered epidemics, starting with acutely vulnerable industries like travel and hospitality? They could then pass on the payout risk from those policies to the same types of investors who had bought their life risk. "There is a bit of financial alchemy to the whole thing," Wolfe told me later. "You really are creating something from nothing."

At the same time, Wolfe had been working to operate Metabiota more like a technology company. In 2015, he hired Nita Madhav, an epidemiologist who'd spent 10 years modeling catastrophes at a company called AIR Worldwide, one of a handful of firms the insurance industry relies on to compute extreme risks. (Munich Re, in fact, had worked with AIR epidemiological models in its life insurance calculations.) Madhav's mandate at Metabiota was to build the industry's most comprehensive pandemic model. Her team, which eventually grew to include data scientists, epidemiologists, programmers, actuaries, and social scientists, began by painstakingly gathering historical data on thousands of major disease outbreaks dating back to the 1918 flu. Her colleagues had recently created what they called the Epidemic Preparedness Index, an assessment of 188 countries' capacity to respond to outbreaks. Together, the two efforts informed an infectious disease model and software platform. A user could begin with a set of parameters around a hypothetical virus-its geographic origin point, how easily it was transmitted, its virulence-and then run scenarios exploring how the disease spread around the world. The goal was a model that could, for example, help a manufacturer understand how a disease might impact its supply chain or a drug company plan for how a treatment would need to be distributed.

As sophisticated as Metabiota's system was, however, it would need to be even more refined to incorporate into an insurance policy. The model would need to capture something much more difficult to quantify than historical deaths and medical stockpiles: fear. The economic consequences of a scourge, the historical data showed, were as much a result of society's response as they were to the virus itself.

The group started building what became known as the Sentiment Index. Ben Oppenheim, head of the product team and a political scientist, had studied the work of Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor who studied how human beings perceive and respond to risk. Inspired by Slovic's data-driven approach, they gathered their own information from around the world on how much various symptoms frightened people. To validate their measures, they also began tracking and studying how media coverage evolved around different types of outbreaks. Scarier diseases tended to generate more news stories.

In 2015 the Zika virus outbreak superscript text arrived and crystallized the reality that fear was a critical variable in understanding the economics of outbreaks. A mosquito-borne disease with no vaccine or treatment, Zika almost never killed its victims, but in pregnant women it could lead to a rare and terrifying birth defect called microcephaly. After decades of low-level outbreaks, the disease suddenly surfaced in Brazil and raged northward, causing billions of dollars in tourism losses across South and Central America. Even two years later, Oppenheim, whose wife was then pregnant, canceled a trip to a conference in Bogotá, despite the fact that his own company's research told him the risk of Zika-carrying mosquitoes at the city's altitude was negligible. "I remember thinking, we have to solve this," he said of the question of how to model fear. "Because if a pretty rational person with access to a lot of data is making an emotional decision, imagine this magnified in a pandemic."

The Sentiment Index was built to be, as Oppenheim put it, "a catalog of dread." For any given pathogen, it could spit out a score from 0 to 100 according to how frightening the public would find it. That number could then be used to help calculate the possible financial losses from an epidemic, everything from empty hotels to postponed mining projects. Madhav and her team, along with Wolfe and Oppenheim, also researched the broader economic consequences of disease outbreaks, measured in the "cost per death prevented" incurred by societal interventions. "Measures that decreased person-to-person contact, including social distancing, quarantine, and school closures, had the greatest cost per death prevented, most likely because of the amount of economic disruption caused by those measures," they wrote in a 2018 paper.

By then, the Sentiment Index had been tested against Metabiota's database of historical pandemics, and Munich Re began incorporating it into a business interruption policy. Gunther Kraut's group was then operating as a stand-alone unit called Epidemic Risk Solutions, with groups in Singapore, Munich, and London. The promise, for both companies, was enormous. Metabiota had raised $30 million via venture funding in 2015, partly on the idea that providing the technology behind pandemic coverage could be a growth business. There was, after all, only so much a government agency might pay Metabiota for disease surveillance; the universe of large businesses that could suffer losses from a major pandemic, however, was nearly limitless. Munich Re had a chance to create an entirely new segment of the insurance market, for a risk that existed in literally every part of the globe.

To Wolfe, the product felt like an elegant solution to the inaction he'd seen for years, as whole industries lacked the tools to prepare for the peril that an inevitable pandemic represented, even if they understood the risk. Insurance would provide a mechanism whereby the financial risks that companies faced-shuttered locations, vanishing customers-would be shouldered by investors eager to accept it in exchange for a regular premium.

Munich Re wasn't the only company looking for a bit of financial alchemy. The US insurance firm Marsh had been grappling with the same question for its customers. Like Oppenheim at Metabiota, Christian Ryan had personal reasons to be struck by the financial consequences of the Zika outbreak. "My father was a hotelier down in Brazil," said Ryan, the head of Marsh's hospitality, sports, and gaming division. When the disease began spreading in 2016, his dad lost a significant amount of his business and eventually sold the hotel for a fraction of the price he once could have gotten. "It just showed how fragile hospitality was. Because it's predicated on people continuing to show up and feel safe and feel secure."

Ryan and his colleagues went looking for someone who might have modeled out the risk, and like Munich Re, they ended up on Metabiota's doorstep. Soon Marsh had formed a three-way partnership with Wolfe's company and Munich Re. Marsh would sell the insurance under the name PathogenRX. (Munich Re set up similar sales relationships in other parts of the world.) The policies would be tailored for each company, but most would contain what's called a parametric solution: a preset amount of coverage that could automatically pay out when the epidemic reached certain thresholds, giving companies an infusion of cash without the delays of filing a claim.

The marketing materials for the policy now read like a letter from 2020. To the airline and hospitality industries, they warned that "these outbreaks have had widespread impact on personal and business travel." For sports teams and leagues, they cautioned, "individuals must be able to participate in and attend events without fear for their safety and health. Pandemic outbreaks can disrupt public confidence, and in turn, make or break many companies."

But selling the insurance meant first persuading risk managers and chief risk officers-the figures responsible for insurance coverage at large corporations-that pandemics were a risk worth hedging. Then the risk managers would need to persuade their bosses-the CFOs and CEOs-to pony up for a new expense that wasn't going to help the company's quarterly bottom line.

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Oftentimes Munich Re and Marsh would bring someone from Metabiota along to client meetings to drive home the existential risks. Jaclyn Guerrero, Metabiota's associate product director, told me that for a meeting with one major hospitality conglomerate, she used the company's data on average hotel bookings and ancillary income to show the executives what the losses could look like. Her analysis made it clear that the shock from a severe monthslong SARS-like pandemic could erase between $300 million and $800 million from the company's annual bottom line. The chief risk officer "really believed that this was something worth protecting against," she said. But the company passed on buying the policy. "A lot of times in these conversations," she said, "clients will say, 'OK, we understand why this could potentially be such an impact. But we haven't seen an event like this in 100 years. Why do we need to care about it now?'"

Marsh and Munich Re both knew they were fighting an uphill battle. "Insurance is sold, not bought," the industry saying goes, and pandemic insurance would be both novel and quite expensive-potentially millions of dollars on top of what the company was paying for insurance. No CFO was eager to be the first among their competitors to take on a significant new cost.

"They all recognized that it was a risk, but I think at the end of the day it was a business decision," Ryan said. "We had a lot of clients say, 'Not now, but let's think about it next year, and I can plan and budget for it.' Well, next year is right now, and unfortunately Covid-19 happened this year."

On December 31, 2019, Nita Madhav was in Portland, Oregon, attending a cousin's wedding. That summer, after four years leading the infectious disease data science team, she'd taken over as CEO of Metabiota. Now she was enjoying a holiday away from the stress of running a 60-plus-employee company. Her extended family had traveled from around the US and beyond to celebrate the wedding and count down the last moments of 2019 together. But that morning, before the ceremony, Madhav began getting texts from Oppenheim telling her about a cluster of unusual pneumonia-like infections in Wuhan, China. The company's early detection system, which included an algorithm for parsing and highlighting news stories about outbreaks, was flagging Wuhan as a potential hot spot. The team typically looked at hundreds of media reports a week and approached new ones cautiously. At the reception, Madhav messaged with Oppenheim and wondered: If it was respiratory, could the source be more like H7N9, the avian flu? A coronavirus like SARS-CoV?

The next day, she checked in with her staff, who would need to quickly marshal enough data to project where the outbreak could land. "We were just trying to see what we could find out," she said. "We weren't yet in the all-hands-on-deck mode. By the third week in January, we certainly were."

As the human and economic devastation multiplied in tandem across the globe, Metabiota's employees suddenly found themselves living inside their own model's projections. Just two years earlier, the company had run a large set of scenarios forecasting the consequences of a novel coronavirus spreading around the globe. "I guess part of what I'm struggling with emotionally is that it's almost like we've been attacked by a cliché," Oppenheim told me later. "No one can predict the exact timing and location and dynamics, but the broad contours are a story that people have walked through specifically before."

At the same time Metabiota was watching the nightmare that its models had anticipated unfold, Gunther Kraut was in Singapore facing a different problem. Where Munich Re's epidemic solutions division had been struggling to get traction with potential customers, now, in early January, buyers were banging at the door. "That's just the nature of human psychology," he said. "Whenever a catastrophe arrives, people immediately want insurance for that catastrophe." The virus was still confined to China and Kraut faced a grim calculation: Should the company write business interruption policies that would cover SARS-CoV-2, outside of Asia? "You clearly have the human tragedy," he said. "On the other hand you are in charge of the business unit." But there were too many warning signs-too much risk for Munich Re. It would have been like selling fire insurance for a house already in flames. Kraut made the decision not to sell.

In a sense, Munich Re had dodged a bullet: Had the company succeeded at selling pandemic protection to corporate giants starting 19 months before, it would have collected almost no premiums and now be paying out on every single one. Kraut acknowledged as much, but offered that if insurers never pay out, "then you lose the reason of existence."

By March, Metabiota had closed its offices in downtown San Francisco, and its employees joined the legions of new remote workers. "It is painful to see loss of livelihoods, insecurity, fear," Oppenheim said, "when potentially we would have had tools to prevent that."

On the afternoon of April 10, as the worldwide death toll crossed 100,000, the data science and product teams gathered on a Zoom call to discuss a new Covid-19 scenario tool. The goal was to help an international aid agency concerned about the possible trajectories for developing countries. Metabiota's models are built for long-term understanding rather than real-time analysis, but as clients turned to them for information, they scrambled to adapt. With home and office life now fully merged-"Was Ben going to join this one?" Madhav asked. "No, I think he's on childcare," came the response-everyone turned off their video to save bandwidth for the screenshare. One data scientist kicked off the call by showing a rough version of the new tool, paging through alternately disheartening and terrifying graphs illustrating the best- and worst-case results for 16 countries, depending on how the virus was contained. The former showed hundreds of thousands of additional deaths from late March onward. In the latter, reflecting a total breakdown in containment, the deaths reached into the tens of millions.

Nicole Stephenson, Metabiota's director of infectious disease modeling, then pulled up a data set the company had obtained, capturing an individual country's epidemic controls: travel restrictions, school closures, border closures, limits on public gatherings. It was the kind of data they could later feed into their disease-spread model. "We're trying to figure out a way to rank countries in their proactiveness," Stephenson reported. The group discussed which parameters to quantify to feed into the system and tossed out ideas on what was missing. They needed data on food security, one suggested, since it could impact the feasibility of national lockdowns. Another had a line on some data about Covid-19's comorbidity with HIV-a critical concern in some African countries.

"Are we tracking which countries have put into place economic stimulus packages?" Madhav asked. "And which countries are seeking out relief or aid?"

"Some of this is captured in this data set," Stephenson said. "But it's very qualitative."

That would be the next step: figuring how to convert thousands of rows of words into quantifiable measures that the model could use for calculations-and ultimately show the client how bad things could get. "Everybody's got some fun data to play with over the weekend," Stephenson said. "I know that's what I'll be doing."

"Nobody bought the policy." I couldn't stop thinking about what Wolfe had told me, back when I reconnected with him in March. It wasn't quite nobody, as it turned out. Kraut told me that one company in the health care industry in the US had bought some level of pandemic protection, although the insurer that sold it had later quit selling the policies due to lack of interest. For confidentiality reasons, Kraut wouldn't say who the end client was or whether it had received payment.

There are some large corporate insurance policies that do cover disease-related losses, such as event cancellation coverage; both Munich Re and Swiss Re announced that they potentially faced hundreds of millions of dollars in claims connected to suspension of the Olympics and other events. In April, news surfaced that the Wimbledon tennis tournament was set to collect $140 million from an insurance policy in which it had demanded a pandemic protection clause 17 years earlier-after the SARS outbreak in 2003. And even as late as February, when the virus was already worldwide news, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman managed to find a taker on a $27 million investment bet that the virus could crash the stock market. It was essentially an insurance policy for his portfolio. When he cashed it in to the tune of $2.6 billion in March, after going on TV and warning of the potential devastation the virus could cause, he felt the need to take to Twitter and defend himself against accusations of profiting off human misery.

But the existence of a few prescient exceptions only served to underscore the question of why no one else had heeded the warnings. The failures are massive, almost incomprehensible. (Among them is the fact that, in September 2019, the Trump administration canceled funding for Predict, the USAID disease surveillance program that had been working to identify dangerous viruses-including work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.) But after weeks of asking the question, I realized that at least part of the answer was already there, in that first conversation I'd had with Wolfe in March. After all, I'd written about him more than a decade before. I had heard the warnings directly from him, listened to him describe the hundreds of thousands of unknown mammalian viruses that lurked out in the biosphere. I'd hiked through the jungles where HIV likely made its jump to humans. And then I'd come home, written my story, and largely forgotten about the pandemic he'd predicted.

"I just don't think our brains are particularly well suited to sorting out these kinds of risks, particularly ones that are infrequent," he told me recently. Companies are led by humans who suffer from the same failures of sustained imagination as the rest of us-unable to truly internalize the one-in-100-year disaster until it arrives on our doorsteps. "It will be a defining event for all humans who have lived through this, including my 3- and 5-year-old children," Wolfe said. "But still, everybody is going to go back to their jobs, and people will wonder whether the risk is really that great again." Researchers who study epidemics even have a term for the phenomenon: the cycle of panic and neglect.

But now, as we swing wildly through the panic end of the pendulum-justified panic, as hundreds of thousands die and the international economy collapses-there's no longer a need to explain to airlines or hotel chains or sports franchises how even a small amount of pandemic insurance might help them. Gunther Kraut and his group find themselves deluged with hundreds of requests for the business interruption policies on the next outbreak. Now their challenge is volume, taking a policy meant to be customized for each client and converting it into a commodity that can be sold to many of them at once.

"The demand for insurance arises at particular moments, often in response to dramatic crises that demonstrate human vulnerability," the Princeton historian Harold James has written. In 1666, after the Great Fire of London destroyed a third of the city, the modern fire insurance business was born. A financial crisis in the 1830s prompted the development of the US life insurance market. In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake became the greatest payout, relative to premiums, in Munich Re's history and reshaped natural disaster preparedness forever. Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11: Each has shifted how our society thinks about risk and the money we set aside to try to prepare for it. Climate change is doing so again.

Companies are led by humans who suffer from the same failures of sustained imagination as the rest of us-unable to truly internalize the one-in-100-year disaster until it arrives on our doorsteps.

Without a doubt, insurance will factor into thinking about the economic consequences of pandemics going forward. Already several prominent US restaurants have sued to try to force the issuers of their current business interruption policies to cover coronavirus losses. (Where policies don't specifically include or exclude disease, insurers have just denied any Covid-related claims from small businesses, leaving them with no relief.) Some in the insurance industry speculate that banks may now make business loans in some industries, like travel and hospitality, contingent on having epidemic insurance. Or governments may simply mandate such coverage. In any case, the demand for disease-based insurance may quickly outstrip even the reinsurers' and other investors' ability to cover the policies.

National governments may end up the ultimate pandemic reinsurers, stepping in to prop up the insurance market, as the US did after 9/11 with the 2002 Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. By late May, there were already multiple proposals in Congress do just that. "I think it's very fair to think 9/11 is to terrorism as Covid-19 is to epidemic risk," Wolfe said.

From a certain angle, it will always appear ghoulish for insurers to capitalize on the risk of misery. Insurance triggers are themselves inherently cold, emotionless calculations-a number of sick or dead, or a level of fear on a Sentiment Index. Both Metabiota and Munich Re have explored the possibility that countries themselves, particularly in the developing world, could be insured against epidemics and pandemics. But one pandemic-insurance-like product on the market, a $425 million "pandemic bond" set up by the World Bank in consultation with Munich Re and Swiss Re, has been heavily criticized for failing to pay out quickly enough. While the bond did eventually deliver the part that covered coronaviruses in April, the World Bank was accused of making the triggers needlessly complex and then dawdling while bodies were piling up.

Epidemics are inherently chaotic, as Metabiota itself experienced during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which killed 11,000 people in six countries. A 2016 Associated Press investigation detailed accusations that the company's laboratory in Sierra Leone had mishandled testing samples and underplayed the epidemic's potential scope. "We're not a response organization," Wolfe told me recently, by way of explanation. "But the government was our partner and it was an emergency, so we stepped up to respond. Everybody makes mistakes in those kinds of environments, and we were not free of mistakes."

Even if and when pandemic insurance policies become widespread, they aren't a panacea for the kind of economic ruin we are currently living through. One only has to look to the 2008 mortgage crisis to see how financial alchemy can go wrong. There will be small businesses priced out of coverage, insurers who exploit every loophole to avoid claims, and corporate executives who enrich themselves and not their workers when they do receive payments. But if SARS-CoV-2 has shown anything, it's that we need every preventive weapon in the arsenal. Even a marginal amount of pandemic insurance could have meant fewer layoffs, diluting the economic pain. "Right now, taxpayers are going to soak up 100 percent of the risk," Wolfe said of the coronavirus impacts. As of late May, the US economic bailout alone amounted to $2 trillion and counting. Pandemic insurance would shift at least some of that burden onto investors who'd willingly taken on the risk. "How much risk will the private sector be able to take? I'm an optimist on that. More than it's currently taking. I don't think anybody would say it's not at least 5 to 10 percent," Wolfe said. Five percent of the bailout would amount to $100 billion lifted off the books of the taxpayers and onto investors who had gambled on the risk.

In the central square in Munich sits a clock tower atop the town hall, completed in 1908. One of the city's most popular tourist attractions, the tower's edifice includes a pair of famous glockenspiels, mechanical-musical dioramas depicting scenes from the region's past. At designated hours, small figurines spin in time with the chiming bells. One portrays the lavish wedding of a Bavarian duke. The other reenacts the "dance of the barrel makers," celebrating the end of a 16th-century plague. Local lore has it that in 1517, the barrel makers took to the streets, dancing to convince the population that the plague had subsided and normal life could resume.

Gunther Kraut often found himself recounting his hometown legend over the years, as he tried to distill the mathematics of pandemic risk into some digestible reality. A one-in-500-year disease event wasn't some abstract concept, he would tell people. It was something that had reshaped our societies in the past and would do so again. And whatever level of truth one ascribed to the glockenspiel's legend, 1517 was just about 500 years ago. The plague would come again, and someone would have to be the barrel makers, bringing everyone back out into the sunlight.

The remoteness of the risk is always the hardest part to get our heads around. Our past moments of calm or our current nightmare, like the last coin flip or turn of the roulette wheel, tell us nothing about when the next one might arrive. One in 500 years isn't a prophesy, just a probability. If anything, as Wolfe pointed out when I first met him over a decade ago, global warming, urbanization, and destruction of species habitats are only accelerating the speed at which the next pandemic may arrive.

"I have a long-term view of this, and this is not the last one," Wolfe said. "It's a bad one." He paused. "It's a bad one. I don't think there's any more 'ifs': This will fundamentally change the future. It is not impossible that over the course of the next 50 years, humanity has an event which is substantially worse than this event, and people at that point look back and say, 'As terrible as Covid-19 was, if we had not had it, the consequences would have been so much more dramatic.'" Even amid the pandemic he had predicted, Wolfe said he still considered himself an optimist. "You want to honor the devastation that this virus is going to have on families, on livelihoods. But in the grand scheme of history, it may also be seen as a very costly inoculum against future events. I believe that the world has no choice but to respond in such a forceful way that will make humanity safer."
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We Can Protect the Economy From Pandemics. Why Didn't We?

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"It's really a 100-year thing," Nathan Wolfe said. It was 2006, and Wolfe, then a 36-year-old virologist with an unruly nest of curly hair, was sitting across a table from me at a bustling restaurant in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon.

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La mastocytose est l'infiltration de mastocytes dans la peau ou dans d'autres tissus et organes. Les symptômes proviennent principalement de la libération de médiateurs et comprennent un prurit, des bouffées de chaleur et une dyspepsie due à une hypersécrétion gastrique. Le diagnostic repose sur la biopsie de moelle osseuse et/ou de la peau. Le traitement repose sur les antihistaminiques et le traitement de tout trouble sous-jacent.

La mastocytose est un ensemble de pathologies caractérisées par une prolifération des mastocytes et une infiltration de la peau et/ou d'autres organes. La physiopathologie résulte principalement de la libération des médiateurs des mastocytes, dont l'histamine, l'héparine, les leucotriènes, ainsi que plusieurs cytokines inflammatoires. L'histamine entraîne nombre de symptômes, dont des symptômes gastriques, mais d'autres médiateurs sont en jeu. Une infiltration importante d'un organe peut entraîner le dysfonctionnement de cet organe. La libération de médiateurs peut être déclenchée par le toucher physique, l'effort, l'alcool, les AINS, les opiacés, les piqûres d'insectes ou les aliments.

L'étiologie chez de nombreux patients implique une mutation activatrice (D816V) du gène codant pour le récepteur du facteur de cellules-souches c-kit, qui est présent sur les mastocytes. Il en résulte une autophosphorylation du récepteur qui provoque la prolifération incontrôlée des mastocytes.

La mastocytose peut être cutanée ou systémique.

Symptomatologie

L'atteinte cutanée est souvent prurigineuse dans la mastocytose, qu'il s'agisse d'un seul mastocytome ou d'une maladie plus diffuse. Ce qui suit peut aggraver les démangeaisons:

Un frôlement ou un frottement des lésions cutanées entraînent une urticaire et un érythème autour de la lésion (signe de Darier); cette réaction diffère d'un dermographisme, qui implique une peau normale.

Des symptômes systémiques peuvent être observés dans n'importe quelle forme. Le plus fréquent est le flush; le plus spectaculaire est la réaction anaphylactoïde et anaphylactique avec syncope et choc.

Les autres symptômes comprennent des douleurs épigastriques dues à un ulcère gastroduodénal, des nausées, des vomissements, une diarrhée chronique, des arthralgies, des douleurs osseuses et des modifications neuropsychiatriques (p. ex., irritabilité, dépression, humeur fragile). L'infiltration du foie et de la rate peut entraîner une hypertension portale avec ascite.

Le diagnostic de mastocytose est évoqué par le tableau clinique. Le diagnostic est confirmé par la biopsie cutanée et parfois de la moelle osseuse. Des infiltrats denses multifocaux de mastocytes sont présents.

Des tests doivent être pratiqués pour éliminer des pathologies provoquant des symptômes similaires (p. ex., anaphylaxie, phéochromocytome, syndrome carcinoïde, syndrome de Zollinger-Ellison); ces examens comprennent les suivants:

Excrétion urinaire d'acide 5-hydroxyindolacétique (5-HIAA) pour éliminer le diagnostic de syndrome carcinoïde en cas de bouffées de chaleur

Métanéphrines et normétanéphrines plasmatiques ou urinaires pour exclure un phéochromocytome

Si le diagnostic est incertain, les niveaux des médiateurs mastocytaires et de leurs métabolites (p. ex., N-méthylhistamine, N-méthylimidazole acide acétique) peuvent être mesurés dans le plasma et l'urine; des niveaux élevés sont en faveur du diagnostic de mastocytose. Le taux de la tryptase (un marqueur de dégranulation des mastocytes) est élevé dans la mastocytose systémique mais est généralement normal dans la mastocytose cutanée.

Une scintigraphie osseuse, un bilan gastro-intestinal et l'identification des mutations D816 V c-kit peuvent également être utiles si le diagnostic nécessite une confirmation.

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Mastocytose - Immunologie; troubles allergiques - Édition professionnelle du Manuel MSD

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La mastocytose est l'infiltration de mastocytes dans la peau ou dans d'autres tissus et organes. Les symptômes proviennent principalement de la libération de médiateurs et comprennent un prurit, des bouffées de chaleur et une dyspepsie due à une hypersécrétion gastrique. Le diagnostic repose sur la biopsie de moelle osseuse et/ou de la peau.

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L’agence de cybersécurité Graphika vient de dévoiler un nouveau rapport qui montre que pendant six ans, la Russie a mené une gigantesque campagne de désinformation pour promouvoir les intérêts nationaux du pays. Secondary Infektion, c’est le nom de cette campagne, s’est étendue sur la quasi-totalité des réseaux sociaux.

Les chercheurs en cybersécurité affirment que Secondary Infektion a démarré en 2014, d’abord sur Twitter puis sur YouTube, avant de s’étendre à d’autres réseaux sociaux au fil des années. La campagne s’est déplacée sur Facebook, Reddit et Medium. En tout, ce sont au moins 2 500 contenus et sept langues différentes qui ont été identifiés. Ils ont également été postés sur près de 300 forums et divers sites web. Ces contenus avaient tous un point commun : valoriser la nation russe.

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A class divided

Elliott divided her class by eye color -- those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were smarter, nicer, neater, and better than those with brown eyes.

Throughout the day, Elliott praised them and allowed them privileges such as a taking a longer recess and being first in the lunch line. In contrast, the brown-eyed children had to wear collars around their necks and their behavior and performance were criticized and ridiculed by Elliott.

On the second day, the roles were reversed and the blue-eyed children were made to feel inferior while the brown eyes were designated the dominant group. What happened over the course of the unique two-day exercise astonished both students and teacher.

On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behavior of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests and other work.

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Elliott divided her class by eye color -- those with blue eyes and those with brown. On the first day, the blue-eyed children were told they were…

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j'ai rien contre ces gens mais je pense qu'ils ont faux

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Many Russians are continuing to ignore social distancing rules.

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Many Russians are continuing to ignore social distancing rules.

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There is a widespread belief that different countries and cultures have different ideas about the acceptable distance between people. There is even an entire science devoted to this discipline, known as “proxemics,” which researchers are using as a framework to establish the measure of these distances.
In proxemics, it’s common to distinguish between

“intimate distance” (between the closest of people),

“personal distance” (in the context of everyday interactions, for example, with colleagues),

“social distance” (in interactions with strangers), and

“public distance” (in public spaces).

Researchers then discuss what distances are specific to different countries. In Russia, the acceptable length of personal distance is sometimes estimated at 120 centimeters (approximately four feet), which is noticeably more than in Western European countries, and the United States.

In Russia, it’s likely that the line between private and public is deeper than in Western Europe. One of the historical reasons for this separation can be found in the Soviet practices of pretense and hypocrisy, analyzed by sociologist Oleg Karkhordin.

The practice of public pretense draws a pretty hard, clear-cut line between public relations and “personal life.” In the USSR, the two were cultivated as distinct spheres of social behavior, which should never be confused. The “center” of the private arose at home; in apartments, huts, and dachas, and sometimes in places like pubs, where short distances reigned (this is also due to the architectural set-up of these spaces). But in public space, it was necessary to keep up a “facade,” in relation to which there was no need to observe the ritual respect expressed in terms of great distances

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During the coronavirus pandemic, being able to maintain social distancing in public spaces has become a vital skill. As it turns out, Russians are not coping with this very well. Meduza asked sociologist Andrey Korbut, a senior lecturer at Moscow's Higher School of Economics who specializes in the sociology of every life, about the particularities of upholding social distancing in Russia.

There is a widespread belief that different countries and cultures have different ideas about the acceptable distance between people. There is even an entire science devoted to this discipline, known as "proxemics," which researchers are using as a framework to establish the measure of these distances. In proxemics, it's common to distinguish between "intimate distance" (between the closest of people), "personal distance" (in the context of everyday interactions, for example, with colleagues), "social distance" (in interactions with strangers), and "public distance" (in public spaces).

Researchers then discuss what distances are specific to different countries. In Russia, the acceptable length of personal distance is sometimes estimated at 120 centimeters (approximately four feet), which is noticeably more than in Western European countries, and the United States.

Does this mean Russians have "colder shoulders" than the French or the Italians? Probably not. Everyday social interactions are not subject to the logic of numbers. We don't subconsciously calculate the distance between ourselves and someone we are talking to, in order to determine whether or not they've come closer to us than our degree of friendship implies. As such, the exact number of centimeters cannot explain how Italians and Russians navigate space differently when walking through the streets, standing in lines, having conversations in their kitchens, riding the subway, or going to stores (even then, it's hard to make generalizations about either group).

If we were to talk about some cultural differences, then we would first have to draw attention to the existing ideas of acceptable and unacceptable distances in the context of specific, day-to-day practices. Roughly speaking, both Russians and Germans stand in lines (for example, at an ATM), but they can have different understandings of what it means to "stand in line at the ATM." Here, one of the most important differences is the notion of the borders between public and private.

This border has its own long and confusing history in Western Europe, which is partly repeated in Russia, but also partly different. And this history leaves its mark on how we interact with other people in different spaces.

In Russia, it's likely that the line between private and public is deeper than in Western Europe. One of the historical reasons for this separation can be found in the Soviet practices of pretense and hypocrisy, analyzed by sociologist Oleg Karkhordin.

The practice of public pretense draws a pretty hard, clear-cut line between public relations and "personal life." In the USSR, the two were cultivated as distinct spheres of social behavior, which should never be confused. The "center" of the private arose at home; in apartments, huts, and dachas, and sometimes in places like pubs, where short distances reigned (this is also due to the architectural set-up of these spaces). But in public space, it was necessary to keep up a "facade," in relation to which there was no need to observe the ritual respect expressed in terms of great distances. Of course, people in the Soviet Union weren't knocking their heads together and stepping on each others' toes when walking down the streets. But the understanding of the meaning of these distances, their distribution in specific spaces and, in some instances, these very distances themselves, differed from what could be observed in other countries.

Accordingly, in Russia (although any generalizations should be taken with great care), public spaces are understood as impersonal - literally "without a face." Russians don't look at public space as a place for demonstrating one's "I." Therefore, in public space personal relationships are only possible in a very limited format: Russians prefer to save them for special, private or semi-private places (for example, kitchens or bars, respectively). In public space, one needs to behave as if they aren't even there.

This, among other things, can lead to the fact that when waiting in line for an ATM, Russians stand much shorter distance from the front than, for example, the British. For Russians, standing in line is a public practice, carried out in a public space, in which privacy is either absent or very limited (to a small space in front of the ATM). For Russians, maintaining a large distance between people in a line would constitute a strange demonstration of the private in public. From a Russian person's perspective, a public space does not call for such behavior and, therefore, does not require the same measure of public scrupulousness with regard to other people's privacy that occurs in other countries.

This is also evidenced by the strange feelings that Russians get when they see how, for example, French people greet their friends with kisses (although the attitude towards such public displays of personal relations is certainly changing over time; today, even Russians, especially the younger generations, often do the same thing). This is not because this degree of proximity seems strange to people in Russia due to other ideas about acceptable distances, but because we are not used to such forms of combining the private and the public. If the private appears in public, it's not through the two being combined, but rather through one suppressing the other.

This can be observed, for example, at political rallies, where both ordinary demonstrators and people who take on the role of political leaders, seek to ensure that the entire movement turns into a "union of souls." Therefore, more often than not, public political engagement in Russia turns into either a total dictate of the public (with a clean sweep of the area or by bringing in involuntary "demonstrators"), or a total dictate of public relations (whoever is here now is either with us, or against us).

However, cultural differences in interactions involving distance should not be overestimated. They reflect not only the historical trajectories of different cultures (and individual communities within those cultures), but also material conditions. The fact that lines for ATMs are noticeably different in Russia and in Germany does not mean that Germans and Russians would experience varying degrees of embarrassment and irritation if they found themselves sitting next to each other on an airplane. Most likely, they would care about the same things; things entirely unrelated to the fact that they are being forced to sit within a certain distance from another person.

Today, the spread of digital technology also shows that everyday interactions in any country can be very easily reconstructed, depending on the opportunities that new means of communication have to offer. Russians very quickly acquired mobile phones, although it's possible that they do not use them to have long conversations, like people do in other countries. It's also possible that during these conversations, should they take place on the street, they do not share the same kind of intimate details as the French or the Italians.

In general, it's safe to say that the particularities of distancing in different countries are becoming less and less discernible. On the one hand, as they get acquainted with different ways of interacting in public spaces (as a result of travel, or through the media), people master ways of constructing and maintaining distances that were formerly unfamiliar. That said, sometimes they can be formally borrowed from another culture, without understanding the notions of public and private behind them. In this case, new methods of distancing are unlikely to catch on, even if they are officially introduced (for example, in the case of epidemiological rules).

On the other hand, different countries, and different groups of people within those countries, live in varying historical and cultural circumstances - they have different realities, which participants can't control as they please. Of course, the different features of everyday life in separate countries and regions is not so deep that we do not understand representatives of different cultures (even without knowing their language, we can come to a mutual understanding). At the same time, it's still deep enough that we might cast an indignant glance at a foreigner who, from our perspective, is standing too close to us in a half-empty subway car.

Translation by Eilish Hart

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расследование

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исследование

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краткий пересказ

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Many Russians are continuing to ignore social distancing rules. A sociologist explains why. - Meduza

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During the coronavirus pandemic, being able to maintain social distancing in public spaces has become a vital skill. As it turns out, Russians are not coping with this very well. Meduza asked sociologist Andrey Korbut, a senior lecturer at Moscow's Higher School of Economics who specializes in the sociology of every life, about the particularities of upholding social distancing in Russia.

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The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

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Tiffany Munroe on Sunday in Brooklyn during a rally to call attention to violence against transgender people of color. Credit... Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a landmark civil rights law protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, handing the movement for L.G.B.T. equality a long-sought and unexpected victory.

"An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law," Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for the majority in the 6-to-3 ruling.

That opinion and two dissents, spanning 168 pages, touched on a host of flash points in the culture wars involving the L.G.B.T. community - bathrooms, locker rooms, sports, pronouns and religious objections to same-sex marriage. The decision, the first major case on transgender rights, came amid widespread demonstrations, some protesting violence aimed at transgender people of color.

Until Monday's decision, it was legal in more than half of the states to fire workers for being gay, bisexual or transgender. The vastly consequential decision thus extended workplace protections to millions of people across the nation, continuing a series of Supreme Court victories for gay rights even after President Trump transformed the court with his two appointments.

The decision achieved a decades-long goal of gay rights proponents, one they had initially considered much easier to achieve than a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. But even as the Supreme Court established that right in 2015, workplace discrimination remained lawful in most of the country. An employee who married a same-sex partner in the morning could be fired that afternoon for being gay.

Monday's lopsided ruling, coming from a fundamentally conservative court, was a surprise. Justice Gorsuch, who was Mr. Trump's first appointment to the court, was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Supporters of L.G.B.T. rights were elated by the ruling, which they said was long overdue.

"This is a simple and profound victory for L.G.B.T. civil rights," said Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia. "Many of us feared that the court was poised to gut sex discrimination protections and allow employers to discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity, yet it declined the federal government's invitation to take that damaging path."

In remarks to reporters, Mr. Trump said he accepted the ruling. "I've read the decision," he said, "and some people were surprised, but they've ruled and we live with their decision." He added that it was a "very powerful decision, actually."

The Trump administration had urged the court to rule against gay and transgender workers, and it has barred most transgender people from serving in the military. The Department of Health and Human Services issued a regulation on Friday that undid protections for transgender patients against discrimination by doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies.

Those actions involved different laws from the one at issue on Monday, and the Supreme Court has allowed the military ban to go into effect while lawsuits challenging it proceed. Still, the court's ruling suggested that a new era in transgender rights has arrived.

The decision, covering two sets of cases, was the court's first on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court's major gay rights decisions. Proponents of those rights had worried that his departure would halt the progress of the movement toward equality.

Listen to 'The Daily': A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

A surprise majority of judges ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

Back to The Daily

transcript

Listen to 'The Daily': A Landmark Supreme Court Ruling

Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Annie Brown, Luke Vander Ploeg, Asthaa Chaturvedi and Sydney Harper, and edited by M.J. Davis Lin and Lisa Chow

A surprise majority of judges ruled that the Civil Rights Act protects gay and transgender people from workplace discrimination.

aimee stephens

My name is Aimee Stephens. I'm 58 years old, and I live in Redford, Mich.

michael barbaro

Aimee, I wonder if you could read from the letter that you handed your boss.

aimee stephens

Sure.

"Dear friends and co-workers. I have known many of you for some time now, and I count you all as my friends. What I must tell you is very difficult for me and is taking all the courage I can muster. I am writing this both to inform you of a significant change in my life and to ask for your patience, understanding, and support, which I would treasure greatly. I have a gender identity disorder that I have struggled with my entire life. I have felt imprisoned in a body that does not match my mind, and this has caused me great despair and loneliness. With the support of my loving wife, I have decided to become the person that my mind already is. At the end of my vacation, on Aug. 26, 2013, I will return to work as my true self, Aimee Australia Stephens, in appropriate business attire. I realize that some of you may have trouble understanding this. In truth, I have had to live with it every day of my life, and even I do not fully understand it myself. It is my wish that I can continue my work at R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes doing what I have always done, which is my best."

[music]

aimee stephens

I gave it to the boss. And then two weeks later, he came back with his own letter, which was my letter of dismissal. Basically, his letter to me was that, your services are no longer needed. This is what we're offering. You have 21 days to make up your mind. But if you accept severance package, you will have to agree to keep your mouth shut and not ever talk about this to anyone. And I didn't think I could live with that the rest of my life. At that point, I knew I had to do something. After all, this was not only happening to me, but to thousands of others. And the only thing I knew to do was basically to take it to court. That's what I did.

[music]

[crowd chanting]

archived recording

We're coming on the air because of a major civil rights decision out of the United States Supreme Court.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is "The Daily."

archived recording

The decision now is clear from the Supreme Court -

michael barbaro

Today -

archived recording

- they have issued a ruling that now bans discrimination by employers against transgender individuals and gay individuals.

crowd chanting

Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter! Trans lives matter!

michael barbaro

Adam Liptak on the surprise majority that decided the case.

It's Tuesday, June 16.

Adam, tell us about this ruling on Monday.

adam liptak

The Supreme Court issued a huge ruling, a very consequential ruling. It said that all across the nation, it's no longer permissible for employers to fire people simply for being gay or transgender. Now, you might think that's already the state of the world. But in 27 states, there's no federal protection for gay and transgender workers. Gay people have a constitutional right to get married. They have since 2015. They can get married on a Monday morning, and when their employer found out about it Monday afternoon, they could be fired without consequence, simply for being gay. Until Monday's ruling from the Supreme Court.

michael barbaro

So in the national debate over the rights for gay and transgender people, this was a kind of untouched area - employment.

adam liptak

Right, it's sort of surprising. I mean, most people I think, think it's unlawful to discriminate against them for being gay or transgender. But until this Supreme Court ruling on Monday, people were without protection in about half the nation.

michael barbaro

And Adam, remind us of the specific cases that are involved in this ruling. I know we've talked about them in the past on the show.

adam liptak

Yeah, so there are actually three separate cases, two of them involving gay men, one involving a transgender woman. The cases involving gay men were a government worker in Georgia and a skydiving instructor, both of whom alleged in their lawsuits that they'd been fired for being gay. And the third was a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens, who, Michael, your listeners may remember, because -

michael barbaro

Right.

adam liptak

- you had a conversation with her and she described how, when she announced she was going to assume the gender identity that she believed was hers, the reaction of the funeral home for whom she worked was to fire her.

michael barbaro

Right, this letter that she had spent years composing in her head and on paper that told her friends and her colleagues and her boss who she was, was actually what ended up getting her fired.

adam liptak

That's right.

michael barbaro

And, Adam, what was the central legal question posed in these three different cases?

adam liptak

The question in the case is whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - a landmark piece of civil rights legislation which prohibits discrimination based on race, religion, ethnicity, and sex - applies to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination. And drilling down just a little bit more, the key question is whether the phrase "discrimination because of sex" covers sexual orientation and gender identity.

michael barbaro

Right, and as I recall from talking about these oral arguments with you many months ago, the case very much rested, not just on what the entire court thought of the phrase "because of sex" and what it meant, but specifically what the conservative justices on the court, who are now in the majority - what they thought that that phrase meant.

adam liptak

That's right. I mean, you have a court where the four more liberal votes are pretty much locked in. You know what they're going to do, and they have to pick up a conservative vote. And the question with this court was, the conservative vote they would ordinarily be sure of picking up was that of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote all four of the major gay rights decisions before this one. But he retired in 2018, replaced by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. And so the court has a five justice conservative majority. And for the liberals to win, they'd have to pick off at least one of them.

michael barbaro

And it sounds like they did that.

adam liptak

Oh, yeah, in fact they got two, Justice Gorsuch, President Trump's first appointee, and they also picked up Chief Justice John G. Roberts. So you got a 6-3 decision in the end. And, Michael, just to put that in context, this is a very conservative court. This is a court that gay rights advocates were terrified of. So to get a 6-3 victory from this court on a consequential, stunning, vastly important decision is really something.

michael barbaro

So let's talk about these two conservative justices who sided with the liberal justices in this case.

adam liptak

Well, the key justice is Justice Gorsuch. He writes the majority opinion. He's the only one whose language we have in front of us and whose reasoning we know for certain. And he says it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex. Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer's mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague.

michael barbaro

So Gorsuch is arguing, you can't divorce discrimination based on sexual identity, sexual orientation, from gender, and perhaps cultural expectations of gender.

adam liptak

That's right. He says, listen, it may not be the only factor, but it's a factor and that's good enough for this law.

michael barbaro

Right, and therefore, by his logic, that word, that phrase, "because of sex" in 1964, clearly applies to gay and transgender people today.

adam liptak

Exactly right.

michael barbaro

And so what explanation do the other conservative justices who did not join Gorsuch in the majority give for breaking with him, and with Roberts, if Gorsuch and Roberts found a pretty conservative justification for extending these rights to gay and transgender people?

adam liptak

So there are two separate dissents, but the theme that runs through both of them, Michael, is that it's just not a natural way to read this set of words. That in 1964, nobody thought that they were prohibiting discrimination against gay people and transgender people. And Justice Kavanaugh in his dissent says, even today, when you ask people what "because of sex" means to them, they will not typically say oh, that means because of sexual orientation, because of gender identity. Then Alito and Thomas, but not Kavanaugh, go on to talk about what they view as the very pernicious consequences of the majority decision, which they say will have an impact on restrooms and locker rooms and college sports and maybe professional sports and religious employers and freedom of speech. Justice Alito even says it might prohibit people from using anything other than the preferred pronouns of the people to whom they talk.

michael barbaro

Right, but of course in the end, those three justices were outvoted. And two of their conservative allies went in the other direction. And I have to say, and I don't know if this is the case for you, it seems surprising that the majority opinion in this landmark gay and transgender rights case was written by a conservative member of the court.

adam liptak

Oh, yeah. No, I think it's a big surprise to me, big surprise to gay rights advocates, big surprise to the L.G.B.T. community. I will say this, Michael, that if you'd asked me in September what the outcome of this case was going to be, I would have said it's classic 5-4, conservatives against liberals.

michael barbaro

You said that on our show. You said this was -

adam liptak

Right, but once it was argued, once we saw Gorsuch struggling with this textual question at the argument in September, I started to think that there was a live possibility it would be 5-4, the liberals plus Gorsuch. And I guess the chief justice came along for the ride.

michael barbaro

But that makes me wonder, does a ruling like this, and the composition of the majority, does that make you conclude that ultimately, we don't really know this relatively new Supreme Court, this conservative majority court, as well as perhaps, everyone thinks that they do?

adam liptak

That's a really important point. People on the left are very unhappy that President Trump got to appoint two people to the Supreme Court. But those two people don't vote together all that often. Overall, their voting will be conservative. But they're individual people with individual jurisprudential commitments, and they will from time to time surprise you as Justice Gorsuch surprised us in this one.

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Adam, how is this ruling being received by those who are champions of religious liberty? Because I have to imagine that they are not looking favorably on a ruling that says every employer, including employers run by people whose religion says that being homosexual is wrong, would welcome this ruling.

adam liptak

Sure, they're nervous about this ruling. And in dissent, Justice Alito said they're right to be nervous, that this ruling can make religious people and religious employers on the hook for employment discrimination if they just follow the dictates of their faith. Justice Gorsuch, who is ordinarily very sympathetic to those kinds of claims of religion said, listen, that's not this case. We'll deal with that case down the line. But he did say, let me tell you, first of all, Title VII itself has an exemption for religious employers. There are other laws and constitutional provisions which can protect religious people and religious employers. So his basic answer is, we'll get back to you on that.

michael barbaro

Hm, so this ruling may leave open the possibility that an employer could bring future cases that could make it all the way up to the Supreme Court challenging this ruling on the grounds of religious liberty, saying this ruling infringes on my right to practice my religion the way I see fit.

adam liptak

Yeah, clashes between religious employers and their employees are commonplace, and we're waiting, even in this term, for a decision on whether employment discrimination laws apply to Catholic school teachers. So that clash is something that's very much on the front burner at the court, but we don't have an answer yet.

michael barbaro

Adam, you've been covering the Supreme Court for The Times for more than a decade. And you have watched this debate over L.G.B.T.Q. rights play out before the justices on many occasions. Where does this decision stack up in that history of the decisions that they have made?

adam liptak

Well, for gay rights, it easily ranks with the top three. It ranks with the decisions in which the court struck down a Texas law making gay sex a crime. It stands with the decision establishing a constitutional right to same sex marriage. And now for gay people, we have this enormously consequential decision protecting them from employment discrimination. And let's not forget, for transgender people, we have the first major transgender rights case from the Supreme Court ever.

michael barbaro

So by definition, this is a historic case when it comes to rights.

adam liptak

Some historic cases are symbolic only. This historic case will have a real-world impact for lots and lots of people.

michael barbaro

It's interesting that this decision comes three and a half years into an administration, the Trump administration, that has repeatedly taken actions to restrict the rights of transgender Americans, in particular. You know, banning them from serving in the military, telling the military to stop paying for gender confirmation surgery. And just about a week ago, narrowing the definition of sex discrimination in the Affordable Care Act to omit protections for transgender people. So how does Monday's decision affect those? Because after all, the United States government is a major employer, right?

adam liptak

Yeah, so as an employer, it's subject to Title VII like other kinds of employers. When it's talking about health care, when it's talking about the military, those are different statutes, and whether it has the power or not to disadvantage transgender people is an open question. This decision of course, gives you some sense that challenges to Trump administration actions would meet with positive reception at the court. But they're different statutes in different settings, and the president gets a lot of deference when it's the military who's involved. We do have a quick sense that President Trump is prepared to accept the Supreme Court's decision on Monday. He was asked about it at a press availability and he said, they ruled, and we live with their decision, a very powerful decision.

michael barbaro

Speaking of that kind of atmospheric change, I have noticed that in the protests that we've been seeing all over the United States for the past few weeks, that in addition to protesting against racism, demonstrators have taken up the issue of trans rights and calling for the protection of black trans people, for example.

adam liptak

Yeah, so society is moving very fast on these issues. The protests reflect that. One thing that struck me that also reflects it is that more than 200 major corporations filed briefs in these cases saying, please subject us to these laws, please make it possible to sue us. Because the commitment among very large parts of society to equality for black people, gay people, trans people is moving quite quickly in the direction of equality. And the Supreme Court, which is seldom very far out of step with the American public, as reflected in this decision, seems to agree.

michael barbaro

Adam, what has been the response from the plaintiffs in this case? I remember speaking with Aimee Stephens after the oral arguments, and she had some real doubts about whether the court was going to ultimately rule in her favor.

adam liptak

Yeah, that's right, Michael. There are three plaintiffs in the three cases, two of them have sadly died, including Aimee Stephens, who died just a few weeks ago. So she didn't see the result of her lawsuit. But she did sketch out some thoughts in anticipation that the court might rule in her favor. So she wrote these words. "Firing me because I'm transgender was discrimination, plain and simple. And I am glad the court recognized that what happened to me is wrong and illegal. I am thankful that the court said my transgender siblings and I have a place in our laws. It made me feel safer and more included in society."

michael barbaro

Thank you, Adam.

adam liptak

Thank you, Michael.

[music]

aimee stephens

They asked me a question. And that question was, are you willing to see this through to the end?

And I told them then that I was raised on a farm, that I was used to hard work, and that I didn't give up so easily. They've had people, I guess, in the past, who started this process, and it can get to you to the point that you just want it to be over. And you say well, I'm done. I'm not going any further. Or perhaps they try to settle out of court.

I had in my mind what I needed to do, and it wasn't to really settle out of court. It wasn't to just give up and walk away. And that yes, I would see this to the end.

michael barbaro

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

archived recording (dermot shea)

Good afternoon, everyone. It's been a tough few weeks for the N.Y.P.D., for the city, really, for the whole country.

michael barbaro

In a major reform by the nation's largest police force, New York City is disbanding its anti-crime unit, a team of 600 officers who patrol the city in plain clothes that has been involved in some of the city's most notorious police shootings.

archived recording (dermot shea)

Make no mistake, this is a seismic shift in the culture of how the N.Y.P.D. polices this great city. It will be felt immediately in the communities that we protect.

michael barbaro

The decision makes the N.Y.P.D. one of the first police departments in the country to begin defunding and dismantling its operations in the wake of nationwide protests.

archived recording (dermot shea)

We can do it better. We can do it smarter. And we will.

michael barbaro

And on Monday, the Food and Drug Administration reversed course and revoked its emergency authorization of two malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, as treatments for Covid-19. In March, the F.D.A. allowed the drugs to be used by hospitals treating patients with the coronavirus. But studies since then have shown that the drugs are unlikely to be effective, despite claims by President Trump, who has repeatedly promoted both of them, and who said he had taken one of them himself.

That's it for "The Daily." I'm Michael Barbaro, see you tomorrow.

The Supreme Court is generally not very far out of step with popular opinion, and large majorities of Americans oppose employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, and substantial ones oppose it when based on gender identity. More than 200 major corporations filed a brief supporting the gay and transgender employees in the cases before the court.

The decision was both symbolic and consequential, and it followed in the tradition of landmark rulings on discrimination. Unlike Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that said racially segregated public schools violated the Constitution; Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 decision that struck down bans on interracial marriage; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 decision that struck down state bans on same-sex marriage, the new decision did not involve constitutional rights.

Instead, the question for the justices was the meaning of a statute, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars employment discrimination based on race, religion, national origin and sex. They had to decide whether that last prohibition - discrimination "because of sex" - applies to many millions of gay and transgender workers.

Justice Gorsuch wrote that it did.

"An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex," he wrote.

"It is impossible," Justice Gorsuch wrote, "to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex."

The decision will allow people who say they were discriminated against in the workplace based on their sexual orientation or gender identity to file lawsuits, just as people claiming race and sex discrimination may. The plaintiffs will have to offer evidence, of course, and employers may respond that they had reasons unrelated to discrimination for their decisions.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that the majority had abandoned its judicial role.

"There is only one word for what the court has done today: legislation," Justice Alito wrote. "The document that the court releases is in the form of a judicial opinion interpreting a statute, but that is deceptive."

"A more brazen abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall," he wrote. "The court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous."

The common understanding of sex discrimination in 1964, Justice Alito wrote, was bias against women or men and did not encompass discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If Congress wanted to protect gay and transgender workers, he wrote, it could pass a new law.

"Discrimination 'because of sex' was not understood as having anything to do with discrimination because of sexual orientation or transgender status" in 1964, he wrote. "Any such notion would have clashed in spectacular fashion with the societal norms of the day."

Justice Alito added that the majority's decision would have pernicious consequences.

He said the majority left open, for instance, questions about access to restrooms and locker rooms. "For women who have been victimized by sexual assault or abuse," he wrote, "the experience of seeing an unclothed person with the anatomy of a male in a confined and sensitive location such as a bathroom or locker room can cause serious psychological harm."

Nor did the majority address, he said, how its ruling would affect sports, college housing, religious employers, health care or free speech.

"After today's decision," Justice Alito wrote, "plaintiffs may claim that the failure to use their preferred pronoun violates one of the federal laws prohibiting sex discrimination."

"Although the court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long," he wrote. "The entire federal judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the court's reasoning."

Justice Gorsuch responded that the court's ruling was narrow. "We do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms or anything else of the kind," he wrote. "Whether other policies and practices might or might not qualify as unlawful discrimination or find justifications under other provisions of Title VII are questions for future cases, not these."

He added that Title VII itself included protections for religious employers and that a separate federal law and the First Amendment also allow religious groups latitude in their employment decisions.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump's other appointment to the court, issued a separate dissent making a point about statutory interpretation. "Courts must follow ordinary meaning, not literal meaning," he wrote, adding that the ordinary meaning of "because of sex" does not cover discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

"Seneca Falls was not Stonewall," he wrote. "The women's rights movement was not (and is not) the gay rights movement, although many people obviously support or participate in both. So to think that sexual orientation discrimination is just a form of sex discrimination is not just a mistake of language and psychology, but also a mistake of history and sociology."

The court considered two sets of cases. The first concerned a pair of lawsuits from gay men who said they were fired because of their sexual orientation: Bostock v. Clayton County, Ga., No. 17-1618, and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623.

The first case was filed by Gerald Bostock, who was fired from a government program that helped neglected and abused children in Clayton County, Ga., just south of Atlanta, after he joined a gay softball league.

The second was brought by a skydiving instructor, Donald Zarda, who also said he was fired because he was gay. His dismissal followed a complaint from a female customer who had expressed concerns about being strapped to Mr. Zarda during a tandem dive. Mr. Zarda, hoping to reassure the customer, told her that he was "100 percent gay."

The case on gender identity, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18-107, was brought by a transgender woman, Aimee Stephens, who was fired from a Michigan funeral home after she announced in 2013 that she was a transgender woman and would start working in women's clothing.

Mr. Zarda died in an accident in 2014, and Ms. Stephens died on May 12. Their estates continued to pursue their cases after their deaths.

Critics sometimes say that the Congress does not hide elephants in mouse holes, Justice Gorsuch wrote on Monday, meaning that lawmakers do not take enormous steps with vague terms or in asides.

"We can't deny that today's holding - that employers are prohibited from firing employees on the basis of homosexuality or transgender status - is an elephant," he wrote. "But where's the mouse hole? Title VII's prohibition of sex discrimination in employment is a major piece of federal civil rights legislation. It is written in starkly broad terms. It has repeatedly produced unexpected applications, at least in the view of those on the receiving end of them."

"This elephant," he wrote, "has never hidden in a mouse hole; it has been standing before us all along."

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Civil Rights Law Protects Gay and Transgender Workers, Supreme Court Rules (Published 2020)

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The court said the language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination, applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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a short history of door handles

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We have all become suddenly more aware of the moments when we cannot avoid touching elements of public buildings. Architecture is the most physical, most imposing and most present of the arts - you cannot avoid it yet, strangely, we touch buildings at only a very few points - the handrail, perhaps a light switch and, almost unavoidably, the door handle. This modest piece of handheld architecture is our critical interface with the structure and the material of the building. Yet it is often reduced to the most generic, cheaply made piece of bent metal which is, in its way, a potent critique of the value we place on architecture and our acceptance of its reduction to a commodified envelope rather than an expression of culture and craft.

Despite their ubiquity and pivotal role in the haptic experience of architecture, door handles remain oddly under-documented. There are no serious histories and only patchy surveys of design, mostly sponsored by manufacturers. Yet in the development of the design of the door handle we have, in microcosm, the history of architecture, a survey of making and a measure of the development of design and how it relates to manufacture, technology and the body.

For as long as there have been doors there have been door handles. They may have been primitive to start, an iron or wooden latch, a turned wooden knob, a piece of string or a leather strap. By the 18th century houses in central Europe displayed elaborate wrought-iron lever handles on their front doors, French palaces showed off with delicately cast brass versions and English houses preferred simple round or oval knobs. Manufacture was relatively local and types developed in specific regions, each with their own tastes and materials. They might be wooden knobs in the forms of beehives and small levers with wooden grips, or made out of porcelain or ceramic.

At the turn of the 20th century architects, rather than artisans, began turning their attention to door handles. The advent of art nouveau and the conception of the building as a Gesamtkunstwerk led to a proliferation of florid, organic brass handles which mirrored the fluid lines of the structure, reconceiving the handle as architectural microcosm rather than craftwork add-on. Peter Behrens, Hector Guimard, Josef Maria Olbrich, Josef Hoffmann and dozens of others created complex, intense and compact designs which mirrored the whiplash lines or geometric obsessions of their architecture. Antoni Gaudí's designs for the delicately scrolled door handles of the Casa Batlló of 1904-06 have a stripped rococo feel and are still in production.

The next big shift came with the application of functionalist sensibilities to the handle. The modernists, notably the designers at the Bauhaus, understood that each element of a building might express the ideas embodied in the whole and in the door handle they found the perfect tool for reducing a building to its most minimal form. Henry van de Velde, who founded the design school in Weimar that would become the Bauhaus, had set the ball rolling but it was the Bauhaus's first director, Walter Gropius, who would design the handle that became the most complete expression of modernism in 1923. Based on a square and a cylindrical section the lever is an amalgam of the platonic geometry of modernity, of constructivism and suprematism. It looks like a component in a machine but is, of course, a handmade object. It was one of the first products to be marketed by the Bauhaus in an effort to raise funds and achieved some limited success - the handles can still be found on public buildings from the era across Germany. It became a kind of handheld modernist manifesto, a radical, stripped-down design that worked, looked elegant and felt comfortable. Another Bauhaus designer, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, designed a number of handles based on similar tectonic games and Mies van der Rohe also tried his hand at a series of surprisingly ergonomic handles that eschewed the geometric rigour of his buildings.

Arguably the most influential, although not necessarily familiar, door handle was designed not by an architect but by a philosopher - albeit one with an engineering degree. Ludwig Wittgenstein's handle for the house he designed for his sister in Vienna in 1928 is a simple bent metal bar with one of the pair kinked to accommodate a portion of frame for the French doors it was designed for. It apparently took him a year to design (he spent two years on the radiators), but that simple bent bar morphed into the bent tube which is perhaps the most ubiquitous and generic of all modern designs.

As factories retooled from making weapons to consumer products after the Second World War, handgun-sized handles proved an easy conversion. The industrial miracles in post-war Germany, France and Italy led to an outpouring of new designs and the growth of the companies that still dominate top-end production. From Gio Ponti to Arne Jacobsen, every decent architect and industrial designer had a go at a handle. Many remain in production, quite possibly unsurpassed. There was a brief renaissance in door-handle design in the postmodern era, when it became a 'typology' and hundreds of ironic or referential designs were launched only to disappear again with fashion. Handles became rather like chairs, with consumers and architects wondering how many more designs the world actually needed. Nevertheless, exquisite and unexpected designs occasionally emerge and each generation finds something new in the everyday. Architects and designers such as 6a, Jasper Morrison and Mark Pimlott have reinterpreted traditional types, while Aldo Bakker has exaggerated existing, familiar forms to create something new and sculptural.

And yet. Despite the plethora of thoughtful designs, almost every door handle you will see today will be cheap and ill-considered. Modernism managed to make a fetish of the handle, but economic reality has always proved a formidable obstacle.

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A short history of door handles | Apollo Magazine

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We have all become suddenly more aware of the moments when we cannot avoid touching elements of public buildings. Architecture is the most physical, most imposing and most present of the arts - you cannot avoid it yet, strangely, we touch buildings at only a very few points - the handrail, perhaps a light switch and, almost unavoidably, the door handle.

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China Is Collecting DNA From Tens of Millions of Men and Boys, Using U.S. Equipment

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China Is Collecting DNA From Tens of Millions of Men and Boys, Using U.S. Equipment

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The police in China are collecting blood samples from men and boys from across the country to build a genetic map of its roughly 700 million males, giving the authorities a powerful new tool for their emerging high-tech surveillance state.

They have swept across the country since late 2017 to collect enough samples to build a vast DNA database, according to a new study published on Wednesday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research organization, based on documents also reviewed by The New York Times. With this database, the authorities would be able to track down a man’s male relatives using only that man’s blood, saliva or other genetic material.

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it estimated that the authorities aimed to collect DNA samples from 35 million to 70 million men and boys, or roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of China’s male population. They do not need to sample every male, because one person’s DNA sample can unlock the genetic identity of male relatives.
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Though the Chinese authorities are still building their database, its contents are already being used to ramp up surveillance.

In March, officials in the Guanwen township in southwestern Sichuan Province said the male blood samples they had collected would be used to bolster the local Sharp Eyes Project, according to a government notice found by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The project is a major government surveillance program that encourages people in the countryside to report on their neighbors.

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Credit... Erik Carter

Even children are pressed into giving blood samples to build a sweeping genetic database that will add to Beijing's growing surveillance capabilities, raising questions about abuse and privacy.

The police in China are collecting blood samples from men and boys from across the country to build a genetic map of its roughly 700 million males, giving the authorities a powerful new tool for their emerging high-tech surveillance state.

They have swept across the country since late 2017 to collect enough samples to build a vast DNA database, according to a new study published on Wednesday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a research organization, based on documents also reviewed by The New York Times. With this database, the authorities would be able to track down a man's male relatives using only that man's blood, saliva or other genetic material.

An American company, Thermo Fisher, is helping: The Massachusetts company has sold testing kits to the Chinese police tailored to their specifications. American lawmakers have criticized Thermo Fisher for selling equipment to the Chinese authorities, but the company has defended its business.

The project is a major escalation of China's efforts to use genetics to control its people, which had been focused on tracking ethnic minorities and other, more targeted groups. It would add to a growing, sophisticated surveillance net that the police are deploying across the country, one that increasingly includes advanced cameras, facial recognition systems and artificial intelligence.

The police say they need the database to catch criminals and that donors consent to handing over their DNA. Some officials within China, as well as human rights groups outside its borders, warn that a national DNA database could invade privacy and tempt officials to punish the relatives of dissidents and activists. Rights activists argue that the collection is being done without consent because citizens living in an authoritarian state have virtually no right to refuse.

Already, the program is running into an unusual amount of opposition in China.

"The ability of the authorities to discover who is most intimately related to whom, given the context of the punishment of entire families as a result of one person's activism, is going to have a chilling effect on society as a whole," said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.

The campaign even involves schools. In one southern coastal town in China, young boys offered up their tiny fingers to a police officer with a needle. About 230 miles to the north, officers went from table to table taking blood from schoolboys while the girls watched quizzically.

Jiang Haolin, 31, gave a blood sample, too. He had no choice.

The authorities told Mr. Jiang, a computer engineer from a rural county in northern China, that "if blood wasn't collected, we would be listed as a 'black household,'" he said last year, and it would deprive him and his family of benefits like the right to travel and go to a hospital.

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Police officers from Shigu, China, collecting DNA samples from boys from the junior high school in September. Credit... The Shifang Municipal People's Government

The Chinese authorities are collecting DNA samples from men and boys for one simple reason: They commit more crimes, statistics show.

The impetus for the campaign can be traced back to a crime spree in the northern Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. For nearly three decades, the police there investigated the rapes and murders of 11 women and girls, one as young as 8. They collected 230,000 fingerprints and sifted through more than 100,000 DNA samples. They offered a $28,000 reward.

Then, in 2016, they arrested a man on unrelated bribery charges, according to the state news media. Analyzing his genes, they found he was related to a person who had left his DNA at the site of the 2005 killing of one of the women. That person, Gao Chengyong, confessed to the crimes and was later executed.

Mr. Gao's capture spurred the state media to call for the creation of a national database of male DNA. The police in Henan Province showed it was possible, after amassing samples from 5.3 million men, or roughly 10 percent of the province's male population, between 2014 and 2016. In November 2017, the Ministry of Public Security, which controls the police, unveiled plans for a national database.

China already holds the world's largest trove of genetic material, totaling 80 million profiles, according to state media. But earlier DNA gathering efforts were often more focused. Officials targeted criminal suspects or groups they considered potentially destabilizing, like migrant workers in certain neighborhoods. The police have also gathered DNA from ethnic minority groups like the Uighurs as a way to tighten the Communist Party's control over them.

The effort to compile a national male database broadens those efforts, said Emile Dirks, an author of the report from the Australian institute and a Ph.D. candidate in the department of political science at the University of Toronto. "We are seeing the expansion of those models to the rest of China in an aggressive way that I don't think we've seen before," Mr. Dirks said.

In the report released by the Australian institute, it estimated that the authorities aimed to collect DNA samples from 35 million to 70 million men and boys, or roughly 5 percent to 10 percent of China's male population. They do not need to sample every male, because one person's DNA sample can unlock the genetic identity of male relatives.

When The Times tried to fax questions about the database to the Ministry of Public Security, an employee said it could not accept them "without permission from a senior official."

Local officials often publicly announce the results of their sampling. In Donglan County in the Guangxi region, the police said they had collected more than 10,800 samples, covering nearly 10 percent of the male population. In Yijun County in Shaanxi Province, the police said they had collected more than 11,700 samples, or one quarter.

To estimate the project's ambitions, the Australian institute looked at sampling rates in 10 counties and districts, then studied purchase orders for DNA test kits from 16 more jurisdictions. The Times reviewed the same public documents, along with 15 similar orders from the past six months that were not included in the report.

Purchase orders were often filled by Chinese companies, but some contracts went to Thermo Fisher, the Massachusetts maker of genetics testing equipment.

Thermo Fisher has sold DNA testing kits to police agencies in at least nine counties and cities for establishing a "male ancestry inspection system," or a male DNA database, according to corporate bidding documents found by Mr. Dirks and verified by The Times.

The company actively sought the business. In 2017, one week before the start of the DNA collection program, a company researcher, Dr. Zhong Chang, said at a conference in Beijing that the company could help, according to a video of the event. The company designed one testing kit to look for the specific genetic markers sought by the Ministry of Public Security, Dr. Zhong said, a common industry practice. Another was tailored to distinguish between China's ethnic groups, including Uighurs and Tibetans, he said.

Dr. Zhong did not respond to requests for comment.

Thermo Fisher said its DNA kits "are the global standard for forensic DNA testing." In a statement, the company said it recognized "the importance of considering how our products and services are used - or may be used - by our customers."

"We are proud to be a part of the many positive ways in which DNA identification has been applied, from tracking down criminals to stopping human trafficking and freeing the unjustly accused," it added.

China has other reasons to buy Thermo Fisher's equipment aside from compiling genetic data to track people: The company's gear can help Chinese physicians screen for deadly diseases. Thermo Fisher also sells DNA equipment to the police in many other countries.

But scientists, medical ethicists and human rights groups say its equipment can also become a critical tool for social control. Last year, in the wake of criticism, the company said it would stop selling its gear to the authorities in Xinjiang, in northwestern China, where the police are collecting DNA from the largely Muslim Uighur minority group for social control purposes.

A Thermo Fisher booth at the Beijing Conference and Exhibition on Instrumental Analysis in 2017. The company sells DNA equipment to the police in many countries. Credit... Shutterstock

Though the Chinese authorities are still building their database, its contents are already being used to ramp up surveillance.

In March, officials in the Guanwen township in southwestern Sichuan Province said the male blood samples they had collected would be used to bolster the local Sharp Eyes Project, according to a government notice found by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The project is a major government surveillance program that encourages people in the countryside to report on their neighbors.

Anke Bioengineering, a biotech company based in eastern Anhui Province, is using the male DNA database to build a "DNA Skynet," according to Hu Bangjun, a spokesman for the company. Skynet is China's policing system that combines video surveillance and big data.

But the national male DNA collection program is running into an unusual amount of opposition in China. Generally, China's citizens have accepted intrusions by the central government into their internet use and other facets of life. But DNA collection is not regulated under Chinese law, and officials worry that the public would react negatively to a broad database containing their genetic secrets and family ties.

At a session of China's Parliament in March, two delegates to China's political advisory body proposed that the government regulate DNA collection. One of them, Wang Ying, an official from Beijing, said that when the technology reached a certain scale, the government needed to protect the rights of users "in a timely manner."

In 2015, Liu Bing, the deputy chief forensic physician at the Ministry of Public Security's Institute of Forensic Science, warned in the ministry's forensic journal that the collection of blood samples "with improper measures" could cause social instability, especially "in today's society where the citizens' awareness of their legal rights is increasing."

The authorities have moved quietly. Mr. Dirks, co-author of the Australian paper, said nearly all of the collection was taking place in the countryside, where there was little understanding of the implications of the program.

In rural areas, many officials show pride in their work. Officials in the city of Dongguan posted a photo showing boys in an elementary school lining up to have a teacher collect their blood. Officials in Shaanxi Province also posted online a photo of six boys gathered around a table at an elementary school watching a police officer take blood from one of their friends.

In another photo from northwestern Shaanxi, a young boy bawls in front of two police officers as one squeezes his fingertip for blood. A woman consoles him.

Police officers from the Jiufeng police station in Shaanxi Province collecting DNA samples from a boy. Credit... Xi'an police

It is unclear whether the people in those photos fully understood what the blood collection was for. Interviews and social media posts have suggested that the failure to give blood would result in punishment.

Mr. Jiang, the computer engineer, lives and works in Beijing but is originally from a village in Shaanxi. In February 2019, the police told him that he had to return to his village to give his DNA samples.

In an interview, Mr. Jiang said he had paid a hospital in Beijing to collect his samples and mailed them. He was not told why his blood was needed, nor did he ask. He shrugged off privacy concerns. Since China's people are required to carry identity cards and use their real identities online, he said, "all our information is with them already."

But rights activists say genetic science gives the Chinese authorities unprecedented powers to prosecute people they do not like.They could cite DNA to give their accusations even more credibility in the eyes of the public. In the hands of local officials, said Li Wei, a rights activist, DNA evidence could also be planted. The Beijing police already have a sample of his DNA, collected while he was serving a two-year sentence for "disrupting public order," a charge that the authorities use against many dissidents.

Two years ago, the police in Hangzhou tried to get a sample of their own, he said. They knocked on his hotel room door soon after he checked in. Mr. Li said that when he refused to go to the police station, they hit him with rubber batons and dragged him there. But when they asked for a DNA sample, Mr. Li said, he stood fast, fearing that the Hangzhou police could use it against him.

"In some cases, your blood and saliva, which was collected in advance, can be put at the crime scene later," Mr. Li said. "You're not there, but your DNA might be on the scene. This is what I'm worried about - the possibility of being framed."

Amber Wang and Liu Yi contributed research.

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China Is Collecting DNA From Tens of Millions of Men and Boys, Using U.S. Equipment

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Credit... Erik Carter Even children are pressed into giving blood samples to build a sweeping genetic database that will add to Beijing's growing surveillance capabilities, raising questions about abuse and privacy.

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Le 8 mai 2002, à Karachi, au Pakistan, un attentat fait 14 morts, dont 11 Français. Les victimes travaillaient pour la Direction des constructions navales de Cherbourg. Selon une des principales pistes explorées par la justice française, ils pourraient avoir étéles victimes de représailles contre la France. L'affaire de Karachi vient de commencer, une affaire politico-financière sur fond de ventes d'armement, de rétrocommissions, et de campagne pour l'éléction présidentielle française de 1995.

Après quinze années d'enquête, les principaux protagonistes de cette affaire comparaissent depuis le 7 octobre devant le tribunal correctionnel de Paris. Ils sont jugés dans le volet financier de l'affaire, mais pas leurs donneurs d'ordre. A l'époque ministres, Edouard Balladur et François Léotard, doivent, eux, répondre de leurs actes devant la Cour de justice de la République. Retour en images sur les mécanismes et les moments clés de l'une des plus célèbres affaires de la V e République.

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Vidéo. Karachi : comprendre le volet financier de l'affaire

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Le 8 mai 2002, à Karachi, au Pakistan, un attentat fait 14 morts, dont 11 Français. Les victimes travaillaient pour la Direction des constructions navales de Cherbourg. Selon une des principales pistes explorées par la justice française, ils pourraient avoir étéles victimes de représailles contre la France.

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si le volet financier de l'attentat de Karachi a bien été jugé, ce n'est toujours par le cas, 18 ans après les faits, de l'attentat lui-même. Et il n'y aurait peut-être jamais eu aucun procès sans la plainte des familles des 11 morts français et 12 blessés graves. Pourtant, le tribunal a rejeté les constitutions de parties civiles des familles, estimant que le lien de causalité entre l'attentat et les faits d'abus de biens sociaux qu'il avait à juger n'était pas démontrée de façon certaine.

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Le tribunal correctionnel de Paris a rendu son délibéré dans le volet financier de l'attentat de Karachi, 25 ans après les faits. Des peines allant de 2 à 5 ans de prison ferme. Le tribunal a globalement suivi les réquisitions du parquet, parfois même au-delà, et prononcé de lourdes peines.

Le tribunal correctionnel de Paris a condamné à des peines de deux à cinq ans de prison ferme six prévenus dont Nicolas Bazire, ancien directeur de cabinet et chef de campagne d'Edouard Balladur © AFP / Thomas COEX

Six prévenus, homme d'affaires, conseiller politique, ancien ministre, haut fonctionnaire. Tous reconnus coupables d'abus de biens sociaux et ou de recel ou complicité de ce délit. Tous condamnés à de la prison ferme par le tribunal correctionnel de Paris, qui a estimé que les fonctions exercées par les prévenus, jusqu'au plus haut rang de l'État, exigeaient une " probité irréprochable", selon les termes du jugement. D'autant, a-t-on précisé à l'audience, que "_le domaine des marchés militaires dans des pays comme l'Arabie Saoudite et le Pakistan touchent directement aux intérêts de l'_É tat" et que "des sommes considérables ont été détournées ".

Faits graves, lourdes peines

Face à ces faits ayant " porté une atteinte d'une gravité exceptionnelle non seulement à l'ordre public économique, mais aussi dans la confiance dans le fonctionnement de la vie publique", précise encore le tribunal correctionnel de Paris, seules des peines de prison ferme pouvaient être prononcées.

L'homme d'affaires franco-libanais, Zyad Takieddine et son ancien associés Abdul Rahman Al Assir écopent de cinq ans de prison ferme, assortis d'un mandat d'arrêt. Le premier, principal prévenu et absent à l'audience, a également été reconnu coupable de faux témoignage, escroquerie et blanchiment d'escroquerie, fraude fiscale et blanchiment de fraude fiscale ainsi que d'organisation frauduleuse d'insolvabilité et usage de faux.

Deux ans ferme ont été prononcé à l'encontre de Thierry Gaubert, alors au ministère du Budget. Cinq ans dont deux avec sursis pour Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, ancien ministre de la Culture et premier conseiller de François Léotard à la Défense ou encore Nicolas Bazire, ex-directeur de cabinet d'Edouard Balladur à Matignon et aujourd'hui patron du groupe LVMH. Enfin Dominique Castellan, se voit condamné à 3 ans de détention dont 1 an avec sursis et 50 000 euros d'amende

La plupart des condamnés ont d'ores et déjà annoncé leur intention de faire appel de ces condamnations. Mais si celles-ci venaient à être confirmées en appel, elles signifieraient une incarcération car ne sont pas aménageables.

Une campagne présidentielle financée par la fraude

Le tribunal l'a indiqué très précisément dans sa décision. C'est bien à l'aide du système de rétrocommissions frauduleuses, mis en place en marge des contrats d'armement qui étaient alors signés avec l'Arabie Saoudite et le Pakistan que la campagne d'Edouard Balladur à la présidentielle de 1995 a été financée. " Une somme de 10 millions de francs , indique le tribunal " venant opportunément combler le trou de 20 millions" dans les comptes de campagne.

La malversation n'a pas suffit à l'ancien Premier ministre pour remporter à l'époque la course à la présidentielle. Mais elle sera au coeur d' un nouveau procès, devant la cour de justice de la République, cette fois. Avec, sur le banc des prévenus : Edouard Balladur, lui-même et son ancien ministre de la Défense, François Léotard.

Les victimes de l'attentat déboutées de leur constitution de partie civile

Mais si le volet financier de l'attentat de Karachi a bien été jugé, ce n'est toujours par le cas, 18 ans après les faits, de l'attentat lui-même. Et il n'y aurait peut-être jamais eu aucun procès sans la plainte des familles des 11 morts français et 12 blessés graves. Pourtant, le tribunal a rejeté les constitutions de parties civiles des familles, estimant que le lien de causalité entre l'attentat et les faits d'abus de biens sociaux qu'il avait à juger n'était pas démontrée de façon certaine.

" Ce qu'il faut surtout retenir ce sont les sanctions extrêmement lourdes, se console Gilles Sanson, grièvement blessé dans l'attentat et qui a suivi tout le procès, " ce sont les politiques qui sont les premiers à jouer avec l'argent et parfois en jouant avec l'argent on joue aussi avec la vie des gens." Sandrine Leclerc, qui a perdu son père dans l'attentat et porte-parle d'un collectif de six familles de victimes, salue quant à elle des " peines exemplaires" : " ça montre qu'en France on ne peut pas magouiller pour financer une campagne présidentielle et faire fi de la vie humaine pour satisfaire des ambitions politiques sans un jour être condamné."

Pour les familles, cette décision ne sonne cependant pas la fin de la bataille. Certaines espèrent toujours voir l'attentat de Karachi un jour jugé par une cour d'assises française.

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Karachi : prison ferme pour les prévenus, anciens ministres, hauts fonctionnaires et hommes d'affaire

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Le tribunal correctionnel de Paris a rendu son délibéré dans le volet financier de l'attentat de Karachi, 25 ans après les faits. Des peines allant de 2 à 5 ans de prison ferme. Le tribunal a globalement suivi les réquisitions du parquet, parfois même au-delà, et prononcé de lourdes peines.

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Preprints analysis suggests a disproportionate impact on early career researchers.
Philippe Vincent-Lamarre, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Vincent Larivière
aluxum/Getty Images

We are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat. The scientific workforce has moved en masse into the home, where male faculty are four times more likely to have a partner engaged in full domestic care than their female colleagues.

This suggests that women scholars may be more likely to face an intensification of domestic responsibilities when confined to the home and, consequently, a reduction in scholarly production.

This hypothesis has borne out in a few early analyses: a study of women economists demonstrated a 12% drop in production of preprints and registered reports in March 2020 and a 20% reduction in April, while another showed that they were less likely to work on COVID-related topics.

Similarly, male authors on popular preprint repositories arXiv and bioRxiv increased at a greater rate than women authors who were submitting during these months. Journal editors report the same trends in submission data.

Given that submission data are not publicly available and there has been a significant uptake in the incentives and use of preprints and registered reports, our study expands on early analyses by including 11 pre-print repositories (to expand disciplinary coverage) and three platforms for registered reports (to indicate the initiation of new projects).

We consider authorship positions, which provides an indicator of leadership role and labour contributions , and our name-gender algorithm significantly improves the matching rates compared to previous analyses.

In total, our analysis represents data from 307,459 preprints and registered reports, submitted by more 1.3 million authors, for which we were able to assign a gender to 92% of authors

Worrying trend for early career researchers

We observe lower rates of submissions from women for March and April 2020, compared with both the preceding two months in 2020 and the same two months of 2019.

There are, however, variations by preprint repository, with the biggest drops in submissions from women observed in EarthArXiv, medRxiv, SocArXiv, and NBER.

In arXiv and bioRxiv, female authorship was increasing in January and February 2020 before widespread social isolation measures came into force, but then dropped to match rates of previous years.

Examining gaps by author order provides a more nuanced lens on these labour differences: women in first-author positions appear to have experienced a larger reduction than their last-author counterparts.

The norm across these disciplines is to assign first authorship to a more junior scholar and last authorship to a senior scholar, who is often the principal investigator on the project.

This suggests that the pandemic may disproportionately affect early career researchers, with negative consequences for their trajectories, given the cumulative nature of the scientific reward system.

As submission of preprints occurs after several months or years of scientific work, this analysis may not fully capture current productivity declines from women scholars. However, preregistration provides an indication of the degree to which new projects are being initiated.

Given that preregistration is down for women in two out of the three repositories examined, there may be further evidence to suggest that the productivity pipeline for women will be diverted by this pandemic.

Women missing out on COVID-19 research

A month-by-month examination of the largest repositories provides some indication of this downward trajectory.

First authors are slightly lower than the 2019 averages and last authors took a small dip in March 2020.

The largest dip is observed in medRxiv, which dropped from 35.9% women first authorship in December to 20.2% in April, 32.6% to 26.9% in middle authorship, and 26.1% to 19.3% in last authorships.

The pandemic has not slowed submissions to these archives. To the contrary, COVID-19 has intensified the need for the fast-paced dissemination that preprints can provide.

On 31 January 2020, the Wellcome Trust called upon publishers, funding agencies, and scholarly societies to endorse a statement for concerted efforts in sharing urgent research related to the pandemic. This included an explicit statement urging researchers to make findings available via preprint servers and for funders and publishers to allow this early dissemination.

COVID-related research is the best indication of work that has been rapidly conducted in response to the pandemic. It is here where we see the greatest loss of early career women, as demonstrated by their generally lower contribution on this topic relative to the other topics (which creates a baseline).

This can have serious implications. The composition of the scientific workforce has significant effects on the populations studied.

If women and other minorities are absent from research on COVID-19, it may alter the emphasis on aspects of the virus that are particularly important for certain populations.

Researchers at risk need institutional support

Institutions must create bridges to support these early career researchers, so that we do not lose an entire cohort of scholars.

Graduate programs should consider extending deadlines for applications, given that there may be a disproportionate amount of college students graduating in December this year, rather than in May.

Current graduate students should receive extensions for qualifying examinations and defenses.

Fellowships for doctoral students and post-doctoral students should be extended so that students can receive the mentorship they need. This is particularly true for those disciplines that do not easily port to a virtual environment (for example, from wet labs to fieldwork).

Tenure track faculty should receive an extension on their clocks to provide maximal time to meet the criteria for tenure.

As the effects and the pandemic are likely to linger, we must consider how our evaluation systems and resource allocation mechanisms take into account the inequities in labour distribution for women and other minorities.

A robust scientific environment requires the participation of all members of the population; a crisis requires that we draw from the intellect of the full population.

We must create infrastructures to allow for all populations to participate, and to acknowledge systematic differences in their ability to do so.

The pandemic will subside, but these inequities will not. A long-term commitment to equity in science will help us to not only survive this crisis, but to be stronger when we emerge.
Additional figures, methodological details, and interactive tool can be accessed here. Philippe Vincent-Lamarre is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Montreal, Canada. Cassidy R. Sugimoto is a professor in the School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering at Indiana University Bloomington. Vincent Larivière is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Montreal, Canada.
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The decline of women's research production during the coronavirus pandemic

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Preprints analysis suggests a disproportionate impact on early career researchers. Philippe Vincent-Lamarre, Cassidy R. Sugimoto, Vincent Larivière aluxum/Getty Images We are all in the same storm, but not in the same boat. The scientific workforce has moved en masse into the home, where male faculty are four times more likely to have a partner engaged in full domestic care than their female colleagues.

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If you're black in the UK, the police are 10 times more likely to stop and search you. How would they feel if it was the other way around?

Starring, Selom Awadzi (Attack the Block), Alessandro Babalola (Top Boy, Flesh and Bone), Phil Barantini (Band of Brothers, Ned Kelly, Chernobyl), Dean Kilbey (All the Money in the World, Love Possibly)

If you'd like to donate, please check out Stop Watch who focus on making policing fairer and more accountable: http://www.stop-watch.org/

Interview with Directors Notes: https://directorsnotes.com/2020/06/10/harry-jackson-stop-and-search/

Featured on Booooooom: https://tv.booooooom.com/2020/06/10/stop-and-search-harry-jackson/

Featured on Film Shortage: https://filmshortage.com/dailyshortpicks/stop-and-search/

Featured in the Evening Standard: https://www.standard.co.uk/go/london/film/stop-and-search-film-institutional-racism-a4463886.html

Written and Directed by Harry Jackson
Produced by Milly Upton
Director of Photography - Molly Manning Walker
Edited by Chloe Hardwick
Sound design and mix by Ben Goodall
Sound recordist - Olly Gale
1st AC - Catharina Scarpellini
2nd AC - Billy Askew
1st AD - Joe Jones
2nd AD - Sam Heazel
Colourist - Jax Harney @ Cheat
Titles and credits by Matt Gillman
Equipment by One Stop Films
Costume hire Lemon Casting
Thanks David Young

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Le phonographe est donc né. Et avec lui, ces petits cylindres permettant de jouer de la musique. Des cylindres, des tubes donc. Vous nous voyez venir ? A l’époque, seuls les titres les plus populaires étaient enregistrés sur ces tubes, car le processus était complexe, coûteux, bref, un quintet de jazz indépendant ne pouvait, comme aujourd’hui, faire circuler sa démo auprès des professionnels.

Un tube est donc nécessairement un succès.

Mais pour Boris Vian, ce mot, “tube”, désignait également des chansons dont les paroles étaient creuses comme un tube. Des titres légers, succès d’un instant, mais qui séduisaient surtout un public peu exigeant. D’ailleurs, dans une chanson de 1957 écrite avec Henri Salvador, et sobrement intitulée “Le Tube”, il raconte comment élaborer une chanson à succès avec des paroles banales :

“V'là les accessoires / Pour faire un succès / Un' rue un trottoir / Une môm' bien roulée / Un gars chandail noir / Et cheveux collés / Rengaine qui traîne / Ni triste ni gaie / Voilà les accessoires / Messieurs dames, entrez / La fille et le gars / Se sont rencontrés / Entre deux y'a soudain / Quelque chose qui survient / Dans la nuit les voilà partis”

. Quelques mois plus tard, il ira même encore plus loin en sortant en librairie une véritable charge contre le showbiz, “En avant la zizique… et par ici les gros sous”.

Mais au fait, avant qu’on appelle un tube, un tube, quel était le petit nom donné aux succès musicaux populaires ? En fait, l’expression inventée par Boris Vian en 1957 remplaçait une autre utilisée alors dans le métier, qui n'était pas très élégante : avant cette date, on disait en effet "un saucisson". Pourquoi ? Un saucisson, en argot musical, était de la musique composée et calculée au kilomètre destinée à être vendue (en rondelle de vinyle), pour satisfaire les besoins alimentaires de l’artiste ou de son producteur.

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It's funny, of course it is, and cringeworthy, and a perfect piss-take of the inconsequentialities, marketable untruths, petty score-settling, feeble addiction narratives and general grandiose bullshit so rife in the autobiographies of minor celebrities, and even of major ones. But for me it never quite scales the heights* of 'personal journey' follow-up Nomad. Still, good to know that Monkey Tennis was a moderate success overseas.

*Metaphor.

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It's funny, of course it is, and cringeworthy, and a perfect piss-take of the inconsequentialities, marketable untruths, petty score-settling, feeble addiction narratives and general grandiose bullshit so rife in the autobiographies of minor celebrities, and even of major ones. But for me it never quite scales the heights* of 'personal journey' follow-up Nomad.

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La non-létalité favorise un usage immodéré

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La non-létalité favorise un usage immodéré

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Ces faits illustrent une logique qui s’applique à toutes les armes «non létales» : plutôt que de se substituer au recours à l’arme à feu, elles sont utilisées en remplacement de la résolution non violente des conflits. En effet, la présence de telles armes dans l’équipement des policiers leur donne une confiance accrue dans leur capacité à gérer une situation par la force.

Car en suggérant la non-létalité, ces armes conduisent à déresponsabiliser leurs utilisateurs des conséquences de leurs actes. Par conséquent, la disponibilité de l’arme non létale augmente le niveau de violence employé par les forces de l’ordre.

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Tribune. En annonçant la généralisation du pistolet à impulsion électrique pour remplacer une technique d'étranglement controversée le ministère de l'Intérieur poursuit le suréquipement des forces de l'ordre en armes "non létales". Il est peu probable que cette décision mette un terme au débat sur les violences policières, au contraire elle risque de l'attiser.

En réaction aux mobilisations des familles de victimes et des collectifs contre les violences policières, le ministre de l'Intérieur, Christophe Castaner, a annoncé l'interdiction d'une technique d'étranglement controversée. Elle sera remplacée par la généralisation du pistolet à impulsion électrique (PIE), plus connu sous le nom de marque Taser. Pour justifier sa décision le ministère a souligné, par la voix de Laurent Nuñez, que le PIE serait une alternative plus douce "à d'autres types d'armes, ou au contact physique" qui permettrait de menotter un individu "récalcitrant". La solution parfaite qui satisfait toutes les parties semble avoir été trouvée. En réalité, rien n'est moins sûr.

Une arme au bilan mortifère

Pour savoir si le PIE permet aux forces de l'ordre de procéder à des arrestations de manière plus humaine il faut tout d'abord vérifier ses effets réels. Pour cela l'expérience d'un autre pays ayant généralisé l'usage du PIE s'avère pertinente. Malgré l'opacité que l'Etat américain organise à propos du nombre de décès impliquant le PIE, l'agence Reuters a réussi à compiler 1 005 cas entre 1983 et 2017. Ce décompte correspond à une estimation conservatrice du nombre de morts qui ne comprend pas par exemple les cas où une personne a été simultanément touchée par un électrochoc et une balle.

à lire aussi Castaner, premier flip de France

Au-delà des conséquences fatales, le PIE présente aussi le risque d'être employé comme outil de torture. Comité contre la torture des Nations unies précise que "l'usage d'armes électriques non létales provoque une douleur aiguë constituant une forme de torture".

Déresponsabilisation

A l'instar d'autres armes "non létales" le gouvernement français présente le PIE comme une solution permettant simultanément de préserver la santé d'une personne interpellée et celle des forces de l'ordre procédant à cette interpellation. Or, Amnesty International montre que d'après les données américaines dans 90% des cas d'électrocution la victime ne portait pas d'arme et ne représentait généralement pas de menace pour les policiers.

Ces résultats sont confirmés par une étude récente de l'université de Chicago qui montre par ailleurs que la généralisation du Taser provoque une nouvelle répartition des blessures : elles baissent chez les policiers mais la population civile se trouve exposée à un recours aux armes croissant de la part des forces de l'ordre. L'association Acat formule le même constat pour la France où "le Taser est fréquemment utilisé dans des situations pour lesquelles l'usage d'armes à feu n'aurait jamais été envisagé".

La non-létalité favorise un usage immodéré

Ces faits illustrent une logique qui s'applique à toutes les armes "non létales" : plutôt que de se substituer au recours à l'arme à feu, elles sont utilisées en remplacement de la résolution non violente des conflits. En effet, la présence de telles armes dans l'équipement des policiers leur donne une confiance accrue dans leur capacité à gérer une situation par la force.

Car en suggérant la non-létalité, ces armes conduisent à déresponsabiliser leurs utilisateurs des conséquences de leurs actes. Par conséquent, la disponibilité de l'arme non létale augmente le niveau de violence employé par les forces de l'ordre.

La situation française, où l'usage du PIE est pour l'instant encore restreint incarne déjà ce paradoxe. Présentée en 2007 comme une arme permettant de baisser le recours à l'arme à feu, de 30% selon la ministre de l'Intérieur, Michèle Alliot-Marie, les chiffres montrent le contraire. Alors que le nombre de situations susceptibles de conduire les forces de l'ordre à en faire usage reste tendanciellement stable, l'utilisation du pistolet tend à augmenter. Quant au nombre de tirs au pistolet à impulsion électrique, il a connu une multiplication par 8 entre 2010 et 2019. Autrement dit, par la disponibilité du PIE, le comportement policier est devenu huit fois plus violent.

Davantage de violences en perspective

Si l'interdiction de la technique d'étranglement est incontestablement un succès de la mobilisation contre racisme et les violences policiers il est moins sûr que le débat sur les violences policières disparaîtra. La généralisation du PIE s'inscrit dans une tendance générale à l'augmentation de l'équipement des forces de l'ordre en armes "non létales" : entre 2012 et 2017, leur stock a doublé et même pendant la crise du coronavirus de nouvelles commandes ont été passées.

La disponibilité de ces armes a produit une hausse inédite des tirs sur des civils ainsi qu'un nombre spectaculaire de blessés graves et de morts. Etant interdit en maintien de l'ordre, le PIE est largement resté à l'écart du débat actuel sur les violences policières. La promesse de sa généralisation contient toutefois le risque de fournir une arme "non létale" supplémentaire aux forces de l'ordre dont l'équipement actuel fait déjà l'objet de vives critiques. Au moment où des villes américaines s'engagent dans la voie du démantèlement de la police, le gouvernement français mise sur davantage d'armes. Au lieu d'apaiser la société, cette décision accentuera les tensions existantes.

Paul Rocher, auteur de Gazer, mutiler, soumettre. Politique de l'arme non létale, La Fabrique.

Paul Rocher Economiste. Spécialiste de l'impact des armes"non létales"

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action des chrétiens pour l'abolition de la torture

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Généraliser le pistolet à impulsion électrique : le choix d'accentuer la violence

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Tribune. En annonçant la généralisation du pistolet à impulsion électrique pour remplacer une technique d'étranglement controversée le ministère de l'Intérieur poursuit le suréquipement des forces de l'ordre en armes "non létales". Il est peu probable que cette décision mette un terme au débat sur les violences policières, au contraire elle risque de l'attiser.

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The Reason Our Streets Switched to Cul-De-Sacs

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What It’s Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride

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What It’s Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride

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To his surprise, the app that he used to record his regular rides from Bethesda into Georgetown via the Capital Crescent Trail shared that information publicly, not just with his network of friends and followers. Someone had located a record of his ride on the path on June 2, matched it to the location of the assault from the video, matched his profile picture — white guy, aviator-style sunglasses, helmet obscuring much of his head — to the man in the video, and shared the hunch publicly.

It took off. Weinberg didn’t know what “doxing” meant, but it was happening to him: Someone posted his address.

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New York Is Committed to Covering This Essential Moment
We've removed our paywall from this and other stories about police brutality and systemic racism. Consider becoming a subscriber to support our journalists.
By the standards of the pandemic, Thursday had been a normal day for Peter Weinberg. A 49-year-old finance marketing executive, he worked from his home in Bethesda, Maryland, right outside of the District of Columbia, staying busy with Zoom meetings and the new rituals of our socially isolated world.

Then, around 10 p.m., he received an irate message on LinkedIn from someone he didn't know. He brushed it off, thinking it was probably just spam. Then he got another. And another. The third message was particular strange, as it mentioned something about the cops coming to find him. Perplexed, he watched as the messages continued to pile up. They were all so similar: angry, threatening, accusatory. His profile views suddenly soared into the thousands.

He began to panic. He decided to check Twitter. Although he'd had an account for more than a decade, Weinberg didn't use the social platform very much. He mostly followed mainstream news outlets, politicians from across the ideological spectrum, entrepreneurs, and financial analysts. He had what you might call "low engagement." But not anymore.

In his mentions, disaster was rapidly unfolding. People accused him of assaulting a child. Of being a racist. They shared a selfie he'd taken in sunglasses and his bike helmet and analyzed it alongside blurry images of another man in sunglasses and a bike helmet.

The other guy had been captured on video hitting children and ramming his bike into an adult after becoming enraged that they were posting fliers around the Capital Crescent Trail in support of George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed by white police officers in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

Weinberg hadn't seen the viral story about the trail where he regularly biked. He didn't know that, for several days, the video had circulated online as law enforcement crowdsourced help in locating the suspect. Now that he had seen it, he didn't think he looked anything like this guy. And he didn't understand why anyone thought he was him.

"You assaulted a little girl and other innocents because of your political beliefs," one Twitter user messaged him. "Hey so are you the piece of shit who assaulted a child in Maryland today on the bicycle trail?" asked another. "Hey you racist bitch....we're coming for you." "You deserve to pay." "Ur going down u disgusting piece of shit." "Nice job assaulting a small child today. You need to be fired from your job immediately." "YOU UGLY RACIST BITCH."

As he attempted to piece together what was happening, Weinberg called the number for a detective provided by the Maryland-National Capital Park Police. "We are seeking the public's assistance in identifying the below individual in reference to an assault that took place this morning on the Capital Crescent trail. Please contact Det. Lopez with any information," read a tweet sent June 2 from the department and shared more than 55,000 times.

But the Park Police had made an error. "Correction, the incident occurred yesterday morning, 6/1/2020," they wrote in a follow up tweet. As with most such clarifications, it had only a fraction of the reach: a mere 2,000 shares.

It was based on that initial, false information that Weinberg had become a suspect for the internet mob. To his surprise, the app that he used to record his regular rides from Bethesda into Georgetown via the Capital Crescent Trail shared that information publicly, not just with his network of friends and followers. Someone had located a record of his ride on the path on June 2, matched it to the location of the assault from the video, matched his profile picture - white guy, aviator-style sunglasses, helmet obscuring much of his head - to the man in the video, and shared the hunch publicly.

It took off. Weinberg didn't know what "doxing" meant, but it was happening to him: Someone posted his address. Detective Lopez didn't answer his call, but soon someone with the police department contacted Weinberg to let him know that officers would be patrolling the area around his home because he might be in danger.

Detective Lopez reached him around 11 p.m. and they agreed to meet the next morning. At 11:47, Weinberg tweeted, "I recently learned I have been misidentified in connection with a deeply disturbing attack. Please know this was not me. I have been in touch with the authorities and will continue to help any way possible."

His fiancée in New York, he spent the night alone, refreshing Twitter, watching helplessly as people tried to destroy his life. And Weinberg wasn't even the only one: Another man, a former Maryland cop, was wrongly accused, too. The tweet accusing him was retweeted and liked more than half a million times.

At 7 a.m., Weinberg brought his bicycle and his helmet with him to the police station. Detective Lopez told him he was free to go and the department would issue a report excluding him as a suspect.

On Twitter, Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh sent Weinberg a message. "I am sorry for what you are going through. Police have a suspect. Can I post something that would help?" Hours before Weinberg was falsely accused, Frosh had asked all of Twitter for help finding the man in the video. "If anyone can identify this man, please let me know," he said, and nearly 50,000 people retweeted him.

"I could use any help you can give. Can we speak quickly?" Weinberg said.

On the phone, Frosh - who did not return a request for comment from Intelligencer- was empathetic. He acknowledged that he had, in some way, contributed to Weinberg's circumstances. He sent a tweet confirming that there was a suspect and "it is not Mr. Weinberg." (228 retweets.)

On Friday, police arrested Anthony Brennan III, a 60-year-old from Kensington, Maryland, and charged him with three counts of second-degree assault.

Weinberg told a reporter he was "dizzy" after what he went through.

"You may hear more from me in time as I reflect on this experience," he tweeted. "For now I will say this. We must align in the fight for justice and equality - but not at the cost of due process and the right to privacy and safety."

As for the woman who shared his home address: She deleted it and posted an apology, writing that in all of her eagerness to see justice served, she was swept up in the mob that so gleefully shared misinformation, depriving someone of their own right to justice. Her correction was shared by fewer than a dozen people.

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What It's Like to Get Doxed for Taking a Bike Ride

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New York Is Committed to Covering This Essential Moment We've removed our paywall from this and other stories about police brutality and systemic racism. Consider becoming a subscriber to support our journalists. By the standards of the pandemic, Thursday had been a normal day for Peter Weinberg.

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Directrice de la publication du site Internet Rappler, Maria Ressa parle aux journalistes après sa condamnation pour diffamation par un tribunal de Manille le 15 juin. PHOTO / Ezra Acayan / Getty Images / Via AFP.

La directrice du site Internet Rappler a été condamnée pour diffamation le 15 juin, au terme d'un long feuilleton judiciaire. Maria Ressa et son site font l'objet de nombreuses poursuites en justice depuis l'arrivée du président Rodrigo Duterte au pouvoir.

"Fondatrice du site Internet Rappler, critique du président philippin Rodrigo Duterte", la journaliste philippine Maria Ressa a été condamnée le 15 juin par un tribunal de Manille dans une affaire de diffamation. Un verdict qui, selon le site Nikkei Asian Review, intervient à une période de fragilité de la liberté de presse dans le pays.

Maria Ressa et son coaccusé Reynaldo Santos, auteur d'un article jugé diffamatoire contre un homme d'affaires, sont condamnés et risquent une peine allant de six mois à six ans de prison. Ils restent libres sous caution et ont quinze jours pour faire appel de la décision.

L'article en cause a été publié le 29 mai 2012 sur le site Rappler et souligne les liens étroits entre l'homme d'affaires, Wilfredo D. Keng et le chef de la magistrature Renato Corona. Ce dernier aurait emprunté la voiture du premier. L'article évoque également l'implication de l'homme d'affaires dans les trafics d'êtres humains et de drogue, précise, par ailleurs, le quotidien philippin The Philippines Daily Inquirer.

Une plainte initialement refusée

La plainte contre l'article, initialement rejetée, a été déposée en 2017, rappelle The Straits Times. Un dépôt de plainte rendu possible suite à l'extension en 2018 par le ministère de la Justice de la période de prescription pour les cas de diffamations.

Maria Ressa et son avocat ont souligné que la loi sur la diffamation en ligne, "très controversée", selon le quotidien singapourien, "n'existait pas au moment de la publication de l'article". Mais, "la mise à jour de l'article en février 2014 à l'occasion d'une correction orthographique", détaille The Straits Times, a permis de relancer les poursuites.

Durant une conférence de presse donnée après l'énoncé du

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Médias. Maria Ressa, l'icône de la presse aux Philippines, condamnée pour diffamation

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La directrice du site Internet Rappler a été condamnée pour diffamation le 15 juin, au terme d'un long feuilleton judiciaire. Maria Ressa et son site font l'objet de nombreuses poursuites en justice depuis l'arrivée du président Rodrigo Duterte au pouvoir.

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L’autorité de contrôle de la police en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles, l’IOPC, fait partie des exemples d’institutions indépendantes. Aucun des membres de son équipe de direction ne doit avoir travaillé dans la police auparavant. L’IOPC enquête seulement sur les affaires les plus sensibles rapportées par les citoyens. Les services de police traitent eux-mêmes la majorité des réclamations contre des officiers de police ou des membres du personnel de la police, mais ils sont tenus de référer les cas les plus sérieux à l’IOPC, que quelqu’un ait posé une réclamation ou non. Dans les cas les plus graves, l’IOPC envoie son rapport à un procureur, qui décide de potentielles poursuites judiciaires. L’IOPC rédige régulièrement des recommandations, tirées des conclusions de ses enquêtes. Elle diffuse des études de cas tirés d’exemples réels pour montrer ce qui s’est mal passé et comment il serait préférable d’agir

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C'est le "i" qui fait toute la différence. En France, il veut dire "inspection". Au Royaume-Uni, il signifie "indépendant". L'Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) enquête sur les bavures policières en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles, afin d'établir l'éventuelle responsabilité des forces de l'ordre. Outre-Manche, l'équivalent de l'IGPN fait figure d'exemple pour sa transparence et son objectivité. Le directeur général de l'IOPC, quand bien même est-il nommé par le ministère de l'Intérieur, n'a pas le droit d'avoir travaillé dans la police auparavant. Il en va de même pour toute l'équipe à la tête de l'institution. Quant aux membres du conseil exécutif, ils ont des antécédents dans la finance, le marketing, voire au sein d'ONG, soit des rôles totalement apolitiques. Si l'organisation reçoit des fonds de l'Intérieur, ceux qui sont à son service, sur le terrain, sont totalement indépendants.

Récupération de preuves

Le fonctionnement est simple, explique une source de l'IOPC : "Il y a trois niveaux d'enquête. Sur le comportement de la police, sur les plaintes jugées "sérieuses" et enfin en cas de décès ou blessures graves lors d'opérations des forces de l'ordre." Ensuite, ce sont aux enquêteurs de commencer leurs recherches. "L'enquête est essentiellement basée sur du travail administratif", explique-t-on, pour effectuer la récupération de preuves, anciennes ou nouvelles, et les examiner. Un rapport final est ensuite rédigé par les enquêteurs, et examiné par leurs supérieurs qui décident de l'issue du dossier en fonction des preuves accumulées. Le rapport est ensuite donné aux personnes qui ont déposé plainte ainsi qu'aux services de police impliqués. S'il s'agit d'une mauvaise conduite reconnue, c'est au sein même du service que les sanctions éventuelles sont établies, avec un panel composé d'au moins un avocat. S'il s'agit d'un cas plus grave, le rapport est aussi envoyé au Crown Prosecution Service, l'équivalent d'un procureur, qui décidera de potentielles poursuites judiciaires.

Au-delà du fonctionnement, ce qui démarque l'IOPC de l'IGPN française, c'est sa transparence. Et ça commence par un détail. En tapant sur un moteur de recherche "IGPN", l'internaute est redirigé sur un site du ministère de l'Intérieur avec des publicités "Devenez policier". Le site web de l'IOPC, lui, est totalement hermétique aux liens subjectifs. Au-delà de l'anecdote, les citoyens ont accès à de nombreuses informations sur les résultats du service, dont des rapports mensuels sur les enquêtes terminées, la liste complète de ceux qui sont à la tête de l'IOPC, ou encore l'accès au magazine "Apprendre les leçons", pour encourager les forces de police à améliorer leur méthode de travail, à travers des exemples précis traités dans le passé. C'est aussi là que se loge une différence clé entre le système français et le système anglais : apprendre de ses erreurs.

L'affaire Stephen Lawrence

Une source travaillant sur certaines des enquêtes de l'IOPC estime "qu'aucun pouvoir ne doit être exercé en toute impunité". Cette dernière explique qu'en outre, l'organisation se remet constamment en question : "Ce fut le cas avec l'affaire Stephen Lawrence." En avril 1993, le jeune homme noir de 18 ans est poignardé à mort par un gang de jeunes blancs alors qu'il attend le bus au sud de Londres. Très vite, des suspects sont identifiés. Mais la police et la justice ne semblent jamais assez convaincues par les preuves apportées pour condamner les jeunes du gang.

L'affaire prend alors une tournure raciale, la famille de Stephen Lawrence étant persuadée que sa mort est due à sa couleur de peau. Cinq ans plus tard, une enquête publique est lancée, et le "rapport Macpherson" (nom du juge retraité l'ayant mené) révèle que des erreurs policières ont été commises, et que les forces de police sont "institutionnellement racistes". Depuis, les entités chargées d'enquêter sur la police ne cessent de se renouveler. L'ancêtre de l'IOPC, le Public Complaints Board créé en 1977, a été remodelé de multiples fois avant l'avènement du modèle actuel en 2018. Gage d'une réelle dynamique démocratique, l'IOPC telle qu'elle existe aujourd'hui a été façonnée après des plaintes de familles de jeunes blessés ou tués après avoir été appréhendés par la police en 2017.

Elodie Goulesque Intérim à Londres

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Au Royaume-Uni, une police des polices saluée pour son objectivité

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C'est le "i" qui fait toute la différence. En France, il veut dire "inspection". Au Royaume-Uni, il signifie "indépendant". L'Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) enquête sur les bavures policières en Angleterre et au Pays de Galles, afin d'établir l'éventuelle responsabilité des forces de l'ordre.

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Une réforme constitutionnelle donne lieu à la création en 2011 du Défenseur des droits, une autorité administrative indépendante chargée de défendre les personnes dont les droits ne sont pas respectés. Celle-ci reprend les prérogatives de quatre institutions, dont la Commission nationale de déontologie de la sécurité, et les remplace. Elle peut être saisie par une victime ou un témoin d’un comportement abusif de la part d’une personne exerçant une activité de sécurité publique ou privée, comme un policier, un douanier ou un agent de surveillance des transports en commun. En 2019,  plus de la moitié des saisines de l'institution concernaient des membres de la police. Le Défenseur des droits ne dispose pas d’un pouvoir direct de sanction, mais peut saisir l’autorité dont dépend la personne visée afin que des poursuites disciplinaires soient engagées. Dans son rapport annuel de 2019, le Défenseur des droits, Jacques Toubon, rappelle que depuis le début de son mandat en 2014, il a réclamé des poursuites disciplinaires dans 36 dossiers sur les 3 987 qu’il a traités, mais aucune n’a été suivie d’effet.

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L’IGPN met en place en 2013 une plateforme internet de signalement accessible à tout citoyen. Jusqu’ici, seuls les habitants de Paris et des départements de la petite couronne (Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis et Val-de-Marne) pouvaient saisir l’IGS ((inspection générale services dépendat de la police) en se déplaçant au sein de ses locaux.  (2013 fusion IGS  - IGPN déja demandée par Pasqua dans les années 80) L’IGPN demande des explications aux services de police concernés ou, dans les cas les plus graves, prend rendez-vous avec les usagers concernés pour un dépôt de plainte. En 2019, l’institution a reçu 4 792 signalements, soit une hausse de 22 % en deux ans, selon son rapport annuel. 83 % des signalements sont envoyés vers la direction des fonctionnaires visés pour enquête administrative interne, 14 % sont clôturés pour insuffisance d’informations et 3 % sont traités par une délégation d’enquête de l’IGPN et concernent les faits les plus graves. L’augmentation des saisines auprès de l’IGPN « traduit une tendance très nette à la contestation et la dépréciation des pratiques policières », justifie l’institution.

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la première fois que j'ai vu le titre de la vidéo, j'ai cru qu'il y avait écrit je m'en tape du confinement

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Discours et annonces d'Emmanuel Macron du 14 juin (en entier)

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c'est chaud

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trouver comment faire pour avoir ce gout de grillé barbecue asiat comme dans le riz aux trois trésors

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La Linguisterie #2 - Le créole est-il une langue ?

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Préparation de porc rôti et couenne de porc  pour riz aux 3 trésors

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Préparation de porc rôti et couenne de porc  pour riz aux 3 trésors

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4 cuillères à soupe de grains de riz long parfumé (non cuit) – pour la poudre de riz grillé

75 g de couenne de porc séchée en filaments (à faire tremper – on en trouve dans les magasins d’alimentation asiatique – voir photo)

500 g de viande de porc (échine ou palette)

2 cuillères à soupe de sauce de poisson en saumure (nuoc mam pur non dilué – j’utilise la marque Phú Quốc)

1 cuillère à soupe de sucre cassonade

2 gousses d’ail pressé en purée

Poivre

Vinaigre

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Le riz brisé au porc grillé et omelette à la vapeur (en vietnamien, cơm tấm sườn bì chả) ou désigné en France sous le nom de " Riz aux trois trésors ", est un délicieux plat du sud du Vietnam très populaire, en particulier à Hô-Chi-Minh-ville (Saïgon). Il est composé de brisures de riz ( cơm tấm); de rôti et couenne de porc en fines lamelles ( bì) délicatement parfumés à la poudre de riz grillé; d'échine ou de travers de porc grillé ( sườn); d'omelette à la vapeur ( chả - un raccourci pour )) ou œuf au plat; accompagnés de légumes aigres-doux , de tranches de concombre nature; le tout arrosé d'huile de ciboulette et de sauce nuoc mam préparé aigre-doux.

Au Vietnam, ce plat se déguste généralement le matin, mais de plus en plus, on le sert pour le midi ou le soir aussi. Bien exporté, ce plat fait la joie des Vietnamiens vivant à l'étranger, aussi bien en Outre-Atlantique qu'en Europe. Même s'il est très apprécié, on ne le trouve pas systématiquement sur les cartes des restaurants ou cantines vietnamiennes à Paris.

Ce plat est très particulier sur plusieurs points. D'abord, c'est un des rares plats servis sur assiette (cơm dĩa), très complet, que l'on déguste à l'aide d'une cuillère et d'une fourchette. Le riz est un riz spécial brisé deux à trois fois, qu'on appelle brisures de riz, et au Vietnam, gạo tấm ( gạo = grains de riz non cuits). La dernière particularité est la présence de la couenne de porc ( bì lợn dans le Nord ou da heo dans le Sud) qui est indissociable avec le rôti de porc coupé en fines lamelles et mélangée à la poudre de riz grillé. Ce mélange spécial se retrouve aussi dans un autre plat populaire, le bì cuốn ou rouleaux de printemps à la couenne de porc. Il est vrai que désigné ainsi, cela ne semble pas très appétissant. Mais à savourer, c'est un vrai régal.

Ce mets demandant beaucoup de préparation, il est plus fréquent de le consommer au restaurant. Cependant à l'étranger, le " riz aux trois trésors " n'étant pas toujours proposé dans les restaurants, les familles le préparent aussi à la maison. C'est ainsi que dans mon enfance dans la maison familiale, j'ai pu goûter au meilleur cơm tấm sườn bì chả (et bien entendu, je manque totalement d'objectivité!) préparé avec tant de soin et d'amour, de patience et de talent. Chez moi, la cuisine était un livre d'histoire ouvert. Observer, écouter, reproduire chaque geste en cuisine était une leçon de vie, une transmission, un héritage familial de mère en fille. Il n'était pas rare d'entendre aussi quelques proverbes vietnamiens (souvent en lien avec la nourriture) pour faire comprendre la sagesse, l'humilité, le devoir ou encore l'obéissance aux parents qui nous est demandé. Aujourd'hui, cela reste un de mes plats favoris que je prépare souvent en deux temps. Avec autant de plaisir que de souvenirs émouvants.

Beaucoup de versions existent. Le porc grillé ( sườn) est souvent sans os, la partie bien moelleuse de l'échine, en tranches. Cependant, je préfère la version avec les travers de porc grillés à la citronnelle, plus parfumée et savoureuse à mon goût. Quant au rôti de porc qui sera coupé en fines lamelles, certains ne marinent pas le porc et se contentent de simplement le cuire, d'autres proposent une marinade à la sauce de poisson en saumure pure (nuoc mam non dilué). Voici la proposition de ma recette du " riz aux trois trésors " (cơm tấm sườn bí chả).

Pour 4 personnes. Préparation en deux temps (sur 2 jours).
Ingrédients et préparation :
Préparation possible la veille :
Porc rôti et couenne de porc :

4 cuillères à soupe de grains de riz long parfumé (non cuit) - pour la poudre de riz grillé

75 g de couenne de porc séchée en filaments (à faire tremper - on en trouve dans les magasins d'alimentation asiatique - voir photo)

500 g de viande de porc (échine ou palette)

2 cuillères à soupe de sauce de poisson en saumure (nuoc mam pur non dilué - j'utilise la marque Phú Quốc)

1 cuillère à soupe de sucre cassonade

2 gousses d'ail pressé en purée

Poivre

Vinaigre

Préparation :

Faire tremper la couenne de porc séchée dans l'eau tiède additionnée d'une cuillère à soupe ou deux de vinaigre blanc. Cela permet d'atténuer l'odeur désagréable de la couenne. Laisser tremper 30 minutes puis rincer à l'eau froide, bien égoutter. Si vous habitez dans un coin où on ne trouve pas de couenne séchée, utilisez de la couenne fraîche (que l'on trouve sur la poitrine de porc), passez un peu de vinaigre sur la couenne et la cuire à la vapeur pendant 15 minutes. Couper en fines lamelles. Réserver.

Couper le morceau de porc en deux ou en très gros cubes. Faire mariner le porc avec la sauce de poisson et le sucre pendant 1 heure. Faire revenir à feu moyen les morceaux de porc avec sa marinade jusqu'à ce que les morceaux soient dorés (environ 20 minutes), ajouter l'ail pressé dès que le porc commence à dorer. Poivrer en fin de cuisson. Laisser refroidir complètement avant de couper en fines lamelles (la viande aura plus de tenue pour la coupe).

Mélanger les filaments de couenne et les fines lamelles de rôti.

Dans une poêle, faire dorer à sec les 4 cuillères à soupe de grains de riz non cuit. Éteindre dès que le riz est doré. Verser immédiatement dans un bol. Laisser refroidir avant de moudre en fine poudre. Parsemer de poudre de riz grillé sur les filaments de couenne et les lamelles de porc. À Paris ou dans les magasins Paristore de France, on trouve de la poudre de riz grillé prête à l'emploi.

Réserver au frais jusqu'à son emploi.

Carottes aigres-douces (đồ chua) : Recette de légumes aigres-doux ici.

Préparation le jour même :
Travers de porc grillé à la citronnelle (sườn nướng sả) :

500 - 700 g de travers de porc (les os pèsent lourd!) suivant les appétits

1 cuillères à soupe de sauce de poisson en saumure pur (nuoc mam pur non dilué)

1 cuillère à soupe de sauce de soja

2 cuillères à soupe de miel liquide

2 tiges de citronnelle (partie blanche) hachées

2 échalotes finement hachées

2 gousses d'ail finement hachées

Poivre

Préparation :

Nettoyer et couper les travers en morceaux (comme repère, couper à chaque 2 os = un carré) et fendre sans trancher complètement entre les 2 os pour que la viande ne se rétracte pas à la cuisson.

Hacher finement l'ail et les échalotes.

Laver les tiges de citronnelles. Supprimer la première enveloppe. Écraser les tiges de citronnelle avec le plat du couperet ou d'un grand couteau et hacher finement.

Dans un bol, mélanger la sauce de poisson en saumure nuoc mam pur, la sauce de soja, le miel et 4 cuillères à soupe d'eau tiède. Ajouter l'ail, l'échalote et la citronnelle hachés. Mélanger et verser sur les morceaux coupés de travers de porc. Réserver au frais pendant au minimum 1 heure. Idéalement 3 heures de marinade.

Dans un four préchauffé à 210°C, cuire et faire griller les travers de porc avec sa marinade pendant 30 à 40 minutes, en retournant les morceaux à mi-cuisson et en arrosant toutes les 15 minutes.

Huile de ciboulette (mỡ hành) :

1 botte de ciboulette chinoise ciselée.

6 cuillères à soupe d'huile neutre (tournesol ou arachide)

Sel

Préparation :

Laver et ciseler la ciboulette chinoise. Réserver dans un bol.

Chauffer l'huile dans une petite casserole. Dès ébullition, arrêter le feu. Ajouter une bonne pincée de sel.

Verser l'huile bouillante sur la ciboulette. Réserver.

Riz :

400 g de brisures de riz (comptez 80 à 100 g de riz par personne - parfois il vaut mieux avoir trop de riz que pas assez).

Préparation :

Cuisson à l'auto-cuiseur (ricecooker) : Laver et rincer le riz deux fois à l'eau froide. Cuire le riz à l'auto-cuiseur en veillant à mettre un peu moins d'eau que pour le riz long parfumé Thaï habituel, le riz brisé absorbe plus d'eau.

Cuisson à la casserole : Après avoir lavé et rincé le riz brisé, le mettre dans une casserole moyenne, verser l'eau froide jusqu'à dépasser la hauteur d'une 2/3 de phalange de doigt (poser un doigt en hauteur sur la surface du riz, verser l'eau jusqu'à ce que le niveau d'eau arrive au 2/3 de la phalange du doigt posé). Le riz brisé absorbe plus d'eau que le riz normal. Allumer le feu moyennement fort, cuire jusqu'à ébullition sans couvrir, puis dès ébullition, couvrir aussitôt et baisser à feu très doux. Cuire encore environ 15 minutes. Ne pas soulever le couvercle pendant la cuisson. Après 15 minutes, vérifier que le riz est bien cuit. Les grains de riz doivent être tendres, un peu collant. Recouvrir aussitôt le riz et laisser couvert hors du feu pendant encore 10 minutes. Puis, aérer un peu le riz en le remuant à l'aide d'une cuillère en bois. Recouvrir jusqu'au dressage des assiettes.

Accompagnement :

1 concombre lavé non pelé, en tranches.

Facultatif : quelques quartiers ou tranches de tomates selon goût.

Sauce nuoc mam préparée aigre-douce (nước mắm pha chua ngọt) :

3 cuillères à soupe de sauce de poisson en saumure (nuoc mam pur)

4 cuillères à soupe rases de sucre

3 cuillères à soupe de vinaigre de riz

8 cuillères à soupe d'eau chaude

1 gousse d'ail haché

Facultatif : quelques rondelles de piment rouge selon envie et goût

Préparation :

Faire chauffer l'eau, verser le sucre et mélanger hors du feu, jusqu'à sa complète dissolution.

Ajouter la sauce de poisson nuoc mam pur et le vinaigre de riz. Si vous n'avez pas de vinaigre de riz, vous pouvez remplacer par le vinaigre de vin (en réduisant un peu la quantité sous peine d'avoir une sauce trop acide car le vinaigre de riz est plus doux). Mélanger et réserver.

Avant de servir, hacher finement l'ail et en option, le piment selon goût. Rectifier si nécessaire : la sauce ne doit pas être trop salée, plutôt sucrée et légèrement acidulée.

Dressage de l'assiette :

Mettre un peu de riz (portion équivalant à un bol de riz), un morceau de travers de porc grillé à la citronnelle, un morceau d'omelette à la vapeur, une portion de lamelles de porc et de couenne à la poudre de riz grillé, un peu de carottes aigres-douces, quelques tranches de concombre et de tomates.

Verser l'huile de ciboulette sur le riz et les travers de porc. Arroser ensuite d'une ou deux cuillères à soupe de sauce de nuoc mam préparée aigre-douce sur toute l'assiette.

Servir aussitôt.

Voilà une belle assiette vietnamienne bien savoureuse qui vous attend ! Si vous arrivez à ce stade de la préparation, je vous en félicite chaleureusement! Comme vous le constatez, c'est un plat qui n'est pas bien compliqué mais qui exige une grande organisation et une bonne préparation... Vous comprenez également la raison pour laquelle ce mets est plutôt consommé au restaurant plutôt qu'à la maison... Cela dit, pour les personnes qui aiment cuisiner, c'est une formidable expérience culinaire, un moment de détente que l'on peut partager en famille si de petites mains supplémentaires sont disponibles pour participer en cuisine. Bonne découverte, bonne dégustation et très belle semaine à vous !

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Riz aux trois trésors (Cơm tấm sườn bì chả)

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Le riz brisé au porc grillé et omelette à la vapeur (en vietnamien, cơm tấm sườn bì chả) ou désigné en France sous le nom de " Riz aux trois trésors ", est un délicieux plat du sud du Vietnam très populaire, en particulier à Hô-Chi-Minh-ville (Saïgon).

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masculin et féminin identiques
(La Réunion) Français de la métropole résidant à la Réunion, aux Antilles (Martinique, Guadeloupe), en Guyane, etc
L'étymologie la plus vraisemblable est donnée par le linguiste Robert Chaudenson dans son lexique du parler créole de La Réunion (Paris, 1974). Il classe le terme dans les origines douteuses. Selon certains témoignages qu’il a recensés, le terme n’existait pas avant la Première Guerre mondiale. Chaudenson opte pour la traduction d’une expression malgache m ena sofina ("oreilles rouges") qui est utilisée pour désigner les européens (parce qu’ils ont les oreilles rouges). Le terme est entré dans l’usage réunionnais lors de la Première Guerre mondiale quand, après la mobilisation, beaucoup de créoles furent envoyés à Madagascar. Nombre d’officiers étaient métropolitains. Les recrues créoles ont peut-être pu se faire traduire par les soldats malgaches l’expression locale et la trouvant plaisante, l’ont introduit dans leur parler. D’autant qu’en créole "faire zoreilles cochon" signifie "faire le sourd, faire mine de ne pas entendre".

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Corinne et Jeannot sont des personnages de bande dessinée de Tabary.
Les personnages apparaissent pour la première fois en 1959, dans la série Totoche. Ce duo particulièrement explosif se singularise par leur relation au sein de la bande d'acolytes de Totoche. En effet Jeannot est amoureux, bien inconsciemment, de Corinne et celle-ci passe son temps à lui jouer des tours les plus pendables. Enfin quand Jeannot décide à son tour de lui rendre la monnaie de sa pièce, il échoue à chaque fois.

En 1966, leur créateur, le dessinateur Tabary, décide de leur faire vivre leurs aventures, surtout sous forme de gags en une planche. À ces deux personnages s'ajoute ensuite l'agent de police Bodard qui, systématiquement, prendra toujours la défense de l'espiègle Corinne au détriment du pauvre Jeannot.

Les débuts des aventures de Corinne et Jeannot paraissent dans le numéro 1075 du 19 décembre 1965 de l'hebdomadaire Vaillant le journal de Pif.

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Un pidgin
est une langue véhiculaire simplifiée créée sur le vocabulaire et certaines structures d'une langue de base, en général européenne (anglais, espagnol, français, néerlandais, portugais, etc.)

Exemple : Dans le pidgin de Papouasie-Nouvelle-Guinée (le tok pisin) et dans le pidgin du Vanuatu (le bichelamar), yumi signifie « nous » (issu de l'anglais you + me).

Différences entre un pidgin, un créole et un sabir
Les linguistes distinguent le pidgin du créole en fonction du niveau de structuration de la langue. Surtout, un pidgin devient un créole lorsqu'il devient la langue maternelle de la population (alors qu'un pidgin n'est utilisé que dans les relations entre des individus qui gardent chacun leur langue maternelle). On peut donc dire que le créole est un pidgin qui a réussi à éliminer l'usage des langues originales de ses locuteurs, accompagnée d'une complexification de leur structure et une extension de leur champ lexical.

Même s'il est courant d'utiliser le terme « pidgin » pour les langues issues de l'anglais et le terme « créole » pour les langues issues du français, cet emploi est abusif. Néanmoins, certains locuteurs de créoles eux-mêmes utilisent le terme « pidgin » pour désigner leur langue maternelle : c'est le cas notamment du créole hawaiien, ce qui contribue à renforcer la confusion.

Le sabir est de même nature que le pidgin (une langue d'appoint créée pour les besoins de communication) mais théoriquement encore plus pauvre que ce dernier.