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Great site to become close to Irish accent.

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Corrections:
Tuesday /tusday/
village /vílleich/

NEW VOCABULARY:
-To be flummoxed (adj)= confused
-higgledy piggledy (adj)= in confusion or disorder, chaotic
-hullaballo (adv)= loud noises, shouting when angry
-to be biased towards/against (adj)= showing an unreasonable like/dislike
-Brolly (n)= short name for umbrella
-Chuffed (adj)= over the moon= overjoyed
-to be DOWN IN THE DUMPS (EXP)= sad
-to HAVE ITCHY FEET (EX`P)= TO WANT TO TRY STH NEW ( a job)
-To be a doddle (adj)= familiar = estar chupado, ser pan comido, fácil
-bog-standard (adj)= completelly ordinary
-the loo (n)= familiar = wc
-a bikini wax (n)= cera depilatoria del bikini

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-to become friends with (v)= hacerse amigos de/con
-...sth gets me to a point  where ...
-to question sth (v)= poner en entredicho
-to bury the corpse (v) enterrar el cuerpo
-'I can't even kill an ant'! (exp)= no puedo ni matar a una hormiga!!
-teenage years (n)= años de la adolescencia
-to piss sb off (v)= to get sb angry
-teetotal (adj)= abstemio, que no bebe nada de alcohol
-to get well with sb (v)= llevarse bien con
-TO GET ON VERY WELL (V)= llevarse bien

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SPEAKING CORNER: 09/06/2020 DIFFERENT PERIODS OF TIME IN HISTORY

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SPEAKING CORNER: 09/06/2020 DIFFERENT PERIODS OF TIME IN HISTORY

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New vocabulary:
-majestic (Adj)= majestuoso, grande
-a rock quarry (n)= cantera
-a trap (n)= trampa
-a puppet (n)= marioneta-the Black Plague (n)= la peste negra
-civil servants (n)= funcionarios
-welfare (n)= bienestar/ prestaciones sociales de una sociedad.

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CORRECTIONS:
ON the terrace
-a recorder (n)= flauta que tocábamos en el colegio
-a flaute (N)= flauta horizontal
-to have a good musical ear
-to mess about (v)= juguetear sin hacer nada, sin un fin establecido

New vocabulary:
to hum (v)= tararear
a creeper (n)= enredadera, planta enredadera
Corduroy (n)= pana, tejido pantalones
to strut (v)= pavonearse
to crave (v)= antojarse, querer algo mucho
conducive (adj)= propicio
chock-a-block (adb)= INFORMAL = overcrowded
wonky (adj)=uneven = torcido, cojo
To tangle (v)= enredar

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...When you get at the age of...
fashion industry (N)= industria de la moda

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Interesting, amusing and fast-paced session in which we have discussed about accents and some slang in Newcasttle.
After that, I have been introduced to her husband, Paul, who very firendly and nicely has talked to me.
And finally I have explained to Ingrid what I discovered about her husband.
Really, very funny session! I have enjoy myself a lot!.
New vocabulary:
to waffle on (v)= hablar mucho sin decir nada, to beat around the bush, as politicians do.
vague (adj)= vago
to be watered down (v)= to be made weacker= to fade away=difuminar, agualir
to be obliged (v)= formal, when you have to do sth against your will
to dithel (v)= vacilar
a whisk (N)= batidor
the deceased (n)= el difunto
a livewire (adj)= ser un nervio no parar nunca quieto
to clap (v)= abofetear.

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CORRECTIONS:
-the year in which the Olympic Games went ON.
-To be hooked ON (V)= sentirse atraido por.
-It demmands a high level of commitment.

NEW VOCABULARY AND EXPRESSIONS:
-Rhythmic gymnastics (v)= gimnasia artística
-don't expect much FROM me (v)= no esperes mucho de mi.
-magnificient (adj)= magnífico.
-to spin round (V)= girar alrededor de un eje.
-to make a recovery (V)= cuando vuelve a la posición después de girar.
-a v-shaped back (adj)= espalda/escote en forma de 'v'.
-skin/tan colour (adj)= color carne
-a plait(n)= /plat/trenza del pelo
-to plait (v)= trenzar, hacer una trenza.
-her hair was plated in a bun(n)= su pelo estaba trenzado en un moño.
a bun (n)= moño de pelo.
-she manages pressure well (v)= manage= deal=handdle=
-precise (adj)= preciso.
-a flawless performance (adj)= actuación sin errores, fallos
-a seamless performance (adj)= sin costuras, consistente
-to be upfifting (adj)= algo que te hace subir el ánimo
-to be upbeat (adj)= persona que te hace subir el ánimo, que te anima.
to glide (v)= deslizar
to slide(v)= resbalzar
IDIOMS
-to hit the sack  (exp)= irse a dormir
-to be under the weather (exp)= sentirse decaído= to come over sth

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New vocabulary:
-unnerving(adj)= troubling =inquietante
-disconcerting, perplexing, disturbing...
-vivid-muted colours (adj)= colores vivos o apagados, ténues
-completeness (n)= enterely
-sun bathing (n)= acción de tomar el sol
-have been tanning (v)=estar tomando el sol
-to tan (v)= ponerse moreno
-tan (n)= bronceado
-meadow (N)= pradera, campo
-pensive( adj)= pensativo
-thoughtful (adj) = considerado
-a haircut (n)= corte de pelo
-antibody (n)= anticuerpo (sistema immune)
-to break up (v)= romper una relación amorosa
-absent-minded (adj)= distraido, despistado
-a quarrel (n)= an argument, una pelea
-a pimp (n)= proxeneta, chulo

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1 HOUR TALKING TO ERIC D'ANTHONY: 4/05/20

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1 HOUR TALKING TO ERIC D'ANTHONY: 4/05/20

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I met this man using HELLO TALK.
He lives in North Caroline and he work as an engineer.
He is interested in learning the familiar Spanish. He speaks English, Portuguish, French, Spanish, Polish and Russian.
New vocabulary:
-to stark up (V)=
-Just going leave it at that! (exp)= vamos a dejarlo así.
-paygrade (v)= salario que recibes en función de un rango.
-to strut (v)= /stuat/ pavonearse
- to put sth aside (V)= posponerlo, dejar de lado algo
-If I'm not mistaken = If I remember correctly.

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I've just started seening it.
Vocabulary:
-to cook the books (exp)= falsear la contabilidad
-a gig (n)= un bolo
out of the blue (exp)= de la nada
-bogus (adj)= fake, hoax
-thud (n)= ruido sordo
-to thud (v)= hacer un ruido sordo
-a chick (n)= SLANG =una chica
-a bloke (n)= un hombre

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Corrections:
-ON the metro
-/intéresting/
-IN the morning
NEW VOCABULARY:
-Sheltered (adj)= resguardado
-greyhound (n)= galgo (Raza de perro)
-to hound (v)= acechar, harassment,
- to stagger (v)= tambalearse
-to pounce (v)= avalanzarse (pe:gato sobre ratón)
-to relax/ to loosen (v)= relajar una medida de seguridad, restricción/el cinturón
-a botched job (adj)= trabajo de mala calidad, una chapuza
-the crux of the matter (exp)= notty-gritty (too much informal)= el quid de la questión
a shack (v)= choza

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Main topic:
why sometimes did we mull over changing our lives but at the end we don't do anything to change them?

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SERIES: SELF MADE 05/20 (only 3 chapters)

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SERIES: SELF MADE 05/20 (only 3 chapters)

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This is a quirky serie in which the main character is a black woman who tries to set up her own business.
She didn't want to create a product targetted to the existent notion of beauty, actually, she had no truck with the men-stereotyped idea of women. Besides, she thought outside the box and went further. She realized that in 19th century, women had to go off the beaten track if they wanted to achieved their goals.
But, despite of all her willing, she had to face up lots of hindrances (=pitfall).
It also includes references to sexual diversity and intelligent feminism.
For the time being, it is an breakthrough.

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1ST SEASON.
to squander (v)= malgastar.
to gasp (v)=quedarse sin aliento.

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loosely(adv)= en lineas generales
outspoken (adj)=straightright =franco
a pimp (n)= proxeneta
to overturn (v)=anular
to overthrow(v)=derrocar
to get along with (v)=llevarse bien con
guff(n)=chorradas
a bust (n) = redada
a joint (n)= porro
to skip the lineE(v)= colarse
to be squared away (V)=estar bien cuidado
a draft dodger (V)= desertor
to puke (v)= vomitar
to be buked (v)= recibir una reprimienda
to scorn (v)= menospreciar
to hop in (v)= subir
worthwhile(adj) =q vale la pena
to peddle(v)= promover
bigot(adj)= intolerante
to piss off(v)=cabrear
faggot(n)=marica
mellow(adj)= suave
boon (n)=beneficio
to get back on track(v)=reencauzar el rumbo
loose canon (idiom)=bala perdida
to vouch (v)=avalar
sidewalk (n)=acera
to redress (v)=rectificar
to whip up (v)=incitar
to tip off (v)=avisar
a curse word (n)=palabrota

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Very usufull tool to practice English, French.. I'm totally hooked on it!

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Today we have discussed about things that we like doing such as doing sports, where parts of the planet we prefer to travel, ...
New vocabulary:
-Go cycling together
-collar bone (n)=clavicule=clavícula
-the doctor decided to let it heal itself
_to raise my arm (v)=levantar el brazo
-to lift my arm =idem
-brake discs (n)= frenos de disco de la bicicleta
-I braked too hard (V)= apretar el freno, frenar
-I went head over heels (v)= caida saliendo volando dando la voltereta
-I went flying (v)= idem
-I had a really bad fall (v)= tuve una caida grave
-BUT: he feel head over heels in love with her =caer totalmente enamorado de alguien
-made OF wood (v)= hecho de madera
-AS OF NEXT DAY/ FROM NEXT DAY= DESDE EL PROXIMO DIA...
-A stepped change (adj)= cambio paso a paso

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Today we have talked about art, our favourite work of art and how he decided our carrers.
As always, this speaking with Laura is has been a completely pleasure!

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Today we have talked a little bit of Uk's situation about coronavirus. But also about our flats and semi-dettached-houses, because in Uk people have the tendency to live in one semi-dettached house while in Spain in an appartment.
Corrections and new vocabulary:
allotment(N)= torre, parcela de terreno
the whole day=all day but not all the day (wrong)
heavy-handed(adj)= firme, severo /patoso
peg (n)=pinza de la ropa
made or do some bread NOT cook bread
consistency (n)= coherencia, consistencia
all the websites crashed = indicar que la red estaba saturada o que se cayó.

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Today I've talked to Ingrid. I didn't know her because she hadn't had the chance to attend our English coure.
She is very nice, and she is very talkative, such as me, and I like this!!
New vocabulary and expressions:
at street level = planta baja
It's pop luck (exp)=a situation in which one must take a chance that whatever is available will prove to be good or acceptable.
to have an excellent commant of any language (v)=tener mucha seguridad usando esta lengua
a blur (N)= borrón /bl3r/
to blur (V)= nucblarse, hacerse borroso
blurry (Adj)=nublado borroso =hazy (hablando del acento americano)

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ANOTHER APP TO HELP  ME WITH REMEMERING NEW WORDS: ANKI APP

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ANOTHER APP TO HELP  ME WITH REMEMERING NEW WORDS: ANKI APP

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Another talk with Laura. This time we have played to tell 3 things about us and we have to discover which one was true and false.
After that we have also speak about cheating on an exam, ridde a camel, and pay a visit to a future teller. Intersting answers and a lot of fun! she's very nice!!
Corecctions:
camel
canoe
observant (adj)= persona que tiene mucha capacidad de observación.

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FILM: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS 14/03/20

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FILM: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS 14/03/20

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NEW WORDS:
Seer (n)= profeta
TO ROW (V)= REMAR
-be with a child (v)=estar embarazada
-cripple (adj)= lisiado

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Yesterday I talked to Laura.
Our topics, obviously, were about this quarentine but also we discussed about different cultures and ways to mantein gardens as a way to interpretate how one sociaty could be.
I enjoyed a lot this activity, and Laura also share this video, a very curious one.
I have just learnt about this app Ankiapp to help me to remember words in a more useful way, not only studying by heart sth.

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The secrets of learning a new language | Lýdia Machová | TED

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We've never been in Amsterdam until the last weekend.
We were surprised because its hustle and bustle. A vively big city crowded of people and bikes.
I think there is nowhere near as bustling as Amsterdam. Not only you can wander around the red neoghbourhood, but also you can rove among its crowded streets.
It's worth going to visit this town.

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The victory for Bong Joon Ho's film at the Oscars has nothing to do with representation of people like me.

By

Mr. Chaw is a film critic.

Bong Joon Ho, the director of "Parasite," accepting one of the four Oscars the film won on Sunday at the Academy Awards. Credit... Noel West for The New York Times

As children during China's 1949 revolution, my parents, like so many Chinese of their generation, fled the Communist takeover of the mainland. Many of them planned to return when the Communist leadership collapsed. It doesn't appear that any of them will live to see it. Both sides of my family landed for a while on Taiwan and then, in the early 1970s, my parents came to the United States, where I was born not long after.

I grew up in Colorado as the only person of Asian descent in most of the environments I lived in, and so learned to assimilate into American culture while rejecting, sometimes violently, my parents and their culture. And so I looked on with anxiety - and some measure of fear - as the South Korean film "Parasite" won four Academy Awards on Sunday evening, including the biggest prize of all, best picture.

The victory of "Parasite" is a stunning moment that may not also be a watershed moment. It's certainly cause for celebration that an organization with notoriously questionable taste seems to have gotten it right this year, and it's unquestionably huge for the South Korean film industry. But despite the initial euphoric reaction from many Asian-Americans, the "Parasite" victory has nothing to do with Asian-American representation.

This is merely Hollywood recognizing, very belatedly, South Korea's amazing film industry - which has been making superlative films for decades.

The social media chatter around these wins has quickly become polarized. For the left, the victory of "Parasite" represents a validation of diversity initiatives undertaken by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recent years. The prominent Asian-American film critic Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times observed, cautiously, that it was "a sign, perhaps, that the academy's efforts to diversify its ranks and become a truly global institution are having an imperfect but measurable effect."

For the right, it's more fuel for the fear machine. It's evidence of, if not the beginnings of a new Yellow Peril, a progressive media conspiracy to frustrate conservatives' pursuit of an increasingly authoritarian nationalism. Even before "Parasite" won best picture, Jon Miller, a prominent host on the conservative outlet BlazeTV, complained to his nearly 60,000 Twitter followers about "a man named Bong Joon Ho" winning the screenplay award over "Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood" and "1917":

The lingering aftershocks of the honors for "Parasite" will satisfy some of the hopes and stoke some of the fears of both sides of the social divide. The left's belief that Mr. Bong's film is a remarkable of-the-moment statement about how fed up the 99 percent are with the greedy 1 percent is valid. In a way few films ever have, "Parasite" captures the spirit of its time by nailing the dissatisfaction with the ruling elite that is driving the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns and, paradoxically, carried Donald Trump to office in 2016.

And the right's belief that the film's awards were a craven effort by the academy's voters to counter last year's loathsome win for "Green Book" (and atone for this year's repeat of a near-#OscarsSoWhite repeat) probably holds some kernel of truth as well. But I'm hesitant to give too much credit to the academy for its sudden interest in "inclusion."

Caught in the middle are Asian-Americans. For many of us, our great hope for representation at the Oscars wasn't "Parasite," it was Lulu Wang's " The Farewell, " about a young Asian-American woman who at a time of personal crisis is confronted with the widening cultural gulf between herself and her parents and grandmother. Alas, "The Farewell," despite finding popular success and recognition at the Golden Globes and the Film Independent Spirit Awards,garnered no Oscar nominations. I find its exclusion a better indicator of how not just Asian-Americans but also female directors are still seen in Hollywood.

As a child, I was frequently asked if I knew Bruce Lee. For my classmates, there were two Asian people: me and Bruce Lee. The belief that there is only one Asian culture and not dozens, some with entrenched dislikes and prejudices against one another, has been one major source of misunderstanding between the East and the West. What "The Farewell" gets right about my specific experience of being an Asian-American is the idea that we are as foreign and alien in China as we are in the United States. It captures exactly the feeling of being culturally homeless. The win for "Parasite" is a win for Asian-Americans only if Asian-Americans buy into the prevailing generic notions around Asian culture. But I didn't know Bruce Lee. I don't know Bong Joon Ho, either.

There is a quiet, yearning part of me that wants to just celebrate all of those faces that look like mine. But the nervous, weather-beaten part of me worries that Hollywood will simply start strip-mining Korean product and luring Korean talent to the United States to humiliate them as sidekicks in action cop franchises. Hollywood did this with Hong Kong's cinema in the 1990s. The biggest star on the planet, Jackie Chan, was never able to be much more than Chris Tucker's straight man in a series of "Rush Hour" films that featured a running joke that Mr. Chan's character was Japanese. Given China's difficult history with Japan - reports vary among historians, but it's widely accepted that at least 14 million Chinese people died during the second Sino-Japanese War - that's a pretty loaded jab.

Even Bruce Lee found himself cast by a racist industry as the driver in "The Green Hornet" and, among other things, a homophobic hothead who leaps off a building after being called "gay" in the 1969 movie "Marlowe." When a white man was cast in Mr. Lee's place in "Kung Fu," a show he helped to develop, he returned to Hong Kong to finally find the success he longed for.

It's important to remember the provincialism of the Oscars, which Mr. Bong himself acknowledged last fall in an interview with Vulture. The Academy Awards, he said, are "not an international film festival." Instead, "they're very local."

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Opinion | 'Parasite' Won, but Asian-Americans Are Still Losing

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The victory for Bong Joon Ho's film at the Oscars has nothing to do with representation of people like me. By Mr. Chaw is a film critic. As children during China's 1949 revolution, my parents, like so many Chinese of their generation, fled the Communist takeover of the mainland.

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The triumph of "Parasite" is a sign of a crisis of faith in capitalism.

Park So Dam and Choi Woo Shik as members of the impoverished Kim family in "Parasite." Credit... Neon

On Sunday night, Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" morphed from a merely great film into a history-making phenomenon, becoming the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for best picture. It also won best director, best original screenplay and best international feature. Additionally, this South Korean horror-comedy, a radical parable of inequality, won the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay and the best-ensemble prize from the Screen Actors Guild.

No foreign film has ever been so honored in this country. Besides the excellence of the filmmaking, there's clearly something resonant about its bleak social vision, so different from anything coming out of Hollywood. Its reception is evidence of the same crisis of faith in capitalism that's making Bernie Sanders into a front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

"Parasite" depicts a world where a chasm divides the rich, who live in airy minimalist splendor, and the poor, who exist - to a degree that becomes increasingly macabre as the film progresses - literally underground. American viewers might get the impression that South Korea is an extremely stratified society, and while they'd be right, it's by some measures less unequal than our own. That makes the film's fatalism about social mobility, so foreign to traditional American sensibilities, particularly bracing.

Americans tend to think of class as being about behavior, at least in part - if you can master the mores of the rich, you can get ahead in the world. Consider the much-loved recent film "Knives Out," a slightly woke version of an Agatha Christie-style whodunit. (Beware, spoilers are coming.) Its protagonist, a saintly nurse with an undocumented mother, triumphs because she understands and outsmarts the venal rich family conspiring against her. By the end of "Hustlers," last year's class-war crime thriller about strippers ripping off plutocrats, the central character played by Constance Wu has hustled her way into what looks like the middle class.

Bong's world, by contrast, tends to be one in which there is no moving up. "Parasite" isn't even his most Marxist-seeming film. That would be the 2013 dystopian thriller "Snowpiercer," in which a failed attempt to stop global warming has turned the planet into a frozen wasteland, and the remnants of humanity are stuck on an ever-moving train. The poor live in cannibalistic squalor in the rear, their children fueling - again, literally - the hothouse luxury of the rich. Salvation comes only through blowing up the whole system and starting anew.

The politics of "Parasite" are only marginally more subtle. It tells the story of a poor family, the Kims, who insinuate themselves into the home and lives of a rich family, the Parks. First the Kims' son, Ki-woo, fakes university papers to become a tutor to the Parks' daughter. He manipulates them into hiring his sister as a high-end art therapist for the Parks' hyperactive son. The siblings then get the Parks to replace the family chauffeur with their father and the meticulous housekeeper with their mother.

None of the Kims, who never let on that they're related, have a problem fitting into their new milieu or doing the jobs they've conned their way into. If they lived in destitution before the Parks, it has nothing to do with their abilities. Nor do their new positions seem to raise their station much; they remain in the same dirty, verminous basement flat.

It's the stink of that flat that comes close to giving Ki-taek, the Kim patriarch, away. The Parks smell it on him. His place in the economic hierarchy is a material reality that has nothing to do with skill or competence; it sticks to him.

Again and again, "Parasite" shows class as a steel trap. The film spins from comedy to grotesquerie when it's revealed that the original housekeeper's husband has been hiding in the Parks' basement for four years, pursued by debt collectors after his small business went bust. That couple discovers the Kims' scam, leading to a zero-sum struggle for the scraps of the Parks' lives. At the film's end, after a spasm of murderous violence, infamy and grief, the Kims' son makes a "fundamental plan" to grow rich enough to save his father. There's a gauzy sequence where this seems to be actually playing out, and "Parasite" briefly dangles the prospect of a Hollywood ending. Only in the last shot is it clear that it's a fantasy and that he's stuck right where he began.

According to the O.E.C.D., American social mobility is no more robust than South Korea's. But with a few exceptions like Boots Riley's surrealist 2018 indie film " Sorry to Bother You," American popular culture hasn't caught up to a world where brains and gumption are no match for larger material forces. At least, it hasn't caught up consciously: "Parasite's" feting at the Academy Awards - where nominees received gift bags worth more than $225,000 that included gold-plated vape pens - could itself be seen as a decadent satire about inequality.

Recently, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elicited spasms of outraged mockery from the right-wing media when she called the idea of lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps "a joke." But maybe "Parasite" has struck such a chord because for too many people inequality is turning modern capitalism into not just a joke but a nightmare.

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The triumph of "Parasite" is a sign of a crisis of faith in capitalism. On Sunday night, Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" morphed from a merely great film into a history-making phenomenon, becoming the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for best picture. It also won best director, best original screenplay and best international feature.

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383 PAGES

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Exp =strike a chord

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I'm just testing this app. I'm not yet very up-to-date, but I'm trying ...
New structures or vocabulary:
-why have you gone from engineering to languages?
Because I became burnt out
-How is it that you took an interest in languages if you were all about engineering?
-...And to be fluent in speaking you should be so with writing beforehand.
-A speed drill (n)= ejercicio, entrenamiento,
-pull back your hair (V)= recoge el pelo atras
-put your thumb up (v)= levanta el pulgar
-raise your mobile (v)= levanta el movil
-dyslexic (adj)= idem
-...well the thing is I knew them but maybe i wouldnt have used them all.
-to gaze at the camera (v)= mira fijamente a la camara
-to be short in time (exp)= ir justa de tiempo

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APP TO LEARN ENGLISH: from the beginning of november to ....

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APP TO LEARN ENGLISH: from the beginning of november to ....

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HELLOTALK
new vocabulary:

-cotton can (n)= lata o
bote de algodón.
-to splice (v)= empalmar dos extremos del hilo.
-a thread (n)= hilo. /zrued/
-sliver (n)= barra.
-the downtime (n)= periodo de inactividad de una máquina p.e.
-to put your feet uo =to kick back (v)= to calm, take a breather

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I'm lucky! The receptionist at the center where I practice yoga has lived in Australia for 2 years, so she speaks English quite well. Since she wants to keep up with the language, we have decided to speak in English. There is also a teacher who comes from Greece that has just added to our special group.

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I've just finD this document in one of the apps that I use to chat in English. I do think that list is CRUCIAL!

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It's kind of a browser with which you can select areas and topics that you prefer and then they are bring out in the app daily.
A classmate of mine told me about it.

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How poor people survive in the USA | DW Documentary

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Certainly, I wouldn't be able to clearly depict my feeling about this film. The actors were entirely fantastic, but the topic was quite outlandish to me. I didn't catch its idea but If I had to make a guess, I would say its director tried to stress the celebrities' plummet once they had reached a peak in their carrers. Even more, the context is lugubrious and declining.
But, despite that sadness, I would recommend seeing this film.

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We've talked about communication and new technologies.

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New words:
dumping site (n): vertedero
dwarf (n): enano (bien considerado)
midget (n): enano (insulto)

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A fortnight travel over Scottish' Highlands. We've slept in Glencoe, Fort Williams, Skye Island, Inverness, Dundee and finally in Edinburgh.
Generally speaking, my view is Scottish people are serious but kind, always ready to help you and  communicative, even when they don't understand you. They make a real effort so AS TO conversation is possible.

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SPEAKING CORNER: 18/11/19 : #TIME'S UP & #ME TO

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SPEAKING CORNER: 18/11/19 : #TIME'S UP & #ME TO

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New vocabulary:
Sexual harassment (n)= acoso sexual
a producer (n)= productor de cine
Advancement(n)=ascenso/progreso
Impunity (n)=impunidad
...a long way to go (exp)= it still rests a long way to go in women world
fount (n)= fuente
to sack (v)=
to lay down (v)=
imbalanaced (adj)= desigualdad, no balanceado
witchcraft (n)= brujería
the glass ceiling (exp)= el tope en carrera profesional, limitaciones en la carrera profesional
civil servants( n)=funcionario
Today has been a good

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New vocabulary:
a heist (n)= atraco
An alderman (N)= concejal
to peddle (v) = traficar
a patronage (n)= apoyo
to wrestle (v)= luchar
to be stern (adj)= severo
to be handled (adj)= controlado
to fix (v)= ocuparse de
a kickback (n)= soborno
to admonish (v)= tell off
to be sloppy (adj)= ser descuidado
a penthouse (n)= ático
to scrape (v)= rascar, recoger
I have a lease (N)= tengo un contrato
to get back on one's feet (exp)= salir a flote
a flask (n)= petaca
to collect a debt (v)=cobrar una deuda
to settle a debt (v)= saldar una deuda
an arrangement site (n)= página de citas
to thrive (v)= crecer
to be thriving (adj)= floreciente
overage (adj)= sobrante
doomed to fail (v)= condenado al fracaso
to plunch a clock (v)= fichar en el trabajo
to deem (v)= consider
outreach (n)= influencia
to have a shot (exp)= tener una oportunidad
to tickle (v)= hacer cosquillas
an auction (n)= subasta
to reposses (v)= embargar
to be a fussy person (adj)= inquieto
to vouch for (v)= responder por alguien, dar la car por alguien
to take a toll on (exp)= pasar factura
you reap what you sow (exp)=recoges lo que siembras
an arrangement (n)= un acuerdo

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SPEAKING CORNER: 10/12/19: Has Asia Sargento raped Jimmy Bennet? 

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SPEAKING CORNER: 10/12/19: Has Asia Sargento raped Jimmy Bennet? 

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NEW WORDS:
condifenciality contract
sexual assalt
consensual
impeaches (n)= censura
nepotisms (n)= en un cargo de poder poner a trabajar a todos tus familiares, parientes,...etc
to perish(v)= perecer, caducado

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SERIAL: THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1ST, 2ND, 3rd AND 4th and latest SEASONS)

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SERIAL: THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1ST, 2ND, 3rd AND 4th and latest SEASONS)

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I started seeing this series because I felt curiosity. I wanted to know how the plot turned into the truth about what really happened in the II  world war. For the time being (for the moment) there's nothing quite special, but I'm still hoocked, so I will probably continue watching it.

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I would say that it is more a documentary than a tv serial. Good plot and clearly explained. It is worth seeing it.

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Wow!! this film is completely unputdownable, absolutely mesmerizing...However, it has been extremely difficult follow the actors because the dialogs are extremely fast and the characters speak with a terrible accent.
Nevertheless, I have enjoyed it because of their performances. One of the things that has drawn my attention is that the film seems more a play rather than a film. All the scenarios, all the performances, all the scenes represented...totally fascinating. Denzel Whashington gives the performance of his life, but Viola Davis too.
New vocabulary:
flaw (n)=  defecto
brooding (adj)= inquietante
mournful (adj)=lúgubre
gloom(n)=tristeza, pesadumbre
dislikeable (adj)=antipático
to endure(v)=soportar
to disparage(v)=desprestigiar
crippled(adj)=incapacitadoflourishing (adj)=exitoso
to keep up with (v)=estar a la altura
overbearing(adj)=
to overbear(v)=dominar
to be the rage(exp)=estar de moda
preposterous(adj)=absurdo
trite(adj)=trillado
to get a word in edgeways(exp)=poder decir algo
chequered(adj)=enrevesado
to carp(v)=criticar
bigot (adj)=racista
to leave to her own devices(exp)=abandonar a su suerte
to bear the brunt (exp)= llevarse la peor parte
to brag (v)=fanfarronear
boisterus(adj)=escandaloso
flamboyant(adj)=extravagante
paper job (n)=trabajo administrativo
to trump up (v)=falsear
liable(adj)=responsable
to get tight(exp dinero)=andar justo dinero
to make a living (exp dinero)=ganarse la vida
raggedy shoes (adj)=zapatos andrajosos
to wrestle (v)=lucharto bring up (V)=sacar un temato grin (v)=sonreir con sorna
to be bound over (exp)=estar bajo fianza
to bum(v)= mendigar
to make up for (v)=compensar
chore (n)=tarea ingrata
to hit the nail on the head(exp)=dar en el clavo
to mess with (v)=liarse con
lousy(adj)=asqueroso
to scrub (v)=fregar
to holler(v)=gritar
to seep(v)=filtrarse
to rot (v)=pudrirse
trade(n)=oficio
whatnot(n)=cosas por el estilo
take the crookeds with the straights (exp)=estar a las duras y las maduras
uppity(adj)=arrogante
to tree (v)=atrapar, arrinconar
rogue(adj)=sinvergüenza
to bust at the seams(exp)= rebosar de entusiasmo
to get cozy(v)=acurrucarse
to swell (v)=hincharse
to duck(v)=esquivar
to recommit(v)=mandar de nuevo a la cárcel
to fret(v)=agobiarse
to screw up (v)=joderla
to give back (v)=devolver
ovrernight(adj)=de la noche a la mañana
paperwork(n)=papeleo, burocracia
a workhouse(N)=jail
to talk back (v)=contestar
to see eye to eye (exp)=llevarse bien
to tip(v)=pasar de puntillas
fo be filled to brsting (exp)=lleno a reventar

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This film is an absolute flop. Even if its characters are amazing, the context and the plot are not well depicted.

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At the beginning, when I started seen it I thought that it was thouhgt-provoking because the topic was controversial. Rarely did I know about all the difficulties that women had to overcome to obtain their right to vote. Unfortunately, the wrap of the film was not clear enough. It wanted to tell lots of things and it seemed that the producers didn't reach their goal.

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I swear!, my husband and I have seen this impossible film in English. Firstly, the technical vocabulary is completely deterrent because not only is very specific but also totally focus on economics, and secondly, the concepts brought out are extremely difficult...
Anyway, it is also upset the plot itself. Nevertheless, it is worth seeing it because you can learn about how the world is manage and by whom...
new vocabulary:
credit default swap (n)= permuta de incumplimiento crediticio
housing market (n)= mercado immobiliario
to default (v)= incumplir pagos
a hedge fund (n)= fondo de cobertura
to gloss over(v)= pasar por encima
IPO (n)= salida a bolsa
a loan (n)= prestamo
to keep up (v)= seguir el ritmo
to short (v)= apostar contra
patronising (adj)=condescendiente
to some extent (exp)= hasta un punto
the stock market (n)= bolsa de valores
a trader (n)= agente de bolsa
to be reclusive (adj)= huraño
an insight (n)= opinión, perspectiva
utility stocks (n)= acciones empresas públicas
snot-nosed kid (adj)= mocoso
to turn fifteen (an age)(v)= cumplir años
payoff (n)= beneficios
yield (n)= rendimiento
to broker (v)= negociar
havoc(n)= estragos
staggering (adj)= sorprendente
mutual fund (n)= fondos inversión
to screw up(v)= cagarla, equivocarse
to grill (v)=acribillar a preguntas
to screw people over (v)= joder a la gente
to rip sb off (v)= desplumar a alguien
to hijack (v)= acaparar
commodities (n)= materias primas
to be pissed off (v)= estar cabreadeo
paperwork (n)= papeleo
housing spike peak (n)= pico inmobiliario
to be riveted (adj)= fascinated
a mortage (n= hipoteca
to go bust (adj)= desplumado
to blow your mind (v)= flipar
to blow sb off (v)= pasar de alguien
a housing development (n)= un urbanización
to be a delinquent (n)= ser un moroso
take-home pay (adj)= salario neto
assets (n)= activos
to brag (v)= to boat
to gobble up (v)= consumir rapidamente
to be on a winning streak (v)= estar en racha
to have a hunch (exp)= tener una corazonada
short-sighted thinking (ajd)= corto de miras
to tank (v)= to plummet

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I've just erased the other post, :-( !!!

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To visit Dr Dirk Obbink at Christ Church college, Oxford, you must first be ushered by a bowler-hatted porter into the stately Tom Quad, built by Cardinal Wolsey before his spectacular downfall in 1529. Turn sharp right, climb a flight of stairs, and there, behind a door on which is pinned a notice advertising a 2007 college arts festival, you will find Obbink's rooms. Be warned: you may knock on the door in vain. Since October, he has been suspended from duties following the biggest scandal that has ever hit, and is ever likely to hit, the University of Oxford's classics department.

An associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature at Oxford, Obbink occupies one of the plum jobs in his field. Born in Nebraska and now in his early 60s, this lugubrious, crumpled, owlish man has "won at the game of academia", said Candida Moss, professor of theology at Birmingham University. In 2001, he was awarded a MacArthur "genius" award for his expertise in "rescuing damaged ancient manuscripts from the ravages of nature and time". Over the course of his career, he has received millions in funding; he is currently, in theory at least, running an £800,000 project on the papyrus rolls carbonised by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79.

Since he was appointed in 1995, Obbink has welcomed many visitors into his rooms at Christ Church: dons, undergraduates, researchers. Less orthodox callers, too: among them, antiquities dealers and collectors. In the corner of Obbink's study stands a pool table, from which two Egyptian mummy masks stare out impenetrably. Its green baize surface is all but obscured by papers and manuscripts - even, sometimes, a folder or two containing fragments of ancient papyrus. One bibliophile remembers a visit to this room, "like the set of an Indiana Jones movie", a few years ago. He was offered an antique manuscript for sale by a man named Mahmoud Elder, with whom Obbink owned a company, now dissolved, called Castle Folio.

One blustery evening towards the end of Michaelmas term, 2011, two visiting Americans climbed Obbink's staircase - Drs Scott Carroll and Jerry Pattengale. Both worked for the Greens, a family of American conservative evangelicals who have made billions from a chain of crafting stores called Hobby Lobby. At the time, the family was embarking on an ambitious new project: the Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington DC in 2017. Carroll was then its director. Items for the Green collection were bought by Hobby Lobby, then donated to the museum, bringing a substantial tax write-off. Pattengale was the head of the Green Scholars Initiative, a project offering academics research opportunities on items in the Green collection.

The Greens, advised by Carroll, were buying biblical artefacts, such as Torahs and early papyrus manuscripts of the New Testament, at a dizzying pace: $70m was spent on 55,000 objects between 2009 and 2012, Carroll claimed later. The market in a hitherto arcane area of collecting sky-rocketed. "Fortunes were made. At least two vendors who had been making €1-2m a year were suddenly making €100-200m a year," said one longtime collector.

That wintry evening, Carroll and Pattengale were making one of their occasional trips to seek Obbink's expertise on matters papyrological. According to Pattengale, just as they were about to leave, Obbink reached into a manila envelope and pulled out four papyrus fragments, one from each of the gospels. Obbink told them that three of these scraps dated from the second century AD.

But the fourth, a fragment of the Gospel of Mark - a 4cm by 4cm scrap the shape of a butterfly's wing, containing just a few broken words - was earlier than that. It was almost certainly from the first century AD, which would make it the oldest surviving manuscript of the New Testament, copiedless than 30 years after Mark had actually written it. Conservative evangelicalsplace enormous weight on the Gospels as "God-breathed" words. The idea that such an object existed was indescribably thrilling. Carroll was "ecstatic", Pattengale recalled. "Veins along his neck bulged. He paced with arms flailing."

Carroll, who declined to be interviewed, has said that Pattengale's account is full of "misrepresentations, misrecollections, and exaggerations". But he has confirmed this: Obbink showed him the Mark fragment "on the pool table in his office ... and he then went into some paleographic detail why he believed it must date to the late-first century ... It was in this conversation that he offered it for consideration for Hobby Lobby to buy."

No purchase was made at the time. Nevertheless, the objects did eventually end up being sold to the Greens, after Carroll left their employ in 2012. The vendor, or so it appears, was Dirk Obbink. His name, and seemingly his signature, appear on a purchase agreement with Hobby Lobby dated 4 February 2013.

The problem is that the items - if the purchase agreement is genuine - were not Obbink's to sell. They are part of the Oxyrhynchus collection of ancient papyrus, owned by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and housed at Oxford's Sackler Library.

Thirteen additional fragments from the collection, it transpired this autumn, had also been sold to the Greens, 11 apparently by Obbink in 2010, and two by a Jerusalem-based antiquities dealer, Baidun & Sons. (A spokesperson for the company's owner, Alan Baidun, says he was an agent acting in good faith, and that he checked the provenance supplied by the person who sold them to him.)

Six further fragments from the Oxyrhynchus collection have turned up in the possession of another collector in the US, Andrew Stimer, a spokesperson for whom says he acquired them in good faith, and with an apparently complete provenance (though parts of it have subsequently been shown to have been falsified). The dealer who sold them to Stimer told him they had come from the collection of M Elder of Dearborn, Michigan. That is, Mahmoud Elder, Obbink's sometime business partner. (Elder did not respond to requests for comment. Both the Museum of the Bible and Stimer have cooperated fully with the EES, and have taken steps to return the fragments.)

In total, the EES has now discovered that 120 fragments have gone missing from the Oxyrhynchus collection over the past 10 years. Since the appearance, in June 2019, of that fateful purchase agreement and invoice bearing Obbink's name, the scale of the scandal has taken time to sink in. What kind of a person - what kind of an academic - would steal, sell, and profit from artefacts in their care? Such an act would be "the most staggering betrayal of the values and ethics of our profession", according to the Manchester University papyrologist Roberta Mazza.

The alleged thefts were reported to Thames Valley police on 12 November. No one has yet been arrested or charged. Obbink has not responded to interview requests from the Guardian, and has issued only one public statement. "The allegations made against me that I have stolen, removed or sold items owned by the Egypt Exploration Society collection at the University of Oxford are entirely false," he has said. "I would never betray the trust of my colleagues and the values which I have sought to protect and uphold throughout my academic career in the way that has been alleged. I am aware that there are documents being used against me which I believe have been fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career."

It seems that Dr Dirk Obbink is either a thief,has been caught up in a colossal misunderstanding, or, perhaps most shockingly of all, is the victim of an elaborate effort to frame him.

A case for Inspector Morse, perhaps. But the real detectives in this case have been a transatlantic band of papyrologists, theologians, classicists and biblical scholars, who have turned their deductive and evidence-sifting professional skills to the mystery. For them, what started as intellectual curiosity has turned into something more like a crusade against the perversion of the ethics of their field.

This band of scholarly sleuths, who have published their findings in books and on blogs and social media, includes thetheologian Candida Moss; Brent Nongbri, a scholar of early Christianity based at the Norwegian School of Theology; Mazza, whose investigations have sometimes made her feel, she said, as if she were in a Coen brothers' movie; and the contributors to a blog called Evangelical Textual Criticism. The last, a forum "for people with knowledge of the Bible in its original languages", has not, until now, had much call for "breaking news" banners.

All these academics have, for different reasons, a strong interest in the Oxyrhynchus collection - half a million ancient papyrus fragments that have transformed knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The fragments were excavated in Egypt, from 1896 onwards, by two Oxford classicists, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. A hunch led them to dig out some low mounds in the village of el-Behnesa, the site of the ancient Greek city of Oxyrhynchus, founded after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC. To their delight, they hit upon rubbish dumps in which 700 years' worth of papyrus had been discarded. The papyrus, preserved by the desert-dry conditions, was covered in writing - mostly Greek, the earliest from the third century BC.

Grenfell and Hunt's discoveries forged an extraordinary, direct link with antiquity. Most of the oldest surviving manuscripts, had, until then, come from no earlier than the 10th century. What classical literature there was - for example, just seven out of over 120 plays by Sophocles - had survived because medieval monks had thought it worth preserving, copying it over and over again down the generations.

Dr Dirk Obbink working on papyrus at the Sackler Institute. Photograph: Geraint Lewis

At Oxyrhynchus, though, an entire culture was revealed in the rubbish, unfiltered by monkish taste, and dating directly from antiquity: previously lost works by canonical writers such as Sappho, Pindar, and Menander; fragments of biblical texts; letters, bills, receipts, tax returns, even magical spells. Legally, under the colonial conditions of the time, the fragments became the property of the Egypt Exploration Fund (now Society) and were taken to Oxford, where for years, they were simply kept in boxes in Grenfell and Hunt's rooms in Queen's College, Oxford, as the scholars, then their successors, started to sift, edit and publish them.

Oxyrhynchus spawned a whole new sub-discipline of classics: papyrology. More than a century after the discoveries, one of papyrology's main tasks is to publish these scrappy manuscripts. That involves offering a proposed reconstruction of a text; translating and dating it; and producing a commentary on its significance. Over the past century, just over 5,000 of the half-million Oxyrhynchus papyri have been published. Each appearance of a volume in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri Series - there are now 83 - is a real event for classicists, historians, theologians. "They redraw the map of what we know," said Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek at Cambridge.

To be a papyrologist - to tease sense from damaged, ancient, near-illegible writing - you need to possess linguistic brilliance, a profound historical imagination, and a codebreaker's ability to play with different hypotheses of a text's meaning. It is patient, painstaking work - but also, exciting. It offers the thrill of discovery. One papyrologist told me, "I could have spent my career thinking about old chestnuts like the terminal date of Caesar's command, or whatever. But what I love is reading stuff that no one has read before."

Today, the Oxyrhynchus collection is held in a back room on the first floor of Oxford's Sackler classics library, where you'll see a scholarly mess of paperwork, microscopes and books. The collection's walls are lined with tall, locked cupboards, filled with ranks of boxes. Open one, and you will see the dark-brown papyrus, astonishingly tough given its age, still wrapped in 1910s and 20s pages of the university newspaper, the Oxford Gazette. Some fragments are large, even up to A4 size; many are tiny, known as "cornflakes" in the trade.

The Oxyrhynchus project is its own little fiefdom. Not exactly secretive, but very far from open, it carries the reputation of being cultish, even within the Oxford classics faculty. At any one time, up to three general editors share the duties of working on the material and assigning it to scholars for study and publication. Until 2016, Obbink was one of that trio of editors, with 24-hour-access. A curator-researcher also works day-to-day with the material. Researchers are employed to help; scholars come in and out to study the material. It is Obbink, rather than anyone else, on whom suspicions have focused.

There is a rough, handwritten catalogue of the entire collection, on 12cm by 7cm index cards, as well as photographs, which gives a rough indication of what each fragment contains. Editors have not usually been forthcoming about the details of the unpublished material, fearing an onslaught of interested academics. For scholars outside the charmed circle, who wonder what gems lie in wait, that can be frustrating. For a criminal, it might create an opportunity. The fewer people who know what is in the collection, the easier it might be to pilfer from it.

When the EES announced in October that index cards and photos had, in many cases, disappeared along with the missing fragments themselves, the scale of the alleged crime began to become clear. Any lingering suggestion that all this had been some colossal misunderstanding was blown aside. Whoever had stolen the fragments had tried to erase any trace of their existence, so that the crime would never come to light. "Destroying the catalogue records - that's such an anti-intellectual thing to do, it blows the mind," said Candida Moss.

However, the alleged thief seems to have erred in one crucial respect: they do not seem to have known, or taken into account, that there was back-up information allowing the EES to ascertain what had allegedly been stolen. (The EES has remained silent on the nature of this backup, but prior to digitisation, libraries would photograph card-index catalogues and transfer the images to microfiche.)

Despite that apparent oversight, one thing is close to certain: the items were taken by someone familiar with the collection's inner workings. Which means - colossal a betrayal as that would be - the crime was almost certainly an inside job.

After Carroll and Pattengale's visit to Oxford in 2011, tantalising rumours of the discovery of a first-century fragment of Mark rippled through American evangelical circles. On 1 February 2012, in Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, two theologians, Prof Bart Ehrman and Dr Daniel Wallace, were debating - to a rapt audience of 1,500 - whether the original text of the New Testament could be recovered. Suddenly, Wallace dropped a bombshell.

"The oldest manuscript of the New Testament is now a fragment of Mark's Gospel that is from the first century," he claimed. "My source is a papyrologist who worked on the manuscript, a man whose reputation is unimpeachable." It was, recalled Ehrman at a recent conference in San Diego, "a real jaw-dropper".

Ehrman was bursting with questions. How extensive was the fragment? Who was the papyrologist? Had the dating been corroborated by others? Wallace said he was sworn to secrecy. All he could reveal was that the fragment would soon be published by the academic imprint, Brill.

A few months later, Brill did indeed announce a new publication: the Green Scholars Initiative Papyri Series, edited by Obbink and Pattengale, a series of volumes of "rare unpublished papyri texts from the Green collection". The mystery fragment of first-century Mark, then, must belong to the Greens, Ehrman reasoned. The only problem was that the fragment "wasn't published that year, and it wasn't published the next year, and it wasn't published the next year," said Ehrman. "I started to feel like it was the parousia [Christ's second coming] - it's coming soon, but we don't know when."

For the scholar sleuths - as they would soon become - alarm bells started ringing. Where had this fragment come from? Why the secrecy? Was it legal? The trade in antiquities is governed by laws designed to protect artefacts from two things. First, the kind of mass removal of cultural heritage that was a feature of the colonial era. Second, illegal excavation and looting of archaeological sites, acts that involve an irreparable loss of knowledge, and, like many criminal trades with a high-value product, are run on human exploitation and violence. Buyers of artefacts, therefore, are supposed to establish provenance: proof that the item was legally removed from its country of origin, usually before 1970, when a Unesco convention on cultural heritage was widely adopted. The Greens, it was becoming apparent to observers, were not doing that. In 2017, for example, a consignment of ancient Iraqi cuneiform tablets they had purchased was found to have been smuggled into the US as "tile samples".

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In the absence of solid information about the fragment of Mark and its origin, gossip proliferated. A widely reported claim was that it had emerged from an ancient Egyptian mummy mask. Obbink's sometime visitor Scott Carroll, whose lecture style is more 19th-century showman than sober scholar, was speaking publicly about mummy masks a lot at the time, claiming they were a great source of early New Testament papyri. Because some mummy masks had been manufactured from a kind of papier-mache of recycled papyrus, known as "cartonnage", you could, he told audiences, dissolve the masks in soap and warm water, prise the constituent sheets of papyrus apart and, hey presto, reveal early manuscripts - fragments of the Gospels, of Homer, whatever. "My wife will laugh and remember the time she would come into the house and smell mummy on the stove," Carroll told an audience in Mexico, in 2013. "Nothing like the smell of mummy on the stove."

All the talk of dissolving mummy masks horrified serious scholars: destroying artefacts in the speculative search for other ancient artefacts is not exactly museological best practice. Those with a cynical cast of mind also observed that mummy masks were a great way to launder illegally procured papyri. All you had to do was claim you had found your dodgy papyrus manuscript in a legally acquired ancient mummy mask. (Such masks were relatively widely produced in antiquity; today, you can find them on eBay.) Mummy masks could be turned into "bottomless provenance machines", as one collector put it.

The scholar-sleuths began to trawl the internet looking for more videos of Carroll and those close to him, on the hunt for further information about the mystery Mark fragment. One video showed a talk by an evangelical author called Josh McDowell, an associate of Carroll's: in it, he revealed that the fragment of Mark was from the Gospel's first chapter. That seemingly tiny piece of information would, later, turn out to be a crucial clue in putting together the story of the alleged thefts from the Oxyrhynchus collection. In 2017, yet another video was ferreted out by scholar-sleuths, and was reposted on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog. In it, Carroll - about whom there is no suggestion of misconduct in this regard - says that he had seen the fragment of Mark, in "Oxford at Christ Church, and actually on [Obbink's] pool table". The fragment, he said, actually hadn't come from a mummy mask, as far as he could tell. It was, however, for sale.

Dirk Obbink cuts an eccentric figure, even by Oxford standards. In 2014, around the time his antiquities dealership Castle Folio was incorporated, he bought himself a castle. Or, rather, the Texan equivalent - an 1890s neo-Gothic pile in Waco, called Cottonland Castle. He already had a six-bedroom house in Oxford's suburbs, in the garden of which he had dug a large, L-shape swimming pool - an upgrade from the canal boat he had once shared with a colleague.

He has a reputation for elusiveness. "If Dirk says: 'See you,' I know I won't clap eyes on him for weeks," said one papyrological colleague. In the early 2000s, he held the chair of papyrology at the University of Michigan - a full-time job - but failed to resign from Oxford, leaving colleagues "profoundly disappointed by his conduct", according to a senior US-based classicist. It didn't seem to matter. "In certain institutional contexts, you somehow become untouchable," one professor of classics told me.

At the same time, Obbink is, in some ways, a standard-issue Oxford don - head in a book, limited social skills, "an absent-minded professor type", as one collector called him. He added: "I have a hard time believing that he stole Oxyrhynchus papyri in cold blood and sold them to Hobby Lobby."

In January 2014, Obbink had a moment of media glory, when he discovered and published two new fragments of poems by the seventh-century BC poet Sappho. It was global news. "A Sappho poem," as the Telegraph's headline put it, " is more exciting than a new David Bowie album ". At the time, the story, at least as it was reported by me and others, was all about the thrill of precious new words by a great poet. It was left to experts in the illegal traffic of antiquities to point out that the "new" Sappho was not just a tender poem about her brothers - but also, and importantly, an ancient artefact. One archaeologist-blogger posted a different kind of headline: "No-Questions-Asking UK Academic Reads a Freshly Uncovered Ripped-up Papyrus from Unknown Source."

Now, in the light of the revelations of the alleged thefts of the Oxyrhynchus papyri, scholars are looking at the Sappho story with new eyes, and asking, with a fresh sense of urgency, whether the manuscript can have been legally obtained. There are even doubts as to its authenticity. The latest gossip in classical circles is that it might even be a fake. "Everything about it seems too good to be true," one senior Cambridge classicist told me.

Dr Dirk Obbink at the Sackler Institute. Photograph: Geraint Lewis

Doubts about the Sappho papyrus have niggled away at scholars because Obbink's account of how it was acquired - all the time reporting, he said, what he had been told by its nameless owner - has been at best sketchy, and at times contradictory. At first, in January 2014, he revealed only that the Sappho papyrus was owned by an anonymous private collector in London. Then, in February, he said the manuscript had come from "a mummy cartonnage panel". It had been carbon-dated, he said, to AD201, plus or minus a century. For expert Egyptologists, though, that was a red flag. Both things - mummy cartonnage and a date of AD100-300 - cannot be true. Papyrus ceased to be used to make mummy cartonnage in around AD14.

In January 2015, the story changed. The Sappho manuscript hadn't been found in mummy cartonnage, after all, but "industrial cartonnage", perhaps used for bookbinding. This "industrial cartonnage", with the Sappho supposedly hidden within it, had been purchased by auction at Christie's in 2011, as part of a mixed lot of papyrus. This new information conveniently solved the dating problem, since industrial cartonnage was still being made during the period to which the Sappho manuscript had been carbon-dated. The detail about the Christie's auction also suggested the item was legal - the papyrus in that particular lot had been exported from Egypt prior to the 1970 Unesco convention on the export of artefacts.

Obbink published an explanation of how the two types of cartonnage had come to be confused. A piece of mummy cartonnage and a piece of industrial cartonnage had been dissolved together by the owner's staff, he said, and the resulting sheets of papyrus got muddled up. Obbink also reported that at some point some 20 smaller fragments of the Sappho manuscript had been "deemed insignificant" by the anonymous owner, and sold off to the Greens.

In this entire story of the origins of "P.Sapph.Obbink" - to use the manuscript's scholarly nomenclature - there was no solid evidence, no documentation, no images, and no external witnesses. Nor did Christie's possess relevant images of its auction lot of 2011 - the mixed lot of papyrus containing the piece of industrial cartonnage in which the Sappho fragment was supposedly concealed. Everything depended on the word of the great Oxford don.

Now, Mike Sampson, a papyrologist at the University of Manitoba, has found evidence, seen by the Guardian, suggesting that the origin-story of the Sappho manuscript reported by Obbink may be a fiction. Sampson was sent a PDF by an academic source. The document is a glossy, lavishly illustrated brochure produced by Christie's. It advertises the Sappho fragment for sale by private treaty. A "private treaty sale" is a service whereby an auction house will broker a sale between vendor and buyer discreetly, outside the relatively public auction schedule. (The document is quite separate from the 2011 auction, and was produced some time after it.) The brochure will have been circulated very discreetly, too, to a few key collectors. Sampson has analysed the metadata of the PDF, and believes that the Sappho fragment was in fact probably offered for sale by private treaty twice - once in 2013, prior to the public announcement of its existence, and again in 2015. (No price is mentioned, but a collector familiar with the field estimates a likely figure of around $800,000.)

In the brochure, there are, at last, images that purport to show how the two different types of cartonnage - mummy cartonnage and industrial cartonnage - were confused. One picture shows a brightly painted blue-and-red piece of mummy cartonnage lying in a ceramic basin beside a brown mass of what appears to be flattened papyrus, described as "cartonnage". The caption recaps the final story reported by Obbink - that the two items were muddled up in a "confusion of processing". However, in the opinion of Sampson, it "defies belief" that the entirely different objects could have been confused. Furthermore, because of the physical condition and measurements of the brown papyrus mass in the photograph, he thinks it unlikely that the Sappho manuscript could have emerged from within it, as claimed.

Perhaps Sampson's most telling finding, though, is that parts of the Sappho manuscript were shown in public when they were supposedly still undiscovered in a wodge of industrial cartonnage.According to his study of the PDF's metadata, the photographs of the materials sitting side by side in the ceramic basin, prior to "processing", were taken on 14 February 2012. And yet there is video footage of Scott Carroll brandishing 26 small fragments of the Sappho, those that ended up belonging to the Greens, a week earlier, on 7 February 2012.

There is no suggestion Carroll was involved in wrongdoing in this regard: the point is that the timeline seems so implausible as to be impossible. According to Sampson, whose analysis will appear in full in a forthcoming academic article, the most plausible interpretation of all this is that the photographs were retrospectively staged by persons unknown - along with images of the Sappho fragment apparently being prised from a dark-brown mass of papyrus.

The most obvious reason for staging an origin-story for the Sappho manuscript like this would be to conceal the fact that the papyrus had been illegally imported, excavated or traded. The other possible reason - though this is not Sampson's personal view - would be to mask a fake.

In response to this new evidence, Christie's told me: "Christie's endeavours to uphold the highest standards of due diligence. We would never knowingly offer any works of art without good title or incorrectly catalogued or authenticated. We take our name and reputation very seriously and would take all necessary steps available to address any situation of inappropriate use." The auction house says that if there is any official investigation, they will cooperate. At present, however, the origins of the Sappho fragment remain shrouded in mystery.

In early 2016, the EES were becoming seriously alarmed that Obbink was refusing to supply an adequate account of the source of the Sappho manuscript - and also, increasingly, by the rumours that he had offered papyrus fragments for sale in his Oxford rooms. These rumours seemed outlandish - who would you be more likely to trust: the eminent Oxford papyrologist Dirk Obbink, or Scott Carroll, with his mummy masks on the stove?

But still, from the stories circulating online, the EES knew two things about the notorious fragment of Mark that had supposedly been sold to the Green family: it was from the gospel's first chapter, and it was first century. It so happened that an item in their own collection was a papyrus catalogued in the 1980s as "I/II", a note that could have been interpreted as "first or second century AD". In 2011, a researcher on the Oxyrhynchus Project had identified it as from the first chapter of Mark. The fragment had not been officially signed out, but EES officials believed Obbink had it in his possession ostensibly to study.

Obbink always denied that he had been trying to sell Oxyrhynchus items, as a later EES statement made clear. Nevertheless, an official of the society was sufficiently suspicious that he might have been at least trying to sell the Mark fragment that he decided to try to smoke him out - by instructing him, in spring 2016, to publish the manuscript in the next volume, number 83, of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Series. That would get the fragment out in the public sphere. It would also mean it would have to be physically returned to the Sackler classics library so that the editing could be checked by colleagues. In short, if Obbink were indeed trying to sell it, this move would stop him. Or so the EES official thought.

That August, the EES decided not to reappoint Obbink a general editor of the Oxyrhynchus series, "primarily," it said in a public statement, "because of unsatisfactory discharge of his editorial duties, but also because of concerns, which he did not allay, about his alleged involvement in the marketing of ancient texts, especially the Sappho text".

It was in May 2018 that a Cambridge-based biblical scholar, Elijah Hixson, flicking through the newly posted Amazon listing for volume 83 of the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus Series, saw that one of the manuscripts about to be published was from the first chapter of Mark. This was, surely, the same item as the fragment of Mark that had been the source of such intense scholarly speculation over the previous seven years.

But if that was the case, then something seriously odd was going on. The Mark fragment was, supposedly, part of the Green collection. It could not also belong to the EES. What's more, the reason the fragment was the source of such fascination was that it was from the first century. But the one about to be published was labelled as late-second, or early-third century. Hixson immediately posted a blog on Evangelical Textual Criticism spelling out his puzzlement. As a commenter on the post said, there had either been a catastrophic misunderstanding - or someone was lying.

Naturally, there was also consternation in Washington, at the Museum of the Bible. Michael Holmes, the director of the Green Scholars Initiative since 2015, believed that the fragment of Mark belonged to them, not the EES. It had been bought and paid for by Hobby Lobby, and donated to the museum. They had the paperwork to prove it, though admittedly, not the papyrus.

The items had, according to an agreement, been left with the vendor temporarily for further study. Something was very wrong. It looked as if they had been sold something that was not what it purported to be, by someone who didn't seem to own it; and what's more, they didn't even have the item in their possession.

In April 2019, Holmes emailed Roberta Mazza in her capacity as an EES trustee, telling her that Obbink had allegedly sold the fragments to Hobby Lobby. Even at this point, Mazza told me, the whole idea still seemed crazy - as ridiculous as the plotline of 1960s Italian film Totòtruffa, in which a hustler pretends to sell the Trevi fountain to a tourist. Of course the items couldn't have been sold to Hobby Lobby - not least because the EES actually had possession of the items themselves. Holmes suggested a meeting so that they could, at last, establish the truth of the matter.

Which is how, on 4 June, the New Testament scholar was taken aback to find himself in the insalubrious, narrow alleyway that flanks one of London's opera houses, looking for the entrance of Two Brydges, a bohemian private members' club frequented by singers and writers. His lunch dates in the wood-panelled restaurant were Mazza, the ancient historian Prof Dominic Rathbone, and Dr Margaret Mountford, a papyrologist and then chair of the EES - better known to the British public in her guise as Alan Sugar's former sidekick on the reality show, The Apprentice.

"At the meeting I shared the evidence that Obbink had in fact sold 'first-century Mark' and three others to Hobby Lobby in January 2013," Holmes recalled at a recent conference. "Sold, but not delivered."

Conversation around the table quickly turned to a further question: had there been other items that had been both sold - and delivered? In the following weeks, it was concluded that a further 13 papyri belonging to EES had been wrongfully sold to Hobby Lobby, 11 apparently by Obbink, two by the Jerusalem antiquities dealers, Baidun.

Soon afterwards, on 23 June, Holmes circulated redacted copies of the alleged sales contracts between Hobby Lobby and Obbink for four Gospel manuscripts, including a fragment of Mark. One of the recipients was papyrus sleuth Brent Nongbri. He immediately published them on his blog: there was Obbink's apparent signature for all to see. Either the documents had been "fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm [his] reputation", as Obbink's later statement claimed. Or he really had sold them. The prices of the items were redacted, but an expert told me he thought they could have been sold for $200,000 each.

On 12 November, the thefts of all 120 fragments, including the four that had remained in Oxford and the 13 that had been delivered to the US, were reported to the police. On 18 December, the 13 were returned, after a delay while it was established that since they were stolen goods, they were exempt from VAT - a coda to the affair that Holmes called "the cherry on the sundae". The fragments that ended up in US collector Andrew Stimer's possession have also been returned to Oxford.

Holmes is trying to improve practices at the Museum of the Bible. Hobby Lobby and the Greens have, he said, declared a halt to what he called "problematic" acquisitions. Only items with fully researched provenances will be bought. Only papyri that have properly established legal provenance will be displayed online and in the museum, and published in scholarly volumes.

At present, just over 20 papyri are displayed on the museum's website, out of 5,000. I asked Holmes whether one can therefore conclude that the Greens own around 4,980 papyri that lack reliable provenance. "In general, yes," said Holmes. The organisation is now negotiating, he told me, with national governments to return ownership of unprovenanced items to their countries of origin.

Classicists are by turns gripped by the drama, and horrified by its implications. "Classics runs on trust - on people working together to make our knowledge and understanding accessible to all," Helen Morales, professor of Greek at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told me. Whoever allegedly stole and sold the papyri "broke that trust, and thumbed their nose at the system," she said. Another lecturer in Greek told me that the alleged crime was, in effect, a deeply disturbing perpetuation of the "profiteering and the pillage" of past centuries - just at the moment when the discipline was trying to reflect on a history of complicity with colonialism.

In November, a "postmortem on so-called first-century Mark" was held at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual conference in San Diego. As Nongbri joked at the time, it was really more of a vivisection. While reserving respect for Holmes's reforming efforts, Mazza did not pull her punches. The Greens have "poured millions on the legal and illegal antiquities market without having a clue about the history, the material features, cultural value, fragilities and problems of the objects," she said. This irresponsible collecting "is a crime against culture and knowledge of immense proportions - as the facts unfolding under our eyes do prove."

At the other end of this disturbing chain is someone who stole and sold Oxyrhynchus fragments to the evangelical billionaires. Whoever they are, they are still at large. For now, the papyrus thief walks free.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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A scandal in Oxford: the curious case of the stolen gospel

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The long read : What links an eccentric Oxford classics don, billionaire US evangelicals, and a tiny, missing fragment of an ancient manuscript? Charlotte Higgins unravels a multimillion-dollar riddle

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So she didn't.

Even on the day the police showed up on her doorstep to question then-12-year-old Sadie's father about his alleged abuse of his daughters.

Even on the day when, almost two years later, Abner was sentenced by a circuit court judge to just five years' probation.

Reporting on sexual abuse is always difficult, but Sarah encountered unique challenges in this story. Listen to The Backstory, where she describes the process.

This page also includes resources for survivors of sexual abuse in Amish and Mennonite communities.

And even on the day when, at 14, she says she was cornered in the pantry by one of her brothers and raped on the sink, and then felt a gush and saw blood running down her leg, and cleaned up alone while he walked away, and gingerly placed her underwear in a bucket of cold water before going back to her chores. A friend helped her realize years later: While being raped, she had probably suffered a miscarriage.

It wasn't until now that Sadie decided to speak up, to reveal the darkness beneath the bucolic surface of her childhood. She's tired of keeping quiet.

Over the past year, I've interviewed nearly three dozen Amish people, in addition to law enforcement, judges, attorneys, outreach workers, and scholars. I've learned that sexual abuse in their communities is an open secret spanning generations. Victims told me stories of inappropriate touching, groping, fondling, exposure to genitals, digital penetration, coerced oral sex, anal sex, and rape, all at the hands of their own family members, neighbors, and church leaders.

The Amish, who number roughly 342,000 in North America, are dispersed across rural areas of states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin, according to the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College, a leading authority on Amish life. Because of their high birth rate-and because few members ever leave-they're one of the fastest-growing religious groups in America. Lacking one centralized leader, they live in local congregations or "church districts," each made up of 20 to 40 families. But the stories I heard were not confined to any one place.

In my reporting, I identified 52 official cases of Amish child sexual assault in seven states over the past two decades. Chillingly, this number doesn't begin to capture the full picture. Virtually every Amish victim I spoke to-mostly women but also several men-told me they were dissuaded by their family or church leaders from reporting their abuse to police or had been conditioned not to seek outside help (as Sadie put it, she knew she'd just be "mocked or blamed"). Some victims said they were intimidated and threatened with excommunication. Their stories describe a widespread, decentralized cover-up of child sexual abuse by Amish clergy.

"We're told that it's not Christlike to report," explains Esther*, an Amish woman who says she was abused by her brother and a neighbor boy at age 9. "It's so ingrained. There are so many people who go to church and just endure."

And yet, as #MeToo has rocked mainstream culture, Amish women have instigated their own female-driven movement. "It's much slower and less highly visible," says Linda Crockett, founder and director of Safe Communities, an organization that works to prevent child sexual abuse. "But I have seen a real uptick over the past 10 years in Amish women coming forward. They hear about each other-not on Twitter or Facebook, but there's a strong communication system within these communities. They draw courage and strength from each other."

"I get phone calls now....There's a bunch of Amish who have my cell phone number, and they use it. The men call on behalf of the women," says Judge Craig Stedman, former district attorney of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania-home to nearly 40,000 Amish-who has served on a task force that connects the Amish to law enforcement and social services. (Although most don't have cell phones, the Amish might use pay phones or call from "English" neighbors' homes.)

Some victims, like Sadie, have long since left the church and the Amish way of life, but others, including Esther, are still on the inside, sending out an alarm to the world they've been taught to reject. "They want to talk," explains Crockett, "so they're turning outside."

There's no one reason for the sexual abuse crisis in Amish Country. Instead, there's a perfect storm of factors: a patriarchal and isolated lifestyle in which victims have little exposure to police, coaches, or anyone else who might help them; an education system that ends at eighth grade and fails to teach children about sex or their bodies; a culture of victim shaming and blaming; little access to the technology that enables communication or broader social awareness; and a religion that prioritizes repentance and forgiveness over actual punishment or rehabilitation. Amish leaders also tend to be wary of law enforcement, preferring to handle disputes on their own.

As a child, Sadie was up before dawn every morning to milk her family's cows, wearing a pleated head covering and long dress, her shoes and socks a dull black, as her local church rules, or Ordnung, required. "If you didn't work as hard as you possibly could, you were considered lazy," she says. She never turned on a light switch or shopped for clothes in a store. She didn't speak English at home-just Pennsylvania Dutch, the only language she knew until first grade. And she never revealed her abuse to anyone, except a cousin and her father himself, when he asked her, point blank, if her brothers were touching her. (The next time he asked, she lied, fearful he would beat the boys, as he often did.)

But what was happening in her house was a poorly kept secret, according to several of Sadie's relatives. One of them reported Abner, who has since died, to local church leaders-Sadie remembers her father being "shunned" for six weeks, a common form of discipline in which the accused is socially ostracized and forbidden from eating at the same table as church members. After a shunning, the person confesses in church and the community is strongly compelled to forgive and forget that the "sin" ever happened. In Sadie's house, she recalls, everything went back to normal-or at least, to how it had been before.

When the police and social workers later showed up on her doorstep, most likely after being tipped off by a local non-Amish person, Abner told authorities that "things which we were speaking about had been brought up and dealt with in the church," according to a police detective's notes. He also silenced his daughters. "You say nothing," Sadie and another relative remember him demanding.

Authorities returned a second time, asking him "specific questions about having sexual intercourse with his daughters," according to the case file. Now Abner confessed to having "sex with two of them," insisting "he made love to them at least three times each but didn't hurt them." Sadie, who had heard from a cousin that her dad was also abusing her sisters, didn't dare breathe a word in their defense.

A relative recalls that Sadie's mother told social workers "to do whatever they could to keep him from going to jail."

It worked. A grainy VHS recording from 2001 shows a gray-bearded Abner standing with his hat hanging between his hands before a judge, as an attorney explains that he is pleading guilty to a reduced charge of sexual abuse in the first degree, and not incest, because "the family is not desiring that he be incarcerated." Instead of serving a sentence that might have been five years or more, Abner got probation.

Sadie says her father abused her for five more years. When I reached out to her brothers, two confirmed that Abner had touched Sadie; one of them also said he himself "messed around" with her when they were young but that he did not rape her; the other denied raping her. A third brother did not respond to a request for comment.

Some victims aren't just silenced-they suffer something worse. Lizzie Hershberger was 14 when she went to work as a "maude," or hired girl, for a 27-year- old Amish man named Chriss Stutzman and his wife, taking care of their four children and helping Stutzman in the barn. One night after they had milked the cows, he pinned her against a wall and kissed her, then pushed her onto the feed bags. Because it was a frigid winter in Minnesota, Lizzie wore pants under her dress, which Stutzman removed while she tried in vain to fight him off. "Relax," he whispered into her ear as he raped her. (To this day, that word remains a trigger for Lizzie.)

She didn't know why she felt pain and blood between her legs. Her parents had never talked to her about sex or even her period. (When Sadie got her period at age 10, while playing outside, she remembers stuffing toilet paper in her underwear and pulling one of her sisters into the outhouse to ask what was going on.)

"Amish victims don't even know the names of body parts," confirms Stedman. "To describe a sexual assault without having any fundamental sex education, it presents even more challenges."

When Lizzie's abuser finally climbed off her, she was shaking. "I felt broken and used and dirty," she says. "I was already blaming myself, thinking, Why didn't I leave the barn just, you know, a couple of minutes earlier? " Stutzman would rape Lizzie 25 more times over roughly five months, according to court records and Lizzie's diary. He raped her in the hayloft, in his house, and on the seat of his buggy. Once, on the way home from church, he pulled the buggy off the road and raped her in the woods. (Through his lawyer, Stutzman declined to comment.) Twice, male witnesses walked in on the abuse, but neither man came to Lizzie's rescue.

Instead, Stutzman himself, perhaps sensing he'd been caught, confessed.

Like Abner, he was shunned for six weeks. And again, no one reported him to outside authorities, especially since the church had already disciplined and forgiven him. Instead, the community turned on Lizzie for what they saw as a consensual "affair." She was bullied and mocked, spit on and called a "schlud" and "hoodah" (Pennsylvania Dutch for "slut" and "whore"). "They didn't ask me how I felt or my side of the story," she says. Instead, the community gossiped that she had "mental issues."

It's common for Amish victims to be viewed by the community as just as guilty as the abuser-as consenting partners committing adultery, even if they're children. Victims are expected to share responsibility and, after the church has punished their abuser, to quickly forgive. If they fail to do so, they're the problem.

When the rare case does end up in court, the Amish overwhelmingly support the abusers, who tend to appear with nearly their entire congregations behind them, survivors and law enforcement sources say. This can compound the trauma of speaking out. "We've had cases where there'll be 50 Amish people standing up for the offender and no one speaks for the victim," says Stedman.

In one 2010 case, young female victims were pressured to forgive their father and brother for abusing them, with one writing a pleading letter to the court ("Hello Sir, I'm Melvin's sister. Please have mercy. Melvin has made a big change to let go of his committed crime in the last year. I'd like to have our family together."), recalls former President Judge Dennis Reinaker, who has presided over 30-plus Amish sexual assault cases in Lancaster County. In this case, the victims agreed to cooperate only in exchange for their abusers receiving no jail time. The deal likely helped save the defendants from what could have been 25- to 30-year prison sentences, says Reinaker.

Things got stranger for Lizzie.She remembers her mother telling her that she was being taken to a chiropractic clinic in neighboring South Dakota, and then boarding a bus full of Amish adults for the 300-mile drive to a facility where, for a week, "they watched me all the time," she says. She received daily deep-tissue massages to "work through my emotional stuff," she was told.

Lizzie's is not the only account of an Amish victim being taken to an alleged "mental health" facility staffed by Amish or Mennonites (a similar, although typically less strict, group) that provides Bible-based counseling-and, in many cases, is not state licensed. Several years ago, Esther was sent to a facility for "counseling" after she tried to seek help for another Amish woman who was being sexually assaulted. When she protested, church leaders threatened to excommunicate her permanently.

No one would tell her why she was there. Instead, she was pressured to sign papers that would allow staff to communicate directly with her ministers, she says (she eventually gave in and signed). "From the first evening, they wanted to put me on medication," she recalls. She said no, since "a lot of these people who get stuck in these facilities come home drugged and no longer have a life. They're zombies." (She's aware of about 30 other Amish sexual assault victims, including two of her sisters, who have been sent away to such facilities.)

Eventually, Esther says she was told that refusing "sleep medication" would only prolong her stay. When she asked about side effects, a house parent told her, "It doesn't matter- you have to take it."

So she did. Except the drugs weren't for sleep at all: According to her medical records, she was prescribed olanzapine, an antipsychotic medication that treats mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Every morning and night, she and other Amish patients lined up to receive their drugs. "We'd have to go and fill a small container with water and then go up to this pedestal; we'd all take turns," she says. "It was gut-wrenching."

It's common for Amish victims to be viewed by the community as just as guilty as the abuser-as consenting partners committing adultery, even if they're children.

Others find solidarity in The Plain People's Podcast, a show launched in 2018 that features stories of Amish and Mennonite sexual abuse. Jasper Hoffman, a former Mennonite and the podcast's cohost, says she receives "hundreds of messages" from people wanting to share stories or get help reporting an abuser.

And especially in Pennsylvania, efforts are being made to reform Amish culture itself. In Lancaster County, the task force Stedman serves on, comprised of police, attorneys, and social service agencies, has been meeting with Amish leaders a few times a year, trying to build trust and communication. (It's worth noting, however, that not a single woman has been included among the group's Amish representatives.)

Some Amish have started their own initiatives too. In multiple states, their Conservative Crisis Intervention committees liaise with local authorities on reporting and prosecuting sexual assault cases. One Lancaster County member, Amos Stoltzfoos, told me that "a lot of things have changed and forced us to comply and not allow things to be swept under the rug, like they had at one point." (Stricter mandatory reporting requirements were implemented in Pennsylvania in 2014 in the aftermath of the high-profile Jerry Sandusky child abuse case, for one.)

Now, Stoltzfoos says, the Lancaster County Amish, at least, "aren't interested in hiding things" and have "adapted and recognized that we need to change with some of the education that we give to the parents and the children." He says they've also tried to understand the lasting trauma that can make quick forgiveness difficult for victims: "Our community does really care....It just takes time."

In the summer of 2018, Lizzie sought her own justice by reporting her rapes to police, something she never felt she could do before. To her surprise, charges were brought against Stutzman, who was by then a deacon in the church. He pleaded guilty to third degree criminal sexual conduct, and at his sentencing hearing, the room was filled with his Amish supporters. But Lizzie was also surrounded by supporters, including Sadie, who had driven two hours to be there. Stutzman was ultimately sentenced to 45 days in jail and 10 years' probation, based on guidelines in place in 1988, the year before the assaults.

As for Sadie, she's now a 32-year-old mother of five living in the Midwest. In 2013, she and her husband finally left the Amish church. For now, she's focused on healing, not pressing charges. She still speaks with her brothers, one of whom has apologized "many times," she says. She knows it sounds "weird," but she even visits them occasionally.

Sadie has tried to work through her trauma in couples therapy with her husband. And she'd still like to get her own Christian therapist. She's pretty sure she'll never completely trust any man around her kids.

There's been plenty of anger to deal with. She used to "fly off the handle," she says. But now, it feels good to finally be letting it all out.
*Name has been changed. These photos are used for illustrative purposes only. Additional research by Darya Marchenkova and Hannah Beckler. Additional support provided by Investigative Reporters and Editors. Type Investigations is an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that works with independent reporters to investigate topics ranging from gender issues to criminal justice to human rights.

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The Amish Keep to Themselves. And They're Hiding a Horrifying Secret - Type Investigations

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So she didn't. Even on the day the police showed up on her doorstep to question then-12-year-old Sadie's father about his alleged abuse of his daughters. Even on the day when, almost two years later, Abner was sentenced by a circuit court judge to just five years' probation.

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The Prince of Wales has urged business and political leaders at Davos to embrace a radical reshaping of economies and markets in order to tackle the climate crisis.

In a special address at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, Charles outlined a 10-point plan to help the global economy become more sustainable including the imposition of green taxes and investing in environmentally friendly technologies.

He argued that taxes, regulations and policies could all be changed, as part of a drive to reverse environmentally damaging subsidies such as financial assistance for the fossil fuel industry. He also cited the "polluter pays" principle that requires those who create environmental damage to pay for the clean-up.

"In order to secure our future and prosper, we need to evolve our economic model," the Prince told an audience of politicians and business and civic leaders at Davos.

"Do we want to go down in history as the people who did nothing to bring the world back from the brink in time to restore the balance, when we could have done?"

Charles, who is supported financially by the £1bn Duchy of Cornwall, made a direct challenge to some of the world's wealthiest people gathered at the Swiss ski resort to think about more than money.

"What good is all the extra wealth in the world gained from business as usual if you can do nothing with it except watch it burn in catastrophic conditions?" he said.

Charles, who also met the climate activist Greta Thunberg at the summit, urged the private sector to use its ingenuity and practical skills to help lead the world out of a climate calamity. "The only limit is our willingness to act and the time to act is now."

Davos is a Swiss ski resort now more famous for hosting the annual four-day conference for the World Economic Forum. For participants it is a festival of networking. Getting an invitation is a sign you have made it - and the elaborate system of badges reveals your place in the Davos hierarchy. The meeting is sponsored by a huge number of international banks and corporations.

For critics, "Davos man" is shorthand for the globe-trotting elite, disconnected from their home countries after spending too much time in the club-class lounge. Others just wonder if it is all a big waste of time.

The 2020 meeting is being advertised as focusing on seven themes: Fairer economies, better business, healthy futures, future of work, tech for good, beyond geopolitics and how to save the planet. Young climate activists and school strikers from around the world will be present at the event to put pressure on world leaders over that last theme.

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The prince was speaking after launching an initiative, the Sustainable Markets Initiative and Council. His 10 proposals included the rapid decarbonisation of businesses, driving investment in new environmentally friendly technologies and helping consumers to make sustainable choices.

Climate change, biodiversity loss and global warming are the greatest threats humanity has ever faced, he warned, adding that capital needs to be properly deployed in order to tackle these threats.

The prince said global consumers could make markets sustainable, but could not make sustainable choices if these options were not clearly laid before them.

Charles also warned that being socially and environmentally conscious cannot be an option for wealthier people only. Markets needed to change, so that prices actually reflected the environmental as well as economic costs.

"If all the true costs are taken into account, being socially and environmentally responsible should be the least expensive option because it leaves the smallest footprint behind," he argued, implicitly calling for subsidies and tax changes.

Charles's intervention comes nearly 30 years after he last spoke at the World Economic Forum, when he had already begun campaigning on environmental issues and corporate responsibility. He joked on Wednesday that it had been "an uphill struggle" trying to generate support but he believed the world was now at a turning point.

The Prince of Wales arrived in an electric car - rather than the helicopter option favoured by some, such as Donald Trump. However, he reportedly travelled to Switzerland by private jet, a reminder of the gap between the goals outlined at the forum this week and the global elite's behaviour.

Environmental issues and the climate emergency have taken centre stage at Davos this year, with a stream of business leaders and politicians expressing concerns and signing up to initiatives to promote sustainability and climate action.

But the meeting also exposed the split between the US and Europe on the issue, with Trump attacking "prophets of doom" in a speech heavily criticised by environmentalists.

Prince Charles's 10-point plan for a sustainable economy

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Rio Manu, home to arguably the highest concentration of biodiversity on Earth, in southeastern Peru. Photograph: Stock Connection Blue/Alamy

1) Put nature and the protection of nature's capital at the heart of operations.

2) Create responsible pathways to decarbonise to reach net zero, and for governments and businesses to set a clear plan for how they will decarbonise.

3) Reimagine industries through the lens of sustainable markets.

4) Identify game-changing technologies that can speed up the creation of a sustainable economy and eliminate barriers to change.

5) Remove subsidies that prevent the economy becoming more sustainable, and set taxes, policies and regulations in a way that catalyses sustainable markets.

6) Invest in science, technology, engineering and maths skills, and in research and development, to help bring emerging technologies to market.

7) Invest in nature as an economic driver of growth.

8) Agree unified metrics for measuring environmental, social and governance standards, to provide transparency to company's supply chains.

9) Make it easier for consumers to see which products are ethical and sustainable.

10) Realign investing so it can support sustainability. This would direct trillions of pounds in pension funds, sovereign wealth funds into environmentally responsible projects that offer long-term value and rate of return.
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Reshape economy to fight climate crisis, says Prince Charles

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The Prince of Wales has urged business and political leaders at Davos to embrace a radical reshaping of economies and markets in order to tackle the climate crisis. In a special address at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, Charles outlined a 10-point plan to help the global economy become more sustainable including the imposition of green taxes and investing in environmentally friendly technologies.

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On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix. And in all those hours, in common with many of Peter's Saturdays, not to mention his Sundays, he had no meaningful interaction with another human being. "The only person I spoke to," he says, "was the lady who came over to verify my bottles of beer at the supermarket self-checkout."

During the week, Peter, 62, is too busy to be lonely. His commute from Brighton to London means that his working life is "a tunnel" he enters on a Monday and from which no daylight is glimpsed until Friday. But just when Peter re-emerges, he is stymied by an overwhelming sense of loneliness. Instead of providing respite from the stress of office life, a chance to reconnect with family and friends, the weekend looms as a vast emotional and social wilderness that must be traversed before work takes hold again.

Peter dreads the weekend. But he is far from alone in this. He is one of nearly 200 respondents, from Falmouth to Jakarta, who replied to a request on the Guardian's website for readers to share their experience of weekend loneliness. The youngest respondent was 16; the eldest in her 70s, and between them, the pain and isolation recurred in countless iterations.

Despite all this, the phenomenon of weekend loneliness has scarcely been studied. "It's not something that's been researched at all," says Pamela Qualter, professor of psychology for education at the University of Manchester. She led the BBC's Loneliness Experiment last year, and "found that there didn't seem to be a time of day [nor] a season when people felt especially lonely. But we didn't ask about the weekend." So what does weekend loneliness look like, who experiences it - and what might be done to alleviate it?

"We define loneliness as the difference between the desire or expectation of what life should be like, and the reality," says Kellie Payne, research and policy manager at the Campaign to End Loneliness. For those who experience loneliness primarily - or only - at the weekend, this painful discrepancy is intensified by the sense of being at odds not only with the world outside the door, but with one's capable, sociable weekday self.

A personal, internal division emerges. Liz is 41, with a rewarding job and family nearby - but she is living two lives. "In the week, I am a contented, fulfilled person. At the weekend, I feel like a lonely outcast," she says. Increasingly, she finds herself out of step with her social group where she lives in Somerset. She runs her own training business from home, so weekdays are busy. But this is exactly when her married friends want to meet for coffee "and a moan about their husbands".

Liz would like to see these friends at the weekend, too, but when Saturday comes, "it's unsaid - but it's like they've closed the doors to me. Weekends are for couples. It would be unheard of to invite me to a dinner party, because I'm single," she says. "I wake up on a Saturday and feel down. It's a struggle to pull myself out of bed if I have nothing planned." When Monday dawns, "it is always a relief".

For Liz, the loneliness of the weekend is exacerbated by an additional, painful sense that she is not only alone but locked out - "banned from the weekend", as she puts it. Between Monday and Friday, she enjoys her neighbourhood, but at the weekend, the streets and parks seem to transform. They become questioning, forbidding, to the extent that Liz wonders if she has "absorbed" her loneliness from her environment, now full of couples, families, groups.

"What's interesting to me is that I'll sit on my own in a cafe easily in the week," she says. But the same cafe at the weekend is a space she cannot enter. Even walking the dog takes on a different cast. "I don't feel conscious at all during the week" - but on a Sunday morning, the same walk feels acutely sad.

"As psychologists we talk about the looking-glass self," Qualter says. "How your feelings about yourself are influenced by how you think others see you. The public space changes, becomes occupied by other people ... It's no longer your space. You feel uncomfortable because you don't fit."

"I hear this a lot," says Sally Brown, a life coach and counsellor. "It's like people have two personas. The weekday persona is busy and confident. But the weekend persona is lost and vulnerable."

But is Liz really projecting her loneliness on to others, and imagining the way they see her - or does society read people who are alone in too predictable a manner? Peter believes he passes through his Brighton weekends undisturbed because he is regarded as a harmless eccentric. "The bachelor is something of a social misfit, but an acceptable one," he remarks.

A person who enters a public space alone will often be read as best left alone. Mark is 32 and recently returned to London after a couple of years travelling. Going to the pub to watch football one weekend, he took a seat at an empty table for six. Quickly the pub filled. But Mark sat alone and undisturbed for 20 minutes before anyone asked if they could take one of the five free seats around him. "I guess they think you are going to be bringing extra people, or you're weird," he says wryly.

Brown, who sees many clients in their 30s and 40s, thinks this disconnect is "related to those transitional times when your peer group may have moved on to a stage you haven't yet reached". And, of course, may not wish to reach. Mark's friends, like Liz's, are mostly in relationships. "It can happen really fast. All of a sudden, your group isn't there any more. You are second-tier friendship, relegated to week nights. You're not in the couples' dinner party or playdate scene. You start to lack confidence in connecting, so hesitate to suggest things. You assume you are not welcome at the weekend and withdraw ... It becomes a toxic circle."

Brown's belief that loneliness at the weekend arises out of life's transitions resonates with Kate. At 61, hers is a different kind of shift to Mark's or Liz's. Kate sees herself moving "from motherhood to single life again". She uses the word "transition", especially when she reminds herself, while she sits alone on Saturday nights, that she has raised her girls well, that the loneliness is just another challenge to overcome.

Kate, who lives in Cardiff, has two grown daughters whom she raised alone. Her weeks are busy with work and friends, and sometimes her children, if they happen to be nearby. But her weekends, like Peter's, are "very long and quiet ... I will not use my voice or speak with another human until Monday."

For Kate, the silence of the weekend is wrapped in another sort of silence. She cannot speak of her loneliness to anyone, least of all her children.

"They would be devastated," she says. "In a way, promoting their education, encouraging them to be social and confident ... That has been to the detriment of me. The more they achieve, the further from home they have moved. But I wouldn't change it, because it was my duty as a mother."

Seven times during the course of an hour-and-a-half's conversation, Kate worries that sharing her loneliness with her children would "burden" them. The word feels heavier each time it lands.

While silence protects her daughters, and preserves their sense of Kate, and Kate's sense of herself, as "strong and capable, someone they can talk to", it compounds her remoteness. Although she exchanges WhatsApp messages with both children every weekend, these seem to make no impact on Kate's underlying isolation.

She has a "wonderful relationship" with both daughters, but their closeness makes the pain worse - because how can they not see?

I wonder if Kate's daughters ever ask her what she did at the weekend, and Kate says she has been wondering about this, too. They don't. "At some level - not consciously - they are worried about the answer." In the meantime, her children's absence weighs "like a bereavement" and the loneliness hits hardest at certain predictable moments.

Just as Peter sits down to his adventurous dinner, picks up his cutlery and feels instantly lonely - despite his efforts in the kitchen - so Kate reels from her plate.

She is at the opposite end of the culinary spectrum to Peter. "One of my favourite go-to meals is a couple of boiled eggs and a piece of toast," she says. It's a classic comfort meal that Kate routinely enjoys. But last weekend, she sat down, cracked open the egg, "and I thought: 'I can't do it.' I have had that meal so many times, I just couldn't eat it." She threw the food into the bin.

Kate is approaching retirement. "But the idea of being retired is horrific - because all the days will be like weekends." So what can she, or anyone, do to try to stem their weekend loneliness?

Sarah, who is 44 and lives in Surrey, asks herself this very question. "What can you do to alleviate your loneliness? We're all struggling. Everyone I know has less money to spend." She, too, is a single parent; and as her daughter, 18, becomes more independent, Sarah feels increasingly lonely at weekends. "What exacerbates the loneliness is that I'm a very sociable person," she says.

To counter this, she keeps herself in a state of perpetual readiness for last-minute invitations. "It's good to be seen as someone who will say yes - because you get asked again. I've been very lucky to be an emergency plus-one in quite a few situations," Sarah says. She is aware that this won't sound lucky to everyone.

She has filled in for her best friend on a trip with her friend's husband to Secret Cinema. And she has made up the numbers at a wedding. "There is a kind of currency to being a couple," she says. "That's the word I want to use - a currency that makes couples worth more in social situations." (Conversely, of course, the cost of living is lower for them, too.) So does being available at the last minute represent a kind of personal devaluation?

"I think that's fair to say," she says. "I'd much rather be turning up with someone. But I really appreciate it when I'm included. I love it. I think it's important to be the person who says: 'Yes, sure, I can sit next to whoever.'"

Sarah and I are speaking on a Saturday afternoon. If she were not talking to me, she says, she would be writing an email or doing housework. She has a natural positivity and a bright voice that belie the sadness she feels on her most solitary weekends. If her daughter goes to university next year, the weekends, and weekdays, will further quieten. Like Kate and Peter, Sarah is conscious of the life change that looms.

So she is quietly hatching plans - to move, maybe, depending on her daughter's movements. And in the meantime, she offers to babysit for friends, hopes for a leisure revolution for single people, and says yes to as many invitations as possible.

"It comes down to keeping the communication lines open, and initiating," Brown, the life coach, says. Some of her clients have resolved their divided lives by adding structure to their weekends. Loneliness creates passivity in friendships, Brown warns. "There is a sense of 'I can't make this happen ... It has got to happen to me'", which can make people who are lonely less inclined to make an effort.

With some clients, Brown has mapped on paper their social circles and groups. "It's amazing how many people they come up with." Others' "proactive approach" include cultivating regular haunts (because being among fellow regulars can feel a bit like being among friends) and attending groups or clubs through the website Meetup.

"That journey can involve some extra loneliness if you find a group you don't fit with," Brown warns. I think of Peter, who dropped out of a walking group after a woman berated him for describing himself as "a sad old bachelor". ("You mustn't say that," she told him. "You must say you're alone and happy.") Or Kate, waiting for her children to ask what she did at the weekend. Or Mark, who sometimes finds Meetups "a group of lonely, desperate guys".

"It's about keeping going," Brown advises. "If after two weeks you're not connecting, move on." Loneliness is complex, she notes. "It can impact those who crave time to themselves after a week at work"; a double bind in which company is both a salve and an impediment.

Peter, for instance, used to volunteer, but, he says, "it cut into what little weekend time I had", which makes me suspect that as well as hankering for connection, he also cherishes his time alone. "People talk about the difference between being alone and being lonely," he says. "I am slap bang in the middle of that."

Meanwhile, Kate is thinking of fostering children. When Peter retires, he might travel the UK and explore a new culinary continent: veganism. Liz has been broadening her group of friends, "meeting new people who aren't so stuck in the couple thing". Mark is considering a move to a livelier part of London. And Sarah reminds herself, on her loneliest Saturday evenings, when no last-minute invitations materialise, "to look at all the positives. It's really hard, but try to embrace the aloneness, the solitude."
Some names and personal details have been changed. Topics

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The agony of weekend loneliness: 'I won't speak to another human until Monday'

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On Saturday morning, Peter got up and went to the supermarket. He carried his shopping home, and took care of his laundry and ironing. In the afternoon, he browsed a few record stores and later he cooked himself dinner; always something adventurous on a Saturday night. Afterwards, he hit Netflix.

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"T o grow up with technology, as my generation has, is to constantly question the self, to split into multiplicities, to try to contain our own contradictions." That sentence from Taylor Fang, the winner of our youth essay contest, neatly sums up the experience of juggling one's identities on Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, each with its own unwritten norms of sharing and self-expression. But I think it also captures the struggle of adults trying to understand the role of technology in their children's lives. How do ubiquitous digital devices influence the way young people learn, make friends, understand the world, and understand themselves? These are the questions we tackle in this issue, and the answers, too, contain many contradictions.

There's growing evidence that the trend of outfitting schools with laptops and tablets hasn't helped kids learn and may even hinder the most vulnerable ones, writes Natalie Wexler. In China, one company claims huge success in using artificial intelligence to deliver personalized learning, Karen Hao reports-but is it just turning children into machines for passing standardized tests?

A few universities have already installed voice assistants in every dorm room, and more are following suit. As Kathryn Miles explains, these devices are gleaning data about students' first experiments with adulthood, and there's no knowing how that data will be used in the future. Philosophy professor Ron Srigley's students were shocked to discover just how much their studies and social lives improved when they surrendered their cell phones for two weeks, yet most couldn't imagine giving them up for good. And when young adults finally enter the workforce, argues Malcolm Harris, they face a grim future of climate change, precarious career prospects, and economic and political unrest.

What about the common fears that technology is depriving kids of real human contact or warping their self-image under the pressure of social-media popularity contests? Here the answers are more mixed.

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Amelia Tait talked to wannabe child YouTube stars who never made it big. For the most part, she found that they've learned from their failures rather than being crushed by them. Cecilia Aragon describes how online fan-fiction communities have become both emotional lifelines and great writing schools for millions of sometimes socially awkward young people. From Korea, Max Kim reports on why, after more than four decades of moral panic about video-game addiction, it's still not clear that it's real. Andy Wright interviews some teens who, unlike Srigley's students, aren't married to their phones. And Anya Kamenetz reports on how an Indian court case offers hope for defending children's digital rights.

Fang explains in her essay why, for all the worries about privacy and social anxiety, creating and remixing online identities is fundamental to how her generation makes sense of itself. However, Kate Eichhorn warns that obsessively documenting and posting one's life online means people will forever be haunted by their youthful indiscretions. That, she argues, is bad for society as a whole, because it makes it harder for anyone to change their mind about things.

In a lighter vein, children can learn the fundamentals of artificial intelligence by playing Karen Hao's AI bingo game, adapted from research done at MIT. And in this issue's short story, Fonda Lee imagines what happens when a young man acquires an AI girlfriend to keep his parents off his back, but quickly gets out of his depth.

Did we miss any important questions? And-especially if you're a young person-did we get anything wrong? Write and let me know at gideon.lichfield@technologyreview.com.

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Editor's letter: How the next generation is using technology to mask, reveal, and form identity

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"T o grow up with technology, as my generation has, is to constantly question the self, to split into multi­plicities, to try to contain our own contradictions." That sentence from Taylor Fang, the winner of our youth essay contest, neatly sums up the experience of juggling one's identities on Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, each with its own unwritten norms of sharing and self-expression.

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Dennis Arp was feeling optimistic last summer, which is unusual for a beekeeper these days.

Thanks to a record wet spring, his hundreds of hives, scattered across the central Arizona desert, produced a bounty of honey. Arp would have plenty to sell in stores, but more importantly, the bumper harvest would strengthen his bees for their biggest task of the coming year.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp's revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California's fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world's almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp's hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. "My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives," he says.

This shouldn't be happening to someone like Arp, a beekeeper with decades of experience. But his story is not unique. Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees - more than seven times the world's human population - were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America's reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature's most delicate natural processes.

Environmental advocates argue that the huge, commercially driven proliferation of the European honeybees used on almond farms is itself undermining the ecosystem for all bees. Honeybees out-compete diverse native bee species for forage, and threaten the endangered species that are already struggling to survive climate change. Environmentalists argue a better solution is to transform the way large-scale agriculture is carried out in the US.

Like all bees, honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California's almond industry places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of Agriculture because of the creature's vital role in food production. But no other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

"The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers," says Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. "It's like sending the bees to war. Many don't come back."

Nuts for almonds

California's $11bn (£8.4bn) almond industry has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 2000, almond orchards occupied 500,000 acres. By 2018 that had more than doubled - almond groves in the Central Valley now blanket an area the size of Delaware, producing 2.3bn lb (1m tonnes) of almonds annually sold around the world.

The average American eats 2lb (900g) of almonds every year, more than in any other country. US almond milk sales have grown 250% over the past five years to reach $1.2bn, over four times that of any other plant-based milk, according to a 2018 Nielsen report.

"We don't see a cap on growth at this point, especially with the incredible versatility of almonds in foods," says Richard Waycott, president and CEO of the Almond Board of California, a not-for-profit advocacy organization representing the majority of farmers.

But these enormous orchards can't function without bees.

It wasn't that long ago that beekeeping was mostly a boutique pursuit of the gentleman apiarist. When European immigrants introduced their own version of agriculture to North America, they also imported the art of beekeeping, along with boxes of Apis mellifera, the domesticated European honeybee.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, beekeepers earned a modest living selling beeswax and honey. But in the late 20th century there was a titanic shift, exemplified by the career of Dennis Arp.

Arp, 67, got into beekeeping nearly four decades ago when he established his Mountain Top Honey company in Flagstaff, Arizona. A commanding presence with biceps toned from hoisting heavy bee boxes, Arp is the sort of diligent beekeeper who spends his days driving between apiary sites, and his nights studying online forums, reading articles on the latest mite treatment.

When cheap imported honey began cutting into Arp's profits in the 1980s, he decided to send some of his hives with a beekeeper friend to pollinate almonds in California. A decade later he struck up a deal of his own with an almond grower in California's Kern county. With that strategic move, Arp joined the growing ranks of migratory beekeepers in the US who still sell honey but mostly travel the country from one pollination site to the next with stacks of bee boxes in tow.

dennis arp works on hives

Left: Dennis Arp works his hives outside Rye. Right: A colony of honeybees hard at work for Mountain Top Honey Company outside Rye. Photographs by Caitlin O'Hara/The Guardian

In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp's bees started dying in greater numbers.

First, he experienced a nearly 100% loss of his hives from an infestation of tracheal mites. Then he had to cope with the intrusion of Africanized "killer" bees. And finally, what he still considers the bane of his business, a parasitic mite called Varroa destructor literally sucked the life out of his bees. The mite feeds on the bee's plump body, destroying the insect's immune system and other vital functions. If Arp doesn't apply regular chemical treatments for the mites, his colonies will die.

Now Arp finds himself in a vicious circle: he is constantly battling to keep enough bees alive to meet the requirements of his almond contract. But if he was not pollinating almonds, maybe his bees would be healthier.

This year Arp's bees, like more than two-thirds of the United States' commercial honeybee population, will spend February in the toxic chemical soup of California's Central Valley, fertilizing almonds one blossom at a time.

Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer-owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)

On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops - apples, America's second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness.

"Bees are exposed to all kinds of diseases in California," says Arp. "There can be hundreds of thousands of hives from multiple beekeepers in one staging area. It is like letting your bees go into a singles bar and then they have unprotected sex."

The almond business has been good to Arp - last February, for instance, he installed 1,500 of his hives in one grower's orchard at $200 per hive - so he is reluctant to make a direct connection between the constant health challenges with his bees and the time spent every spring in the almond groves. "The bees like working on the almonds," says Arp. "But it obviously exposes them to risks."

Now he routinely loses 30% or more of his bees a year, mirroring national statistics. In any other industry, the death of a third of your workforce would cause an international outcry - but this staggering loss is now considered the normal cost of doing business.

"The bees in the almond groves are being exploited and disrespected," says Patrick Pynes, an organic beekeeper who teaches environmental studies at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive."

The high price of growth

When the phenomenon called colony collapse disorder was first identified in 2006, after a record number of honeybees mysteriously disappeared or died outside their hives, it was linked to a variety of factors including loss of habitat and climate change. But the primary culprit was pesticides. Researchers found that a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids was especially lethal to bees.

Last May, the EPA pulled a dozen "neonics" from the market following a successful lawsuit brought by beekeepers and environmental groups.

But there are many chemicals that are not labeled as bee toxic, even though they can make bees sick and weaken their immune systems. While bees may survive the pollination season, they may not last the winter or may take back substances that gradually poison the entire colony.

Those on the almond growers' side acknowledge there is a huge problem. "The bee mortality rate is too high and is unacceptable," says the entomologist Bob Curtis, a pollination consultant for the Almond Board of California. "It is only because of the hard work and creativity of beekeepers that [almond growers] have gotten the bees they need."

The almond board's "best practice" guidelines encourage beekeepers to spend as little time in California's Central Valley as possible. Honeybees can travel up to three miles in search of varied forage, so even if the almond grower is doing everything right to protect a pollination investment, the cotton or grape farmer down the road may be spraying bee-toxic chemicals on crops.

Even as almond production has steadily ramped up for decades, the number of commercial hives in the US has remained at a steady 2.7m colonies since the early 2000s. With all the challenges beekeepers face, just maintaining the bare minimum is a struggle.

photos of queen bees being replaced and colony of honey bees hard at work.

Left: Dennis Arp replaces queen bees in hives that rejected or were missing them outside Rye. Arp drove to California to purchase the new queens. Right: Honeybees working for Mountain Top Honey Company. Photographs by Caitlin O'Hara/The Guardian

One coping strategy pursued by the almond industry has been to breed almond varietiesthat require only one hive per acre to pollinate, instead of two. And last January, a pollinator protection law went into effect in California as part of the state's "Bee Where" initiative. For this program, beekeepers are required to register the location of their hives with the county's agricultural commissioner and farmers must notify the commissioner in advance of any plans to spray pesticides.

Even so, the costs beekeepers incur trying to keep their bees alive are constantly rising. Arp has spent approximately $50,000 in the past year buying new hives to compensate for the 35% colony loss he experienced last year. He also spends at least $50,000 a year on mite treatments, not to mention other more aggressive measures the industry is taking just to maintain the status quo.These include splitting robust hives in half, introducing mail-order queens to new hives and fattening bees on corn syrup or on simulated pollen substances called "pollen patties".

Experts say that simply working around the pesticide problem isn't enough and that farming itself must be changed from the ground up.

The search for a solution

Hope is being found in a new certification program that, similar to "organic" or "fair trade" labels, will help consumers choose products that have been made with bee-friendly methods.

The "Bee Better" certification program, launched in 2017 by the not-for-profit Xerces Society, introduces biodiversity into almond groves to naturally control pests and nourish honey bees. Xerces is working with almond growers to plant California wildflowers, mustard and clover in between the rows of trees and native flowering hedges along the perimeter of the orchard - a kind of eco-friendly fence to keep bees in the orchard.

The program scored a victory when Häagen-Dazs ice cream became the first food company to carry products with the Bee Better seal. The company's bee-friendly vanilla milk chocolate almond bar was rolled out in December at Costco, Sam's Club and BJ's Wholesale Club, with three more bee-friendly almond ice cream flavors to be available in early 2020.

Letting nature take its course is nothing new for 81-year old Glenn Anderson. He is the first and still one of the few organic almond growers in California's San Joaquin Valley. His 40-year-old orchard is small - just 20 acres - and has always been chemical free.

"We don't have pests; we have biodiversity," says Anderson, who primarily sells directly to individual customers through his Anderson Almonds company. Unlike large industrial almond farms that strip the orchard ground bare to more efficiently treat for insects and fungi, Anderson allows a rich understory to grow, which naturally nourishes the soil and strengthens the trees.

Anderson hires a "beekeeper hobbyist" from northern California every spring to install about 20 hives in his orchard. "We have the opposite of colony collapse at my farm," says Anderson. "My beekeeper brings weak hives down that he wants to recharge on my property."

Anderson says the tradeoff for not using pesticides is that his annual crop yield is lower - typically about 10,000 pounds - and he keeps his orchard small in order to manage its wildness. "I'm averse to an expansion model," he says. "It doesn't suit me much."

And as for industrial-grown almonds? "They taste like cardboard," he says.

Back in Arizona, Dennis Arp and his son Adam are just trying to make it through the next few months with as many healthy bees as possible.

There are days when the costs seem overwhelming, and Arp wonders if he should hang up his honey-stained bee suit. But beekeeping is what he knows best, and he wants to pass the business on to his son.

"I don't know how we will pull it off yet," he says. "But we will make it work."

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'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond milk obsession

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Bees are essential to the functioning of America's titanic almond industry - and billions are dying in the process

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461 pages.