Tag: better life
Why So Many Americans Are Traveling Back to Their Roots
The first generation of immigrants wants to survive, the second wants to assimilate, and the third wants to remember, the sociologist Marcus Lee Hansen wrote in 1938. The fourth, fifth, and sixth? Apparently they now want to go on a luxury vacation to visit the Welsh coal mines their ancestors crossed an ocean to escape.
So-called heritage tourism has grown into its own travel category, like skiing and whale watching. In 2019, an Airbnb survey found that the share of
The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza
Numbers are one way to make the destruction of war legible: number of hostages, number of children killed, number of buildings destroyed, number of aid trucks that made it across the Egyptian border. For Marwan Bardawil, who lives in Gaza, the unit of peril he tracks is cubic meters per hour. Bardawil is a water engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority overseeing Gaza. And these days he is measuring, in cubic meters per hour, the quantity of water flowing through
The End of German Exceptionalism
Asked what came to her mind when thinking about Germany, former Chancellor Angela Merkel once said, “I think of airtight windows. No other country can build as airtight and as beautiful windows.”
With its history tainted, post-1945 Germany looked to its economy for a positive conception of itself. The goods Germany produced, such as those quality windows, allowed politicians to celebrate the country as an “export world champion.” Germany Inc., was a well-oiled capitalist-corporatist ensemble. Trade-union leaders and CEOs
The Family Who Tried to End Racism Through Adoption
Growing up as the adopted Korean daughter of white parents in a predominantly white community, I discovered early on that my presence was often a surprise, a question to which others expected answers. I soon learned how to respond to the curiosity of teachers at school, strangers at Sears, friends who had finally worked up the nerve to ask Who are your real parents? Why did they give you up? Are you going to try to find them someday?
The Uncertain Forecast for Europe’s Energy Crisis
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Today’s question concerns affairs of the heart.
Last week on Twitter, a presumably young person posted this question: “Literally BAFFLED as to how people found love before dating sites and social media. Was settling the
Photographs of condolence items after school shootings.
In the halls of schools where students have learned about the archaeological remains of failed civilizations, they have unwittingly shed the wreckage of their own. The visual artist and author Andres Gonzalez spent six years dutifully photographing the debris of a society in a specific form of decline: the letters, cards, notes, mementos, keepsakes, toys, talismans, objects, and ephemera that accumulate following a school shooting. The artifacts pictured in the book American Origami, Gonzalez’s incredible collection of more than
How To Stop Objectifying Yourself
In the social-media age, we curate images of our lives on a screen—making it especially easy to translate images of perfection as the image of oneself. But the pressure to pretend we are perfect is exactly the thing holding us back from experiencing the happiness we seek—and limiting our ability to be our whole, authentic selves.
In this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life, we’ll define what we mean by “authenticity” and explore the psychological underpinnings