When he arrives, he apologises profusely for being late (he isn’t). I give him time to remove his jacket and order a glass of pompous-sounding vin rouge. Then I launch into a well-worn speech.
I tell him we’ve had fun over the last few months but that this is our last date and we won’t be seeing each other again. He looks utterly crestfallen.
Yes, he is easy on the eye — tall with a good body — but my
The spring 2014 annual reindeer festival in Yar-Sale, a rural town on the Yamal Peninsula in Western Siberia, was a grim affair. A rainstorm followed by a deep freeze the previous November had turned the normally snow-covered tundra into an ice shield. Reindeer could not paw through the thick ice to access lichen, their primary food source. In a region where winter temperatures can plunge below –50° Celsius, that ground remained frozen months later. Tens of thousands of reindeer had
HEERLEN, Netherlands
THE ARCHITECT OF EUROPE’S GREEN REVOLUTION knew he was unleashing dislocation and suffering across the Continent. He knew that, because half a century ago his family and practically everybody they knew had their lives turned upside down by the same kind of industrial upheaval he himself has now loosed across the European Union.
As the European commissioner in charge of the wrenching transformation the bloc must undergo to meet its climate ambitions, Frans Timmermans has spoken often about
Lucky is the writer upon whom misfortune smiles, especially when it’s a relatively minor misfortune from which a lot of narrative mileage can be wrested. Take, for instance, the “personal-branding meltdown” that has recently befallen Naomi Klein. A prolific writer and activist, Klein became notable at a youthful age for having written a mega-best-selling anti-branding manifesto, No Logo, in 1999, which naturally led to her becoming a massive brand herself, a twist of fate about which she’s both amusing … Read more
More than seven in ten adults don’t fully understand what the washing symbols mean on their clothes. A poll of 2,000 adults found 32 percent believe there are too many of them to comprehend, while 22 percent get confused by the varying instructions between different items.
And as a result, one in five have given up reading them altogether before loading the machine.
Washing machine symbols prove tricky, too – with synthetics cycle (76 percent), cold wash (49 percent), and
Washing clothes is relatively simple, but every now and again there may be one item which requires special attention. And if it comes to reading symbols on clothing labels, 70 percent of adults wouldn’t know what to do.
A study of 2,000 adults found 32 percent believe there are too many symbols to comprehend, while 22 percent get confused by the varying instructions between different items. Consequently, 20 percent admitted to giving up on reading the symbols altogether before loading
Among the many difficulties imposed upon America by the pandemic, the scourge of anti-vaccine sentiment—and the preventable deaths caused as result—ranks among the most frustrating, especially for infectious-disease doctors like me.
People who are hospitalized with COVID-19 rarely refuse therapy, but acceptance of vaccines to help prevent infection has been considerably more limited. Seventy percent of Americans have received the initial complement of vaccine injections, and many fewer have received the boosters designed to address viral variants and confer additional
A village welcome in rural France is always a warm, albeit nosy, one.
In 2014, soon after I moved into a farmhouse hidden away on the outskirts of a hamlet with my French husband, welcome drinks were held in the village hall and hosted by our mayor.
The idea was for us, and another newbie couple, to get to know our neighbours — all spread out in farms and smallholdings over many, many miles.
Pascal and I shared many similarities
Early on in her masterful book Cuba: An American History, Ada Ferrer alludes to a double meaning embedded in her subtitle: “History in the first sense refers to what happened; in the second, to what is said to have happened.” Cuba’s history, Ferrer tells us, is likewise two histories. It is simultaneously a narrative of freedom (as well as of its absence from historical memory) and a chronicle of the ways in
If you tried to imagine the perfect gym teacher, you’d probably come up with someone a lot like Hampton Liu. He’s a gentle, friendly guy who spends most of his time trying to figure out how to make the basics of exercise more approachable, and he talks frequently about how he never wants anyone to feel shame for their ability or skill level. In other words—and with apologies to good gym teachers, who almost definitely exist—he’s probably the polar opposite
