“Olympic Games Doomed” and “No More Olympic Games,” read headlines published in London’s Times in 1924.

A century ago, British commentators called not only for their nation to withdraw from the Games, but some, more radically, for the end of the Olympics entirely. Rather than bringing together nations in friendly competition, many felt that the Olympic Games were only deepening global strife. Looking back on Great Britain’s continuously shifting history with the Games—and with the 1924 edition in particular—today reminds us why global politics always has the potential to spill over into the Olympic arena.

The 1924 Paris Games witnessed over 3,000 athletes from 44 nations compete in 17 sports. Coming almost exactly five years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the end of World War I, these contests carried clear international and political significance. For the French, that meant seeing their athletes succeed at almost any cost and using their host’s spotlight to fight back against international criticism.

Following a general ban by the International Olympic Committee on the representatives of the defeated powers from the war, all countries except Germany were invited back to the 1924 Games. To the French, German participation was unthinkable considering relations between the two nations, and so French officials didn’t invite Germany to compete.

But the atmosphere was now fraught among the hosts, the United States, and Britain, former wartime allies who found themselves in a state of strained relations due to the French Occupation of Germany’s Ruhr region.

In January 1923, after Germany failed to make a scheduled Treaty of Versailles reparations payment, French troops entered the German region of the Ruhr to take resources, primarily coal, by force. Britain and the United States were among a large group of nations that condemned the occupation and the soldiers’ treatment of the local population. In response, France used the Olympics as a means to push back against international criticism.

The Americans bore the brunt of French hostility, beginning with the May rugby final, among the earliest competitions to take place. The American team had comprehensively beaten the French 17-3, yet still the home crowd taunted their opponents, leading to fights between fans in the crowd. Jeers of the locals nearly drowned out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In the tennis men’s singles competition, the victory of American Vincent Richards over Frenchman Henri Cochet produced more outbursts from the crowd. And back-to-back American diving victories upset spectators to the point where they threatened to throw the judges into the pool.

For the British, the primary incident came in boxing, where judges awarded French rookie Roger Brousse victory over Britain’s Harry Mallin, the defending Olympic boxing champion, despite the contest being very much in Mallin’s favor. Mallin immediately launched an appeal, showing bite marks on his chest inflicted by his French opponent. Brousse was ultimately disqualified, and Mallin went on to become the first and only British male to successfully defend an Olympic boxing championship. But this helped sour the British on the Games. This sentiment was compounded by controversies in which the British were not directly involved in, like a fencing controversy between the Hungarians and Italians that resulted in an actual duel.

The British athletes did achieve victories, notably that of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell in track, performances later immortalized in the 1984 movie Chariots of Fire. Nevertheless, the Times of London columnist Sir Harry Perry Robinson wrote in August, shortly after the conclusion of the Games, that they “exacerbate international bitterness instead of soothing them.” An editorial in the same edition bemoaned that “shameful disorder, storms of abuse, free fights and the drowning of the national anthems of friendly nations by shouting and booing are not conductive to an atmosphere of Olympic calm.”

1924 wasn’t the first year that the Brits had questioned their participation in the Olympic Games. By the time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) formed in 1894, Britain, the self-proclaimed home of “modern sports,” already had its own ingrained sporting calendar, revolving around events like Ascot, Lord’s, Henley, and Wimbledon. Its preference had always been for the plethora of sporting events it organized and officiated. The consequence was that for the inaugural Olympic Games of 1896, Britain was represented by just 10 little-known athletes, several of whom came from the staff at the British Embassy in the host city of Athens. Britain’s Olympic organizing body, the British Olympic Association (BOA), wasn’t formed until 1905, nearly a decade after its counterparts in the U.S. and France.

When Britain hosted the Olympics for the first time three years later, in 1908, the U.S.  dominated in track and field, winning 16 of the 34 titles (while Britain only mustered seven). This victory of the “professional” American college system established a general feeling of negativity among the British public toward an “unwanted” addition to the sporting calendar; one that served to further damage the British ego, which was continually knocked at the start of the 20th century both on and off the sporting field.

Because of this, for the outspoken British press, the early Olympic Games didn’t feel as much a forum for British excellence but rather evidence of the nation’s physical decline.  After Britain only finished third in the medals table in the 1912 Stockholm Games, the Duke of Westminster branded the team’s poor performance a “national disaster.” That’s where the desire for Britain to drop out of the Olympics started in earnest. Nonetheless, Britain went in the other direction in its preparations for the 1916 Games, appointing its first-ever professional athletics coach to compete against its rivals for cultural, economic, and military dominance, in a period of heightened chauvinistic nationalism. But preparations for those Games ended in the summer of 1914 following the outbreak of World War I. Upon the resumption of the Olympics in 1920, there was no money for anything beyond sending a team to Antwerp and certainly no desire for expressions of nationalism following four years of bitter war.

The Paris Games of 1924 was perhaps a high point of British Olympic apathy, but despite the complaints of some, the growing international standing of the Games meant that the nation continued. Today, Great Britain remains just one of six countries to have competed at every Olympic Games.

As the Games (and Britain) return to Paris a century later, the world has accepted both the positivity of the Olympics in bringing nations together in friendly competition and the international incidents that they are poised to generate.

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We’re more than a year out from #TheMoment, March 17, when the first lockdown in France began. At that crossroads where countries made different political decisions, France chose to put health first.

Now, as we settle into a third lockdown, to encounter someone without a mask in the street is startling. Every few streets or so, outside every pharmacy, there are little collapsible huts where people can get a rapid antigenic test. It’s also easy to get PCR tests, which are carried out in labs. All COVID-19 tests are free, and people are encouraged to get tested if they have the slightest doubt of infection.

After a very slow start, France is speeding up its vaccination campaign. Now besides vaccination centers, pharmacies and doctors can administer the Astra Zeneca jab and will soon be able to do the same with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccinations. At first, a sizeable portion of the population was resistant to being vaccinated. Then, when vaccine supplies were slow to arrive in the European Union, the joke was that the contrarian French suddenly all wanted to be vaccinated.

Political figures and personalities were vaccinated publicly in order to encourage those who were reticent. In a moment of delightful silliness, when Olivier Véran, the Minister of Solidarity and Health, was vaccinated in public with his shirt half open, Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot (who was more recently hospitalized with COVID) commented on television that she had given him the nickname “Jolitorax” referring to a character in the comic, Asterix. “Jolitorax” is translated into “Anticlimax” in English Asterix editions, but in French, the name literally means nice-looking chest.

Such moments of levity are important in a country where we haven’t been able to go to a bar or restaurant since last October, and probably won’t be able to until May.

Because France is part of the European Union, we have a tendency to compare ourselves to our neighbors (most often Germany). France’s first lockdown of nearly two months was one of Europe’s strictest, and we had a second lockdown which lasted a month and a half in the fall. We have been wearing masks any time we leave the house since July 20, and have undergone two successive curfews. One began on December 15 and included New Year’s Eve; it kept people inside from 8 p.m. until the morning. The second curfew started January 16, and it required people to stay off the streets from 6 p.m. until morning. Despite these efforts, one year later we’re approaching 95,000 deaths from COVID.

Now, France has locked down for a third time, due to the British variant which accounts for three-quarters of the new cases. As the EU and the UK spar over vaccine doses, Boris Johnson’s government is in discussions as to whether France should join their “red list” from which travel into the UK is banned—“Now that they’ve given us their variant,” sniped my neighbor. On the bright side, we did gain one hour this time around: curfew begins at 7 p.m.

Surprisingly the French—who are famous for being grumblers—have been quite reasonable on the whole, compared to some of their neighbors, from Belgium to Austria, who have staged anti-curfew riots, even though they have had fewer restrictions imposed on them. But patience is starting to wear a little thin.

Instead of rioting, Parisians have spent the past year reading. With all cultural venues and festivals closed or canceled, people turned to books, and despite France’s 3,300 independent bookshops being closed for three months during 2020, losses were only 3.3 percent compared to the previous year. Teenagers made a comeback hit of the classic Arsène Lupin series by Maurice Leblanc, set in the early 1900s about a gentleman thief, following the success of the Netflix series, Lupin, based on the books. A recent decree passed that gave bookshops the status of “essential businesses,” meaning that, along with food shops and pharmacies, they can remain open during the current lockdown. Curiously, record stores, florists, hairdressers, and chocolate shops have been allowed to stay open as well.

We’ve also been cycling. According to the organization Vélo et Territoires, the number of bicyclists in Paris has increased by 70 percent since last May. It helped that city officials transformed an additional 50 kilometers of traffic lanes used by cars into bike lanes. There are evident growing pains; as amateur or aggressive cyclists vie for space with pedestrians and scooters it’s led to encounters that can degenerate into shouting matches.

Still, the heart of Parisian daily life is its cafés, and without them, Paris doesn’t seem like itself. The most recent closure of bars and cafés was October 6, while restaurants closed for service October 30, leaving only the option of takeaway and delivery.

But eateries have not been abandoned. Restaurants and cafés can choose between government aid of up to 10,000 euros per month or compensation equal to 20 percent of their revenues from 2019 with a limit of 200,000 euros per month. Most of the larger bistros and restaurants are closed, but neighborhood bistros are often open.

The enterprising owner of our café downstairs, a Kabyle man born in Algeria, reinvented his establishment with grace and humor over the various lockdowns, first offering frankfurters and sandwiches, then adding to the takeaway menu homemade couscous and mulled wine. During the winter months, in fact, while Germans were deprived of their glühwein in Christmas markets, Parisians converted to drinking mulled wine in order to linger in front of cafés offering takeaway beverages.

Now that it’s spring, people often congregate outside the takeaway window drinking beer. This is technically illegal and defeats the purpose of the closures, but at least they’re outside, and it gives us a semblance of normalcy. This March, during a wave of spring-like weather, the police banned alcohol in certain areas of Paris, such as the Canal Saint-Martin, where large groups had begun to gather.

Masked Parisians have been getting together legally throughout the year—to continue a tradition of demonstrating. There have been protests against police brutality, sexual harassment, poverty, nuclear weapons, and working conditions, and demonstrations in support of medical staff or teachers, climate change policy, and of political prisoners in Turkey, Algeria, or Saudi Arabia. A motley crew of conspiracy theorists, and groups against restrictions and mask-wearing, pop up in various cities to have their say as well.

Paris real estate remains expensive, and unless you’re very wealthy, apartments are small. The chic neighborhoods, for the most part on the city’s Left Bank, have emptied, their inhabitants having decamped temporarily to second homes in Brittany, Normandy, or the south of France. The first lockdown led to a rush of families deciding to leave the city permanently, often for the northern suburbs, expediting a trend that began with the extension of metro lines going just outside the city’s perimeter.

But most Parisians are still stuck at home in confined spaces. In my north-eastern neighborhood of Belleville, however, which is rapidly gentrifying but remains ethnically and socially mixed, the streets are packed with people going about their daily business or enjoying one of the largest parks in Paris, the 19th-century Buttes-Chaumont. Small children, all masked, skip along joyfully holding hands as their teachers take them for a walk.

Childhood is one area where France stands out: following the first lockdown, the government made it a priority to keep schools open to avoid disrupting education. According to statistics gathered by UNESCO, France’s schools were among the European schools least likely to close over the past year. Children ages 6 and up are required to wear masks, and classes are held in person as usual (except for high schools where classes can be also be attended via Zoom). This has been a godsend for most parents, especially those who can’t work remotely. A recent poll showed that 73 percent of parents and 89 percent of children considered their experience together during the pandemic a positive one for their family.

University courses, however, have all been online, which has been particularly difficult on foreign students who are new to France and are stuck in front of their computers in tiny rooms. And many French students have lost part-time jobs with parents unable to help out. A group of restaurants that had served meals to hospital staff a year ago is now offering meals to students in need. In January, President Macron announced that students could have two meals a day at the price of 1 euro.

Despite being provided with as much uninterrupted schooling as possible, the French are currently experiencing what is called a “baby crash.” This is also surprising. France has Europe’s highest fertility rate, and at the beginning of the first lockdown some specialists predicted a baby boom. But statistics show that nine months after the first lockdown, birthrates were 7 percent lower than in 2019.

Last but certainly not least, culture, an essential component of city life, is still on hold. Lucas Destrem, who specializes in urbanism and political and cultural geography, recently re-designed the iconic Paris metro map in support of cultural venues waiting to open. His approach was to replace the metro stops with names of museums, art centers, cinemas, theatres, libraries, or music conservatories. The map won media coverage and wide praise in the cultural milieu.

In the meantime, some Parisians are soothing themselves in an unusual way: by behaving like the tourists who typically crowd our streets. It’s become more common for Parisians to treat themselves to a weekend in a hotel, and hotels, in turn, are turning to locals for business, such as the new Hotel Paradiso. Operated by the production company and movie theatre chain MK2, the hotel offers giant screens in each room, and an open-air cinema on the roof, with popcorn, snacks, and a restaurant that delivers meals to rooms. For Parisians who are already avid movie-goers and have 200 euros to spare for a rare treat, this could provide a way to fill this unusual, and temporary, cultural void while we wait for what will happen next.

The post A Letter From Paris, Where the New Normal Is Less Grouchy Than You’d Expect appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This 18th-century pile of stone—despite being dedicated to the patron saint of the city, Saint Genevieve—is as banal as it is big, vacuous as it is vast. In his novel Notre-Dame de Paris (more commonly known as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Victor Hugo declared that the design, by the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot, failed to provide the “sacred horror” expected of great churches. All it inspired, he huffed, was the image of a great sponge cake.

The last laugh was on Hugo: The Panthéon happens to be his final resting place. Hugo’s tomb now gathers dust in this colossal cake’s cold and cheerless crypt, alongside several dozen of France’s most notable figures, ranging from writers and philosophers to war heroes.

But while the Panthéon might be empty of sacred horror, it is filled with secular wonder, crypt and all. This becomes clear in the remarkable history behind the building’s latest chapter: the interment earlier this summer of the remains of French Resistance heroine and courageous politician Simone Veil.

The event, replete with renditions of “La Marseillaise” (sung by the American soprano Barbara Hendricks and the French Army chorus) and the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth (sung by a children’s chorus), was attended by tens of thousands of spectators, standing under a blinding sun, with many wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Merci, Simone.”

Soufflot had never meant for his creation to become, as one wag labeled it, the “Académie française of the dead.” Commissioned by King Louis XV, the church was completed in 1790, just months before Louis XVI lost his throne (and head) to the Revolution. With the violent shift from monarchy to democracy and from religion to reason, the church’s purpose changed as well. No sooner had it opened for business than it was de-Christianized. Nevertheless, it held on to its saints—though instead of giving their lives to God, the new honorees were those who had given their lives to the nation of France.

But the revolutionary and republican rebranding did not remain for long. France’s 19th century was marked by what historians call les guerres franco-françaises: the epic struggle between reactionaries and revolutionaries, peasants and Parisians, believers and unbelievers that fueled the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870. Inevitably, Soufflot’s big cake was pulled into this series of mêlées, as the two sides repeatedly took turns claiming it. Confused Parisians had only to glance at the building’s front portal to determine the current political situation. If the celebrated phrase Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante—“To great men, a grateful country”—engraved by revolutionaries was there, you were living under one of the 19th century’s three republics. If it had been removed, it meant one of the three monarchies was back in the driver’s seat.

The Republic won the deciding match in 1885 when Hugo—who by then had become the semi-divine embodiment of the Republic—was laid to rest in the building’s crypt alongside the remains of Rousseau and Voltaire. Among the Panthéon’s many ironies is that these two thinkers, national heroes and neighbors for eternity, had vexed ties to France—Rousseau was a Genevan who was forced to flee France, and Voltaire was a Frenchman who was forced to flee Paris. What’s more, the two men utterly despised one another. Still, as the engraving over the Panthéon’s front portal said, “To great men, a grateful country.”

Over time, the other meaning of that inscription became clear: the revolutionary trio of values—liberté, egalité, and (by definition) fraternité—applied to just one-half of the nation, the grands hommes. The Panthéon was reserved for men. The one exception was Sophie Berthelot, whose interred husband, the chemist and politician Marcellin Berthelot, had requested a tombeau à deux.

This was no surprise. Women in France would not get the vote until 1945, and would not be able to open a bank account without their husband’s signature until 1965.

Women were only officially welcomed at the Panthéon in 1995. That year, President François Mitterrand declared the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie as worthy of “panthéonisation.” And yet, because her colleague and husband, Pierre Curie, accompanied her into the crypt, some observers wondered if an asterisk should be placed next to her name.

For the next two decades, Marie Curie was as good as it got for grandes femmes at the Panthéon. It was not until 2015 that President François Hollande, a socialist like Mitterrand, announced the panthéonisation of two more women, Germaine Tillion and Geneviève de Gaulle-Antonioz. Both women fought in the French Resistance during World War II, both were captured and imprisoned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and both continued to fight on behalf of deportees and the dispossessed in the years following their liberation. (No significant other, by the way, accompanied either woman into the crypt.)

After Simone Veil’s death last year, the ensuing campaign to induct the beloved political figure was not limited to women—it was catholic in the best sense of the word. Left and right, men and women, believers and atheists, young and old, clamored for her candidacy.

And though the feminist movement in her day left her ambivalent, Veil would have welcomed recent legal and cultural changes. France’s version of the #MeToo movement, known as #BalanceTonPorc, or #ThrowOutYourPig, has made progress. In March, the national government’s Minister of Gender Equality announced legal proposals, including on-the-spot fines for sexual harassment in public places. In 2022, the government will begin to fine French companies for unexplained wage differences between male and female employees.

Veil’s new tomb in the Panthéon is located in the same section as those of celebrated Resistance figures like Jean Moulin. This reflects Veil’s personal history: She was the lone survivor of a family deported to Auschwitz during the war.

Yet Veil’s most important act of resistance came in 1974 when, as Minister of Health in the centrist government of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, she spearheaded the effort to legalize abortion in France. Given the vitriol and violence of her critics, the task would have reduced most anyone else, man or woman, to tears. When Gaullist and religious opponents in the National Assembly were not denouncing Veil’s effort, to quote one infamous speech, “to toss the unborn into crematory ovens,” they played in the vast chamber of the National Assembly a recording of a fetus’s heartbeat. Yet Veil never wavered, and shepherded the proposed legislation into law. The courage and compassion she demonstrated made Veil one of France’s most admired public figures.

In his speech at the Panthéon, President Emmanuel Macron came close to capturing the nature of Veil’s life. “This woman presents us with a life marked by abysses from which she should never have returned and stunning victories only she knew how to achieve. To this mystery of existence and character, this mystery that defies reason and inspires our respect and fascination, the French have a word that is anchored in our national genius. The word is greatness.”

The flag-draped coffin of Auschwitz survivor and former French health minister Simone Veil is carried to the Panthéon mausoleum in Paris on July 1, 2018. Photo by Kamil Zihnioglu/Associated Press.

With the arrival of Veil—whose coffin was accompanied into the crypt by that of her husband Antoine, who had died a few years before—five women have been pantheonized. While the principle of parité, or gender parity, has already been introduced into political life—parties are now obliged to present an equal number of male and female candidates on their electoral lists—it will be slower going at the Panthéon.

Still, a number of French feminist organizations, led by Osez le feminisme (“Dare to Be Feminist”) continue to push for greater balance to be introduced into the recipe of Soufflot’s sponge cake. Needless to say, there is no shortage of candidates, ranging from two other Simones (the philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil) to the revolutionary actor Olympe de Gouges, who authored the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizenesses, which opens with the electrifying phrase: “Woman, awake: the tocsin of reason resounds through the whole universe: discover your rights!”

De Gouges ended her days by offering to defend Louis XVI at his trial—an offer, she explained, motivated by her desire to show that women were no less capable of “heroism and generosity” than men. For her opposition to the Terror, she exited from life on the same bloody stage, the guillotine, as did Louis. De Gouges’s life—as well as those of Tillion, de Gaulle-Anthonioz and Veil—reminds us that heroism and generosity have never been, and will never be, gendered. Nor should the Panthéon’s welcome mat. It is time to revise it once and for all: Aux grands hommes et femmes, la patrie reconnaissante.

The post How France’s Panthéon Started Living Up to the Nation’s Ideals appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The United States, we are told, will have a burst of economic growth, now that it is unshackled from an agreement that required (suggested is more accurate) our nation to do too much while other countries did not do enough. Hours after the announcement, Vice President Mike Pence stated on Fox News that this was “for American jobs.”

But there are questions about all of these claims, especially the one about what leaving Paris might mean for the economy and jobs.

The United States should get an economic boost if leaving the agreement means that it does not change its domestic environmental policy—and other countries respond by putting limits on greenhouse gas emissions in the service of fighting climate change. But that doesn’t square with the context.

The United States is already in the process of changing domestic policy, and leaving Paris is only part of it. Back in March, President Trump signed executive orders instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back the Clean Power Plan, a program designed to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from coal, and to review and roll back CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy), standards that were designed to increase gas mileage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from autos.

Given the fossil fuel sympathies of the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, one can easily predict what direction these policies will take. You may like the official U.S. position on greenhouse gas emissions—that we don’t care about them much anymore—or you may not. As for me, full disclosure: I lived in the San Fernando Valley in the 1980s and worked in China in the mid-1990s, so from my personal experience I can tell you there are some things that I consume—like air—that I find better when I can’t see them.

But this article is about economics, not personal preferences. We economists tend to look at both the immediate impact and the long run impact of policy.

In the near term, being free of the Paris Agreement means that the elimination of anti-pollution restrictions on coal can go forward. Coal producers and coal-fired energy plants can then lower their costs by reducing the amount they have to spend on pollution abatement. Lower costs mean lower prices, and all good Econ 101 students know that when producers lower prices, consumers purchase more. That means more coal and coal-related jobs, and that is the point.

But that’s only the beginning of a longer story. Modern economics traces its study of external costs (such as pollution) back to the 1960 classic “The Problem of Social Cost” by Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase. This and subsequent studies clearly show that the efficiency of a free competitive market in allocating a nation’s resources is impaired when external costs are free to the producer. The problem can be solved in one of two ways: private side payments or government intervention. An example of a side payment would be when a neighbor pays you to not use Roundup in your garden because they are trying to grow a totally organic garden just over the fence. But side payments are unusual. Thus government has a role in restoring efficiency to free markets by bringing the external cost into the producer’s cost equation.

In the case of a coal mine that is polluting the nearby water supply, total cost has two elements: an internal cost paid by the consumer through the price of coal, and an external one paid by the person facing higher water prices due to increased purification costs. When coal is priced too low, as it will be with fewer regulations, too much is consumed and those purchasing water are in fact also purchasing some of this extra coal with it.

Thus, unless the United States is willing to return to the table and negotiate greenhouse gas emission reductions once again (and it isn’t), then its current response is: Since you (insert your favorite miscreant country here) are not going to do more to control emissions, we are going to increase our emissions as well. Let’s all pollute together, shall we?

As with the coal mine example above, those producers who can lower costs with less regulation of emissions will end up producing more, and those who bear the additional costs, for example through additional asthma medication purchases, will end up paying for that additional production. And that means our free market system will produce too much of some goods and not enough of others.

For the longer-run economic impact, it is useful to think of this change in the context of a simple economic model developed by another Nobel Laureate, Robert Solow. In the Solow framework, there are three ways to increase economic growth in the long run: capital accumulation, increased labor, and productivity gains. The great strides in per capita income in the U.S. between 1950 and 1990 were due in large part to productivity gains. At present we are in a productivity improvement drought, part of the reason that our economy has grown at only two percent per year over the last eight years.

What does this have to do with Paris? It’s simple. A heavier reliance on fossil fuels, which is an old technology, impairs innovation and productivity gains. So long as it is possible to lower costs through non-taxed carbon emissions, the incentive to innovate is diminished.

To be sure, there always is some incentive to innovate; it’s just that there is less now that we’ve left Paris. But the incentive to innovate remains high in the United Kingdom and the European Union, where research institutes such as The Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult and The Fraunhofer Institute continue to pursue emission abatement technology. China also is innovating, having invested $1.2 billion more than the United States in renewable energy research and development in 2015 alone.

Energy innovators in Europe and China see an opportunity for their products to gain immediate market acceptance from the demand induced by their government’s actions to satisfy the Paris Agreement. But can’t U.S. innovators see the same opportunities in the Chinese and European markets? The answer is only a qualified yes. First, Trumpian trade policy introduces a great deal of uncertainty about trade relations and the ability to penetrate these markets in the future. Second, innovators have to worry about exporting to foreign markets about which they may know little. So there is a double whammy to American incentives. This means that the United States will fall behind in energy-related technology industries, and the associated employment and income growth of the future will be sacrificed to the coal mines of Appalachia.

But all is not lost. California immediately rejected the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and as of this writing has been joined by 11 other states in the United States Climate Alliance. The Alliance members promise to uphold the Paris Agreement standards regardless of the Trump Administration’s position on them. California by itself is a $2.5 trillion economy with nearly 40 million residents. That is a big market by any standard. And, combined with the world-class universities and research institutions, the incentives lost in Coal Country might well survive on the Left Coast.

That’s why California Governor Jerry Brown quickly jumped on a plane to China to affirm a partnership and co-operative position vis-à-vis the country with the most to gain from reducing carbon emissions. It seems that the Governor, along with the California legislature, recognizes the long-run stakes for economic growth and prosperity.

Is this enough? Perhaps it is. Innovators in this country might find more than enough demand for their products from the 102 million people living in United States Climate Alliance states.

So, regardless of one’s views on the Trump administration’s decision to exit Paris, the economics are very clear. We’ll see a misallocation of U.S. resources through induced market failure in the short term, and slower growth in the longer run—unless enough states act to effectively negate the withdrawal.

In the very long run, the news might be a little better. Ultimately, the United States will go to renewable energy because of economics. Self-driving vehicles, electric vehicles, and efficient battery storage packs will eventually become cheap enough to price fossil fuels out of the market.

When that happens, even more income, jobs, and wealth will shift westward. So, from Silicon Beach to the Emerald City on the cote gauche, it is not au revoir Paris. Instead, as the Grammy-winning EDM duo The Chainsmokers sing, “We are staying in Paris.”

The post We’ll Always Have (the) Paris (Accord) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The National Institutes of Health recently announced that it plans to end the ban on funding research for part-human, part-animal embryos, raising urgent ethical questions such as, what if this produces an animal with a partly human brain?

But the origins of these very modern concerns date back more than a century, with lively discussions about “modernization” underway as early as the Paris World’s Fair of 1900. One especially compelling yet largely forgotten analysis was penned by Henry Adams, son of a congressman and diplomat, descendant of two U.S. presidents, and a highly regarded historian—and conflicted technology enthusiast—in his own right. His reflections were contained in his posthumously published autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams.

In a chapter titled “The Dynamo and the Virgin,” he ponders the implications of the Machine Age, expressing deep concern over what he sees as a dangerous clash between the seductive grandeur of modern science and technology, which he calls “the Dynamo,” and the essential undergirdings of humanity—religion and traditional values—which he christens “the Virgin.”

More introspective than descriptive, The Education of Henry Adams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. It leads the Modern Library’s list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century, outranking Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.

Today, Adams’s work is not nearly as widely known as those, but not for lack of merit and timeliness. Indeed one could argue that “The Dynamo and the Virgin” is even more relevant today than it was when it was written.

After studying exhibitions on art, science, and technology at the Paris World’s Fair of 1900, Adams concluded that—despite his own appreciation of the merits of “progress”—Americans were too ready to embrace new technology at the cost of traditional values. This raised for him a disquieting question for the dawning century: Will the human spirit survive the new Age of the Machine?

Adams was anxious that American culture was about to take a fateful turn, sacrificing traditional values on the altar of technology. Prompting his reflections was a visit to the Hall of Electrical Machines. He fixated in particular on one of the gigantic dynamos on display. Its purpose was beside the point. Adams’s focus—and his fear—centered on its size and mechanism, its “huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed” while making hardly a sound. Its workings, he wrote, were an unfathomable, but seductive, mystery—one that left him in awe. The dynamo became for him the incarnation of modernity and symbol of the “revolution of 1900”—interwoven revolutions in science and technology that ushered in, most impressively, the new age of electricity along with automated production, the car, and the airplane.

Henry Adams seated at his desk, 1883. Courtesy of Marian Hooper Adams/Wikimedia Commons.

And then there was the art. Adams contrasted the dynamo with the figure of the Virgin, which he suggested was the central inspiration behind much of what he had viewed in the fair’s acclaimed art pavilions. The Virgin became his symbol for Christian tradition and, equated by Adams to the Roman mythological Venus, the female force in general. Looking to the future, he wondered if the god of technology, the dynamo’s apotheosis, was on the verge of replacing, as he put it, the Church and the Cross. Adams was in fact seeking a middle ground between religion and science.

Adams’s guide through the Hall of Electrical Machines was a leading American scientist, S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Although holding Langley in the highest esteem, he wrote of being puzzled, and a bit disturbed, by the scientist’s laser-like focus on machines and forces, to the exclusion of the art displays and all else non-scientific at the fair: “Langley, with the ease of a great master of experiment, threw out of the field every exhibit that did not reveal a new application of force, and naturally threw out, to begin with, almost the whole art exhibit.”

Adams, writing in the third person about his experiences, described how Langley taught him to appreciate, if not really understand, recent discoveries in radioactivity, radio, and electricity: “He [Adams] wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly [inventor of the Branly coherer, one of the earliest radio wave detectors] had he met them, as he hugged the dynamo.”

Long fascinated by modern physics, Adams later experimented with applying physical theories, including the Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy, and “Maxwell’s Demon” (a thermodynamic thought-experiment by physicist James Clerk Maxwell), to the theory of human history, even in the face of skeptical feedback from scientist friends. But it was the dynamo that excited his strongest reactions at the Paris fair: “As he grew accustomed to the great gallery of machines, he began to feel the 40-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross … Before the end, one began to pray to it.”

Indeed, Adams later did pray to it, composing a poetic tribute, “Prayer to the Dynamo: Mysterious Power! Gentle Friend! Despotic Master! Tireless Force!” he wrote, with more than a hint of ambivalence.

The rush of discoveries in science and technology sometimes left him longing for the solace of tradition, security, and unity that he associated with medieval society and the Church. That people now seemed to be turning away from the Virgin worried him, for he believed it could mean the end of the great artistic traditions that were propelled by the power of Christian faith, “the highest energy ever known to man,” surpassing even the power of the steam engine and the dynamo.

Adams noted that in Europe the “force of the Virgin was still felt at Lourdes, and seemed to be as potent as X-rays,” while “in America neither Venus nor Virgin ever had value as force.” Despite his personal religious skepticism, (he was attracted to religion, but remained agnostic, never really reconciling the truths of science and religious faith) he regretted that his countrymen were apparently throwing in their lot with the machine worshippers.

So, what does Adams have to say to us today as we confront the dilemmas of our own technological revolution? Adams was enthusiastic about modern science and technology—today we might refer to him as an early adopter—but he remained an essentially 19th-century man, mindful of the challenges to society posed by 20th-century technology. His hope was that dynamo and Virgin would ultimately join together in support of both our spiritual and material lives.

To be sure, we no longer speak of dynamos and Virgins, much less of “hugging dynamos.” Yet, in many ways, Adams was extraordinarily prescient. With today’s advances in artificial intelligences and genetic manipulation, we face the very existential crisis that Adams foresaw.

Precisely one hundred years after Adams’s toured the Paris Exposition of 1900, Bill Joy, co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, wrote his now famous essay in Wired magazine, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” projecting a dystopian future in which “our most powerful 21st-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” Adams was not half so gloomy as Joy. From the vantage of the revolution of 1900, he welcomed our technological future, but with a crucial caveat: make sure our technology has a soul, not in the sense of superseding us as sentient human beings, but of living in spiritual harmony with our better selves.

The post The 1900 World’s Fair Produced Dazzling Dynamos, Great Art, and Our Current Conversation About Technology appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

She is telling me this because I am her primary care doctor. As part of a routine check-up, I want to know if her arthritis is affecting her daily life. When patients become socially withdrawn, their health deteriorates further. She wants a reality check. Her arthritis never limited her but, she asks, should she avoid these places, be this afraid of terrorism, even if it’s affecting her health and happiness?

Anna is an example of the ‘‘terrorism burden”: the adverse health effects—ranging from loss of well-being or security to injury, illness, or death—caused by terrorism and national terrorism policies.

Terrorism causes public fear by definition and by intent. Our response to terrorism can harm our health, too. Watching the unrelenting replays of the September 11 attacks on television worsened psychological distress and even increased the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder. After every terrorist attack, pediatricians warn parents to limit their child’s exposure to television news on the topic.

But beyond what’s clinically diagnosed, our counterterrorism policies can also create other unintended psychological harm. And it is the most vulnerable people among us who feel these effects most deeply.

After September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security ran its well-intentioned, color-coded system alerting the public to the risk of terrorist attack. For 10 years, the terror alert level remained at yellow, an elevated risk of attack. It’s not surprising that, a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, more than 10 percent of Americans were still changing their behaviors from fear of terrorism—limiting their outside activities, use of public transportation, and attendance at public events. The constant reminder about the threat of terrorism impaired our sense of security, a critical part of one’s overall health.

Unremitting warnings of terrorism harmed people from some walks of life more than others. Surveys found that persons with disabilities were more anxious about their personal risk from terrorism than were persons without disabilities. One survey that my research team worked on in 2004, three years after September 11, found that having a physical disability increased the likelihood among Los Angeles residents of frequently avoiding activities from fear of terrorism. The study also found that, compared to non-Latino whites, African-Americans were eight times more likely to frequently avoid activities from fear of terrorism; Latinos were seven times more likely.

We looked for reasons to explain this disparity. Could differences in the prevalence of psychological anxiety lead to different reactions? Or might lower educational attainment make it harder to understand the real risk, thereby leading some people to overreact? Nope. Our results did not change after statistically accounting for differences in education, income, anxiety level, immigration status, and other factors. Other researchers have found similar results across America.

Psychological theories such as R.W. Rogers’ protection motivation theory and Kim Witte’s extended parallel process model may explain our results. According to these theories, people will change their behaviors to protect themselves and reduce their fears based on their appraisals of both the threat and their abilities to cope with the threat. The threat appraisal includes perceptions of the probability of harm. The coping appraisal assesses their perceived self-efficacy to cope with an attack.

These theories help me understand my patient Anna’s avoidance behavior. Anna is less able to protect herself in a terrorist attack, like the attack in San Bernardino, because she can’t run away or hide as easily as someone without a mobility impairment. No matter how well prepared she is for any disaster, she faces greater risk of harm for this reason. Terror alerts may be nationwide, but people assess their vulnerability to terrorism and disasters—and their ability to recover—on a very personal level. Then they adapt their behaviors to protect themselves from harm and to reduce their fears. One possible reason minority groups take measures to avoid terrorism is they may not trust they will be treated equally after a disaster, as in Hurricane Katrina.

Of course, trying to protect yourself from harm is a good thing. But avoiding going to a restaurant with your friends is not the best way to do this. When people feel at risk, they may make bad choices or make good choices. It’s a bad choice to stay at home all the time, but a good choice to learn how to protect yourself in the event of a disaster or mass shooting. In my research, the same vulnerable groups who are avoiding public places after a terrorist attack are also buying emergency supplies and making disaster plans immediately after disasters and terrorist events. People who believe they are particularly vulnerable to a risk are motivated to reduce it. We should be guiding people to the right choices.

I am tempted to reassure Anna that her risk of meeting a terrorist is vanishingly small, but I know this won’t really help her. It could make her feel unheard. What I can do is recommend actions, in detail, that will actually reduce her risk in a risky world. This is one of the first lessons of what is called risk communications—the study of how we should communicate about risk in ways that promote healthy responses.

She should talk with a close colleague at work to enlist her help should she need to evacuate quickly. She should watch the online videos giving detailed instructions about “Run, Hide, Fight” with a particular focus on the details in the Hide and Run parts. (This is the approach recommended by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, based on a small body of research showing that immediate evacuation can save lives. It is also controversial. But having a plan and training may be better than inaction.) Anna can view the video and decide if it will work for her. I recommend the Ready Houston video on YouTube, despite the terror of watching it.

She should ask her boss to make a company-wide drill out of these recommendations, or at least practice it herself in her head—to “train your brain” as Amanda Ripley suggests in her excellent book, The Unthinkable. And she should keep at least a week’s worth of water, food, and her prescription medicines for the inevitable earthquake. As her doctor, I can give her detailed directions about how to get an extra week’s worth of medicine, which is only allowed by her health insurance plan if she makes the requests in the right way.

The recent terrorist attacks are an opportunity to improve our preparedness for emergencies and disasters. Let’s not miss this opportunity. For all the media attention to the San Bernardino attacks, I have not seen anything on how to promote our safety and well-being in the practical ways I describe.

All businesses should actively drill “Run, Hide, Fight.” I like Ripley’s idea of encouraging participation in drills by having the official meeting spot be a coffee shop on the next block where the boss buys everyone a coffee. Other doctors and pharmacists can proactively advise patients on getting and storing a week’s worth of medicine for disasters. Rather than using these attacks as moments to remind ourselves what we should be scared of, we can make these events teachable moments that build a greater culture of preparedness across the nation.

The post Obsessing About Terrorism Is Bad for Your Mental Health appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The horrible events in Paris inspired a round of global rubbernecking and then a sloppy debate over whether the Western World cares more about the victims in Paris than those in Beirut or Kenya and now Mali. Predictably that debate quickly evolved into one over race and ethnicity.

But there’s a deeper question to be asked here: How exactly does empathy work?

When the news of the Paris attacks hit, I was in a meeting in Washington, D.C. with a French-born publisher who quickly became anguished over the news. She grew up in Paris. Her daughter lives there now. In fact, her daughter frequents one of the targeted restaurants. While the events disturbed me, this French woman was clearly more pained. She was safe. Her family was safe. But the news invaded her consciousness in a way that seemed to affect her physically. At one point she sat down on the floor, hunched over, and stared gloomily at her smart phone.

It wasn’t until I learned that Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old Mexican-American from Southern California, had been killed in the attack that news of the massacre struck me on a more personal level. Nohemi was an American. Like me. She was a Mexican-American. Like me. She was from Southern California. Like me. Suddenly the horrible events that occurred 5,600 miles away seemed closer to home. What I had seen as tragic now felt sad.

A few days after the attacks in Paris, I drove down to Cal State Long Beach, the university Gonzalez had attended, to ask some students how her death had influenced their emotional response to this act of terrorism.

At first what I heard were reactions not dissimilar to mine. People ticked off certain aspects of their multi-layered identities that connected directly to Nohemi’s story, which, in turn, made them feel more deeply about the tragedy in Paris.

“All life is meaningful,” 23-year old senior Ernie Smith told me. “But I related to the events more when I found out she was a student, at Cal State Long Beach. Then it really hit home.”

The distinction between generally caring and having that feeling really “hit home” is suggested in the difference between the origins of the words sympathy and empathy. Sympathy derives from the Latin and Greek words meaning “fellow feeling.” The word empathy came to English from the German word Einfühlung, which means something like “inner feeling” or “feeling into.” While often used interchangeably, empathy carries a more intimate meaning than sympathy and suggests that the subject understands and is capable of sharing an emotion with the object. Sympathy, on the other hand, implies a greater distance. In a nutshell, you feel empathy when you can imagine being afflicted by the tragedy in question, and sympathy when you cannot.

What 26-year-old senior Catherine Gillespie then told me explains further how identifying—then empathizing—with a victim of a tragedy can help place you, at least on some psychic level, closer to the incident.

“The band that was playing at the concert hall where so many people were killed was from Palm Desert, California,” Gillespie told me. “I’m from nearby Indio. If I had been in Paris that night, I would have gone to see them play.” In other words, her identification with the band enabled her to imagine suffering the fate of the concertgoers, which therefore made her feel for the victims more deeply. Her response also suggests that there is a strong connection between empathy and fear.

Before last week, I would have told you that selflessness is at the core of caring. But after the events in Paris and listening to people’s reactions, I realize that whatever else empathy does for our psyches, it is also a form of self-preservation. I empathize with you, because what happened to you could happen to me. And that would be really horrible.

The post Why Americans Care More About Paris Than Other Terrorist Targets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Indeed, the Stade de France was the one target in Paris last Friday night where the terrorists must have known they’d encounter a level of security they might not (and ultimately did not, thankfully) overcome. But still they deemed it a worthwhile attempt. At least one, and possibly up to three, suicide bombers sought to enter the stadium. As it happened, the first bomber detonated his vest upon being stopped at a security perimeter (the boom was heard during the game’s telecast, and was confused within the stadium for firecrackers). Two other suicide bombers blew themselves up outside the stadium; between them, the thwarted bombers only took the life of one victim. The gruesome plan probably entailed sequencing the explosions inside the stadium in such a way that would have killed (before the eyes of the head of state and a global TV audience) not only scores of people seated near the bombers, but also possibly hundreds or thousands more in an ensuing panicked stampede.

There is another more substantive reason why Islamist fanatics intent on a war between civilizations would target a major soccer match: the sport’s singular role in bridging Western culture and Muslim youth. If you are a crazed “Soldier of the Caliphate,” soccer ranks up there with Hollywood movies and American pop music among the most potent threats in your deluded campaign to win over hearts and minds around the world.

Soccer is one form of global pop culture not driven by the United States, but it’s still a potent Western influence. If terrorists in the Middle East spend any time fantasizing about attacking an NFL or NBA game, it’d only be because they know Americans care about those games; they themselves, and the public in their home countries, certainly don’t. But soccer—the global sport centered around Europe’s major leagues but drawing in players, fans, and business interests from most of the planet—is an obsession throughout the Muslim world.

The game also offers the most prominent example of successful cross-cultural assimilation within Europe. Targeting a match between the French and German national squads may have been a way to strike at two “infidel” nations at once. But, as analysts were quick to point out after the attacks, some of the most prominent French and German stars in recent years—Germany’s Mesut Özil and Sami Khedira, France’s Karim Benzema and Bacary Sagna, among many others—are Muslim celebrities of immigrant backgrounds.

The impressive diversity of Europe’s major soccer leagues, and of their national teams, has long been a potent force for disarming xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment, and outright racism, across Europe. North African immigrants have never felt more welcome in France than when the entire nation rallied around Zinedine Zidane, the captain of the 1998 World Cup-winning French squad. And it is no small cultural milestone for Turkish immigrants in Germany to have millions of German fans these days wearing a jersey bearing the name of midfield artist Özil.

But the converse often gets overlooked: the impact of immigrant players on the mindsets of soccer fans across the Middle East and North Africa, and the crazed terrorists who thrive on the narrative that there is no compatibility between degenerate infidel societies and righteous Muslims.

The sport is a seductress of Muslim youth, as it is of all youth around the world, much to the chagrin of those eager to fend off Western influences. Across the Middle East, soccer has been a galvanizing force in the debates over whether girls should be allowed to play sports. And just look at any photos of large crowds milling about anywhere in the region—whether at a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan or an upscale mall in Dubai or Saudi Arabia—and you will invariably see some people sporting Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, or Manchester United jerseys.

European games are avidly watched across the region, courtesy of Qatari-owned beIN Sports, the same TV network broadcasting Spanish and French games to U.S. audiences. The success of so many Muslim and immigrant players in the English, Spanish, French, and German leagues provides a constant counter-narrative to tales of immutable estrangement and alienation between West and East. And it isn’t just about players—business interests from Muslim countries (most prominently the airlines from the Gulf states) brand themselves through the sport, to a point where people in the Middle East (and as far away as Malaysia, in the case of some teams) proudly feel that certain fabled European clubs belong to them.

In some cases, they literally do. Paris’ own iconic team, Paris Saint-Germain F.C., is now owned by Qataris.

The targeting of soccer by jihadists fighting modernity should only intensify as the game’s influence continues to expand in the Muslim world. And when you look at the calendar of upcoming major tournaments—with the next two World Cups slated for Russia and Qatar, and next summer’s Euro Championship hosted by France, kicking off in the targeted Stade de France—security forces everywhere, not to mention lovers of the game, should consider last Friday night a declaration of war by the terrorists against the world’s most beloved sport.

The post Why ISIS Declared War on Soccer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The coffee was perfectly roasted. The steamed milk almost fluffy. The young woman reading next to me had that perfect combination of elegance and boho grunge, style and studied insouciance that only a French woman can pull off.

You see what I did? I just said the word insouciance! Shoot me now!

This gorgeous city can do that to you—make you say words you wouldn’t be caught dead uttering at home and think thoughts you know you shouldn’t be thinking, well, anywhere!

But that’s why we Americans love it here, right? It’s the place we can visit to imagine the life our loved ones, our circumstances, or our better judgment would never let us get away with back in Peoria. It’s where you don’t feel indulgent ordering that bottle of 2005 Château Mont-Redon or taking the time to enjoy the profiteroles and then maybe a digestif after your main course. It’s where you’ll appreciate more art in one week than you did in the previous three years back home.

I suppose I should be grateful that there’s a place in the world that inspires us to slow down and actually enjoy—and not just consume—life. And to some extent I am. To the middle-class American imagination (mine included), Paris symbolizes the sophisticated, urbane, gracefully choreographed life we should all be living.

But there’s also something deeply unsettling about the effect this hyper-idealized city has on foreign minds.

There are two types of earthly paradises: the kind that draws you in, embraces you, and gives you space to reinvent yourself (say, California), and the kind that is so elusive that you can only dream about receiving that sort of embrace, even after you’ve entered its gates.

The archetypal American in Paris, Gertrude Stein, insisted that Americans love France precisely because it leaves them alone, because there is no embrace. Here, she said, expats “are free not to be connected with anything happening.” The brilliance of Paris, she mused, is its ability to imbue foreigners with “the emotion of unreality.”

Sure, there is an element of that in any place to which scores of tourists and expats flock. No one goes on holiday—for however long—to immerse himself or herself in “the real world.” What would be the point? But Paris—and France’s infamous culture of seduction—take unreality to a whole new level.

In La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, a book that’s slightly annoying because it tells us things like Henry IV was an “indefatigable lover,” New York Times correspondent Elaine Sciolino explains that French seduction is all about persuasion, charm, lingering, process, strategy, and subtle negotiation. Because there’s not necessarily an end to it, the means—the game, the dance—is the point. In France, seduction applies not only to personal encounters, but to commerce, diplomacy, politics, and even bureaucracy.

But whatever allure the idea of endless seduction might have for you, it might be instructive to recall that the French séduire derives from the Latin seducere, which means to “lead astray.”

Annie Cohen-Solal, the writer and Sartre biographer, told me over a drink the other night that she also thinks Americans find France so fascinating in part because it eludes them. She finds it ironic that the city that symbolizes for so many the release from narrow, practical, middle-class constraints is itself the most bourgeois of places.

“France is still a very traditional country,” she told me. “People want to keep it that way. There is a strong elitist tradition, particularly in education. Old, heavy institutions play a big role here, and civil servants run the show. That’s why tastes are very, very slow to change.”

In other words, for all its human diversity, Paris’ great beauty derives in no small part from an aesthetic and cultural consensus that only a deeply hierarchical society can maintain. Contrast the relatively uniform architectural styles of any major boulevard in central Paris to the wild variety on any major street in New York or Shanghai. This also helps explain why the uber French Louis Vuitton Foundation had to choose Frank Gehry, an American architect from Los Angeles, when it wanted to design the single most revolutionary new building in town.

I realize it’s a little unfair to blame Paris for the illusions we have of her. And ultimately my interest is not in the city itself, but on the psychic effects built—and, in this case, imagined—environments have on the people who live and visit.

My biggest problem with Paris is that it’s a cop-out for so many foreigners who come to conjure the myth of their more sophisticated selves. There is nothing wrong with inspiration or aspiration—two things this city provides in spades. But illusions are no substitute for real life and flirtation can never trump the value and meaning of a warm, genuine embrace. If tourists and expats cared so much about cultivating their finer selves, they’d go back home and do it—for real—rather than rely on a visit, however long or short, to give them a temporary fix. While we’ll always have Paris, you don’t have to walk her streets to live the life she inspires.

The post <i>Écoutez Bien, Américains!</i> Don’t Expect Paris to Make You More Sophisticated appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

New York-based photographer Gail Albert-Halaban recently spent a year exploring that question in Paris, peering from one building into another to capture intimate moments: a girl practicing her clarinet, a woman with a cat in her lap, a man reading a book.

You may feel like a voyeur looking at these photographs—some of which are currently on view in “Paris Views” at the Kopeikin Gallery in Culver City—but these images are not only staged and shot with a normal focal-length lens, they’re a collaboration among Albert-Halaban and the people on both sides of the view. The people loaning their homes for the shoot described what they saw and imagined to their neighbors across the street—and the neighbors talked about what their lives were actually like. Collectively, both sides came up with a plan for a photo: what time of day it would be taken and what it would depict. In the process, new relationships formed, which was a key part of the project.

“It used to be, we’d go to the corner store or deli and meet our neighbors, but now we live in a world that’s so mediated by computer screens,” says Albert-Halaban. This project is all “about having face-to-face contact with our neighbors, so instead of just watching and judging them, we can become brothers and sisters.”

The Paris photos weren’t her first foray into window photography. She previously spent six years taking similar photographs in New York City, mostly in her Chelsea neighborhood. For this “Out the Window” series, friends and acquaintances would tip her off to a compelling view, and she’d write to the subjects to explain the project and ask to set up a meeting. Most people were interested and willing to participate.

It was a little trickier in Paris, where people tended to be shy about letting a photographer into their home. But with the help of Cathy Remy, the photo editor of M, the magazine section of Le Monde, Albert-Halaban took 10 photos in October 2012—all of which appeared in the next month’s edition of M. The final project, now collected in a book called Gail Albert Halaban: Vis à Vis (Editions De La Martinere, 2014), includes 70 photographs taken between 2012 and 2013. Aperture published the English version, Paris Views.

One photograph shows a mother standing in front of her child’s crib. At first, the woman said she was too busy to be photographed. But once she agreed to meet, Albert-Halaban found they had a lot in common. “I saw her messy child’s room and it was just like my messy child’s room,” Albert-Halaban says. “She’s a working mom who’s always multitasking.” The mother—who revealed that she and the father of her child were once neighbors who watched each other through their windows—is now a good friend of Albert-Halaban’s.

These interactions made Paris feel like home for Albert-Halaban. In her own “quirky” building in Chelsea, all the people know each other. There’s a mystery writer on the fifth floor, a painter on the seventh floor, and a person who makes honey. Their relationships were strengthened by Hurricane Sandy, which hit the day after Halaban-Albert flew to Paris in 2012. Though she missed the disaster, she heard from friends and family back in New York City about the important role that neighbors played for one another. “My apartment had electricity and became the place where people hung out. … People really became friends.”

Looking ahead, Halaban-Albert is planning to take her project global. So far, she’s hit Utrecht, Holland, and Istanbul, Turkey. The gifts she brings to each meeting of the neighbors may differ—in Paris, it was wine; in Holland, chocolate—but the rewards are similar everywhere.

“I truly believe that if, instead of just watching each other, we actually met and engaged with our neighbors, we’d be much better neighbors,” she says. “We’d have a much stronger community.”

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