A Matter of Life and Breath

Oxygen may not strike you as a likely protagonist for a book. It’s invisible, it’s all around you, it’s something you inhale 19,000 times a day and take utterly for granted. But Joe Sherman’s Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air is a masterfully inventive biography of air, weaving together geology and history, myth and science, to deepen our understanding and appreciation of life’s most precious gas.

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Berlin Bind: Between Neo-Nazis and Mendelssohn

Last month, one day after 1,000 skinheads marched here to celebrate the first-ever “National Nazi Day,” a different cast of Germans huddled into the country’s largest synagogue and listened raptly to cellist Steven Isserlis, whose performance opened the 18th Berlin Jewish Culture Festival.

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Labor pains

It’s difficult being a foreigner in Spain these days. The government labels you illegal three months after you arrive. Residency and work permits are nearly impossible to obtain. You can’t legally rent an apartment. And that’s if, like me, you’re an American. If you’re an immigrant from a poor country, life can be much grimmer.

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Climate Dispatch from the World Forum of Cultures, Part 2

BARCELONA, Spain—Maybe it’s only natural, at a conference where activists propose something as radical as a universal declaration of the human right to water, that the tone turns preachy and we feel like we’ve heard it all before. Of course, we haven’t — we don’t know, for example, that half of Africa’s 784 million people suffer from water scarcity; or that agriculture absorbs 70 percent of the global water supply; or that 1.3 billion people live on less than a dollar a day … wait a minute, yeah, we know that one. Everyone knows it by heart because the number hasn’t changed much in years.

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Climate Dispatch from the World Forum of Cultures, Part 1

BARCELONA, Spain—As I craned my head to read the translation screen over the stage, Mikhail Gorbachev was waving his arms wildly and bellowing in Russian about the need to pursue nuclear energy, eliminate terrorism with military force, admit Belorussia and Ukraine into the European Union, and substitute Muslim troops for the U.S. “Christian” forces currently occupying Iraq.

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Terrorism in Spain

BARCELONA, Spain—After Sept. 11, security tightened at the Hewlett-Packard office in Barcelona, where 1,000 employees were told to wear a microchip badge each day to work. Now, six weeks after train bombs exploded in Madrid, those rules are being strongly reinforced – and setting some of the company’s foreign workers at ease.

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