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If you want to understand why the French overwhelmingly oppose raising their official retirement age from 62 to 64, you could start by looking at last week’s enormous street protest in Paris.

Retirement before arthritis read one handwritten sign. Leave us time to live before we die said another. One elderly protester was dressed ironically as “a banker” with a black top hat, bow tie, and cigar—like the Mr. Monopoly mascot of the board game. “It’s the end of the beans!” he exclaimed to the crowd, using a popular expression to mean that pension reform is the last straw.

President Emmanuel Macron won reelection easily last year, partly on a promise to overhaul this system, though his party lost its parliamentary majority soon after. At first glance, his argument for changing France’s retirement rules seems like simple math: The French are living far longer than they used to, so there aren’t enough workers currently paying into the system to cover the pension checks going out to all these retirees.  

France is not alone with this problem. Rich countries everywhere are facing similar demographic challenges, and pushing up their retirement ages to cope. The advocates of reform in France should have more room to maneuver than most, because retirements here last an average of about 25 years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s among the longest in Europe, where retirements even out at about 22 years, and well above the average retirement duration in the United States, where people now live for about 16 years after they stop working (measured from when most Americans start collecting Social Security, at 63).

Yet this fiscal math has convinced hardly anyone here in France. In a recent national survey, 80 percent of respondents opposed Macron’s proposal, including adults of all ages and socioeconomic groups, as did a slight majority among members of Macron’s own political party.

Why have the French dug in their heels on this seemingly necessary, perhaps unavoidable reform?   

[Pamela Druckerman: Where France differs on abortion]

Part of the answer is that they already made a concession on the pension age, and not so long ago. In 2010, the right-wing government of President Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded in raising it from 60 to 62—despite fierce street protests. Another age hike faces even more determined opposition.

The larger picture, though, is that the French have their own distinct conception of work and retirement, which is still winning. As an American, I find their perspective both jarring and refreshing. It deserves a hearing among those of us who don’t often encounter it, and probably don’t agree with it.   

Although France is a successful capitalist country, its population is skeptical of unimpeded free markets. In a 2019 national poll, about two-thirds of respondents said they had a “pretty bad” or “very bad” opinion of capitalism. France’s once-powerful Communist Party is now a minor political player, but it was in a government coalition as recently as the late 1990s and retains some presence—the party still counts about a dozen deputies in the National Assembly and hundreds of mayors, mostly of small cities.

Amid the skepticism about market economics lies a broader French tendency to frame political issues as a battle between owners and employees. That’s especially prevalent among sympathizers of both the far left and the far right, which, combined, won 45 percent in the first round of last year’s presidential vote. In that 2019 opinion survey, 81 percent of far-left voters held negative views of capitalism, and 72 percent of far-right voters did.

The fiery politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who heads the far-left party La France Insoumise, has called for France to lower its retirement age back to 60. When the billionaire businessman Elon Musk tweeted his support for Macron’s pension reform last week, Mélenchon retorted: “Choose your side. Capital or labor.”

Billionaires like Musk get some flak in the U.S., of course. But when my kids were learning to read, American friends sent them admiring children’s biographies of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. In 2016, the U.S. made a would-be billionaire its president—we tend to see entrepreneurs as aspirational figures who have earned their loot.  

In France, however, the well-off and their perceived allies are the villains. Hence Mr. Monopoly. In a 2020 national poll, 82 percent of those surveyed said rich people were not well regarded, mostly because of the perception that they try to avoid taxes.

Macron himself is pejoratively called the “president of the rich” because of his nearly four-year stint at a French investment bank. Then practically his first act as president in 2017 was to abolish the “wealth tax,” an annual fee on net assets above 1.3 million euros ($1.4 million)—a move meant to encourage rich people to return to France. (He in fact replaced the old tax with a new one on real-estate holdings with a net value above 1.3 million euros, but that got far less press.)

[Read: Macron shouldn’t misinterpret his mandate]

Macron soon also signed a law that made it easier for companies to fire people—and did not help his cause when, shortly afterward, he told an unemployed gardener that he need only “cross the street” to find a job in a hotel, café, or restaurant. A French TV show then tracked the young man as he crossed lots of streets and failed to find a job. (In Macron’s defense, unemployment in France has fallen since then.)

The protesters’ other main target at last week’s march was Bernard Arnault, head of the French luxury-goods conglomerate LVMH and currently the world’s richest man, having relieved the Twitter-distracted Musk of that title. My retirement will be fine read one mock quote on another protester’s sign, next to Arnault’s picture. It might as well have said Let them eat cake.

In the pension debate, all of this translates into a belief that the government wants workers to absorb the pain, while sparing the wealthy. “The money is there; it just always goes to the same people,” said a 40-year-old nurse I spoke with at the demonstration. He argued that France could easily pay for the pensions “by balancing out the money between the more and less rich.”

“There’s an idea that the changes should be made exclusively to the detriment of workers,” says Dominique Méda, a sociology professor at Paris Dauphine–PSL University who studies attitudes toward work. “This is all happening amid the announcement of enormous dividends and the crazy rise in the fortunes of billionaires. It makes people angry.”

Another factor, she says, is the workplace culture in France: Many people enter jobs expecting to be useful and find personal satisfaction, but according to her research, “employees too often say that they don’t serve any purpose, that they’re invisible, they’re pawns. And for many, this obviously explains their desire to quit working as quickly as possible.”

Their solution is to band together against another authority, the state. Last week’s march and nationwide strike—the largest of Macron’s tenure—unusually united all of France’s major trade unions.

The protesters seemed disgruntled with their lot, but when I told a group of them that I’m American, they gasped and said Oh, là là.

“I would never go live there, absolutely not,” said another nurse, a 47-year-old mother of three. “We Europeans, what we understand is that everything there is based on money, cash. There’s no solidarity. And it’s a shame.” In France, she said, “the guy that gets up in the morning and cleans the streets, we’re grateful to him, too.”

[Read: The case for raising the retirement age]

Some members of the professional class also express solidarité with those in difficult blue-collar jobs. “These workers are the ones that France applauded during COVID,” wrote Cécile Prieur, the executive editor of the center-left news weekly L’Obs, in a recent editorial. “They’re also the ones with among the lowest life expectancies, who thus lose any real chance to enjoy a long retirement, in good health.” Everyone deserves “the elementary justice of a decent retirement,” she concluded.

In fact, the math of a 25-year pension does not necessarily favor the retirement-age hawks. The state currently spends 14 percent of GDP on public-sector pensions, compared with the 7 percent, on average, spent by other rich countries, according to the OECD. But a 2022 report by a government advisory group forecasts that, as France’s economy grows in the coming decades, the percentage of government spending on pensions won’t need to increase much, and will eventually stabilize or even decline.

The French have not always had such high hopes for their retirement. In the 1960s, stopping work was considered a “social death,” wrote Vincent Caradec, a French sociologist who studies aging. Most workers at the time were men, who generally retired at age 65, then died at 70.  

That began to change when, in 1982, the Socialist President François Mitterrand lowered the retirement age from 65 to 60. By the late 1990s, the nature of employment and life expectancy had changed so much that many people could expect 20-year stretches after they stopped working. This brought the idea that retirement should be a time of personal fulfillment and self-actualization—the so-called third age of life. (The whole phenomenon led the French journalist Danièle Laufer to write a book about the identity crisis some suffer when, after idealizing what retirement will be like, they suddenly face the reality of all that free time. “I compare it to the crisis of adolescence,” she says.)

A long retirement for all came to be seen as a basic right and a fact of life. French seniors are everywhere in Paris: roaming museums and supermarkets at midday, and hosting their grandchildren for week-long school holidays. “We’re very attached to our social model,” says Méda, the sociologist.

That sentiment was on display at the march, where a protester held a placard warning Métro, boulot, caveau, or “Train, work, tomb,” a mordant play on the French expression Métro, boulot, dodo, about the daily grind: “Train, work, sleep.” I passed a young woman holding a cheeky sign demanding retirement at age 20: We need time to screw!

They mostly have it already. Although the headline retirement age here is 62, most French people retire just over a year earlier. Some have lost jobs in their 50s, can’t get rehired, and drop out of the labor market entirely (raising the retirement age would be an extra burden for them, after their unemployment benefits run out). Others belong to so-called special-regime categories of workers, which include air-traffic controllers, priests, ballet dancers, and others, who are allowed to get their pensions much earlier.

All of this entitlement doesn’t seem excessive to the French. On the contrary, they regard it as civilized and humane. For all the system’s deficits and failings, the French believe that they have something precious and that “national solidarity,” as they call it, requires them to assemble in its defense. “For health, for education, for retirement, we know that we’re privileged and we want to protect this,” explained another nurse, aged 56.  

All of the opposition has already softened the government’s position. Macron initially wanted to raise the retirement age to 65. A minister, Gabriel Attal, said this week that he’s open to suggestions for how to “enrich” the government’s proposal, and tried to claim the “national solidarity” mantle himself by saying the reforms are meant “to save our system” and, above all, benefit “those who toil.” (He told this to Le Parisien, a daily newspaper owned by Arnault’s LVMH.)

The government plans to send the measure to the National Assembly in early February, and it could go to a vote before the end of April. If that fails, Macron might try to push his plan through by presidential decree.

Meanwhile, the labor unions that organized last week’s march and strike plan to hold another national shutdown on January 31.

Oh, là là.

Tesla is expected to report record earnings after the bell Wednesday, but it might not be enough to satisfy anxious investors.

Lisa Marie Presley died unexpectedly earlier this month, and within hours, lacking any evidence, Twitter users were suggesting that her death had been caused by the COVID-19 vaccine.  

The Twitter account @DiedSuddenly_, which has about 250,000 followers, also started tweeting about it immediately, using the hashtag #DiedSuddenly. Over the past several months, news stories about any kind of sudden death or grave injury—including the death of the sports journalist Grant Wahl and the sudden collapse of the Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin—have been met with a similar reaction from anti-vaccine activists. Though most of the incidents had obvious explanations and almost certainly no connection to the vaccine, which has an extremely remote risk of causing heart inflammation—much smaller than the risk from COVID-19 itself—the idea that the shots are causing mass death has been boosted by right-wing media figures and a handful of well-known professional athletes.

They are supported by a recent video, Died Suddenly, that bills itself as “the documentary film of a generation.” The hour-long movie has spread unchecked on Rumble, a moderation-averse video-streaming platform, and Twitter, which abandoned its COVID-misinformation policy two days after the film premiered in November. It puts forth the familiar conspiracy theory that the vaccines were engineered as a form of population control, illustrated by stomach-turning footage of funeral directors and embalmers removing “white fibrous clots” that “look like calamari” from the corpses of people who have purportedly been vaccinated against COVID-19. (There are also some clips of Lee Harvey Oswald and the moon landing, for unclear reasons.)

Died Suddenly has been viewed nearly 20 million times and cheered on by far-right personalities such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens. It was released by the Stew Peters Network, whose other videos on Rumble have titles like “Obama Formed Shadow Government BEFORE Plandemic” and “AIRPORTS SHUT DOWN FOR EVERYONE BUT JEWS!” And its creators are already asking for donations to fund a sequel, Died Suddenly 2, which promises to explore “deeper rabbit holes.” (Nicholas Stumphauzer, one of the film’s directors, did not respond to questions, other than to say that the production team was motivated by a desire to "stop the globalist death cult.")

[Read: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

As a meme, “died suddenly” could last a long time—possibly indefinitely. People will always be dying suddenly, so it will always be possible to redeploy it and capture further attention. What’s more, there is a thriving alt-tech ecosystem that can circulate the meme; a whole cohort of right-wing, anti-vaccine influencers and celebrities who can amplify it; and, crucially, a basically unmoderated mainstream social-media platform that can put it in front of hundreds of millions of users—some of whom will make fun of it, but others of whom will start to see something unsettling and credible in its repetitions.

What is most startling about the Died Suddenly documentary is not its argument, but the way that people are watching it. “#DiedSuddenly is the first movie to premiere on Twitter since your friendly takeover,” the official Died Suddenly account, @DiedSuddenly_, tweeted at Elon Musk. The account has a blue checkmark next to it—a symbol that used to indicate some kind of trustworthiness but now indicates a willingness to pay a monthly fee. When @DiedSuddenly_ first uploaded the movie in full on Twitter, it was labeled as misleading, in accordance with the COVID-19-misinformation policies that were then in place on the site. But this label was soon removed, on November 23, the same day that Twitter stopped enforcing rules about COVID-19 misinformation—including posts stating that the vaccines intentionally cause mass death.

Twitter, like many platforms, has spent the past decade refining its content-moderation policies. Now it is randomly throwing them out. Jing Zeng, a researcher at the University of Zurich, began her work on Twitter and conspiracy theories in 2018, and she noted a major transformation in response to the pandemic and the rise of QAnon. “Especially since the start of COVID, Twitter had been active in deplatforming conspiracy-theory-related accounts,” she told me. A lot of conspiracy theorists moved to fringe sites where they had trouble rebuilding the huge audiences they’d had on Twitter. But now their time in the desert may be over. “Twitter under Elon Musk has been giving signals to the communities of conspiracy theorists that Twitter’s door might be open to them again,” Zeng said.

The anti-vaccine movement is always poised to take advantage of such opportunities. Absent any moderation on Twitter, anti-vaxxers are once again free to experiment wildly with their messaging, according to Tamar Ginossar, a health-communication professor at the University of New Mexico who published a paper earlier in the pandemic about how vaccine-related content traveled on Twitter and YouTube. “Enough people are sharing this and enough content is being made that it’s taking off,” she told me.

In just a few months, the #DiedSuddenly meme has become a presence on most major social platforms, including Instagram and Facebook. At the end of 2022, researchers and reporters pointed to large Facebook groups dedicated to “Died Suddenly News.” Last week, I was able to join a community that was created in October and had more than 34,000 members. They referred to themselves as “pure bloods” and to vaccines as “cookies” or “cupcakes,” and alternated between mourning “sudden deaths” and gloating about them. And they had been careful to evade detection by Facebook’s automated content-moderation systems: Group administrators asked them to write about “de@ths and injury from the c0v1d sh0ts” and “disguise ALL words that have any medical meaning.” (Facebook removed the group after I inquired about it.)

But “died suddenly” thrives on Twitter. Tweets referencing news stories about unexpected deaths can be flooded with replies trumpeting the conspiracy theory, which go unmoderated. It’s a radical change from the earlier years of the pandemic, during which Twitter implemented new policies against health misinformation and updated them regularly, gradually finessing the wording and clarifying how the company assessed misleading information. These policies and the tactics used to enforce them tightened as the pandemic went on. According to a transparency report the company published in July 2022, Twitter suspended significantly more accounts and removed far more content during the vaccine rollout than during the earliest months of the pandemic, when various groups first expressed concern about dangerous misinformation spreading online.

This isn’t to say that Twitter’s policies were perfect. Journalists, politicians, and medical experts all had issues with how the site moderated content in the pandemic’s first two years. But from 2020 on, parties who were interested in the challenges of moderating health information were able to have a fairly nuanced debate about how well Twitter was doing with this super-convoluted task, and how it might improve. In 2020, a sea-change year for content moderation across the social web, major platforms were pushed by activists, politicians, and regular users to do more than they had ever done before. That year saw the proliferation of election disinformation and Donald Trump’s leadership of a violent, anti-democracy meme army, as well as nationwide protests in support of social justice whose reach extended to the practices of internet companies. And there was a backlash in response: Aggrieved right-wing influencers bemoaned the rise of censorship and the end of free speech; commentators with bad opinions about vaccines or other public-health measures got booted off Twitter and wound up on Substack, where they talked about getting booted off Twitter.

Now we’re in a reactionary moment in the history of content moderation. The alt-tech ecosystem expanded with the launch of Trump’s Truth Social and the return of Parler; the Died Suddenly filmmakers were recently interviewed for a program exclusive to Frank, the supposed free speech platform created by the MyPillow founder and conspiracy-theory promoter Mike Lindell. Some of the alt-tech platforms, including Rumble, saw significant growth by openly marketing themselves as anti-moderation. As I wrote at the end of last year, Rumble grew from 1 million monthly average users in 2020 to 36 million in the third quarter of 2021. The platform used to market itself as a “clean” alternative to YouTube, but its CEO now talks about its aversion to “cancel culture” and its goal of “restoring” the internet “to its roots” by eliminating content guidelines.

And Twitter is backsliding, led by a CEO who has delighted in sharing company documents with critics who held the old COVID-19 policies in disdain. In the “Died Suddenly” Facebook group I joined, commenters praised Musk’s version of the site. “Sign up for Twitter,” one wrote. Those questioning the vaccines used to be “censored earlier by the old Twitter nazis,” but now there is “FREE SPEECH.” “If you want TRUE information … get off Facebook and get on Twitter,” another posted before the group was shut down.

Earlier in the pandemic, researchers like Zeng were concerned about “dark platforms” such as 8kun or Gab, and how their wacky, dangerous ideas about COVID-19 could leech onto mainstream platforms. But now? The difference between alt and mainstream is getting slimmer.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk took the stand again on Monday morning in a California courtroom to testify for a second day in the lawsuit over his controversial "funding secured" tweet from 2018.

Mastodon has seen a huge influx of users since Elon Musk took over Twitter. Founder Eugen Rochko tells "Nightcap's" Jon Sarlin things have been chaotic, since he's the only full-time employee managing a platform that now has more than 1 million active users. And his message to Elon Musk? Get off the internet

Noora Alsaeed has often thought about building a snowman on Mars.

Let’s go over that again. A snowman on Mars? That desertlike, desolate planet over there? The one covered in sand? What an unusual daydream.

But Alsaeed knows a few things that the rest of us don’t. She is a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder whose work relies on data from a NASA spacecraft that orbits Mars. She studies the red planet’s polar regions and the peculiar molecules suspended in the atmosphere above them. She knows that on Mars, it snows.

Just like Earth, Mars has seasons, and during the winter—about twice as long as ours—icy crystals cascade from the clouds and accumulate on the frigid surface. This sounds unbelievable, given that Mars is notoriously dry. But Mars gets around that little technicality by substituting intricate, six-sided water snow for something else. The Martian atmosphere, many times thinner than Earth’s, is primarily composed of carbon dioxide. In the most bitter conditions, the carbon dioxide transforms from a gas into small, cube-shaped crystals of ice—specifically dry ice, the kind we earthlings use to set a spooky scene on Halloween. The ice is too heavy to remain in the Martian sky, so it flurries down, settling in shallow piles on the red planet.

Mars is the planet that, aside from Earth, has likely made the largest impression on the public imagination. We’re well acquainted with Mars as the planet with all the rovers, the place where Elon Musk wants people to make a second home, the obvious next destination now that humans have been to the moon. But under all that hype are subtler, downright fascinating details about the fourth planet from the sun, such as its mesmerizing soundscape and its richly textured rock formations, layered like mille-feuille. Carbon-dioxide snow is just one of Mars’s many curiosities.

Scientists began to suspect that Mars’s polar regions could become cold enough to turn carbon dioxide into snow as early as the 1800s, Paul Hayne, a planetary scientist at CU Boulder who studies Martian snowfall, told me. A NASA mission in the 1970s made observations that would later be interpreted as the first signs of carbon-dioxide snowfall. In 2008, a spacecraft that landed in Mars’s northern plains detected evidence of snow—the water-ice kind!—falling from the atmosphere. But there was no evidence that the water snow actually reached the ground; the air on Mars is so thin and cold that the water sublimates into a gas before the crystals can touch the surface.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling Mars for more than 15 years, has captured carbon-dioxide snow reaching the surface, though. (Scientists don’t have photographic or video evidence of carbon-dioxide snowfall, only detections made with laser technology and observations in wavelengths that are invisible to our eyes. “Since most of the snow on Mars falls in the darkness of polar night, we need to use wavelengths of radiation outside of the visible spectrum,” Hayne said.) The snow even accumulates, mostly near sloped areas such as cliff sides and crater edges, Sylvain Piqueux, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who studies Mars, told me. He said that enough of it piles up to—hypothetically—snowshoe in.

That idea tickles the imagination. What might it be like to stand on the Martian surface in the middle of winter, the temperatures finally cold enough to loose some molecules from the sky? Snowfall occurs only during the cold Martian night, so if you brought some night-vision goggles, you’d see that you were enveloped in a bright haze. Carbon-dioxide snowflakes are tiny, smaller than the width of a strand of hair—much smaller than their six-sided, water-ice counterparts. “It wouldn’t look as magical as it does on Earth,” Alsaeed said.

But a Martian blizzard would be lovely in its own way. “It would be extraordinarily quiet,” Hayne said. You might even be able to catch the sound of little carbon-dioxide snow-cubes falling onto the ground. A gust of wind could kick up “an opaque column of glittering snow,” he said. “Glittering” and “snow”—two words that may reshape your mental picture of Mars.

So if astronauts could, in theory, snowshoe on the red planet, what else could they do? Skiing is likely out, Hayne said. “Part of what makes skiing possible on Earth is that a thin film of liquid water forms on the surfaces of the ice particles as your ski creates friction, lubricating your motion,” he said. On Mars, that friction would cause icy particles to turn into vapor and billow away, which “would probably make your skis a bit squirrelly.”

The experts don’t really know whether other classic winter activities could take place on Mars. “The idea of dealing with snow that’s made of CO2 is just so alien to me,” Alsaeed said. “It’s gonna be a completely different ball game.” Piqueux isn’t sure whether carbon-dioxide snow would clump enough to form a snowball, let alone a snowman; dry ice is not exactly a chemical enigma, but how the stuff behaves under Martian conditions is more mysterious, he said. At the very least, you might manage a snow angel. And as for opening your mouth wide to catch a cube-shaped snowflake? “You can’t stick your tongue out on Mars, ever!” Hayne said. (Sorry, I had to ask!)

There is much to learn. “Snow might be a universal process for [worlds] with an atmosphere,” Piqueux said. “Learning how it works might tell us quite a bit about planets—what shapes their surface, how they evolve, and what they look like.” Scientists theorize that Mars was more like Earth a few billion years ago—warm and balmy, with real lakes and seas. Perhaps it snowed more back then too, with chunky flakes of frozen water, and the influence of that ancient precipitation remains embedded at the planet’s poles.

Many decades ago, well before any space robots arrived on Mars, scientists imagined the red planet to be a bustling place, believing that the surface markings they saw through their telescopes were evidence of intelligent engineering. The astronomer Percival Lowell wrote at length about these markings, which he called canals, in The Atlantic in 1895, sparking in the public imagination the tantalizing promise of an inhabited Mars. That ended up not being the case: Any life that may have arisen on Mars is either long dead or hiding out of view, buried away from the glare of the sun. The dissimilarity to Earth was almost disappointing.

But still, there are familiar echoes, as Lowell himself recognized. “If astronomy teaches anything, it teaches that man is but a detail in the evolution of the universe, and that resemblant though diverse details are inevitably to be expected in the host of orbs around him,” he wrote. “He learns that though he will probably never find his double anywhere, he is destined to discover any number of cousins scattered through space.” Cousins like Martian snow—perhaps not enough to make a genuine snowman, but certainly enough to stir our imagination from millions of miles away.

A nine-person jury was selected Tuesday to hear a trial that will determine whether Tesla CEO Elon Musk cheated investors with tweets in 2018 saying that he had lined up financing to take the electric automaker private.

While Tesla has withered since Musk embarked on his takeover of Twitter, SpaceX is flourishing.