It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words I’d first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexicon—words like fascism, global pandemic, and ecological disaster—then settled, with alarming speed, into the static of how things are, I have often felt dizzy and uncertain of how to live. I have felt, as the writer Eileen Chang once wrote, like my everyday life “is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree.”

Sometimes I have consoled myself with what feels like the exceptionalism of our present instability. Has the pace of change—social, political, ecological, technological—ever moved with such hallucinatory, destructive intensity? But this consolation doesn’t reach the more urgent question: While I am being hurled into the scary future, what am I supposed to do about breakfast, and vacuuming, and laundry? When I feel caught like this, between the tidal tug of the times and the calls of my small but pressing life, reading a writer like Chang is what brings me true comfort.

Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang, became a literary wunderkind in her native Shanghai for her stylish and slyly observant stories of city love affairs and romances—“some of the trivial things that happen between men and women,” as she put it, with characteristic understatement—before falling into obscurity after the 1949 Revolution, when she and her work were no longer welcome in mainland China. She was later rediscovered by Taiwanese and Hong Kong readers.

The facts of her historical era serve a healthy dose of humility to my own sense of contemporary tumult: As Chang was coming of age, competing warlords were still trampling the grave of the Qing dynasty. China was fighting the invading Japanese while also embroiled in a civil war. Mao’s Communist rebels were marching steadily in the provinces, preparing to overturn everything. Elsewhere, World War II was raging. All of this historical noise flickers in the background of Chang’s writing—and if you look closely, informs its very core—but somehow, her eye remains determinedly trained on the individual human life, catching and examining those fluttering bits of reality that the tides of history threaten to wash away. A new edition of her early essays, Written on Water, translated by Andrew F. Jones (and edited by Jones and Nicole Huang), captures Chang’s irreverent voice and her stubborn everyday sensibility. This sensibility, powered by a modest humanism and formed by a subtle and heartbreaking discipline, has become my manual for surviving history.

In 1944, when Written on Water was first published, Shanghai was a city of commerce and fashion and unwilling political entanglement. China’s most cosmopolitan city because it was chopped up for foreign concessions after the first Opium War, Shanghai to this day has a reputation for “mean” and savvy people who know “how to fish in troubled waters,” as Chang wrote. Like many Shanghainese, Chang herself was a “traditional Chinese [person] tempered by the high pressure of modern life,” one of many “misshapen products” of a place where so many ideologies, cultures, and trends met and clashed and melded.

Her life, too, was misshapen by the wild instability of her time. In “Whispers,” Chang divulges that her father, once a favored aristocrat in the Qing dynasty court, was an opium addict who ruled dictatorially over his wife, concubines, and children. Once, he punished Chang by locking her in a room for months, refusing her medical treatment even when she got dysentery; only with the help of a servant did she escape that room, and that household, one “cold bitter” night. Her mother, a bourgeois woman who preferred all things European, left Chang with her father for years at a time while she traveled. Later, when Chang was a student at the University of Hong Kong, the arrival of Japanese bombers cut her studies short, forcing her to return to Shanghai. She was only in Hong Kong at all because the world war had made university in London an impossibility.

But what is captured in these essays is not Chang’s life so much as her way of living and seeing. These are dashes of vivid observation, sketches of whatever Chang happens to want to write about: movies, money, her friends’ favorite sayings. Take “On Carrots,” a two-paragraph transcription of a memory her aunt once recounted over a meal of turnip soup, about Granny feeding carrots to the pet cricket, which Chang thought a “stylish little essay.” Or “Under an Umbrella,” a bite-size riff on a rainy day that doubles as a parable about class. “Those who don’t have an umbrella press against those who do, squeezing beneath the edges of passing umbrellas to avoid the rain,” she writes. “But the water cascading from the umbrellas turns out to be worse than the rain itself and the people squeezed between umbrellas are soaked to the skin.” Her crisp moral? “When poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.”

Then there is the structurally fascinating “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” which follows the writer step by step on a walk to the vegetable market. Chang describes in fastidious detail the interesting people she passes on her way, as if transcribing one of the lively character drawings interspersed throughout the book (“a tangerine seller,” “a Taoist monk,” “a servant woman”). Then she goes home, writes a poem, and the essay—and the book—ends.

Written on Water evokes a lyric Chinese conception of ephemerality while also alluding to Keats (his gravestone reads “Whose name was writ in water”). As Huang writes in an afterword, the title came to Chang in English first. But for me, it can’t capture the barbed playfulness of the Chinese, 流言 (Liu Yan), which translates to “flowing words” but also means “gossip.” Indeed, Chang relished any occasion to take a “stealthy glance at one another’s private lives.” She declared, “The secrets of everyday life must be made public at least once a year.” She thought literature should “plainly sing in praise of the placid.” She preferred the “noise and clatter” of city streets to “rousing” symphonies. She wished historians would write more about “irrelevant trivialities.”

With this assertion, she opens “From the Ashes,” her account of the Battle of Hong Kong, Japan’s December 1941 attack on the then–British colony. In the essay, Chang recalls surviving weeks of shelling and unhappily volunteering as a makeshift nurse. But what she foregrounds is a string of almost devastatingly flippant observations: the “wealthy overseas Chinese” dorm mate who’d packed clothes for dances and dinner parties but didn’t know what to wear for a war; “hardy” Evelyn who stuffed herself with more rice than ever while rations ran out, and then got constipated; defiant Yanying—“the only one of my classmates who had any guts”—who left the basement to take a bath, singing even as a stray bullet shattered the window. These anecdotes are told with amusement and some gentle mocking, but also with admiration: Here are people who, in a literal war zone, insisted on the small pleasures of living.

Chang defended her trivial stories against those who might wish them more heroic. Ordinary people going about their lives, falling in love, and acting on petty fancies might not make a “monument to an era,” but, she wrote, “people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution.” Chang had no desire to write about “supermen,” who “are born of specific epochs.” Why, when the “eternal”—the grist of daily life that is the only true stability—was right there? She understood the contradiction in her belief: that although everyday life is fundamentally “precarious,” “subject at regular intervals to destruction,” it is also the material from which springs the truly human, and the divine. (Also: “Chest-pounding, wildly gesticulating heroes are annoying.”)

[Read: Great sex in the time of war]

I read in Chang’s determined apolitical gaze a transgressive, feminine ethos. For a great deal of history—and still, amazingly, today—men have shaped epochs, with their empires and conquests. Meanwhile, women have sustained the reality that is accrued in days: going to the market, mending garments, cooking and cleaning, carrying and caring for the people who are coming next. In “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” Chang documents the passing fashion fads—collars rising then disappearing, necklines going from square to round to heart-shaped—as “warlords came and went.” Chang loved clothes and designed many of her own. Fashion is decidedly trivial, and Chang’s interest in it is a powerful aspect of her “misshapen” morality, one way of insisting on something minorly meaningful in a world of constantly shifting values. Buffeted from place to place by war, Chang could control little of her external circumstances, but she could decide, every day, what to wear.

“Each of us lives inside our own clothes,” she writes. We live inside our clothes; we live inside our days. Imagined as a container for life itself, the vanities of fashion gain urgent moral significance. In this light, the dullness of menswear can be seen as a form of depravity: “If men were more interested in clothing,” Chang writes, they might be “a bit less inclined to use various schemes and stratagems to attract the attention and admiration of society and sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the people in the process of securing their own prestige.” Think of the uniforms of men like Steve Jobs or Mao Zedong, who preferred to preserve the energy it took to dress for accomplishing what Chang called “earth-shattering deeds.” Chang was already famous when she published this book, but she distances her writing from this epic realm, comparing herself instead to a child running home from school, eager to gab about everything she’s seen to any available adult.

Can seeing be an ethic, a way we choose to live? For Chang, it was also a way to continue living. To fix a gaze is also to find something—anything—to hold on to amid terror and chaos. In “Seeing With the Streets,” Chang teaches us how to see the reality that can be irrevocably disrupted by history. She walks through the city, observing the displays of shop windows, passing through the smoke and scents of street vendors, and noticing the usual people and things, before a military blockade brings her walk and day to a halt. Everyday life is eternal; in war, the eternal is in grave danger.

Behind Chang’s knowing irony, I hear a desperate urgency. I hear the rapt attention of someone who loves her world and sees that it is disappearing. I hear: What you treasure, however silly, might not be here tomorrow. Chang wrote like the devil was chasing her. It is as if she knew that when the era she lived in reached its culmination, there might no longer be a place for someone like her—a writer between nations, epochs, and ideologies—“in the barren wastes of the future.” “Hurry! Hurry!” she wrote. Hurry to capture reality, as closely as possible; hurry, hold on to it and keep it. Then you might have it for tomorrow, to turn over in your hand, for just a little pleasure, a little amusement, a little laugh, even after it is no longer real.

The European tourism sector looks set for another bumper year, the inaugural Destination Europe Summit in Brussels told.

In the spring of 2018, I received a Facebook-friend request from an imposter—someone pretending to be my father. At least, that’s what I thought. The profile used my dad’s photos, but his name was spelled incorrectly. I reported it and went on with my life.

Less than a month later, my dad was diagnosed with dementia. At first, my sister and I didn’t think much about his social-media use; we were busy worrying about his new tendency to elope—the term for when dementia patients wander away from their confines or, driven by anxiety or confusion, attempt to escape. (Once, he stole back the car keys we had hidden to keep him from driving off; twice, he simply bought a new car.) But then we noticed his Facebook profile. Though it was the one he’d long been using, with his name spelled correctly, he’d been sending odd messages, starting seemingly random group chats, and sharing the same thing over and over. One day, he posted three different memes three times each and three others six times each, all within the same hour. We realized the fake profile had, in fact, been very real—it was an additional account my father had made by mistake. It had only been the start.

My father’s cognitive decline had an audience of almost everyone we knew, many of whom didn’t know about his diagnosis. Were his friends confused or worried? we wondered. More important: Would the clear-minded version of him who existed before his dementia want to appear this way online? We didn’t think so. Yet the one who existed right in front of us wanted connection, and he seemed to be pulled to social media. And the more he reached out to people—however strangely, purposefully or not—the more we realized that his reality didn’t need to be concealed.

[Read: How people with dementia make sense of the world]

When my dad joined Facebook, almost a decade before his dementia diagnosis, he wasn’t impressed with the platform. I remember him commenting on a status I had posted, to my embarrassment: “Facebook seems like a huge waste of time.” Eventually, though, he discovered friends with whom he’d gone to high school in Beirut. He hadn’t connected with them in years, and they were scattered across the world—but now he could interact with them.

Then, in 2018, he began forgetting things. “Where are you two going?” he asked one day as I grabbed my mother’s purse from the living room. “Mom has a doctor’s appointment,” I said. A few minutes later, when I rolled her wheelchair into the living room to go pull up the car, he looked at us, surprised. “Where are you two going?”  

In the last six months of his life, dementia made my father deeply anxious and afraid to be alone. If I told him I was going for a 20-minute walk, he’d panic and call me five minutes later. One evening, after I’d spent the whole day caring for him and my mom, who was also terminally ill, I was desperate to pass out in my bed for just a few hours—but he wanted me to sleep on the sofa in his room. All night, he kept the lights and the TV on, pressing buttons to move his power recliner every five minutes. He’d always been the most independent person I knew, but now he couldn’t sit still or pass the night without company.

That sense of restlessness is common for people with dementia. They often have the feeling of wanting to go home even when they are home, which is one reason they might elope. And the feeling of loneliness, too, is not unusual; even those who aren’t physically isolated in care facilities probably struggle to keep up with friends. The pandemic, which began roughly two years after my dad’s diagnosis, didn’t help. Studies suggest that social-distancing restrictions took a major toll on many people with dementia.

[Read: What if this was the last year your loved one was lucid?]

My father’s social-media use reflected his constant state of agitation. He’d ping me endlessly on Facebook—often sending repeated chain-message-type warnings, like one cautioning that women had died after inhaling a free perfume sample they’d received in the mail. But his frenetic posting also seemed to soothe him in real life; it gave him an outlet for his nervous energy, and a sense of being linked to other people.

Still, I felt anxious about his more public online activity. Some people reacted with bewilderment; on one post, a friend from Beirut wrote, “Too confusing. Incomplete sentences.” It would have taken too much effort to privately and tactfully alert every one of his friends of his situation. So we just let him continue to use social media, assuming that people would eventually ignore his posts.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, people seemed to recognize that he wasn’t well. And instead of disappearing, they were mostly just concerned, and loving, and glad to still be connected to him. Once, about a month before my dad died, he video-called me through Facebook—something he had never done before, so I could tell it was a mistake. “I know you didn’t mean to, but I’m glad you called,” I said. “Did you know you added six other people to this call?” He didn’t. “Well,” I told him, “we might have some visitors joining.”

One friend joined from North Carolina and talked with him for a few minutes. Before he hung up, he shared how much my dad meant to him. Then a friend who was driving through the mountains of Lebanon joined. “I love this man. I love your dad,” he said. “He’s like a father to me.” My dad still had faint bruises on his face from a fall on concrete a few weeks earlier, after which he’d had to get staples in his head. “It’s good to see that you’re doing better,” his friend said. He never would have seen this had my father not accidentally called.

[Read: How dementia locks people inside their pain]

Another time, I found that my dad had created a large group message. Because he was a natural-born leader—president of every group he’d ever joined—and categorically outspoken, the 50 or so people added, most of whom did not know he had dementia, were waiting to see what he had to say. The chat consisted of his friends in Beirut, friends living in other Middle Eastern or European countries, and friends across the United States—from Georgia, Michigan, Tennessee. I was anxious about what he might send.

But after several hours with no word from my dad, someone in the group sent a wave. Other members, not knowing one another, followed suit. Eventually, if I scrolled down, there were tens of people in this newly formed group, just quietly saying hello. I think often about that chat, which still exists, however inactive—a whole network of friends, waving forever.

Dementia patients are so often hidden, whether in facilities away from their communities or more subtly—by people like me, keeping private the thoughts and behaviors of our loved ones that make us uncomfortable. That impulse, I believe, is often well intentioned; we just don’t know what people will think. Perhaps we also don’t want to tarnish the image of our loved one that members of their circle once had. But watching my dad’s friends react to his online activity, I realized I should have had a little more faith in their care for him, and the persistence of that care even when he didn’t seem like himself anymore.

And while my dad’s social-media use revealed how profoundly he had changed, it also gave me glimpses of my old father, still there, somewhere within him. The last Facebook status he wrote before entering the hospital for the very last time read “Bravo air fryer” with a 1-800 number. He’d seen the product advertised on TV, and posted the number when he meant to just write it down. Though he’d once loved to cook—he’d even briefly owned and run a restaurant—he hadn’t been able to in at least a year. “What am I still living for?” he’d recently asked as I was putting his shirt and shoes on him; he could only walk a few steps with his walker before feeling exhausted.

He’d lost so much of what gave him a sense of identity. And yet, that post made me realize that he hadn’t lost all of it. My dad was still my dad. He wanted to air-fry something.

Liked coalition governments? Wait until you hear about coalitions of coalitions

More than 25 tonnes of trafficked eels worth €13 million were seized by Europol.

On Monday, in an 11-minute speech, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the convicted criminal who leads the Wagner mercenary group, reflected on his brief revolt against the Russian government. It was the capstone to a tense and confusing geopolitical crisis—and it took the form of a voice memo on the popular app Telegram, where it was subject to a form of instant feedback. Reviews have been mixed: 155,600 fire emoji to 131,900 clown emoji.

For close followers of the ongoing conflict in Russia and Ukraine, it’s not unusual to see playful reaction emoji sitting just beneath pictures, videos, and text documenting the horrors of war in real time. Since Russia’s invasion, one of the quickest ways to follow the chaos on the ground has been to download Telegram and wade through live updates from citizens, soldiers, and the government—a digital morass of confusing, contradictory information. Just weeks into the Ukraine war, Time proclaimed that the decade-old app was “the digital battle space,” a moniker that held up over the weekend as onlookers used Telegram to try to suss out whether Russia was heading into civil war.

“The RU/UA war is 99% Telegram,” Aric Toler, an investigative journalist for Bellingcat, which has reported extensively on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, told me this week over direct message. “Prigozhin broadcasted, organized, and orchestrated this all from the platform.” The app and individual channels within it—Prigozhin’s has grown to 1.3 million followers since it launched last November—are effectively feeders for the rest of the internet, according to Toler, who monitors, verifies, and reports on Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels: “Almost every bit of information about the war on Twitter, [Instagram, Facebook, and others] is downstream of Telegram.” Many popular accounts on these social platforms merely repackage what they see on Telegram, often using unreliable programs to translate the channels.

Though public download numbers indicate that it has fewer users than chat platforms such as WhatsApp—700 million versus 2 billion every month—Telegram is the communications platform of choice for many activists, crypto scammers, drug dealers, terrorists, extremists, banned influencers, and conspiracy theorists. Because the app is free to download, lightweight, and marketed as privacy-forward and anti-censorship, it attracts people looking to fly under the radar. It’s a theater of war, a clandestine marketplace, and a safe haven for the deplatformed to build their alternative realities, which makes Telegram an excellent fit for the turbulence of the 2020s and perhaps the most important app in the world today.

The brainchild of brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, Telegram shares the techno-libertarian sensibilities of its creators, especially its CEO, Pavel. The brothers, who founded a popular Russian social network, VKontakte, launched Telegram around the time Kremlin allies took over the platform. Pavel Durov told The New York Times in 2014 that Telegram was conceived out of a desire to have a free and secure communications platform out of the hands of the Russian state. Since its inception, Durov, known for his nomadic lifestyle and for posting cryptic philosophical messages and shirtless pictures of himself on Instagram, has positioned Telegram as a staunch anti-surveillance tool and rebuffed critics who have argued that the platform offers organization and communication abilities to dangerous groups.

[Read: How Ivermectin became a belief system]

“Our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism,” he told a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2015, arguing that ISIS, which used Telegram to claim responsibility for or plan numerous attacks in Europe, “will always find [another] way to communicate.” Durov has touted Telegram’s capacity to act as a form of digital resistance and has publicly fought Russian efforts to view encrypted messages on the platform. And the app has indeed been crucial in nations such as Belarus, where it was used for 2020 election protests, and in China last year during the COVID-lockdown demonstrations.

It’s not just that Telegram offers end-to-end encryption, a feature that shields messages from any outside party that would seek to access them, and one that many tech companies, including Apple and Meta, support. The app’s leadership also takes a pointedly hands-off approach to content moderation even for public-facing content, aside from illegal pornography and explicit “public calls to violence.” Far-right influencers such as Milo Yiannopoulos and neo-Nazi sympathizers such as Nick Fuentes have kept posting on Telegram even after being deplatformed elsewhere; the app offered these influencers a place to amass fans, spout hateful rhetoric, and solicit donations, all without having to compete for eyeballs in an algorithmic feed. Telegram has also enabled the distribution of shooter manifestos as well as information about manufacturing weapons—in 2020, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks anti-Semitism, declared that Telegram was the “online weapon of choice for [the] violent far-right.” And it was allegedly used by some to coordinate the January 6 insurrection, after which it saw a substantial influx of accounts following conspiracy theorists and election deniers. (Shortly after the attack on the Capitol, Telegram said it removed “dozens” of channels for inciting violence.)

Unmoderated free-for-alls that attract dangerous fringe groups are as old as the internet. What makes Telegram different is both its size and its opacity. Although many channels are easily searchable, a great deal of what goes on inside the platform happens in invite-only channels, making it difficult for academics, journalists, or law enforcement to scrutinize or study. A recent Wired investigation of Telegram’s booming gray market for abortion pills turned up 200 public channels containing 47,000 messages, but trying to understand the scope of the market—who was selling legitimate pharmaceuticals and which organizations were fronts or scams—was nearly impossible for the journalists to untangle. Because of the lack of oversight, Telegram channels are the place where information circulates in private after being banned by bigger platforms, as was the case in 2019, when the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto spread widely in Eastern European countries in the weeks after the attack.

“It’s a Wild West kind of platform where anything can kind of happen, so I think there’s a good case to be made that it’s a perfect place for chaos,” Jared Holt, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who monitors right extremism, told me.

[Read: The three logics of the Prigozhin putsch]

That chaos is most apparent during frenetic news events. Although Telegram is a valuable firsthand resource during breaking news, it’s also a confusion machine. The platform offers verification for public figures, but it is nevertheless flooded with sketchy eyewitness accounts and strategically placed propaganda. In a recent paper, the scholars Mariëlle Wijermars and Tetyana Lokot observed that, during the Belarus-election protests, Telegram’s marketing of the platform as a secure, prodemocratic organizing tool led dissidents “to perceive it as an ally in their struggle against repressions and digital censorship,” prompting them to sign up in droves. Meanwhile, the Belarusian state also took advantage of Telegram’s lack of moderation and anti-censorship rules to co-opt the grassroots efforts of democratic activists, manipulating citizens by disseminating propaganda on state-run Telegram channels.

It feels fitting that millions are witnessing the chaos of the 2020s—a decade so far marked by competing versions of science and reality, pandemics, political corruption, war, and the rise of global authoritarianism—through the window of an app that acts as a force multiplier for the chaos it documents. Ultimately, the platform reveals a fundamental truth about the internet: It is extremely difficult to untangle whether a particular piece of technology is the cause of so much of the chaos of modern life or merely an outgrowth, a symptom of it all. Telegram appears to be a vital resource in a world that feels like it is unraveling, despite being one of the many forces pulling at the seams.

Read more...

England continue their perfect start to the European Under-21 Championship with a 2-0 victory over Germany in their final group game.

The painting Dame mit Fächer (Lady with a Fan) by Austrian artist is most expensive artwork ever auctioned in Europe.

Just two weeks after Manchester City became European champions, the Champions League is back in its last season before a new format.