‘France Is a Catastrophe’: Life in a City Gone Still

Naina Bajekal / Paris

Nov. 14, 2015

After a night of terror and chaos, Parisians found themselves caught between wishing life could go on as normal and fear that the bloodshed was not yet over. The City of Lights ground to a virtual standstill, with the authorities closing schools, museums, libraries, food markets, swimming pools and leisure centers. Security was boosted at city halls across Paris. Sports matches were canceled, many metro lines were shut and Disneyland Paris closed its doors for the first time since it opened in 1992, as the city reeled from the deadliest attack since World War II.

But in the 10th arrondissement, where two of the attacks took place, many cafés and shops were open on Saturday. Dozens of people wandered the streets, their faces fixed in somber defiance of the authorities’ instructions to stay inside for now. It’s a feeling I can understand. I had not been dispatched to Paris on assignment as a journalist. I had come for a weekend away with four friends, and spent Friday wandering cobbled streets in the Marais, eating crepes, sipping coffee and visiting museums.

When the first explosions went off on Friday night, I wasn’t looking at my phone. As we emerged from the metro about a quarter past ten and walked towards the restaurant where we planned to celebrate our friend’s birthday, it was immediately clear that the mood had shifted in the twenty minutes we had spent underground. Paris was not bustling with Friday night revelers but with tense clusters of people on the streets. I glanced at my phone, disoriented, and saw that there were reports of some kind of soccer-related violence at the Stade de France. But the scenes in central Paris told a different story: sirens were wailing nearby and the same words kept echoing on the crowded streets: Charlie Hebdo.

We arrived at the restaurant we had booked for dinner to find it had pulled all its shutters down and looked closed. Paris was under attack, we were told. While the dozen people and staff still in the restaurant tried to carry on as normal, serving dishes and mixing cocktails, my phone began flashing relentlessly with messages flooding TIME’s breaking news chat room. In between courses and clinking glasses, the death toll kept climbing: 18 dead, then 26, then 60. One hundred hostages. Four attacks, then six. Facebook wanted to know if we were safe, sending out an alert I’d only seen people use before during earthquakes. French President François Hollande imposed a state of emergency for the second time since 1961 and required all people entering the country to show documentation. Even taxi-hailing app Uber urged everyone to stay inside.

I had written about terror many times before, but I had never felt it until last night. The apartment we had rented for the weekend was nearly an hour’s walk away from the restaurant. Worse still, it was in the 10th arrondissement, less than a mile from three of the sites we knew to be under attack. Every taxi we saw was occupied, the nearby hotels were full and our cellphones were all so close to being out of battery that we couldn’t effectively search the #PorteOuverte (#OpenDoor) hashtag to find somewhere safe to stay. Stuck in the restaurant, we had no choice but to try and act as though things were okay. After all, unlike so many others, we were safe. “What the terrorists want is for us to be afraid,” each one of us would say from time to time, as if we weren’t. By the time we found a taxi and left the restaurant, it was past 4am. The streets of Paris had emptied and 127 people were dead.

This morning, after a couple of hours of snatched sleep, I joined the crowds gathering at the corner of Rue Bichat to lay flowers and light candles outside Le Petit Cambodge restaurant and Le Carillon bar, where more than a dozen people were killed on Friday night. “I thought I was hearing fireworks,” sobbed one woman, hugging her neighbor. Opposite the bar and restaurant, a long line of people waited for more than two hours to donate blood at the medical center.

On the other side of town, at the Hôpital Universitaire de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, families of people injured in Friday’s attacks huddled together outside the emergency room. “We are still afraid, of course. Always. This is all the fault of President Hollande, he needs to get out of Syria,”” says Christophe, whose wife has just had an operation to remove the shrapnel in her leg after being injured in the explosion by a McDonalds near Stade du France. “I am desperate to see her, the doctors haven’t let me yet,” he says, his eyes filling with tears. Christophe, who asked TIME not to publish his last name, is of Serbian origin but was born and raised in Paris. Once his wife has recovered, he wants to move away with their four-year-old son. “France is a catastrophe.”

Fabien Leroi, 31, agrees that he would no longer feel comfortable bringing his three-month-old baby into central Paris, given what has happened. Leroi has come to visit his colleague, who was shot last night at the Bataclan. “The bullet just missed his liver,” says Leroi, who received news at 5am that his friend was in the hospital. “2015, it’s been a tough year for France.”

http://time.com/4112907/paris-terror-attacks-isis-survivors/

Structure of the lead:

WHO- not given

WHEN- on Friday night

WHAT- Paris was under attack

WHY- not given

WHERE- Paris

HOW- French President François Hollande imposed a state of emergency for the second time since 1961 and required all people entering the country to show documentation.

Keywords:

1.          chaos 混亂

2.          bloodshed 流血事件

3.          somber 昏暗的;憂鬱的

4.          defiance 挑戰;蔑視

5.          disorient 使失去方向;使迷惑

6.          echo 回音

7.          relentlessly 無情

8.          hostage 人質

9.          desperate 情急拼命的;絕望的;危急的

10.        tough 艱苦的

Tourists among 22 killed in apparent attack on Bangkok shrine

By Eliott C. McLaughlin and Kocha Olarn, CNN

August 18, 2015

Bangkok, Thailand (CNN)A huge bomb explosion that appeared to target a popular Hindu shrine in central Bangkok killed at least 22 people Monday and wounded about 120 more, authorities said.

Twelve victims died at the scene, and the others died later at area hospitals, officials said.

"It was like this huge gust of wind and debris flying through you," recalled Sanjeev Vyas, a DJ from Mumbai, India, who was in the middle of the fray. "... And then I see bodies everywhere, there are cars on fire, there are bikes everywhere. People are screaming."

Police spokesman Lt. Gen. Prawut Thavornsiri Tuesday morning told Channel 3 that at least 22 people had been killed, marking the latest incremental uptick in the death toll.

Foreigners are among the casualties, with the Erawan Emergency Center saying that a Filipino and Chinese citizen were among those killed.

National police Chief Somyot Pumpanmuang said on state TV that Chinese tourists who had traveled to Thailand from the Philippines had been killed. The Chinese Embassy in Bangkok later confirmed the report, telling China's state-run Xinhua that three nationals had died in the blast, while another 15 Chinese tourists were injured, some seriously. Hong Kong's Immigration Department reported that three residents were among the injured.

It's too early to say who orchestrated the attack, Somyot said there had been warnings about possible attacks, if not exactly when or where they might occur.

The blast didn't cause immediate, rampant panic, as some bystanders were milling around peacefully and a family apparently unaware of the explosion was enjoying a meal at a nearby McDonald's, freelance journalist Adam Ramsey said.

Vyas, the Indian DJ, said he initially didn't know what to think of the explosion -- thinking, as his ears were ringing, that it seemed like a Hollywood movie or maybe a major car wreck.

"But then I was like, yeah, this has to be a bomb because of the utter scale of devastation," he said early Tuesday. "I could see it in front of my eyes."

With school out and many in the city commuting home at the time of the blast, locals were among those caught up in the mayhem. So, too, were tourists there to visit the shrine, shop in the mall or stay in the many area hotels.

There was traffic, everybody was honking," Vyas recalled. "It (was) utter chaos and mayhem.

"http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/17/asia/thailand-bangkok-bomb/

Structure of the lead:

WHO- not given

WHEN- Monday

WHAT- a huge bomb explosion

WHY- not given

WHERE- Bangkok, Thailand

HOW- not given

Keywords:

1.         target 目標

2.     shrine 神社;聖地

3.         debris 碎片;瓦礫

4.         fray 磨損;爭論;打架

5.         death toll 死亡人數

6.         confirm 確認

7.         orchestrate 把...編成管弦樂曲;精心安排

8.         rampant 猖獗的;猛烈的;蔓生的

9.         bystander 旁觀的

10.      utter 完全;絕對;全然的

11.      mayhem 混亂

NASA Says Data Reveals an Earth-Like Planet, Kepler 452b

By DENNIS OVERBYE

JULY 23, 2015

Inching ahead on their quest for what they call Earth 2.0, astronomers from NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft announced on Thursday that they had found what might be one of the closest analogues to our own world yet.

It is a planet a little more than one and a half times as big in radius as Earth. Known as Kepler 452b, it circles a sunlike star in an orbit that takes 385 days, just slightly longer than our own year, putting it firmly in the “Goldilocks” habitable zone where the temperatures are lukewarm and suitable for liquid water on the surface — if it has a surface.

The new planet’s size puts it right on the edge between being rocky like Earth and being a fluffy gas ball like Neptune, according to studies of other such exoplanets. In an email, Jon Jenkins of NASA’s Ames Research Center, home of the Kepler project, and lead author of a paper being published in The Astronomical Journal, said the likelihood of the planet’s being rocky was 50 percent to 62 percent, depending on uncertainties in the size of its home star. That would mean its mass is about five times that of Earth.

Such a planet would probably have a thick, cloudy atmosphere and active volcanoes, Dr. Jenkins said, and twice the gravity of Earth. Describing the planet during a news conference, Dr. Jenkins lapsed into lines from John Keats’s poem “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”: “Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken.”

The star that lights this planet’s sky is about 1.5 billion years older than our sun and 20 percent more luminous, which has implications for the prospects of life, Dr. Jenkins said.

“We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth’s evolving environment,” he said. “It’s awe-inspiring to consider that this planet has spent six billion years in the habitable zone of its star, longer than Earth. That’s substantial opportunity for life to arise, should all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life exist on this planet.”

Asked if any radio telescopes had pointed at the planet to try to detect extraterrestrial radio broadcasts, Dr. Jenkins said, “I hope so.”

To determine whether Kepler 452b deserves a place on the honor roll of possible home worlds, however, astronomers have to measure its mass directly, which requires being close enough to observe the wobbling of its star as it is tugged around by the planet’s gravity. For now, that is impossible, as Kepler 452b is 1,400 light-years away.

The planet is the first to be confirmed in a new list of candidates unveiled by Kepler astronomers on Thursday. It brings the number of possible planets discovered by Kepler to 4,696, many of them small like Earth. “We are the bread crumbs of the universe,” said Jeff Coughlin, of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., who compiled the catalog.

The spacecraft, launched in 2009, spent four years staring at a patch of the Milky Way on the border between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the dips in starlight caused by the passage of planets. Its pointing system failed in 2013, but astronomers are still analyzing the data Kepler collected. Every time they sift through it, new planets pop out.

In the meantime, Kepler has switched to a different mode of observing in a mission called K2.

The NASA news conference coincided with a major anniversary: It was only 20 years ago this fall that Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, of the University of Geneva, discovered a planet circling the star 51 Pegasi, about 50 light-years from here. It was the first planet known to belong to a sunlike star outside our solar system, and its discovery ignited an astronomical revolution.

Dr. Queloz, now at the University of Cambridge in England, said at the news conference, “This is a great time we live in.”

“If we keep working so well and so enthusiastically,” he went on, it is not too optimistic to think that in the future, “the issue of life on another planet will be solved.”

Astronomers say they now know from Kepler that about 10 percent of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way have potentially habitable Earth-size planets, Kepler 452b probably among them. This means that of the 600 stars within 30 light-years of Earth, there are roughly 60 E.T.-class abodes, planets that could be inspected by a future generation of telescopes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/24/science/space/kepler-data-reveals-what-might-be-best-goldilocks-planet-yet.html

Structure of the lead:

WHO- astronomers from NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft

WHEN- Thursday

WHAT- Kepler 452b

WHY- temperatures are lukewarm and suitable for liquid water on the surface

WHERE- Milky Way

HOW- planets that could be inspected by a future generation of telescopes

Keywords:

1.          quest 尋找

2.          analogue 類似物

3.          orbit 軌道

4.          lukewarm 微熱的

5.          ken 視野範圍

6.          luminous 發光的；明亮的

7.          extraterrestrial 宇宙的

8.          wobbling 擺動

9.          unveil 揭開

10.      ignited 點燃；激起

11.      inspect 檢查

The famous Steve Jobs commencement speech: ‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’

May 18, 2014
By Valerie Strauss

The speech:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/05/18/the-famous-steve-jobs-commencement-speech-stay-hungry-stay-foolish/

Structure of the lead:

WHO- Steve Jobs

WHEN- June 12, 2005

WHAT-commencement speech

WHY-not given

WHERE-at Stanford University

HOW- Steve Jobs told them three stories from his life

Keywords:

1.      commencement 畢業典禮

2.      intuition 直覺

3.      calligraphy 書法

4.      karma 命運

5.      diverge 偏離

6.      devastating 毀滅性的

7.      entrepreneur 企業家

8.      diagnose 診斷

9.      dogma 教條

10.  farewell 告別