The most violent places today are not at war. Eighty-three percent of all violent deaths occur outside of conflict zones, and in 2015, more people died violently in Brazil than in Syria’s civil war. Yet multiple places which were once engulfed in violence and instability have recovered and have since formed stable democracies. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "A Savage Order: How the World’s Deadliest Countries Can Forge a Path to Security", joins Markos Kounalakis, WorldAffairs co-host and visiting fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, in conversation about how violent and weak states transform into stable ones.
1 August 2019
The Guardian Longreads: The rise and fall of French cuisine
Almost as soon as they had invented the restaurant, the French invented the restaurant scene. The first restaurant critic, Grimod de la Reynière, wrote reviews in his gazette, the Gourmet’s Almanac. By the time Napoleon had been defeated for the first time, in 1814, the almanac listed more than 300 restaurants in Paris. The lexicon of cuisine soon followed. Marie-Antoine Carême was the first celebrity chef, who cooked for kings and emperors, and wrote the code of French cooking, categorising the five great mother sauces (béchamel, espagnole, velouté, hollandaise and tomato) from which all others were derived. Later, Escoffier organised the restaurant kitchen into the strict hierarchy that still prevails today, from the commis chefs at the bottom, to the chefs de parties who oversee the different stations of meat or fish or cold starter, to the sous chef and the chef de cuisine. Meanwhile, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer who coined the term gastronome, had made the intellectual leap: enjoying food was not just a pleasurable distraction, he argued, but a civilising art of existential import. As he once wrote: “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are.” [...]
Conservation can breed conservatism. Over the decades, French cuisine has been increasingly codified. The system of appellation d’origine contrôlée, a governmental designation that creates legal labelling criteria for the provenance and quality of food products, was introduced in 1935 and now encompasses over 300 wines, 46 cheeses, and foods such as Puy lentils and Corsican honey. The famous Bresse chicken, with its tricolore colouring of blue feet, white feathers and red cockscomb, must be raised with a minimum of 10 sq metres of pasture per bird, finished and fattened on grain for two weeks and then killed at minimum age of four months and a minimum weight of 1.2kg, before it can be certified with a special metal ring around its dead leg stamped with the name of the producer. [...]
It is tempting to draw a neat loop from culinary conservatism to culinary cul-de-sacs, but this isn’t really fair. France has consistently produced extraordinary chefs cooking extraordinary food. This year, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, the list first published in 2002 that has largely replaced Michelin as a global guide to top restaurants, ranked Mirazur in the south of France as No 1. It’s more the general mid-level restaurant culture that had got stuck, but in France, just like everywhere else, the internet has been breaking down frontiers and collapsing distances between trends and ideas and dishes.
BBC4 Analysis: Understanding the risks of terrorism
With unprecedented access to the work of MI5, Dominic Casciani asks how the security services, business and the public should perceive and respond to the threat of terrorism.
The World Economic Forum: Chart of the day: Is 2019 the beginning of the end for coal in Europe?
Western Europe saw particularly dramatic drops in production – up to 79% in Ireland, according to climate think-tank Sandbag. And there were times of zero or near-zero generation in many countries. The UK, for example, switched off its coal plants for a fortnight in May for the first time.
In absolute terms, Germany saw the biggest drop, as it made substantial cutbacks in both hard coal and its dirtier relative lignite. But it remained responsible for over a third of the coal generation in the EU so far this year, the research shows. [...]
The trend for less coal puts the EU on course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 1.5% year-on-year. But coal’s phase-out is still fairly slow: just a smattering of plants have been closed so far in 2019, mostly in the UK and Germany. And coal will continue to account for 12% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions this year.
Vox: The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump’s logic about gun violence
It wasn’t as though officers were lucky to be in the area of the gunman when he started shooting. According to CNN, security at the festival was “present and conspicuous.” It included a police compound on site, officers on horses and motorcycles, bag searches, and metal detector wands. But none of that was enough to stop the gunman, who gained entry to the festival by cutting through a back fence before opening fire at random. [...]
But none of those proposals would’ve helped in this case. A San Francisco Chronicle report finds the shooter had no criminal record, and he circumvented California’s strict gun laws by obtaining his WASR 10 legally in neighboring Nevada. [...]
The Democratic-controlled House has passed a number of gun control bills this year, only to see them wither in the Republican-controlled Senate. So unless some Republican senators change their minds, it’s unlikely the loophole exploited by the Gilroy shooter will be closed anytime soon.
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