The EU has spoken out in support of “all those who have suffered under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes”. This comes on the eve of the Europe-wide Day of Remembrance of the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes on 23 August. Ahead of the Day, senior EU political figures have issued a strongly-worded statement against “hatred, intolerance and the denial of human dignity. The statement was issued by the EC Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, Henna Virkkunen, and Democracy, Justice, the Rule of Law, and Consumer Protection Commissioner Michael McGrath (pictured).
It reads: “On 23 August, we commemorate the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. “That pact, and the war and devastation that followed, brought intolerable suffering to millions of people across Europe and beyond. The years that followed were marked by occupation, repression, deportation and violence on a massive scale.”
It goes on: “Today, we honour the memory of all those who have suffered under totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. “The pain endured by victims, survivors and their families echoes across generations. Every EU country is now home to a generation that has grown up free from tyranny and oppression.
“For many, freedom, democracy and peace may appear self-evident, but they are not. They were secured through extraordinary courage, sacrifice, resistance and resilience, and they must never be taken for granted. Remembering the past is therefore not only a duty to those who came before us. It is also a responsibility to future generations.”
The statement continues: “This day is a solemn reminder of the consequences of hatred, intolerance and the denial of human dignity.
“It calls on us to remain vigilant in defending the values on which the European Union is founded: respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and fundamental rights.
"By preserving the memory of the past, we reaffirm our commitment to a Europe built on peace, justice and solidarity.”
Special events will take place this weekend to mark the anniversary of the First Battle of Mons on 23 August, the first major action of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in World War I.
Commemorations, which take place on Monday 24 August, start at 1pm at the Hôtel de Ville in Mons.
Representatives of RBL Brussels branch will also lay a wreath at the town's British Empire Memorial which was first unveiled by King Baudouin on 11 October 1952.
Several representatives of Royal British Legion Brussels will be taking part.
The RBL delegation is comprised of Captain (retd) Dennis Abbott (RBL Brussels Chair) (pictured); Colonel (retd) William Bache (ex-US Special Forces, Vietnam veteran and Co-Chair Brussels Battles and Books Club) and Lieutenant-Colonel (retd).
Others present will be Matt Hill (ex-US Marine Corps); Andrée Ferrant (RBL Brussels Joint Secretary); Mireille Picron (RBL Brussels Joint Secretary); Freddy Roiseux (RBL Brussels Standard Bearer); Professor Jean-Francois Husson (RBL Brussels committee, Namur representative) and Ela Nora Fidan (Brussels Battles and Books Club).
Wreaths will be laid at the Hôtel de Ville (Dennis Abbott), Nimy railway bridge where Lieutenant Maurice Dease and Private Sidney Godley each won the Victoria Cross (Ela Nora Fidan) and Saint Symphorien military cemetery (Col William Bache at British memorial, Lt Col Hill at German memorial).
Similar wreath-laying commemorations take place at the British Empire memorial at Place de la Bascule (Mireille Picron et Andrée Ferrant) and at the Irish Cross (Jean-François Husson).
There will also be commemorations in Brussels and Antwerp to mark the anniversary of the Liberation (3-4-5 September). Full info/timings are on the RBl Brussels website under “calendar.”
Speaking about the upcoming events, Abbott said: “The Brussels branch of the Royal British Legion has taken part in the commemorations to mark the anniversary of the Battle of Mons since its very formation in 1922.”
He added: "The battle has gone down in the annals of British military history thanks to the heroic stand by troops of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in their first major engagement of 1914. Outnumbered three to one by the Germans, they held out for hours before withdrawing, preventing the enemy from outflanking French positions.
"Wilhelm, the German Kaiser, is said to have dismissed the BEF as a 'contemptible little Army' before the battle, but the British fought tenaciously, none more so than Lieutenant Maurice Dease and Private Private Sidney Godley who were each awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest award for gallantry, for their defence of the railway bridge over the canal at Nimy."
Four German battalions attacked the bridge, which was defended by a company of the Royal Fusiliers.
Despite being mortally injured, Dease held the position until he was overcome by his wounds. Godley took over and despite sustaining a head wound covered the withdrawal before disabling the weapon.
Abbot added: "The branch lays a wreath at the position they held, which is marked by a plaque recalling their exploits."
Lance-Corporal Charles Jarvis and Captain Theodore Wright of the Royal Engineers were also each awarded the VC for preventing the enemy from seizing a bridge at nearby Jemappes. Wright was mortally wounded less than a month later.
The British suffered over 1,600 casualties (killed, wounded or missing) at Mons, around half from two battalions – the 4th Middlesex and 2nd Royal Irish. The German army lost about 5,000 men killed or wounded.
The Germans later established the St Symphorien Military Cemetery which contains the graves of graves of 284 German and 229 British and Commonwealth soldiers.
Among them are the graves of the first and last Commonwealth soldiers killed during the First World War, Private John Parr and Private George Price.
After the war, the veterans who took part in the Battle of Mons proudly called themselves the "Old Contemptibles" in response to the Kaiser's slur.
At the inauguration of the British Empire Memorial in Mons, the British Defence Minister, Field Marshal Lord Alexander of Tunis, recalled his "baptism of fire" in his first action as a young lieutenant in the battle on 23 August 1914.
The VIPs present included Belgian Prime Minister Jean Van Houtte, Major General Sir Edward Spears, who served as a liaison officer with the French forces during the battle, and British Ambassador Sir Christopher Warner, a Captain in the Royal Fusiliers in the First World War.
The memorial was originally erected in the Belfry Park, but was moved to the original frontline at La Bascule crossroads and re-dedicated in 1986. It is close to the Celtic Cross Memorial, which honours the Irish soldiers who fought in the First Battle of August 1914 and the Second Battle of Mons in November 1918.
The European Commission has approved, under the EU Merger Regulation, the creation of a joint venture by AI Infrastructure Development, S.L. (‘ACS AIID'), Telefónica S.A. (‘Telefónica'), Banco Santander, S.A. and Entidad Pública Empresarial Sociedad Española para la Transformación Tecnológica, E.P.E. (‘SETT'), all of Spain.
The transaction relates primarily to third-party data centre colocation services in Spain and contributes to the EU's tech sovereignty strategy of strengthening and expanding sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe, as part of the EU's AI Gigafactories Initiative.
The Commission concluded that the notified transaction would not raise competition concerns, given the companies' limited market positions resulting from the proposed transaction. The notified transaction was examined under the simplified merger review procedure.
The EU economy’s seasonally adjusted greenhouse gas emissions in the first quarter of 2026 were estimated at 837 million tonnes of CO2-equivalents (CO2-eq), a 0.3% increase compared with the fourth quarter of 2025 (835 million tonnes of CO2-eq). At the same time, there was no change to the EU’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of 2026, compared with the last quarter of 2025.
The economic sector with the largest increase in greenhouse gas emissions was electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply (+4.8%), while households (-1.3%), manufacturing and transportation and storage (both -0.6%) recorded the biggest decreases.
Compared with the first quarter of 2025, emissions went down by 1.2%, while the EU’s GDP increased by 0.8%.
Greenhouse gas emissions decreased in 7 EU countries
In the first quarter of 2026, seasonally adjusted greenhouse gas emissions increased in 20 EU countries and decreased in 7 countries, compared with the fourth quarter of 2025.
The largest reductions in greenhouse gases were estimated for Slovenia (-5.0%), Luxembourg (-3.8%) and Romania (-2.7%).
The largest increases in greenhouse gas emissions were estimated for Estonia (+9.7%), Finland (+6.4%) and Bulgaria (+4.6%). The increases in these countries are largely due to growing emissions by economic producers in construction and electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply.
In the first quarter of 2026, 20 EU countries recorded increases in greenhouse gas emissions, out of which 18 also increased their GDP. 7 countries reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. Out of these, 4 countries recorded a higher or stable GDP.
The data presented here are estimates by Eurostat, except for the Netherlands, Slovenia and Spain which provided their own data.
The greenhouse gas emission figures are seasonally adjusted. These adjusted series enable quarter-on-quarter change analyses. Data provided by countries are seasonally adjusted by Eurostat. The GDP figures are seasonally and calendar adjusted. More information on the seasonal adjustment is provided in atechnical note. Eurostat’s methodology attributes international transport emissions to individual countries according to the country of residence of the emitting economic producer, following the international System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) standard. This is in line with the European System of Accounts used for the GDP and differs from the UNFCCC and the Paris Agreement rules.
The EU and the EU countries report annually on their greenhouse gas emissions to the UN. The so-called ‘Kyoto basket’ of greenhouse gases includes carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and fluorinated gases. They are expressed in a common unit: CO2-equivalents. EU countries are required to monitor their emissions of these gases for all source sectors based on internationally agreed obligations and rules. The EU greenhouse gas inventory managed by the European Environment Agency covers emissions from 1990 to 2 years before the current year and is submitted to the UN each spring after quality checks.
According to theEuropean Climate Law, the EU’s climate target is to achieve a -55% net reduction by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2050. The European Commission monitors and reports progress towards their GHG emission reduction targets on an annual basis using the inventory data in the Climate Action Progress Report.
The Commission has presented an action plan for the chemicals industry to strengthen the competitiveness and modernization of this sector.
The action plan addresses key challenges – high energy costs, unfair global competition, and weak demand, while promoting investment in innovation and sustainability. It proposes the following measures
Resilience and level playing field: establishing a Critical Chemical Alliance to address the risks of capacity closures in the sector and applying trade defence measures to ensure fair competition
Affordable energy and decarbonisation: swiftlyimplementing the Affordable Energy Action Planto help reduce high energy and feedstock costs
Lead markets and innovation: highlighting fiscal incentives and tax measures to boost demand for clean chemicals
Taking action on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS): minimizing PFAS emissions through a robust, science-based restriction, while ensuring continued use in critical applications under strict conditions where no alternatives are available
The plan is accompanied by a simplification package, the so-called 6th Omnibus, to further streamline and simplify key EU chemicals legislation. This includes simplifying hazardous chemical labelling rules, clarifying EU cosmetics regulations, and easing registration for EU fertilising products. These measures should save at least €363 million annually for the industry.
The EU chemical industry is the 4th largest manufacturing sector, with 29 000 companies providing 1.2 million direct jobs and supporting 19 million across supply chains. The European chemicals industry action plan builds on the Competitiveness Compass and Clean Industrial Deal, while the simplification package delivers on President von der Leyen's commitmentto simplify EU laws and cut administrative burdens, helping businesses innovate and grow.
In 2023, public spending on education (from pre-primary to the tertiary level) in the EU accounted for 4.7% of its gross domestic product (GDP). Compared with 2022, this figure did not change; however, it represents a slight decrease of 0.3 percentage points (pp) from 2020 (5.0%), the year with the highest level of public expenditure on education since the data collection started in 2012.
Among the EU countries, the highest level of public expenditure on education relative to the GDP was observed in Sweden (6.8%), followed by Finland (6.3%) and Belgium (6.2%). The lowest levels were registered in Romania (3.0%), Greece (3.3%) and Malta (3.4%).
In 2025, the EU produced 3.44 billion litres of ice cream, representing a 1.9% increase compared with 2024 (3.38 billion litres).
Germany remained the top producer of ice cream in the EU, with 608 million litres in 2025. Italy (549 million litres) and France (525 million litres) followed at the top. The list of main producers also included Spain (457 million litres) and Belgium (274 million litres).
Compared with 2024, all of these 5 EU countries registered an increase in production; +10% for Italy, +6% for Belgium, +4% for France, +2% for Spain and +0.2% for Germany.
In 2025, EU countriesexported289.8 million kg of ice cream to non-EU countries and imported77.8 million kg. Exports increased by 10% compared with 2024 (+26 million kg), while imports rose by 12% (+8.5 million kg).
As in previous years, France was the largest ice cream exporter in the EU, exporting 59.1 million kg of ice cream to non-EU countries in 2025. This represented a fifth of the total extra-EU ice cream exports (20%). France was followed by Italy (55.2 million kg of ice cream; 19% of EU ice cream exports), Belgium (34.5 million kg; 12%), Germany (29.9 million kg; 10%), and the Netherlands (26.5 million kg; 9%).
Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta: exempt from providing data on production due to their economic sizes.
Production ranking is based on available and non-confidential data. Sold production quantities are confidential for Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Sweden.
In this news article, production of ice cream is expressed in litres, while imports and exports are expressed in kg.
In the face of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, the EU, together with Ukraine and Moldova launched the EU-Ukraine Solidarity Lanes in May 2022, establishing new transport routes to keep Ukraine’s imports and exports flowing via rail, road and inland waterways. Today, the EU-Ukraine Solidarity Lanes have become a lifeline for Ukraine’s economy.
In July 2026 the Solidarity Lanes allowed:
Around 90% of Ukrainian imports (in comparison to around 10% through the Black Sea)
Around 95% of Ukrainian exports of non-agricultural products (in comparison to around 5% through the Black Sea)
Around 20% of Ukrainian exports of grain, oilseeds and related products (in comparison to around 80% through the Black Sea)
Ukrainian exports
Since May 2022, the Solidarity Lanes have allowed Ukraine to export ca. 230 million tonnes (Mt) of goods, according to data from the Ukrainian customs registers. Within this amount, it can be estimated that the Solidarity Lanes enabled exports of around 103 million tonnes of Ukrainian agricultural products (including ca. 95 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and related products) and around 127 million tonnes of non-agricultural goods including ores, steel and related products.
In total, around 255 Mt of Ukrainian grain, oilseeds and related products were exported through the Solidarity Lanes (40%) and the Ukrainian Black Sea ports (60%) since May 2022 [1].
Imports to Ukraine
The Solidarity Lanes also play a crucial role for Ukrainian imports. Since May 2022, they have allowed Ukraine to import ca. 111 Mt of goods, such as fuel, vehicles, fertilisers as well as military and humanitarian assistance.
Value of trade
The total value of trade via the Solidarity Lanes since May 2022 is estimated at around EUR 304 billion, with around EUR 78 billion for Ukrainian exports. The total value of imports to Ukraine is estimated at ca. EUR 226 billion.
Background
Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the blockade of Ukrainian seaports, Ukraine has been unable to export its produce and import what it needs via its usual transport routes.
Against this background, the EU established 'Solidarity Lanes' to ensure Ukraine can export grain, iron ore, steel and other products and to import the goods it needs, from fuel to military and humanitarian assistance, via alternative transport routes: inland waterways, rail and road. The Solidarity Lanes cover trade across all sectors and are an unprecedented cooperation of authorities and businesses in EU Member States, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova.
The Solidarity Lanes’ work is carried out in close cooperation between the European Commission, concerned authorities and the transport community. The focus is on addressing bottlenecks to enhance the capacity and smooth functioning of the Solidarity Lanes to sustain Ukrainian exports and imports across sectors. This includes measures to improve traffic management and streamlining of border procedures and checks, as well as investments in infrastructure or logistics equipment.
The Solidarity Lanes are also laying the ground for the longer-term connectivity between Ukraine and the EU and will play a key role for Ukraine’s reconstruction and integration in the EU single market.
[1] Between May and July 2022, the Solidarity Lanes were the only option for Ukraine to export its agricultural produce. In August 2022, the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative (BSGI) helped relaunch grain shipments from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. In mid-July 2023, Russia terminated its participation in the BSGI, which was consequently discontinued.
In August 2023, Ukraine launched a new Black Sea corridor for trade vessels heading to and from Ukrainian sea ports despite Russia’s withdrawal from the BSGI. Ca. 2.4 Mt of grain, oilseeds and other related products have been exported this way in July 2026.
This week, Mark Leonard is joined by Janka Oertel, director of ECFR’s DARE* initiative, and Andrew Small, head of ECFR’s Asia programme, to examine the growing impact of the “China shock 2.0” on Germany and Europe.
A new wave of Chinese competition, driven by overcapacity and state-backed industrial strength, is hitting sectors such as car manufacturing, chemicals and machine tools. Germany is at the epicentre, with mounting job losses raising questions about Europe’s long-term economic resilience and competitiveness. The crisis is reshaping German politics, exposing government divisions and putting pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz ahead of September’s potentially divisive regional elections.
Together, Mark, Janka and Andrew discuss the policy options being considered in Brussels and in European capitals—from emergency trade measures to new industrial strategies. Can Europe protect its industrial base without triggering a damaging escalation with China? Is Germany able to lead a coherent European response amid its own political turbulence?
A Trump-Kim summit would be a spectacle like no other. A carnival extravaganza with the Korean Peninsula holding center stage, and every handshake, expression, seating arrangement, and stray remark dissected by troupes of North Korea pundits across the world’s news networks. But like any great traveling carnival, a few days later ticket holders will be […]
È indispensabile difendere il denaro contante, quello che sta nel nostro portafogli. Chi ama pagare con carta di credito ha un’idea di libertà declinata come comodità.
È comodo non avere contante: non si rischia il furto o lo smarrimento; non ci si sente limitati nelle spese. Una libertà negativa, consumistica, tipicamente moderna, finta, da mondo al contrario.
L’individualismo spinto, unito all’indifferenza per le motivazioni reali dei comportamenti diretti dall’alto, rovescia le prospettive.
Parliamo di libertà ma accettiamo senza battere ciglio che il potere finanziario sia il vero padrone del “nostro” denaro, che ci consegna in piccole quantità, non prima di avere estratto uno strano plusvalore, la commissione, il pizzo del grassatore.
I signori del denaro ci controllano, sanno tutto delle nostre propensioni, spese, preferenze, in nome della maledetta “trasparenza”, ovvero della fine della privatezza, dell’intimità e della riservatezza; trattengono il nostro denaro e decidono insindacabilmente se e in quale misura restituircelo.
Per questa operazione estrattiva – trasferimento di risorse dal basso all’alto – hanno bisogno della complicità dello Stato, le cui leggi rendono sempre più complicato usufruire liberamente del nostro peculio e utilizzare il contante come mezzo di pagamento.
Il potere pubblico condivide con gli emittenti di denaro la capacità di conoscere tutto di noi, quindi anche di estrarre alla fonte parti del reddito. Una rapina legale della quale siamo vittime impotenti.
La maggiore libertà dei pagamenti elettronici riguarda solo chi gestisce il rubinetto – emittenti di moneta, banche, società finanziarie – chi orienta le norme a favore di quei poteri fortissimi, oltreché i padroni delle complesse tecnologie alla base del gesto di appoggiare una carta elettronica al POS, digitare il codice relativo e attendere il buon fine, accompagnato dalla dicitura “transazione approvata”.
Qui dovrebbe sorgere la prima reazione e, invece, no. L’omuncolo postmoderno, superbo cultore delle sue (apparenti) libertà, per quale motivo dovrebbe vedere approvate da qualcuno – l’entità sovraordinata, impersonale, la Matrix finanziaria – le sue spese, scelte di consumo, preferenze?
Non sono forse suoi i quattrini?
Perché Stato, tecnostruttura e banche dovrebbero sapere per filo e per segno dove, quando e per quali spese abbiamo usato i nostri (!) soldi?
Il potere fonda la sua presa ferrea sulla maggioranza sulla reiterazione ossessiva di messaggi, in gran parte falsi o fuorvianti.
Ripetiamolo a nostra volta: l’uso del contante è la pietra angolare della sovranità personale, che è innanzitutto padronanza di se stessi.
Il denaro contante, misura del valore ma anche valore della misura (Giacinto Auriti) è un sistema efficiente, semplice e immediato per condurre transazioni finanziarie da oltre quattromila anni.
L’uso della moneta il cui valore nominale corrispondeva al contenuto in metallo, risale a Babilonia prima del 2000 a.C..
L’introduzione della cartamoneta deriva dalle cambiali dell’antica Cina, dai titoli di credito ebraici e da Cartagine. La banconota nella forma odierna nacque nel VII secolo in Cina.
Oggi siamo esposti a un rischio mortale per la libertà con la diffusione obbligata della valuta digitale emessa da una banca centrale (privata, sottratta per legge al controllo pubblico dei governi e dei parlamenti), destinata a fungere da unica unità di pagamento, vietando di fatto l’uso del contante.
L’acronimo a cui dovremo abituarci – e sottometterci – è CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency, valuta digitale della banca centrale). Sono stati lungimiranti gli svizzeri, che hanno imposto con referendum l’inserimento nella costituzione elvetica del diritto all’uso del denaro contante.
Sotto forma di legge di iniziativa popolare, il movimento Italia del Domani di Marco Rizzo sta cercando di offrire agli italiani la medesima possibilità.
La valuta digitale ha gravi conseguenze per la libertà dei cittadini. Le tutele previste per l’uso del contante negli USA possono essere un punto di riferimento per resistere alle catastrofiche conseguenze dell’instaurazione del tecnofeudalesimo monetario.
La prima linea di difesa della costituzione americana è avere stabilito l’autorità del parlamento federale sul denaro.
L’articolo 1, sezione 8, conferisce al Congresso il potere esclusivo di “coniare moneta, regolarne il valore e quello della valuta, e fissare gli standard di pesi e misure”.
La Corte Suprema – massimo organo giurisdizionale Usa – non si è ancora pronunciata direttamente sulla questione delle CBDC.
Le principali decisioni in merito sono state le sentenze Knox contro Lee (1871), che sancì la costituzionalità dell’autorizzazione federale della stampa di moneta legale e McCulloch contro il Maryland (1819), che stabilì il diritto e il potere governativo di creare una banca federale.
I principi della Costituzione statunitense proteggono dunque il diritto di utilizzare il contante nelle transazioni finanziarie.
L’istituzione delle CBDC come unità monetaria obbligatoria rappresenterebbe una novità assoluta negli USA e un precedente di capitale importanza.
Il Quarto Emendamento (clausola I) garantisce i cittadini rispetto a perquisizioni, sequestri e confische, con l’esplicito divieto di entrare nella proprietà privata, nonché l’opposizione alla confisca illegale e arbitraria di beni; protegge la sicurezza di persone, abitazioni, documenti ed effetti personali.
Sancisce, cioè, il diritto fondamentale alla privatezza contro le intrusioni governative, a cui oggi si affianca il potere della tecnostruttura privata.
Eliminare il contante come mezzo di pagamento legale annullerebbe il diritto alla privacy sancito dal Quarto Emendamento. Le persone non avrebbero più riservatezza nelle transazioni quotidiane e sarebbero assoggettate a un’inaccettabile intrusione da parte del governo, degli emittenti di moneta, delle entità finanziarie e dei possessori delle tecnologie applicate alla monetazione elettronica.
Chi detiene moneta a corso legale, ovvero contanti, possiede il valore di tale valuta senza intermediari. L’utilizzo delle valute digitali delle banche centrali annullerebbe la proprietà effettiva di un bene o di una somma di denaro, poiché le CBDC sono diverse dai contanti soprattutto perché rappresentano una promessa di pagamento che le banche possono interpretare, ritardare, sospendere, disattendere.
Esiste una differenza fondamentale tra una promessa di pagamento e il pagamento effettivo, ossia i contanti, proprietà incondizionata e assoluta.
Il più sinistro esempio di coercizione digitale è stato l’atteggiamento del governo liberale canadese contro il cosiddetto Canadian Freedom Convoy (convoglio canadese della libertà) nel 2022, con cui gli autisti di camion si opposero alla vaccinazione contro il COVID-19.
Il governo bloccò settantasei conti bancari dei dirigenti della protesta. A chi manifestava pacificamente contro l’obbligo di sottoporsi a una terapia genica sperimentale fu impedito di accedere al suo denaro.
Il congelamento dei conti bancari fu una palese coercizione politica per costringerli a fare ciò che non volevano bloccando il mezzo della loro sopravvivenza.
Non esiste un modo più semplice per bloccare l’accesso ai conti bancari che utilizzare la valuta digitale al posto del contante, ben più difficile da confiscare. Non esiste un metodo più perfetto per sovvertire la libertà che costringere a utilizzarle.
La stabilità di un sistema politico si fonda sulla proprietà diffusa, che garantisce sicurezza poiché consente ai singoli di controllare i mezzi di produzione, protezione e sopravvivenza.
Il denaro, in quanto mezzo di scambio, assicura la stabilità economica, incoraggia gli investimenti e la crescita nazionale.
Il dollaro statunitense è stato la valuta di riserva mondiale per decenni anche perché non ha mai confiscato denaro ai cittadini. Nessuna nazione responsabile investirebbe in una valuta di riserva gravata dall’abolizione o dal difficile uso del contante come mezzo di pagamento legale.
I CBDC aumentano il rischio di furto e criminalità informatica e possono, in casi estremi, mettere in pericolo la vita delle persone. Esiste una vasta letteratura sui furti informatici ai danni dei conti bancari, così come sulle fughe di informazioni personali.
Secondo il Fondo Monetario Internazionale, la CBDC crea un ecosistema vasto e complesso, che amplifica i rischi esistenti e ne genera di nuovi.
Pensiamo a situazioni come guerre, interruzioni o crisi energetiche, malfunzionamenti, disastri naturali che causano guasti alle reti energetiche o bancarie, rendendo impossibile l’accesso ai fondi.
Già questo giustifica l’imperativa necessità di conservare il contante. Non esiste migliore garanzia indipendente da qualsiasi ente o potere che preservi l’accesso alle risorse finanziarie per famiglie e individui in ogni momento.
Le valute digitali (CBDC) istituiscono e legittimano un sistema di credito sociale sul modello cinese, ponendo il potere politico, dirigenti ed azionisti della banca centrale, l’élite tecnologica e i banchieri nella posizione di signori tecno feudali.
Il sistema di credito sociale cinese valuta l’affidabilità di individui e imprese, monitora il comportamento e assegna un punteggio, con tutto ciò che comporta in termini di diritti politici, opportunità sociali e sanzioni.
Un punteggio negativo può comportare restrizioni di viaggio, impedire l’accesso a posizioni professionali, difficoltà nell’ottenere prestiti, umiliazione pubblica.
Le valute digitali delle banche centrali facilitano l’imposizione di controllo sociale e politico per promuovere, colpire o vietare mandati politici, culturali, legali e religiosi, cancellando la privacy e la libertà di espressione.
Il governo indiano ha ritirato improvvisamente due banconote che rappresentavano l’86 per cento del circolante, ufficialmente per combattere la corruzione. La scomparsa del contante ha causato un’ondata di suicidi tra chi non sa orientarsi nella complessità dei sistemi digitali o ne è escluso.
Adottare le valute digitali rappresenta il compimento della transizione a una drammatica forma di feudalesimo, l’arma assoluta della tecno tirannia. Difendere e sancire legalmente l’uso del contante è la chiave per preservare le concrete libertà individuali.
Laddove il governo non rispetta i diritti civili, il contante aiuta a proteggere la società dall’uso illegittimo del potere pubblico, dalla sorveglianza e dall’intimidazione, ha dichiarato Heike Mai, dirigente di Deutsche Bank. È tanto difficile da capire?
President Trump's envoy Jared Kushner met with Israel's prime minister in an effort to revive the stalled Gaza agreement. NPR's Michel Martin talks to former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro.
NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Michael Fuchs, director at the Open Society Foundation and a former State Department official, about President Trump's threat to bomb Oman, an ally of the U.S.
Esterno giorno, una città qualunque, otto e venti del mattino, dodici agosto. Mentre il termometro digitale della superstite tripperia – unica concessione alla modernità di un negozio sopravvissuto al passato – segna trentadue gradi, l’amico edicolante allarga le braccia. Il quotidiano locale è già esaurito: offriva gli occhialini per osservare l’eclissi senza danni. Altrove qualche bagarino dell’astronomia coglie l’occasione vendendo gli stessi visori procurati chissà dove, presumibilmente assai poco adatti a proteggere la retina. Vince sempre la forma merce, giudizio su se stessa ( Gunther Anders, L’uomo è antiquato).
La stessa città, esterno sera. In ogni punto considerato favorevole all’avvistamento dell’eclissi , si affollano persone accaldate di ogni età; quasi tutti inforcano le strane lenti colorate, fotografano se stessi con il telefonino, inviano orgogliosi alle reti sociali le immagini, in attesa del posizionamento della luna dinanzi al sole. Pochi autentici appassionati, con cannocchiali e altri strumenti, attendono il fenomeno astronomico con vero interesse, probabilmente infastiditi dalla folla. Anzi, dalla massa. In realtà non succede quasi nulla, il cielo non diventa nero e pochi hanno visto qualcosa di memorabile. Molti saranno rimasti delusi : lo spettacolo non è stato all’altezza delle aspettative. Assai meglio gli effetti speciali cinematografici. Che importa: potranno dire “io c’ero”, tutto documentato- salvo backup– dalle foto scattate con lo smartphone.
Fenomeni come le eclissi non destano il mio interesse – lo confesso con una certa vergogna- e non sono stato mai attratto dalle stelle cadenti che la fantasia popolare chiamava lacrime di San Lorenzo. Forse perché quei brevi momenti cosmici portano alla riflessione che sgomenta : l’immensità del creato, le sue leggi immutabili, la risibile piccolezza e caducità dell’ homo sapiens. Non penso siano stati molti a pensare in termini analoghi: meglio così, meglio non sfogliare il libro dell’inquietudine e lasciarsi vivere. Un numero incalcolabile di contemporanei – gli altri sono una trascurabile minoranza – ha la sindrome più ridicola dell’uomo ridicolo. E’ la paura di perdersi qualcosa- l’acronimo FOMO in americanese ( fear of missing out). Dilaga tra i più giovani, ma avanza inesorabile anche tra gli adulti. Anche l’eclissi, fenomeno cosmico, è un’occasione di presenza, l’ illusione di vivere un’esperienza, un’emozione ( parole svuotate di significato) o semplicemente di “esserci”, grottesca banalizzazione del dasein di Heidegger .
Non più protagonista e nemmeno comparsa, l’uomo-massa si accontenta di essere spettatore, con il naso all’insù e gli occhialini da esibire sulle reti sociali in attesa del “mi piace” e dell’invidia degli assenti. Massa, non folla. La prima si forma quasi casualmente, non ha nulla in comune, è formata da atomi solitari temporaneamente riuniti nella stesso luogo, come a Ferragosto sulle spiagge o in autostrada sotto il sole. La folla, al contrario, nasce, si riunisce, ha una sua psicologia, non è massa casuale, informe carnaio. Le immagini spiegano tutto con immediatezza perfino quando sono un prodotto dell’intelligenza artificiale. Circola una rappresentazione in due quadri. Il primo mostra , nel giorno dell’eclissi, una massa umana con il volto all’insù e gli occhiali mentre indica l’eclissi. Nel secondo , con la didascalia “la gente ogni giorno”, la stessa massa ha le spalle curve e gli occhi sul telefonino ; ignora il cielo pieno di aerei che producono scie chimiche. Sono gli stessi, colti in due momenti dell’esistenza gregaria , omologata, programmata dal potere. In un’epoca dominata dalla feroce competizione tra immagini e suoni, nonché dalla saturazione di stimoli visivi, perfino un’ eclissi appare deludente. Tutto qui? ci chiediamo. Eppure, la gente si sente dire che deve assolutamente vederla; così affronta code per procurarsi quegli occhialini ridicoli, suda e soffre sotto il sole implacabile, parzialmente e momentaneamente nascosto dalla bianca luna.
L’eclissi finisce per diventare uno di quei romanzi “assolutamente da leggere” o film “imperdibili”, che risultano poi deludenti. Eppure la massa corre verso i luoghi più spettacolari non per contemplarli, ma per immortalare se stessa col telefonino e postarli come fondali su Instagram (esiste qualcosa che rovini una meraviglia più del banalizzarla in un reel?) ed accetta disciplinata l’impellente necessità di assistere a un fenomeno che la farebbe sbadigliare se trasmesso su uno schermo. Non posso fare a meno di pensare alle code per vaccinarsi. Leggo post furibondi che chiedono che cosa aspettiamo a ribellarci, agire e reagire contro un potere che fa ciò che vuole con disprezzo per la gente comune. Come può una massa ribellarsi , quando si mette in fila per comprare occhialini di cartone per vedere qualcosa di cui non le importerebbe granché, se non glielo avessero imposto per giorni ? Coazione per ripetizione del messaggio, l’abc della comunicazione.
Perché ci tengono così tanto a farci vedere questa benedetta eclissi? Sembra strano che insistano per uno spettacolo gratuito. Oscar Wilde diceva che nessuno dà valore a un tramonto perché nessuno paga per vederlo. Le eclissi sono come i tramonti: non si fa il biglietto. Si paga, però, per proteggersi da potenziali danni agli occhi; un rischio che si potrebbe evitare gratuitamente guardando per terra. Molti incauti sono finiti dall’oculista. La parte più bella è il momento in cui il giorno si trasforma brevemente, improvvisamente, in notte; la cosa interessante da fare, in quel frangente, sarebbe guardarsi intorno, eppure nessuno lo fa: non sono le istruzioni della TV e tutti vogliono sfruttare quegli occhialini che non resisteranno fino alla prossima eclissi.
Semplicemente, il potere si accerta – guadagnandoci sopra – che i popoli si siano trasformati in masse addomesticate, dopo essere state provvisoriamente folle. Lo capì per primo Gustave Le Bon, prontamente imitato da Walter Lippman ( “ L’ opinione pubblica”), Edward Bernays ( “Propaganda”) e oggi dal possente apparato di psicologia sociale al servizio del potere. Ecco l’ultimo capoverso di Psicologia delle folle di Le Bon: [ Il popolo] diventa nient’altro che un pulviscolo di individui isolati e ritorna a ciò che era al punto di partenza: una folla, senza consistenza e senza futuro. La plebe è sovrana e i barbari avanzano. La civiltà può sembrare ancora splendente perché conserva la facciata esterna creata da un lungo passato, ma in realtà è un edificio mangiato dai vermi che nulla sostiene più e che crollerà alla prima tempesta. Passare dalla barbarie alla civiltà inseguendo un sogno, per poi declinare e morire non appena quel sogno ha perduto la sua consistenza: questo è il ciclo di vita di un popolo”. Eclissi definitiva.
NPR's Michel Martin asks Abbas Milani, director of Iranian Studies at Stanford, why more Iranians are fleeing their country and whether there's a realistic path to end the U.S.-Iran war.
Sam Roberts | Longreads | August 11, 2026 | 4,862 words (20 minutes)
This is an excerpt from Are They Dead Yet? by Sam Roberts, which was published on August 11, 2026, by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.
Tuck Everlasting is a cautionary tale about a family of the same surname who, by inadvertently discovering the proverbial Fountain of Youth, is forced to reconcile with eternity. When I was assigned to write the obituary of the book’s author, Natalie Babbitt, I wondered whether she had continued pondering immortality herself. It turned out she had. Not surprisingly, her own take on eternal life echoed that of the fictional family patriarch, Angus Tuck. “I think that living forever would be a terrible thing,” I quoted her as saying in her Times obituary. “It would be boring, sad and lonely.” Babbitt died when she was 84. But Tuck and her other novels endure as Babbitt’s legacy for readers. So does my obituary, which in 2016 revealed her motivation to become an author: She was inspired to write Tuck, she said, when her four-year-old daughter woke from a nap crying because she was scared of dying. Babbitt had intended to become an illustrator, not an author, but pivoted after taking one writing course in college. She had enrolled because her husband hoped to become a novelist and she wanted to understand the challenges he faced.
Back at the Daily News, obituaries weren’t the best way to achieve immortality. We mostly ran one-paragraph squibs for members of the paper’s family, of printers, pressmen, and their immediate relatives. Instead, like most tabloids, the News thrived on the reported details of murders, assassinations, and suicides. Few news stories generated more of a sensation than death in all its dimensions. No less an authority once defined “news” than the ancient newspaper deliverer—a beloved man known as Bo Gee, who was decades too old to be described as a newsboy—weaving up Second Avenue with a wire shopping cart brimming with Chinese-language newspapers, calling out the headlines as he delivered the papers to Chinese bars and restaurants on Manhattan’s East Side. He began his route in Chinatown, where the papers were printed. Subscribers on Manhattan’s Upper East Side were often a day or two behind the headlines because the last stop on his evening route depended largely on the number of drinks he had finagled from bartenders along the way before he was too wobbly to walk any farther. When a colleague of mine, the columnist Jimmy Breslin (who described him as “a small, thirsty man”), asked him which headlines sold the most papers, he responded unhesitatingly. He didn’t need a public opinion poll or a focus group of readers or a real-time digital analysis of clickbait: Two were surefire circulation boosters. One was war! The other: big guy dies!
Taken separately, obits constitute an individual’s legacy. In aggregate, they can capture the social and cultural currency of an era. Which people are worth remembering? Which values are worth celebrating? How do we measure success and failure, good and evil, achievement and defeat, social rank and professional standing? How many of the one hundred thousand people now immortalized in the periodically printed historical compilation Who Was Who were deemed worthy of obituaries at the time of their death? How many of the more than 33,000 contemporary notables included in the latest editions of Who’s Who will get obituaries when they die? (That the titles of those reference books don’t include question marks suggests that the listings themselves are indisputable, a questionable supposition when the price of inclusion by some publishers seems to be for the “whos” to buy at least one copy of the book. An entry for Michael Fowler Cullis, a former British diplomat, describes his recreation as “writing obituaries for friends.”)
People want to be remembered, and we want to remember them, or, at least, we do. “Obituaries commemorate a life at the point where it is completed by death. Yet the completion is also depletion, in the sense that the life is constructed as meaningful precisely at the point where it stops,” Professor Clare Brant, who teaches literature and culture at Kings College London, has written. “They act as the first version of a biography—sometimes the only one, although Wikipedia has closed the gap with each life story seemingly waiting for a death sentence.” But as valuable as Wikipedia can be, the New York Public Library notes, “Obituaries provide an important tool to researchers by offering biographical information on individuals that may not be readily available elsewhere. In many cases, the obituary supplies the only biographical data extant on a person.” Philip Sutton, a genealogy librarian at the library, told Legacy.com, the self-proclaimed world’s largest commercial provider of online memorials and guest books, that obituaries may reveal the married name of a daughter identified years earlier in the census only by her maiden name; that by identifying an immigrant’s specific birthplace, obituaries can also invigorate research on a family’s roots.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words.
Especially in small towns and midsize cities, local newspaper obituaries bond one generation to the next. By recalling where the deceased went to school and whom they married and who survived them, those obits provide the frames that form a moving picture of continuity, a narrative of cohesion. They describe whether, and how, the departed outpaced their parents in personal and professional achievement, their legacy to contemporary readers, and the promise of their progenitors—grandchildren or great-grandchildren who are still blank slates with the potential to add to the story.
To me, obituaries evoke the heartrending backstories of the characters in Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, the unfulfilled promise of Joe Crowell, who got a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and graduated first in his class: “Goin’ to be a great engineer, Joe was. But the war broke out and he died in France. All that education for nothing.” Emily is dead, too, but so consumed by nostalgia—before being persuaded that “live people don’t understand, do they?”—that she descends from the town’s cemetery and wants to return to her past life in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, until the Stage Manager reminds her, “You not only live it but you watch yourself living it. And as you watch it, you see the thing that they, down there, never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards.” “When I think of an obituary, it’s as objective as journalism can be, a story on someone’s life,” Holly Shreve Gilbert, a journalism instructor at Oakland University who was the interim president of the Funeral Consumers Information Society, told Molly Birnbaum of Atlas Obscura. But “hyper-local journalism is dying, and so is the obituary of the local person.” Gilbert added, “Now, if it’s on Legacy.com or Facebook or a blog, we’re basically whitewashing everyone’s lives. We’re all happy. Everyone is happy.”
Well, not everyone.
Obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy—or, at least, the first of the last words. And for all the beloved and respected and cherished and valued that punctuate paid obituaries, don’t forget that families can try to perpetuate irreverent descriptions unilaterally to settle scores when one is no longer in a position to retaliate or respond. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Malcolm declaims of the repentant Thane of Cawdor, who was executed for treason, “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.” If the Thane got the benefit of ambiguity, Florence Harrelson of Chelsea, Maine, had no such luck when she died in 2024 and her daughter, Christina Novak, placed a paid obituary in the Kennebec Journal. Wasting no words, the four-line obit read that the 65-year-old Henderson died “without family by her side due to burnt bridges and a wake of destruction left in her path.” It continued, “Florence did not want an obituary or anyone including family to know she died. That’s because even in death, she wanted those she terrorized to still be living in fear looking over their shoulders. So, this isn’t so much an obituary but more of a public service announcement.”
In 2023, Gayle Harvey Heckman took the trouble to announce the death of her mother, Linda Lernal Stull, in her Michigan hometown newspaper, the Three Rivers Commercial-News, even though they hadn’t spoken in 24 years. “As a mother, Lernal was violent, hateful and cruel,” Heckman wrote. “She physically, mentally, emotionally, verbally and financially abused Gayle.” After going into excruciating detail, the obituary concluded, “Gayle and her family forgive Lernal and hope that she has found peace. They also hope to find peace within themselves. Lernal will not be missed by Gayle or her family. They all understand that the world is a much better place without her.”
Blunt isn’t always bad. If writing can be a cathartic, it can also offer an object lesson. In 2015, a nine-hundred-word paid obituary in Maine’s Bangor Daily News (down-easters seem less inhibited about publicly evaluating their kin) began, “Coleen Sheran Singer (born Coleen Sheran Clark) would have turned 33 this August 31, but she died in Lewiston in an unsuspecting suburban professional couple’s home of a heroin overdose on the morning of December 25, 2014.” The obit was written by Singer’s former husband. It detailed her considerable assets—intellectually gifted, creative, and spirited—without concealing her hefty baggage as a woman who was addicted and suffering from borderline behavioral disorder. Brent Singer attributed the life his former wife led to her broken childhood home but blamed her death on Maine’s governor for denying her access to the methadone clinic she had relied on to stay straight.
In 2008, the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reported that Jim Adams died at 53. Weary of soppy obituaries of patients who had courageously struggled against one disease or another until the bitter end, Adams went through his son to provide an unvarnished premortem verdict on his abbreviated life. And he had no compunctions about belatedly exercising personal responsibility and admitting that he lost his battle for less inspiring reasons entirely: “It was primarily as a result of being stubborn and not following doctor’s orders or maybe for just living life a little too hard for better than five decades.” He did lament, however, that he “was sadly deprived of his final wish, which was to be run over by a beer truck on the way to the liquor store to buy booze for a date.”
In 2019, the family of Joe Heller (not that one) playfully celebrated his life in the Hartford Courant. They described him as “a frequent shopper at the Essex Dump” who “left his family with a house full of crap, 300 pounds of birdseed and dead houseplants.” Heller was so practiced a consummate napper that “there wasn’t an occasion too formal or an event too dour that Joe didn’t interrupt with his apnea and voluminous snoring.” The obituary added, “The family is seeking donations to offset the expense of publishing an exceedingly long obituary which would have really pissed Joe off.” (It then appealed generously for contributions to the Seabee Memorial Scholarship Association.)
The Hellers weren’t kidding. Those paid “obits” aren’t cheap. The New York Times doesn’t accept paid obituaries, but their paid death notices, depending on the edition and the day, cost about $1,000 for a bare-bones nine lines of type and $50 for each additional line, which verbose encomiums and fervent eulogizing can raise into the thousands of dollars. (In memoriam notices in newspapers that wish the departed “Happy Birthday in Heaven” remain a testament to the enduring value of print advertising.) While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death. So far, though, it’s one area in which even a buzzworthy website can’t always live up to its name (such as when Michael Jackson’s death was announced on MichaelJacksonLive.com).
The Charlotte Observer in North Carolina used to publish brief obituaries of local figures for free—until executives discovered that printing a full page of them daily was costing $350,000 annually for newsprint alone. When the paper imposed a fee, readers revolted; the editors relented in some editions. MyGoodbye.com was started by Stephen Miller (definitely not that one), who grew up next to a cemetery and, after escaping from his bank’s eightieth-floor office in 2 World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, decided to become an obituarist full-time. Legacy.com partners with hundreds of newspapers and thousands of funeral homes worldwide to account for about 70 percent of the deaths in the United States alone. A prototype called EPOCH—Electronically Preserving Obituaries as Cultural Heritage—created by the Orange County, Florida, Library System enabled people to publish an obit online for free. Another website, MyObits.com, also lets anyone publish a free memorial. Facebook even allows users to designate an executor to manage their profile after they’ve personally logged off this mortal coil for good.
While radio and television have generally fallen short in memorializing the dead, there are blogs, zines, and commercial websites devoted to dying, and personal web pages and online videos have all helped democratize death.
Paid death notices have been wielded as much to ward off the living as to get the last word on the dead. In the early 1920s, Audrey Munson, America’s first supermodel, became so fed up with fame that she tried to fake her death by paying to run a phony death notice in her local upstate New York newspaper. Her gambit failed; she was so celebrated that the clerk she approached refused to accept the advertisement because he recognized her. Rudyard Kipling may have done her one better: When a newspaper reported his death prematurely, he wrote to the editor, “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Six months before Oliver Sacks died of cancer at 82 in 2015, the London-born neurologist who lived in Manhattan wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that amounted to an auto-obituary. Sacks was galvanized, he wrote, by the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, who, learning he was mortally ill at 65, penned a short autobiography in a single day in 1776. “I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective,” Sacks wrote. “There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at ‘NewsHour’ every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.” He explained that his shifting priorities were influenced less by passion than perspective: “This is not indifference but detachment—I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future.”
Kelly McMasters, the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir, started writing her obituary when she was 12; she has refreshed it almost annually since then. Her ritual was inspired by an assignment her mother was given while training as a volunteer at a local hospice. “I usually end up with a gentle accounting of the year, held against all the past ones,” McMasters wrote in a New York Times opinion essay. “I found many of the accomplishments that felt precious one year were hardly worth a mention the next.” Her private accounts produced an album of verbal snapshots, unreachable versions of herself that seemed as good as the dead about whom obituaries are otherwise published. “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves,” McMasters wrote. “Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”
By inspiring the “Portraits of Grief” series of intimate minibiographies of the victims of 9/11 in the New York Times, the attack by fanatical al-Qaeda suicide bombers on the World Trade Center in 2001 may inadvertently have made the obituary more egalitarian than any event since the Civil War. These 200-word vignettes with thumbnail photographs weren’t standard obits or news stories. Volunteer reporters interviewed families and friends of the victims and the missing to sketch some 2,500 hundred profiles. Overseen by Jon Landman and Christine Kay on the Metro Desk, the portraits were published over nearly five months. “Terrorism rather than the internet democratized the obituary,” Professor Clare Brant wrote. Roy Harris wrote for the Poynter Institute of the project, “The portraits identified one aspect of life—a woman gardening, a man taking his daughter to ice-skating lessons, or perhaps indulging in a fondness for cigars.” The obituarist Nigel Starck said, “Each day’s pages would renew a sense of the tragedy’s scope, while the individual portraits made each person intimately real.” Our exercise in mining the unremarkable found a larger-than-life common denominator, one that challenges the novelist W. P. Kinsella’s conclusion that “the lives of ninety percent of the population are so dull that no one would care in the least about them, the lives of the remaining ten percent are so bizarre that no one would believe them.”
Some of the deaths in those “Portraits of Grief” were preceded by chivalrous acts of courage and self-sacrifice. Those heroics worked their way into news articles. The portraits were not about how people died, not about their last moments of life, no matter how gutsy, but how they lived and what their loss meant to their family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. The gruesome, grisly details were superfluous, unlike an earlier obituary style in which the how sometimes seemed to predominate over the who, what, when, where, and why.
When Louisa May Alcott died in 1888, for example, the New York Times explained in the first paragraph of her obituary, “For a long time Miss Alcott had been ill, suffering from nervous prostration. Last Autumn she appeared to be improving and went to the Highlands to reside with Dr. Rhoda A. Lawrence. She drove from there into town to visit her father on Thursday last, and caught a cold, which on Saturday settled on the base of the brain and developed spinal meningitis.” The first five paragraphs of Teddy Roosevelt’s Times obituary in 1919 left nothing about the cause of death to the reader’s imagination: “His physicians said that the immediate cause of death was a clot of blood which detached itself from a vein and entered the lungs.” In 1892, reporting the death of Caroline Harrison, the wife of President Benjamin Harrison, the Atlanta Constitution described her corpse in clinical detail: “She shows in her emaciation the effects of the long wasting illness of eight months that has reduced her large, matronly figure to a thin, frail form.” Then again, as recently as 2000, the paper, now called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ran an obituary by Kay Powell of a local church-choir tenor, who had also written a manuscript on the philosophy of religion, beginning this way: “David Robeson Morgan was a brilliant man whose future looked good, until he had a frontal lobotomy in 1947.”
“A writer may bear the same name as the subject of his memoir, but he is hardly the same person,” Robert W. Fuller, the former college president and self-styled dignitarian, surmised in the epilogue to his own memoir. “He has long since morphed into the subject’s successor, and then the successor of the successor.” Bridget Fowler, a sociology professor at the University of Glasgow and the author of The Obituary as Collective Memory, wrote, “The auto/biography as such is under the expressive control of its author and is thus as profound (or simplistic) as he or she is. In contrast, one characteristic of the obituary is that these lives are selected as particularly memorable, distinguished, or newsworthy.” She adds, “The obituary offers the rare accolade of public recognition, the first step toward posthumous memory. Yet it is not just a store of value, it is also a measure of value: the obituary as a biographical form illuminates the social reality of dominance and distinction, whilst only rarely shedding light on the world of subordination.”
The onset of the AIDS epidemic presented editors with a sensitive dilemma: Merely having the virus implied vulnerable behavior—either drug use or homosexuality—that society was far from accepting. In 1986, the fashion designer Perry Ellis died of AIDS at age 46, as stated in his obituary in the Washington Post. In the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, his cause of his death was reported to be viral encephalitis. In early May 1987, Charles Ludlam, a playwright, parody actor, and admired figure in New York’s East Village underground arts scene, withdrew from the New York Shakespeare Festival’s scheduled Central Park production of Titus Andronicus. On May 28, Ludlam’s publicist announced that he had died of pneumonia. The New York Times‘s Jeremy Gerard assumed correctly that the pneumonia was a complication of AIDS, and believed the refusal to acknowledge the disease compounded the tragedy of Ludlam’s death by validating the stigma attached to gay people, who were among its most prominent victims.
As Leah Rosenzweig reported in Slate, for hours Gerard desperately tried to persuade Ludlam’s parents to confirm the actual cause but failed. “They were working-class Catholics from Long Island; as far as they were concerned, their son had died a shameful death,” Gerard recalled. But fifteen minutes before his deadline, the family’s lawyer called back. The Ludlams agreed to confirm the cause. On May 29, 1987, Gerard’s obituary of Charles Ludlam was the first that identified AIDS as the cause of death in the Times, on the front page.
“Obituaries contribute to national myths or collective memories of contemporary heroes by symbolically ‘reflecting what, in death, was most valued about the lives of individual citizens,'” Janice Hume wrote. “An obituary distills, publishes, and thus legitimizes something more abstract than mere facts. It also reveals values, highlighted in the attributes of the deceased, and should be examined not just as an indifferent chronicle but as a commemoration, a representation of an ideal, with its own distinct contribution to the understanding of history. Those ideals, part of obituary coverage, become safeguarded by their publication.”
To quantify those values, Lux Narayan, a social media analyst, conducted a statistical survey of some 2,000 New York Times news obituaries that were published in 2015 and 2016. Not surprisingly, the fields of academics, science, politics, film, theater, music, dance, and art predominated among those deemed worthy. On average, they achieved the thing that made them worthy of a Times obituary when they were 37 years old—athletes more likely in their twenties, politicians in their forties. The prototypical obituary subject lived to be 81, which meant 44 years had elapsed between the accomplishment and, in the cases of the many obscure and quirky characters, their public aggrandizement. “Talk about having to be patient,” Narayan said. In a TED Talk, he explained his obsessive reading of the daily paper over scrambled eggs this way: “If you think about it, the front page of the newspaper is usually bad news and cues man’s failures. An instance where bad news cues accomplishment is at the end of the paper, in the obituaries.”
What were the most common denominators among those obituarized, and what do they suggest society—or, more to the point, the Times—valued? If your name was John, you didn’t necessarily have a better chance of being the subject of an obituary, but it was more likely that a man whose first name was John would appear in one. That’s not so surprising, given that John (along with James, Robert, Michael, and David) has been among the most popular names for American men born in the last 100 years. Narayan was struck by another commonality, though. The language-processing program revealed that the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” Narayan said.
For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity.
Journalists understand, or should, that statistical surveys of subjective material are fertile ground for as many question marks as answers. Patrick Nolan, a sociologist at the University of South Carolina, wondered whether the cult of celebrity has blossomed over the last century, as the anecdotal evidence suggests. Has the public become so starstruck that somebodies in less glamorous professions have been overshadowed? One way to measure the trajectory of society’s fascination quotient, he figured, was to enlist New York Times obituaries as a cultural barometer. Nolan’s canvas was every “notable death” that was published in the Times during the entire twentieth century.
“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities—entertainers and athletes.” After dividing the century into quarters, Nolan and a doctoral student, Timothy Bertoni, randomly selected 20 days from 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975, and 2000 and ranked the professions of the dead by the number of obituaries run.
The number of obits of entertainers and athletes, grouped together, rose, from seventh most in 1900 to fifth in 1925, third in 1950, and first in 1975. By 2000, they remained in first place and accounted for 28 percent of obituaries. In 2000, the researchers didn’t find a single notable religious figure who was memorialized. The category had plummeted from fourth place when the 20th century began to last when the millennium ended. During the same period, the number of obituaries of notable individuals from the fields of business, finance, manufacturing, and industry declined by half. Americans, Janice Hume has written in her study of grief, “value each other and, indeed, value life for collective reasons. They value a long, robust, and full life, a life that is uniquely American, and a life that ensures social preservation. A typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.” Nigel Starck, too, argues that obituaries provide a glue that bonds society not in grief but in an aspirational reevaluation of our own lives.
“There is nothing inherently gloomy about the newspaper obituary page,” he writes. “Done well, it should capture life rather than wallow in death.” Clare Brant recalled her euphoric reaction to reading of the death of Martin Wells, the grandson of the English writer H. G. Wells, in the Guardian in 2009. He was an 80-year-old biologist with a passion for cephalopods and was also a novelist, painter, and yachtsman. “Though marine biologists don’t have dry lives in a literal sense, and people who love octopus usually have a sense of play, he was really lively,” Brant wrote. “I rejoiced that an academic could have such a full, happy and entertaining life—there’s hope for the rest of us! It wasn’t that I wanted to know him or even to have known him, but I was glad he’d existed, and I still want not to forget the implications of his existence.”
And that was an obituary about a total stranger. For a family member, an obit represents an imprimatur, validation by association, a keepsake that maintains their heritage and, perhaps for a generation, prevents their own legacy from vanishing like a walnut in the batter of eternity. “The greatest investigative piece I ever wrote when I thought I was really important never survived more than a few weeks in terms of being kept around,” said Jim Nicholson, the Philadelphia journalist who regularly chronicled deaths of the common man, the nobodies, as he put it. “But these obituaries, they’re laminated. They’re put under glass. They’re hung on walls or in family Bibles. In fact, they’re even put into the inside coat pocket of the deceased. And, yeah, they’ll be around long after you and I are gone.” Nicholson’s obituaries were indelible. “My words give readers thousands of moments to remember of little lives lived well,” he said. “Perhaps I even gave them the secrets of how to live one well.”
What readers cherish about obituaries, Casey Cep wrote in the New Yorker, is “the opportunity to celebrate one’s own good fortune at still being alive, to keep tabs on death—who it comes for, at what age, and how much we have in common with the deceased—and also to trace an immensely compact narrative arc. So much of the news is ongoing and unsettled, but obituaries by definition have a kind of alluring finality.” In the two weeks after Victoria Chang’s mother died of pulmonary fibrosis in 2015, the Los Angeles–based poet feverishly wrote seventy poems. Her goal: to recast the newspaper obituary to identify what had been lost (“civility, language and the future,” she wrote) and death’s cultural impact on the living. She described writing an obituary as a wake-up call. “This person is dead,” Chang wrote. “You’re alive.”
Sam Roberts, a fifty-year veteran of New York journalism, is an obituaries reporter and formerly the Urban Affairs correspondent at the New York Times. He has hosted the New York Times Close Up on TV and the podcast Only in New York, anthologized in a book of the same name. He is the author of The New Yorkers, A History of New York in 27 Buildings, A History of New York in 101 Objects, Grand Central, and The Brother, among other books. He has written for the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, New York magazine, Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, and Air Mail. Before joining the Times in 1983, he was the youngest city editor of the New York Daily News. He lives in New York with his wife.
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