Reasons to be Cheerful

In the town of Gateshead in North East England, coal mining runs thick in the blood. Up to the final coup de grâce delivered by Margaret Thatcher’s coal purge in the 1980s, Gateshead had been tapping its dark subterranean seams as far back as 1344, when packhorses conveyed “s...

There are all kinds of enormous, impressive and, frankly, noisy machines at work across the 20,000 square meters of industrial warehouses at the headquarters of Fagor Arrasate, a manufacturing company in Spain’s northern Basque Country.

Here, a team of engineers is constructing machines that can put together household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines,...

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Do you really need to fly from Paris to Bordeaux? Not when there’s a train that can get you there quickly and easily.

That’s what the French...

When she was 21, Gabriela Nathania H dove underwater with a cohort of four strangers off the coast of Gili Air. The tiny island is one of three that make up the Gili Islands, an archipelago that divers the world over admire for their incredible marine biodiversity. 

But on that trip in 2022, Nathania experienced something more powerful than just a scenic dive. “We were...

At the end of 2020, Dr. Jean-Luc Bernard, a family doctor who had been caring for the community in Ajain, France, for over 40 years, finally hung up his stethoscope and retired.

It was not easy to convince a new general practitioner to settle down in the town of 1,000 people — and there were no appropriate local replacements. Ajain, located in France’s Creuse departmen...