Le Journal

A highly unlikely set of nuptials has taken place in China with a pair of twin brothers marrying twin sisters. Not only that, both sides have a pair of twin uncles. A wedding photo featuring four sets of twins went viral online recently, racking up more than 10 million views. According to the mainland media outlet Jiupai News, the two couples only discovered on the wedding day that their uncles were also twins. The wedding host called it a “miracle”, and the guests were equally astonished and...

If you’re looking for a lengthy debate about the merits of authentic cuisine, ask a Bahamian about their grandmother’s recipe for guava duff. The national dessert of the Bahamas, the duff is a steamed, doughy dumpling furrowed with fresh mashed guava (canned fruit is not acceptable, we are told), served piping hot and swimming in rum-spiked butter sauce. After listening to our waitress wax lyrical, we had to order one at Daddy Joe’s, more a living room than a restaurant in North Eleuthera, on...

Are your loved ones in luck this year? See our predictions for all the zodiac signs in the Year of the Horse. In my years of interviewing fortune-tellers and feng shui masters for Lunar New Year content, the term “benefactor” – 貴人 or guiren in Chinese – comes up time and again. While I feel that is the best translation for what literally means a “precious” or “noble” person, it seems there is a lack of appreciation for how profound the concept is in Chinese culture. The character 貴 or gui in...

In 1900, most people lived without electricity, antibiotics or universal education. Today, life expectancy is decades longer, literacy and access to medicine are near universal in many regions, and hundreds of millions have entered the global middle class. This progress was built through science, industry, public health, education and the hard work of ordinary people who believed tomorrow could be better. The question now is whether humanity can achieve a still more audacious goal: a world in...