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It began online. I submitted my request for a book and was told to provide “eight working days’ notice” prior to my planned visit. I wasn’t surprised – and pleased when I was given an appointment within a few days. Not many people will want to read about the Maladies et Insectes Nuisibles (Diseases and Insect Pests), part of Auguste Chevalier’s multi-volume treatise on Les Caféièrs du Globe (Coffees of the World), published in the 1940s.

In fact, I was chary about uploading it into this article. Why? Read on. The image was originally at the top of The Madness of Crowds, an article written by Stoker in July 2024. Then, in May, Vincent Guy asked politely why “a strange bunch of cars” had "parked themselves” across the top of his February 2021 post, How I found out I was Jewish.

There is a word we lack in most languages; a word for the feeling of being exactly where you want to be, doing precisely what you chose, with no gravitational pull toward anywhere else. We have assembled entire vocabularies for its opposite. We have built industries, economies, whole architectures of digital life around its opposite. But the thing itself, that rare, settled sufficiency, that quiet fullness, resists naming, and so resists pursuit.

The UK’s Financial Times could not resist some mild sexual innuendo in the headline of a front-page article in its 30 May edition: “Durex sales deflate as China withdraws condom tax break to revive birth rate.” China announced last December that from January 1 condoms would be subject to a Value Added Tax of 13%, reversing a tax-exemption dating from 1993. Sales of China’s leading condom brand, Durex, owned by British company Reckitt, drooped 5% in the first quarter of 2026.

Disillusioned with politics? Exasperated by the tedious political mudslinging? Unsure about how to vote next time? You are not alone. Half the voters who backed Labour at the last general election have deserted the party, and the Tories would limp home with a mere 14 seats if a general election were called, according to separate polls disclosed towards the end of 2025...