Category: News

SARCELLES, France — Every time Mama Diakité heads to a soccer game, her stomach is in knots.

It happened again on a recent Saturday afternoon in Sarcelles, a northern suburb of Paris. Her amateur team had come to face the local club, and Diakité, a 23-year-old Muslim midfielder, feared she would not be allowed to play in her hijab.

This time, the referee let her in. “It worked,” she said at the end of the game, leaning against the fence bordering the field, her smiling face wrapped in a black Nike head scarf.

But Diakité had only fallen through the cracks.

For years, France’s soccer federation has banned players participating in competitions from wearing conspicuous religious symbols such as hijabs, a rule it contends is in keeping with the organization’s strict secular values. Although the ban is loosely enforced at the amateur level, it has hung over Muslim women’s players for years, shattering their hopes of professional careers and driving some away from the game altogether.

In an ever more multicultural France, where women’s soccer is booming, the ban has also sparked a growing backlash. At the forefront of the fight is Les Hijabeuses, a group of young hijab-wearing soccer players from different teams who have joined forces to campaign against what they describe as a discriminatory rule that excludes Muslim women from sports.

Their activism has touched a nerve in France, reviving heated debates on the integration of Muslims in a country with a tortured relationship with Islam, and highlighting the struggle of French sports authorities to reconcile their defense of strict secular values with growing calls for greater representation on the field.

“What we want is to be accepted as we are, to implement these grand slogans of diversity, inclusiveness,” said Founé Diawara, the president of Les Hijabeuses, which has 80 members. “Our only desire is to play soccer.”

The Hijabeuses collective was created in 2020 with the help of researchers and community organizers in an attempt to solve a paradox: Although French laws and FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, allow sportswomen to play in hijabs, France’s soccer federation prohibits it, arguing that it would break with the principle of religious neutrality on the field.

Supporters of the ban say hijabs portend an Islamist radicalization taking over sports. But the personal stories of Hijabeuses members emphasize how soccer has been synonymous with emancipation — and how the ban continues to feel like a step backward.

Diakité began playing soccer at age 12, initially hiding it from her parents, who saw soccer as a boys’ sport. “I wanted to be a professional soccer player,” she said, calling it “a dream.”

Jean-Claude Njehoya, her current coach, said that “when she was younger, she had a lot of skills” that could have propelled her to the highest level. But “from the moment” she understood the hijab ban would impact her, he said, “she didn’t really push herself further.”

Diakité said she decided on her own to wear the hijab in 2018 — and to give up her dream. She now plays for a third-division club and plans to open a driving school. “No regret,” she said. “Either I’m accepted as I am, or I’m not. And that’s it.”

Karthoum Dembele, a 19-year-old midfielder who wears a nose ring, also said she had to confront her mother to be allowed to play. She quickly joined a sports-intensive program in middle school and participated in club tryouts. But it wasn’t until she learned about the ban, four years ago, that she realized she may no longer be allowed to compete.

“I had managed to make my mother give in and I’m told the federation won’t let me play,” Dembele said. “I told myself: What a joke!”

Other members of the group recalled episodes when referees barred them from the field, prompting some, feeling humiliated, to quit soccer and turn to sports where hijabs are allowed or tolerated, like handball or futsal.

Throughout last year, Les Hijabeuses lobbied the French soccer federation to overturn the ban. They sent letters, met with officials and even staged a protest at the federation’s headquarters — to no avail. The federation declined to comment for this article.

Paradoxically, it was Les Hijabeuses’ staunchest opponents who finally put them in the spotlight.

In January, a group of conservative senators tried to enshrine the soccer federation’s hijab ban in law, arguing that hijabs threatened to spread radical Islam in sports clubs. The move reflected a lingering malaise in France regarding the Muslim veil, which regularly stirs controversy. In 2019, a French store dropped a plan to sell a hijab designed for runners after a barrage of criticism.

Energized by the senators’ efforts, Les Hijabeuses waged an intense lobbying campaign against the amendment. Making the most of their strong social media presence — the group has nearly 30,000 followers on Instagram — they launched a petition that gathered more than 70,000 signatures; rallied dozens of sport celebrities to their cause; and organized games before the Senate building and with professional athletes.

Vikash Dhorasoo, a former France midfielder who attended a game, said the ban left him dumbfounded. “I just don’t get it,” he said. “It’s the Muslims who are targeted here.”

Stéphane Piednoir, the senator behind the amendment, denied the accusation that the legislation was aimed at Muslims specifically, saying its focus was all conspicuous religious signs. But he acknowledged that the amendment had been motivated by the wearing of the Muslim veil, which he called “a propaganda vehicle” for political Islam and a form of “visual proselytizing.” (Piednoir also has condemned the display of the Catholic tattoos of the P.S.G. star Neymar as “unfortunate” and wondered if the religious ban should extend to them.)

The amendment was eventually rejected by the government’s majority in parliament, although not without frictions. The Paris police banned a protest organized by Les Hijabeuses, and the French sports minister, who said the law allows hijab-wearing women to play, clashed with government colleagues opposing the head scarf.

The Hijabeuses’ fight may not be a popular one in France, where six in 10 people support banning hijabs in the street, according to a recent survey by the polling firm CSA. Marine Le Pen, the far-right presidential candidate who will face President Emmanuel Macron in a runoff vote on April 24 — with a shot at a final victory — has said that if elected, she will ban the Muslim veil in public spaces.

But, on the soccer field, everyone seems to agree that hijabs should be allowed.

“Nobody minds if they play with it,” said Rana Kenar, 17, a Sarcelles player who had come to watch her team face Diakité’s club on a bitterly cold February evening.

Kenar was sitting in the bleachers with about 20 fellow players. All said they saw the ban as a form of discrimination, noting that, at the amateur level, the ban was loosely enforced.

Even the referee of the game in Sarcelles, who had let Diakité play, seemed at odds with the ban. “I looked the other way,” he said, declining to give his name for fear of repercussions.

Pierre Samsonoff, the former deputy head of the soccer federation’s amateur branch, said the issue would inevitably come up again in the coming years, with the development of women’s soccer and the hosting of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, which will feature veiled athletes from Muslim countries.

Samsonoff, who initially defended banning the hijab, said he had since softened his stance, acknowledging the policy could end up ostracizing Muslim players. “The issue is whether we are not creating worse consequences by deciding to ban it on the fields than by deciding to allow it,” he said.

Piednoir, the senator, said the players were ostracizing themselves. But he acknowledged never having spoken with any hijab-wearing athletes to hear their motivations, comparing the situation to “firefighters” being asked to go “listen to pyromaniacs.”

Dembele, who manages the Hijabeuses’ social media accounts, said she was often struck by the violence of online comments and the fierce political opposition.

“We hold on,” she said. “It’s not just for us, it’s also for the young girls who tomorrow will be able to dream of playing for France, for P.S.G.”

Monique Jaques contributed reporting.

If you live in most any Western country, your government’s support for Ukraine, including sending weapons and imposing sanctions on Russia, can give the impression of a united global response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion.

But that isn’t the case. Most of the world’s 195 countries have not shipped aid to Ukraine or joined in sanctions. A handful have actively supported Russia. Far more occupy the “messy middle,” as Carisa Nietsche of the Center for a New American Security calls it, taking neither Ukraine’s nor Russia’s side.

“We live in a bubble, here in the U.S. and Europe, where we think the very stark moral and geopolitical stakes, and framework of what we’re seeing unfolding, is a universal cause,” Barry Pavel, a senior vice president at the Atlantic Council, told me. “Actually, most of the governments of the world are not with us.”

Today’s newsletter offers a guide to some of those countries and why they have committed to their stances.

National interests

India and Israel are prominent democracies that ally with the U.S. on many issues, particularly security. But they rely on Russia for security as well and have avoided arming Ukraine or imposing sanctions on Moscow. “In both cases, the key factor isn’t ideology but national interests,” says my colleague Max Fisher, who has written about Russia’s invasion.

India is the world’s largest buyer of Russian weapons, seeking to protect itself from Pakistan and China. India joined 34 other countries in abstaining from a United Nations vote that condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as you can see on the map below. And India appears to be rebuffing Western pleas to take a harder line.

Israel coordinates with Russia on Iran, its chief adversary, and in neighboring Syria (with which Russia has a strong relationship). Russian-speaking émigrés from the former Soviet Union also make up a sizable chunk of the Israeli electorate. Israel’s prime minister has avoided directly criticizing Putin, and though its government has mediated between Ukraine and Russia, little has come out of the effort.

Several Latin American, Southeast Asian and African countries have made similar choices. Bolivia, Vietnam and almost half of Africa’s 54 countries declined to support the U.N. resolution condemning Russia. Some rely on Russian military assistance, said Bruce Jones, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Others don’t want to risk jeopardizing trade relations with China, which has parroted Russian propaganda about the war.

Those countries “might be more accurately described as disinterested,” Max says, unwilling to risk their security or economies “for the sake of a struggle that they see as mostly irrelevant.”

West skeptics

Some countries, citing the West’s history of imperialism and past failures to respect human rights, have justified opposing its response to Ukraine. South Africa’s president blamed NATO for Russia’s invasion, and its U.N. ambassador criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq during a debate last month about Ukraine’s humanitarian crisis.

Other countries, including some that voted to condemn Russia’s invasion, accuse the West of acting counterproductively. Brazil’s U.N. ambassador has suggested that arming Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia risk escalating the war.

“There’s nothing intellectually incoherent between viewing Russia’s actions as outrageous and not necessarily fully siding with the West’s reaction to it,” Jones told me.

Autocratic leaders — including in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Nicaragua — may also feel threatened by Ukraine’s resistance and the West’s framing of the invasion as a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, experts said. “They’re concerned that this could inspire opposition movements in their own countries,” Nietsche said.

Russia’s friends

China, with all its economic and military might, has seen the war as a chance to enhance its own geopolitical standing as a counterweight to the U.S. while still maintaining ties to Russia. The countries recently issued a joint statement proclaiming a friendship with “no limits.” But China has struggled with the delicate balancing act of honoring that commitment without fully endorsing Russia’s invasion: Beijing has denounced Western sanctions but has not appeared to have given Russia weapons or economic aid.

“China’s support for Russia, while very important, is also carefully hedged and measured,” Max says.

Four countries — North Korea, Eritrea, Syria and Belarus — outright voted with Russia against the U.N. resolution condemning the invasion of Ukraine. Belarus is a former Soviet state whose autocratic leader asked Putin to help suppress protests in 2020 and allowed Russia to launch part of its invasion from within Belarus.

Russia intervened in Syria’s civil war on behalf of the Moscow-aligned government there, and Syria is sending fighters who may aid Russian forces in Ukraine.

What’s next?

It’s not unusual for countries to avoid picking sides on big global issues. Several stayed neutral during World War II; dozens sought to remain free of both U.S. and Soviet influence during the Cold War.

But if the war in Ukraine drags on, Jones said, neutral countries could come under stronger international pressure to condemn Moscow. And for countries with close ties to Russia, even neutrality can be an act of courage.

More on Ukraine

• The fate of Mariupol, in the southeast, hinges on a battle at a steel factory, where Ukrainian forces are holding out.

• Capturing Mariupol would create a land bridge between Russia’s stronghold in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

• Russian forces fired missiles at Lviv, in western Ukraine, killing at least six people. It’s part of a pattern of attacking cities even as they prepare for an offensive in the east.

• In Russia, brutal crimes by soldiers are rarely investigated or acknowledged — let alone punished.

• A Ukrainian village is haunted by the disappearance of five men who went to feed the cows.

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Books’ big-box embrace

Once upon a time, Barnes & Noble was the nemesis of indie booksellers across America. Now, it’s important to their survival, The Times’s Elizabeth Harris reports.

Many book enthusiasts and writers used to see the chain as “strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores,” Elizabeth writes. But in today’s book landscape, upended by online sales, Barnes & Noble helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in distributing in physical stores, a boon for booksellers of all sizes.

“It would be a disaster if they went out of business,” a literary agent said. “There’s a real fear that without this book chain, the print business would be way off.”

Barnes & Noble’s success stemmed from offering big discounts on best sellers and an enormous variety of books. Amazon supersized that formula: Its discounts are steeper, it has a seemingly endless selection of books, and it now sells more than half the physical books in the U.S.

What’s lost in that process are the accidental finds — the books that readers pick up in a store. Such discovery in chain and indie bookstores is crucial for writers who aren’t established names. “The more Amazon’s market share grows, the less discovery there is overall, and the less new voices are going to be heard,” the founder of an independent publisher said.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT

What to Cook

WASHINGTON — As millions of Americans race to finish filing their tax returns on Monday, the Biden administration made another plea for Congress to give the Internal Revenue Service more money.

The call for funding to modernize the agency and beef up its enforcement staff comes as I.R.S. and Treasury Department officials have complained that they are facing an extraordinarily challenging tax season because of staff shortages and the complexity associated with distributing pandemic relief money. The Biden administration’s proposals to provide the I.R.S. with $80 billion over a decade have thus far fallen flat in Congress.

“The I.R.S. knew walking into this filing season that it did not have the work force or technology in place to serve the American people the way they deserve — to pick up the phones when taxpayers call, to help them access all the credits and benefits to which they are entitled, and to ensure that each and every taxpayer receives their refund quickly,” Natasha Sarin, Treasury’s counselor for tax policy, wrote in a report about Tax Day.

Ms. Sarin said that the I.R.S. had collected more than 130 million tax returns from individuals and businesses this year and had disbursed more than $220 billion in refunds. The average refund, as of the week of April 8, was $3,175.

Taxpayers who received a portion of the child tax credit in advance last year could receive smaller refunds than they expected.

The agency started this tax season buried in a backlog of more than 20 million tax returns from previous years, leaving many taxpayers frustrated about delayed refunds.

The I.R.S. has been holding job fairs with the aim of hiring 10,000 new employees to clear the backlog by the end of the year.

Despite the Biden administration’s continuing push for more money for the agency, it was not clear if that proposal would make it into any legislation that Democrats could pass. Republicans have staunchly opposed providing the I.R.S. with more funding.

Ms. Sarin said that the I.R.S. continued to be bogged down by antiquated technology and thin resources. She said that a lack of funding was fueling a $600 billion annual “tax gap” of revenue that is going uncollected and leaving the entire tax system in a state of distress.

“It is a tax system where ripped paper returns are literally pieced together with Scotch tape,” Ms. Sarin wrote. “Ultimately, it is the I.R.S. that is stuck with short-term salves for much deeper trauma.”

PARIS — As President Emmanuel Macron wove through crowds during a campaign stop in northern France last week, an elderly voter got in his face to protest one of his most unpopular economic proposals: raising the retirement age to 65 from 62 to fund France’s national pension system.

“Retirement at 65, no, no!” the woman shouted, jabbing a finger at Mr. Macron’s chest as he tried to assuage her. The boisterous exchange was caught on camera. Two hours later, he retreated, saying he would consider tweaking the age to 64. “I don’t want to divide the country,” he said on French television.

Mr. Macron’s reversal on a key element of his economic platform, in an industrial region backing the far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen ahead of France’s presidential election next Sunday, was a reminder of the social distress dominating the minds of voters. He and Ms. Le Pen have starkly divergent visions of how to address these concerns.

As they cross the country in a whirlwind of last-minute campaigning, their runoff will hinge to a large extent on perceptions of the economy. Worries about widening economic insecurity, and the surging cost of living amid the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, have become top issues in the race, ahead of security and immigration.

Ms. Le Pen won by a comfortable margin in the first round of voting last Sunday in places that have lost jobs to deindustrialization, where she has found a ready audience for her pledges to bolster purchasing power, create employment through “intelligent” protectionism and shield France from European policies that expanded globalization.

While Mr. Macron is still expected to win in a tight race, workers in restless blue-collar bastions may yet prove a liability. Despite a robust recovery in France from Covid lockdowns — the economy is now growing at around 7 percent, and unemployment has fallen to a 10-year low of 7.4 percent — many feel inequality has widened, rather than narrowed, as he pledged, in the five years since Mr. Macron took office.

After France’s traditional left-wing and right-wing parties collapsed in the first round of voting, both candidates are scrambling to lure the undecided and voters who gravitated to their opponents — especially the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon — in large part by recasting major planks of their economic programs to appeal to those struggling to get by.

Pensions is a case in point. Mr. Macron has worked to recalibrate his image as a president who favors France’s wealthy classes, the business establishment and white-collar voters as he set about overhauling the economy to bolster competitiveness.

In 2019 he was forced to set aside plans to raise the retirement age to 65 after raucous nationwide strikes shut down much of France. He had sought to streamline France’s complex system of public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan to close a shortfall of 18 billion euros, or about $19 billion.

Following his confrontation in northern France last week, Mr. Macron insisted that he would continue to push back the retirement age incrementally — by four months per year starting next year — but that he was open to discussing an easing of the plan in its later stages.

“It’s not dogma,” he said of the policy. “I have to listen to what people are saying to me.”

Ms. Le Pen accused Mr. Macron of engaging in a policy of “social wreckage” and of blowing with the wind to capture votes, although she has also shifted gears after the protectionist economic platform she advanced five years ago spooked businesses. She dropped plans to withdraw from the European Union and the eurozone.

Today, Ms. Le Pen favors maintaining the current retirement age of 62, abandoning a previous push to reduce it to 60 — although certain workers engaged in intensive manual labor like construction could retire at the lower age.

As Ms. Le Pen seeks to rebrand her far-right National Rally party as a kinder, gentler party than the one she steered in 2017, albeit with a clear anti-immigrant message, she has focused on economic issues close to blue-collar voters’ hearts.

She got out front on one of the biggest issues of the campaign: a surge in the cost of living.

While Mr. Macron was trying to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen was visiting towns and rural areas across France, promising increased subsidies for vulnerable households.

She has pledged a 10 percent hike in France’s monthly minimum wage of 1,603 euros. She is also vowing to slash sales taxes to 5.5 percent from 20 percent on fuel, oil, gas and electricity, and to cut them altogether on 100 “essential” goods. Workers under 30 would be exempt from income tax, and young couples would get interest-free housing loans.

Her France-first policy extends even further: To make up for increased spending on social programs, she has said she would slash billions in social spending on “foreigners.”

She has also vowed to create jobs and re-industrialize the country by prioritizing French companies for government contracts over foreign investors and dangling a host of expensive tax incentives to encourage French companies that have branched out overseas to return to France.

While she has abandoned talk of a so-called Frexit — a French exit from the European Union — some of her proposals to protect the economy would amount to essentially that, including a pledge to ignore some European Union laws, including on internal free trade. She has said she would withhold some French payments to the bloc.

Mr. Macron has branded such promises “pure fantasy” and is proposing to retain many of his pro-business policies, with modifications.

Having vowed to lure jobs and investment, under his watch foreign companies have poured billions of euros into industrial projects and research and development, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country that has not easily embraced change.

At the same time, he has faced a challenge in discarding the image of an aloof president whose policies tended to benefit the most affluent. His abolition of a wealth tax and the introduction of a 30 percent flat tax on capital gains has mainly lifted incomes for the richest 0.1 percent and increased the distribution of dividends, according to the government’s own analysis.

After a growing wealth divide helped set off the Yellow Vest movement in 2019, bringing struggling working-class people into the streets, Mr. Macron increased the minimum wage and made it easier for companies to give workers “purchasing power bonuses” of up to 3,000 euros annually without being taxed, a policy he has pledged to beef up.

As inflation has surged recently, Mr. Macron has also authorized billions of euros in subsidies for energy bills and at the gas pump and has promised to peg pension payments to inflation starting this summer. He has vowed new tax cuts for both households and businesses.

His economic platform also aims for “full employment,” in part by pressing ahead with a series of pro-business reforms that has continued to lure the support of France’s biggest employers’ organization, Medef.

“Emmanuel Macron’s program is the most favorable to ensure the growth of the economy and employment,” the group said last week, adding that Ms. Le Pen’s platform “would lead the country to stall compared to its neighbors and to put it on the sidelines of the European Union.”

For all the differences, the pledges by Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen have one thing in common: more public spending, and less savings. According to estimates by the Institut Montaigne, a French economic think tank, Mr. Macron’s economic plan would worsen the public deficit by 44 billion euros, while Ms. Le Pen’s would widen it by 102 billion euros.

“These shifts are significant enough to think that some of their proposals cannot actually be applied — except if they put in place budget austerity measures that they are not talking about,” Victor Poirier, director of publications at the Institut Montaigne, said.

In March of 2020, Krista Fahs began working from home. As she sidled up to her desk, the 53-year-old sales associate for a computer distributor put aside her usual sneakers. She found herself doing laundry, playing with her cat and even visiting neighbors without putting on shoes. “I was barefoot all the time,” she said.

A few months into working from home, she began to feel a twinge of heel pain, but disregarded it until last month, when it got too intense to ignore. Even as she lay in bed, the throbbing wouldn’t stop. “‘This is ridiculous,’” she remembered thinking, “I didn’t even know how I was going to fall asleep.”

The beginning of the pandemic coincided with a steep decline in foot trauma, said Dr. Robert K. Lee, chief of podiatric foot and ankle surgery at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, but his practice quickly repopulated with patients like Ms. Fahs who complained about foot pain. “I was like, ‘Aha, so this is the effect of the pandemic on feet across the country,’” he said.

There is no hard data on the increase in foot pain, but Dr. James Christina, the executive director of the American Podiatric Medical Association, said it’s been a clear trend for many of his 12,000 members.

Members like Dr. Rock Positano, the co-director of the Non-surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who has seen foot pain increase so much — 20 to 30 percent — that he called the phenomenon “pandemic foot.”

Now that spring is here, mandates are relaxing and people are eager to get their prepandemic bodies and hobbies back, they are hitting the pavement, said Dr. James Hanna, a podiatrist and president of the New York State Podiatric Medical Association. Many are exacerbating existing foot injuries or creating new ones.

“People thought they could just return to where they left off or try something they hadn’t tried in a couple years,” he said, “but their feet aren’t prepared for what their bodies want to do.”

By instituting a few simple measures, Dr. Hanna assures owners of achy feet everywhere that foot pain can be alleviated as well as prevented.

Overuse Injuries

Some of the most common foot ailments occur simply because the foot is under increased strain during the pandemic. Perhaps you opted to walk long distances instead of use public transportation or went barefoot at home. “People don’t realize how much mileage they put on walking and standing in their houses,” Dr. Positano said.

Ms. Fahs was diagnosed with one such overuse injury, plantar fasciitis, where the ligament under the foot that supports the arch becomes inflamed, often felt as pain in the heel. “I knew what it was because my brother, sister and one of my best friends all got it recently, too,” she said.

Metatarsalgia is another overuse injury, similarly caused by inflammation, but in the toe joints, which causes pain in the ball of the foot.

For those starting ambitious running routines right out of the pandemic gates, Achilles’ tendinitis has been a common diagnosis. The tendon connects the calf muscle to the heel bone and with a sudden increase in use, it can become irritated and swell.

These injuries can impact more than foot health. If they are not addressed, they can “go up the chain,” and cause knee, hip and back pain. “People think they are falling apart, but they are not,” Dr. Positano said. “They are overusing their feet.”

Fragile Feet

Overuse injuries aren’t the only reasons people have been feeling foot pain lately. Dr. Priya Parthasarathy, a Maryland-based podiatric surgeon, has also seen an uptick in toe and foot fractures. Some are caused, she said, by accidentally kicking furniture — a result of being home and barefoot more often — and tripping and falling awkwardly over pets. “You see one, then you see two, then three and then four,” she said of such pet-related fractures, “and you’re like, ‘Wait, there’s definitely a connection here.’”

Spreading Toes

Meanwhile, Dr. Judith F. Baumhauer, an orthopedic surgeon at University of Rochester Medical Center, has been removing more bunions, which are bony protrusions at the base of the big toe. Without supportive shoes, the foot can splay — actually widen — and the anatomical structures can change. Among other issues, this can aggravate bunions.

“They let their feet do whatever they wanted,” Dr. Baumhauer said, “and now that they have to go back to work, their feet are rebelling.”

More Weight on the Foot

Dr. Baumhauer said that pandemic weight gain may also be to blame for the rise in foot discomfort. She explained that even an extra couple of pounds makes an impact. “It’s literally just physics,” she said, explaining that the foot takes on four times the force of our body weight when walking. Losing or gaining five pounds would be a change of “20 pounds to their ankle and foot,” she said.

Too Much Too Fast

Jacqueline M. Dylla, an associate professor of clinical physical therapy at the University of Southern California, said one of the biggest triggers is people doing too much too fast. Many of us have undergone atrophy and bone density loss from inactivity without noticing it, making it harder to stabilize ourselves on uneven surfaces. “Smaller injuries are causing more catastrophic problems,” she said. “I have patients who look like they were in a car accident,” she added, “but they just rolled their ankle during a hike.”

Even young children, after a year or two doing virtual school, are experiencing issues as they jump headlong into sports. “You have a kid sitting at home every day for a year going straight into cross-country practice,” Dr. Parthasarathy said.

How to Help Your Feet

Podiatrists say one of the fixes for foot pain can be quite simple: Wear supportive footwear. That means a semirigid sole, a spacious toe box and a small heel lift. Get properly fitted at a shoe store and, if you don’t want street shoes in your home, get a pair specifically for use indoors. If using older shoes, be sure that the tread is not too worn, as those may have degraded too much to offer substantial support. Insoles can also be added for additional arch support.

Ms. Dylla said it’s also essential to prepare our bodies for renewed activity by strengthening them first. This means exercising the feet with toe curls and foot doming. “There’s a crunch for the stomach,” Ms. Dylla said, “doming is the crunch for the foot.”

Dr. Hanna said the best advice may be to start slow. “If you’re going to start walking, do moderate pace at short distance,” he said. “If you tolerate that well, maybe go at a faster pace for longer distance.”

Podiatrists also say stretching is crucial to prevent and treat unhappy feet. “A proper warmup,” Dr. Hanna said, “I cannot emphasize this enough.”

In the morning, even before going to the bathroom, Dr. Hanna recommends flexing your feet by pulling your toes up toward your body. Then pretend your toes are a pencil and write out the alphabet. “If you do that,” he said, “you’ll activate all the joints and be much less likely to injure yourself.”

Even though the calf seems distant from the bottom of the foot, stretching it plays an essential role in pain-free walking. “When your calf and Achilles are tight,” Dr. Lee said, it “creates a lot more stress to all your foot joints.”

He suggests getting into a lunge position with one foot in front of the other, your hands up against a wall and your feet flat on the ground. You should feel the stretch in the calf of the back leg. He suggests doing this several times throughout the day.

Massaging the arch area can also prevent injury by keeping the bottom of our feet limber. Dr. Lee advises grabbing a tennis ball or golf ball while sitting at a desk or while watching TV. “Roll your foot over the ball and massage into that area to loosen up those fibers,” he said.

However, if you are having heel pain, get your foot checked by a doctor before stretching. In some cases, Dr. Positano said, there can be undiagnosed tears in the plantar fascia that stretching can worsen.

If you are experiencing any persistent foot pain, book an appointment with a podiatrist. There are many simple ways doctors can relieve pain and prevent chronic issues from developing. If you’re in discomfort, “seek care,” Dr. Baumhauer said, “because there are a lot of tricks up our sleeves.”

Mara Altman is a journalist and the author of “Gross Anatomy: Dispatches From the Front (and Back)”

Today’s energy crisis has a familiar ring. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy supplies have faltered and prices have skyrocketed. Americans are seeing costly gasoline, and in Europe, natural gas prices are around five times typical levels for this time of year, driving up the price of electricity and even threatening bankruptcies across industries that depend on gas.

After previous global energy crises — 1973, 1979, 1990 and 2008 — tensions abated, prices fell, people forgot and governments turned to other priorities. And global dependence on oil and gas kept rising.

This time could be different. Western nations have aggressively employed sanctions against Russia, and those sanctions are expected to tighten and include Russian oil and gas exports, as Europe and other importers gain confidence that they can replace those supplies. But what really matters for the long term is whether the West can lower its dependence not just on Russian exports, but on fossil fuels altogether.

To do that, companies and investors have to take risks on new, clean technologies, but many won’t if governments don’t give them the signal. What’s new in this crisis is how the European Union, in particular, is using the war in Ukraine to give investors a big green light.

The Union already had plans, outlined last summer, to slash emissions 55 percent by 2030, mainly by cutting consumption of fossil fuels that cause global warming. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe went a step further with a new plan to accelerate the shift away from Russian gas (including by importing, for now, more gas from friendlier places, including from the United States). New details on those plans are expected next month. Over the long term Europe is now speeding the exit from oil and gas altogether.

It is easy for politicians to announce bold plans. What’s different is that Europe’s plans are mostly already written into binding laws backed by big spending on infrastructure and research and development.

This kind of credibility matters because it determines where capital flows, and almost every approach to making big cuts in fossil fuels and emissions is capital intensive. The good news is that there are vast pools of available private capital willing to back risky novel technologies — a sharp contrast with the 1970s, when shifts in technology were slower because access to capital was controlled by a few large financial institutions and multinational energy companies and allocated mainly to established enterprises.

In almost every aspect of the industrial economy — from making steel and cement to new aircraft to better systems for heating homes and making electricity — the emission reduction plans in Europe are opening markets to new technology while also convincing big existing businesses, like oil and gas companies, they must innovate or get out of the way. Where investors put their money today hinges not just on technological promise, but also whether radical new ideas will be allowed to flourish and compete.

Take hydrogen, which is a leading idea for cutting dependence on conventional fossil gas. Modern energy systems depend heavily on natural gas, in part because it is easy to store and use when needed. Greater use of gas has already helped cut emissions because it has displaced coal. Shifting to clean hydrogen could cut those emissions essentially to zero, and would also make it possible to reuse some of today’s extremely valuable gas infrastructure.

One way to make clean hydrogen is with electrolyzers that split hydrogen from water. Right now that’s expensive, but with a spurt of new investment, electrolyzer costs will likely tumble. Other methods will compete as well.

Central to the European plan for cutting dependence on natural gas is investment in hydrogen and other alternatives to conventional gas — something that companies are lining up to do with their own capital. Privately backed projects are exploring how to link hydrogen production to renewable electric power generators — a key innovation because hydrogen is easier to store than electricity and could help make electric grids reliable even when they depend on large amounts of intermittent wind and solar.

Leaders in sectors such as steel, refining and chemicals all see hydrogen investments as part of their plans to remain viable in a world that slashes emissions. Maersk, one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, is backing some of these projects — along with several other clean fuels. Even in aircraft and heavy trucks, hydrogen may prove the best way to cut emissions.

The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that the value of investment in clean hydrogen projects by 2030 will exceed half a trillion dollars, based on the announcements made — with Europe in the lead. For comparison, the total value of all fossil fuels sold globally in 2021 was about $5 trillion.

The United States is finding it harder to be a clean technology leader because the political environment is fractured. But one area of promise is $8 billion for “hydrogen hubs” in the recent bipartisan infrastructure law to build the production facilities, pipelines and terminals to link producers and consumers.

A hydrogen revolution could take a while — perhaps two decades with a highly committed effort, until there are substantial volumes of hydrogen replacing conventional natural gas and also replacing oil. But beyond hydrogen there are many other examples of credible policy, along with new technology attracting a flood of capital. New designs for nuclear plants attracted $3.4 billion in private capital in 2021 alone. (New nuclear plants are likely to focus on America, Britain, China and other markets. Attitudes around nuclear power in most of continental Europe are yet to turn reliably in favor.) Other, more mature clean technologies like solar, wind and batteries are expanding massively as well.

Europe is in the lead because it has found ways to make political pronouncements more credible. This leadership matters because technologies are traded globally, and European investments are redefining the frontier. The effect of all this will be a series of revolutions that cut dependence on Russia and on fossil fuels — and also help heal the planet.

Philip Verleger is a retired professor of economics from the University of Calgary and a nonresident senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. David G. Victor is a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, and nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

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NASHVILLE — I was 10 when “Brian’s Song” aired in 1971 as an ABC Movie of the Week. It is the story of the abiding friendship that grew as Brian Piccolo, who was white, and Gale Sayers, who was Black, competed for playing time as N.F.L. rookies with the Chicago Bears. It’s also the story of Piccolo’s death of cancer at 26. I was a girl in Birmingham, Ala., then “the most segregated city in America,” when “Brian’s Song” reminded this country that race was not an insurmountable barrier to love.

Of course I read “I Am Third,” the 1970 memoir by Gale Sayers from which the film was adapted, as soon as I could get my hands on it. When the bookmobile librarian suggested that I might also like “Death Be Not Proud,” John Gunther’s heart-wrenching account of his 17-year-old son’s death from a brain tumor, I devoured it too.

I was not a child obsessed with death; I simply wanted to understand how the world works. My friend Mary Laura Philpott read the same kinds of books as a child, and for the same reason.

“The more I saw and heard of the real world, the more I came to suspect there was sadness everywhere, and if I was going to live in this world, I should understand its scale and reach,” she writes in her acclaimed new book, “Bomb Shelter.”

Reading stories is a gentle way for a child to encounter the hardest truth that shadows mortal life: There are no happy endings.

“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her new memoir, “Lost & Found.” “But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.” Many stories solve the first problem. Far fewer admit that the second even exists.

Books about loss tell us something about our own nature. They remind us that we belong to a species capable of carrying on when we think we can’t carry on any longer. Death is just part of how the world works. It’s part of how we ourselves work.

“No part of an embodied life is guaranteed except for death,” writes Tallu Schuyler Quinn in her new essay collection, “What We Wish Were True.” To face it — however haltingly or furiously or tearfully, or on a carousel of all those swirling feelings — is to be fully alive.

Ms. Quinn was the beloved founder of the Nashville Food Project, which addresses food insecurity. Last summer, when I wrote about her life and mission, she was working on a collection of essays drawn in part from her CaringBridge journal about living with a terminal brain cancer. Ms. Quinn died in February. The book will be published on Tuesday.

I did not know Ms. Quinn personally, but even from a distance I know that her life was a bright testament to the power of serving others. I know, too, that she could write like an angel, with poetry and humor and a bone-deep understanding of the way love and grief walk hand in hand through the world together, twinned: “As these tumors hold court in my mind and mix me up in these sad and terrible ways,” she writes, “I find shelter in new thanks and new praise and in another day — and even in how healing these salty tears taste pouring into my open mouth as I wail my thanks for this unexpected, unbelievable, boundless shelter of love.”

There are reasons to worry that a book which confronts the essential inevitability of death, especially the untimely death of a human being in love with the world, someone who never seemed to waste a minute of her one remarkable life and is heartbroken to leave it behind, will be a book many readers will fear to face.

After all, we are still in the midst of a pandemic that has taken millions of people from their loved ones. We are watching in real time as bombs fall from Ukrainian skies and Vladimir Putin’s ground forces slaughter innocent people. The hunger Ms. Quinn fought so hard to alleviate will inevitably worsen as inflation rages. In such a world, who could bear to read a book which the writer herself did not live long enough to see into print?

But the human world has always been just this tragic, just this unbearable, and the literary world has always given us reasons to understand the gifts such books can offer — not in spite of the tragedies we witness and live through, but because of them — if we don’t turn away.

We’ve all had near misses that shook us to the core: when a hydroplaning car skidded to a stop in the nick of time; when a toddler, unwatched for half a second, teetered at the top of a flight of steps but was caught just before stepping over the edge; when the scan showed a shadow that had to be a tumor but turned out to be nothing at all.

And every near miss is almost always followed by a golden time, too brief, when the futile frustrations and pointless irritations of daily life fall away, when all that’s left behind is gratitude. We are here. Our beloveds are here. How remarkable it is to be together. How full of grace the fallen world can be.

“What We Wish Were True,” like so many end-of-life memoirs that came before it, and so many others still to come, is for readers a kind of literary near-miss experience. Its beauty reminds us to linger in the grace. Its wisdom teaches us to treasure the ordinary pleasures we ought to have been treasuring all along.

“I think about everything I will miss, and what I won’t be alive to witness or experience or endure or bounce back from,” writes Ms. Quinn. “No singing show tunes in the minivan. No burnt toast with butter in the mornings. No snuggling up to watch cooking shows. No walks together circling the neighborhood we love so much.”

Whether it comes before or after we turn the last page of a book, we know the ending of every human story. “If an ending could be changed through strategic planning or force of will or the sheer love of life, things would go differently, but this cannot be changed,” Ann Patchett writes in “These Precious Days.”

It cannot be changed. The finality of that truth is breathtaking.

But “What We Wish Were True” is not a book about dying any more than “Brian’s Song” is a movie about dying. It is a book about the life of an extraordinary person. It is a book about love and gratitude and making every day an opportunity to love, a chance to decide, again and again, to keep on loving for as long as we draw breath. And, through the miracle of books, beyond it, too.