The rise & fall of the minivan
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
The Kids Who Didn’t Know Their Parents Were Russian Spies
Putin romanticizes Moscow’s network of deep-cover operatives, but their missions come with a heavy price …
“Ludwig” and “Maria” had suffered an abrupt end to their clandestine careers, arrested just after finishing breakfast in their suburban home and outed as deep-cover spies for Moscow. But as they flew in a Bombardier jet to freedom as part of an epic prisoner swap last month, they had more familial concerns in mind: How to break it to the kids?
Please, they’d quietly pleaded with their Slovenian escorts, don’t address us by our real names. They hadn’t yet told their son and daughter, touring the cockpit, that they were Russian.
The two officers from Directorate S, the so-called “illegals department” of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency, had spent more than a decade building fake identities. Their children, 9-year-old Daniel and 11-year-old Sophie, knew their mom and dad as Argentine citizens named Ludwig Gisch and Maria Mayer Muños. What they didn’t know is that their family was a carefully constructed lie.
The Miraculous Resurrection of Notre-Dame
In 2019, a fire nearly destroyed the crown jewel of France—and the nation set a breakneck five-year deadline to bring it back from the ashes. This is the story of how an army of artisans turned back centuries to restore Notre-Dame by hand, and wound up reviving something even greater than the cathedral itself.
Some time after six in the evening on April 15, 2019, Rémi Fromont was sitting at the Brasserie Saint-Malo, a lively café in Montparnasse, Paris, when his phone rang.
“Notre-Dame is on fire,” said a friend on the other end of the line.
Fromont, the chief architect of historic monuments at the French Ministry of Culture, assumed that the call was a joke. But when the caller insisted that he was dead serious, Fromont leapt out of his chair, got on his bike, and pedaled north toward the cathedral.
Fromont is a slim, elegant man of 46 with a cherubic face framed by tight brown curls. Born in Vincennes, outside Paris, he had spent his career renovating sites of national importance, and was intimately familiar with the medieval structure. Notre-Dame was a tinderbox, and if the fire couldn’t be controlled, he knew the result would be calamitous.
Fifteen minutes later, Fromont arrived at Notre-Dame de Paris, on the Île de la Cité. Wisps of smoke were rising from the cathedral’s lead roof covering. An ominous glow was beginning to envelop the Flèche, the over 300-foot-tall spire added by the French architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859. But beneath the spire lay a greater risk: the cathedral’s medieval roof frame, a roughly 300-foot-long, 30-foot-high assemblage of medieval axe-hewn oak beams so dense and intricate that it had been nicknamed la forêt—the forest.
A colleague who had arrived a few minutes earlier approached Fromont. He, too, knew about ancient wood’s combustibility.
“The forest,” the colleague said, “is dead.”
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers
The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce [pagers] on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo.
In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers.
But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.
The Death of the Minivan
The minivan dilemma: It is the least cool vehicle ever designed, yet the most useful. Offering the best value for the most function to a plurality of American drivers, a minivan can cart seven passengers or more in comfort if not style, haul more cargo than many larger trucks, and do so for a sticker price roughly a quarter cheaper than competing options. Even so, minivan sales have been falling steadily since their peak in 2000, when about 1.3 million were sold in the United States. As of last year, that figure is down by about 80 percent. Once sold in models from more than a dozen manufacturers, the minivan market now amounts to four, one each from Chrysler, Honda, Toyota, and Kia.
On account of the dilemma, a minivan is typically purchased under duress. If you live in a driving city, and especially if you have a family, a minivan conversation will eventually take place. Your older, cooler car—perhaps your Mini Cooper or your spouse’s Honda CR-V—will prove unfit for present purposes. Costco cargo, loads of mulch, sports equipment, and holiday loot all need a place to go. The same is true of car seats, which now are recommended for children as old as 7. And so, before too long: “Maybe we should get a minivan.”
This phrase is uttered with an air of resignation. The minivan was popular, but it was never cool, not even in its youth, during the 1980s. Now it’s middle-aged: The first of its type came out in ’83, which makes the minivan an elder Millennial, and it’s no more attuned than your average 41-year-old to recent trends. But why, exactly, has it earned so much derision through the years? And why was the minivan replaced, almost altogether, by the SUV?
China Shut Down Foreign Adoptions. This Family Doesn’t Want to Give Up
As an adoptive parent myself, I have complex feelings on how adoption works, and I think international adoptions are even more complex. That said, this family’s story is worth sharing.
On Sept. 5, China’s Foreign Ministry suddenly, and with little explanation, announced an end to the country’s three-decade-old foreign adoption program, which has sent more than 82,000 children to the United States, more than any other country.
The announcement came five years to the day after Colin Pitts and Fan Pat promised a bright-eyed, then-9-year-old Chinese girl that they would adopt her. The pandemic shut down adoptions and travel temporarily, but they stayed in touch with monthly videos.
Adoptions in China transitioned over time from mostly healthy girls to children with relatively minor impairments such as a cleft lip to those with more profound disabilities and medical conditions who struggle to find homes domestically.
The girl Pitts and Pat hoped to adopt, who is now nearly 14, has cerebral palsy.
“It’s one thing for them to end international adoptions,” Pitts said softly, his wife beside him, noting that the number of kids who end up in orphanages has gone way down. But, breaking into tears, he could only haltingly make it through an appeal for a reprieve for the few hundred families already matched by China with children. “I mean, she knows about us. She called us Mom and Dad. They can’t — they can’t do that. They should — there are 300 of us — just, just make an exception. It would be ending — ending the program on a high note.”
Sean Combs’ New Home — a Notorious Federal Jail — Has a ‘Way of Breaking People,’ Lawyers Say
If Sean Combs (aka Diddy) is guilty of even a small bit of what he’s charged with, then he’ll deserve whatever he gets. Still, sometimes when high-profile people are charged with crimes, it shines a light on the prisons that all the rest of us are paying for — like the jail where Combs will be held, which is so bad that another U.S. judge refuses to send defendants there.
Sean "Diddy" Combs is used to living in multimillion-dollar mansions. His new home is a notorious federal jail in New York City known for extreme violence and abominable medical care.
The Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn was the scene of two fatal stabbings in two months over the summer. And in April, MS-13 gang members stabbed an inmate 44 times in a shocking attack that was caught on camera.
The victim was one of the lucky ones: He survived.
The situation at the Metropolitan Detention Center, known as the MDC, has gotten so bad that judges have refused to send certain nonviolent inmates there.
“Chaos reigns,” U.S. District Judge Gary Brown wrote in a decision last month blasting the conditions at the facility, “along with uncontrolled violence.”
The 2024 Fall Foliage Prediction Map
Finally, let's end on a much nicer note: It's fall (or autumn, whichever you prefer to call it). And I've noticed a few rogue leaves changing where I live already. Anyway, there are some nice tools out there to help gauge the turning of the leaves. None of them are 100% accurate, but this one looks pretty on-target.
You'll have to click through for it to be of any use, of course!
So, at 57 and clearly no small children in the house, I just regressed and bought a minivan. Mainly because now that I have eight grandchildren, and I have my own business, I found I was constantly needing to take the car seats of the grandkids out of my hybrid Ford Escape for more room. Then I would still need my husband’s explorer from time to time in addition. I love cars. I am fascinated by all the features and such and my husband says I am obsessed with mileage (it does fascinate me as well) but getting the van felt like a relief this time. It solved some problems and I do like sitting higher up. However, I sometimes feel like singing “Wheels on the Bus” as I turn a corner….
As a family of 2 we need a minivan. We loved our Windstar, complete with a real spare tire and a lower cargo area. But alas, at 20+years and 285000 miles it became clear it needed replacing. The results were nightmarish which thus amounted picking the lesser of the 3, ultimately 2 evils as we were insisting that we have some sort of tire in case of a flat. The stow and go seats make the cargo space higher and very uneven to roll a wheelchair into!
We must have explained 100 times that without sliding side doors we lost easy access to the back seat. And that without a flat cargo area neither was designed to carry what the van part of mini van meant!
I still claim that minivans are being rejected because of poorer and poorer design. As the still get better gas mileage than an SUV why anyone chooses the latter is simply because of marketing not utilitarian use.