Benoît Laborde

After the end of the Cold War, the Baltic was viewed almost as a quiet backwater. A nice place to visit to see charming Hanseatic cities and sandy beaches. But since the war in Ukraine the Baltic sea, bordered by eight European Union countries as well as Russia, has become a hot spot of world geopolitics. And tensions are high.

Gare du Nord in Paris is a transit station for all those coming from the suburbs, the provinces or abroad. Accompanied by Simon Mérabet, the son of Algerian immigrants from the Var, Human Geography offers a series of brief meetings with individuals who recount their lives in just a few words before disappearing to take their trains. The crowd of passengers is embodied in these stories, one life after another, and we see how globalization fashions individual destinies, subject to geographical and economic pressures.

For many, meditation is the new yoga and is gaining new popularity worldwide. More and more clinical studies are showing that meditation has a positive influence on our brain and our health. Science has the first answers to the question of the extent to which mental practice is actually effective for pain, depression or anxiety. Could meditation help to cure certain illnesses or prevent them altogether?

Historian Patrick Boucheron revisits the most important dates in history through the prisms of memory and collective imagination.

The history of our modern Indo-Arabic numeral system begins in Mesopotamia, leads through India to the Arab world – and from there around the globe. This three-part series explores how the "Arabic numerals" began their triumphant march and the special role that zero played in this process. From its beginnings to modern computer science – today, numbers are the universal language of the world.