Three presidents and countless scandals later, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton on Dec. 19, 1998, may seem like a relic of a different time. But that day 20 years ago remains an extraordinary moment in American history — Clinton became only the second president ever to be impeached when, in the wake of his affair with a 22-year-old White House intern, the House of Representatives formally accused him of perjury and obstruction of justice.

The Senate acquitted Clinton two months later, but for the time being he faced the possibility of becoming the first president to be convicted and removed from office.

Twenty years later, impeachment continues to loom over American politics as the most extreme way a president or other official can be punished for bad behavior in office. However, as the process has played out in public so few times, how it actually works may be less well known.

To better understand impeachment, why it works the way it does and what happened to Clinton, TIME spoke with Michael Gerhardt, a University of North Carolina professor who specializes in constitutional law and has frequently served as an expert witness before Congress on constitutional conflicts.

What is impeachment?

In the United States, impeachment is the process by which federal officials, including the president and federal judges, can be prosecuted and removed from office. While elections are the conventional way of replacing a president or other official, impeachment is intended for situations in which wrongdoing is so severe that more immediate action is necessary.

The Constitution lays out three reasons officials can be impeached — “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

While the first two accusations are relatively straightforward, “high crimes and misdemeanors” is considered to be a broad category — and the founders likely intended for it to be that way. Such crimes would be considered what Alexander Hamilton called “violations of the public trust” in the Federalist Papers, Gerhardt says. In such cases, the president might do something that “benefits [him] in some way but hurts the country in another,” Gerhardt says.

For instance, Clinton misled others about Monica Lewinsky to protect himself from public embarrassment, but in doing so also may have eroded trust in the presidency.

Things that can get an official impeached may not even be crimes, and not all crimes are necessarily impeachable, Gerhardt adds. And while impeachment uses some of the language of a criminal case — such as “conviction” and “trial” — the process is actually a political trial of a political person by their peers. As Gerhardt explains, impeachable offenses are “special kinds of crime only people in office could commit.”

Why did the framers include impeachment in the Constitution?

Impeachment originated in British law, but the framers included impeachment in the Constitution for their own particularly American reasons.

While British law at the time also used a process of impeachment to prosecute individuals for treason or “high crimes and misdemeanors,” in practice, the bar of lords could impeach all the King’s subjects — whether or not they were officials — for any reason. The framers of the American Constitution narrowed impeachment to only include only federal officials, including the president.

Gerhardt says that the framers used impeachment as a way to make certain that everyone, including the president, is subject to the Constitution. It thus functions as part of the system of checks and balances that ensures each branch of the government has the ability to temper the power of the others.

“They didn’t want to go back to a world where the king was immune to impeachment, or to where ordinary people could be impeached,” Gerhardt says.

What are the steps in an impeachment?

On Dec. 19, 1998, President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives. However, impeachment is only the first stage in the two-pronged process to remove a president or another federal official from office.

After the House votes to impeach, the Senate must then hold a trial to determine whether an official is “guilty” and should actually be removed from office. To start the impeachment process, an individual member of the House must request that impeachment proceedings begin, or the House itself could pass a resolution to launch the proceedings. The Speaker of the House would then refer the process to the House Judiciary Committee, which must then determine if there is enough grounds for the process to move forward. If the committee finds enough evidence, it would then draft “articles of impeachment” and vote on whether to bring the articles to the House floor.

The case for impeachment would then go before the rest of the House. If a simple majority votes to pass the articles of impeachment, the President or other official is impeached.

After that, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must decide whether an official is guilty or not guilty of the charges in the articles of impeachment. For most officials, the President pro tempore of the Senate would oversee the process — but if the president were the official being tried, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court would preside. If a two-thirds majority votes to convict, the official would be removed from public office. Afterward, the Senate could also vote to disqualify them from holding a federal office in the future and take away the official’s pension or other benefits. The convicted official could even face criminal or civil charges.

Read more: A Complete Timeline of Key Moments in the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal

Why don’t impeachments happen more often?

Impeachments require a significant amount of political will, Gerhardt says. An impeachment will take up a lot of a Congress’s time and energy, and congress members who support impeachment have a lot to lose and potentially little to gain by undertaking an impeachment.

In practice, in order to actually remove a President from office, members of his or her own party must decide that there is enough public desire to impeach him or her, as Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institute has explained. “In order for an impeachment to move forward, a president’s own party has to get on board with an impeachment vote. For that to happen, it would mean that the president’s supporters in the electorate have lost faith in him,” she wrote.

In Clinton’s case, Senate Democrats ultimately decided not to convict, but it wasn’t always clear that they wouldn’t turn on him, Gerhardt says. “A lot of these people found that there was misconduct,” he says, “but there wasn’t enough to impeach him.”

Why was Clinton impeached?

The House voted to pass articles of impeachment on Dec. 19, 1998, on two charges: perjury and obstruction of justice. Prosecutors alleged that Clinton had perjured himself by testifying to investigators that he had not had “sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky, and that he had attempted to encourage White House staff to give false testimony by denying the relationship.

Gerhardt said that, while popular support for impeachment waned as the proceedings went on, a significant undercurrent of public anger drove the proceedings forward.

“You don’t get an impeachment without a good deal of hate,” he says. “There were a lot of people who hated Bill Clinton.”

Why wasn’t Clinton convicted and removed from office?

Ultimately, there was uncertainty as to whether or not Clinton’s wrongdoing had been serious enough to justify removing him from office — as well as insufficient public support for doing so.

Bill Clinton’s approval ratings remained high throughout his second term of office, including during the trial. The impeachment seemed to galvanize the country to support him. His peak job-approval rating — 73% — was recorded the very week of the impeachment, according to Gallup. When Clinton and independent counsel Kenneth Starr were named Person of the Year in 1998, TIME columnist Michael Kinsley wrote that the lack of public interest in Clinton’s alleged misconduct was striking:

While many Senators thought that Clinton’s behavior was wrong, many did not agree that it was worthy of a conviction.

“In voting to acquit the President, I do so with grave misgivings for I do not mean in any way to exonerate this man,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine said in announcing her decision.

What happened to Bill Clinton after the impeachment?

Although Clinton was never convicted, he arguably did not get away unscathed from the proceedings.

Clinton’s law licenses with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Arkansas bar were suspended, which prohibited him from practicing law after his time in office. After he was suspended from the Supreme Court Bar in 2001, he chose to resign his license rather than be permanently disbarred. Possibly the biggest consequence of Clinton’s impeachment, however, was the mark it left on his public record.

On Jan. 17, 2001, Gary Langer ABC News characterized how most Americans felt about Bill Clinton at the time: “You can’t trust him, he’s got weak morals and ethics — and he’s done a heck of a good job,” Langer wrote.

Robotics firm Boston Dynamics is showing off its latest creation: A robotic dog that can open doors.

In a video posted by Boston Dynamics, the company’s SpotMini robot is seen struggling to get past a locked door — until another SpotMini shows up with a special arm that opens the door. The second robot then holds the door open for its robotic buddy. It isn’t clear if the robots are acting autonomously or if someone’s controlling their movements behind the scenes.

Boston Dynamics’ videos never fail to impress — or to terrify, depending on your views of robotics and artificial intelligence. The company’s creations may have been the inspiration behind a recent episode of the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror in which robotic dogs set out to kill all living things. But robots like the kind Boston Dynamics makes can have real-world benefits, like the ability to find people stranded in the rubble after an earthquake.

Japanese conglomerate SoftBank purchased Boston Dynamics from Google parent company Alphabet in 2017 for an undisclosed sum.

Americans eagerly anticipating the first total solar eclipse visible in the contiguous U.S. since 1979 — and the first to cross the country from coast to coast in 99 years — may know well know that what they’re watching is the moon simply passing in front of the sun. But even so, as long as eclipses have occurred, humans have interpreted them as a sign of something.

As TIME editor-at-large Jeffrey Kluger explains in the above video, the Lydians and the Medes ended a war in 585 B.C. because they took a solar eclipse eclipse as a sign of heavenly disapproval. The Roman author Pliny the elder drew a line from the eclipse of 59 A.D. to towns being struck by lightning. Eclipses were even thought to have influenced tragic events that happened years later, as was the case with the death of King Henry I in 1135, two years after an eclipse.

Some may also have considered a 1652 total solar eclipse to be partly responsible for the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London about a decade later, says John Dvorak, a planetary geophysicist and author of Mask of the Sun: The Science, History, and Forgotten Lore of Eclipses. Harvard’s Commencement Day in 1684 was moved up a day because a total solar eclipse would be visible from Martha’s Vineyard, though university president John Rogers said that the decision was a matter of convenience rather than superstition. The 52-year-old administrator would, eerily, end up dying on the day of the eclipse from what was described back then as a “visitation of sickness,” and it was later announced that he passed as the sun was “beginning to emerge out of a Central Ecclipps.”

Yet, even during what were perceived to be highly superstitious times, ancient astronomers could already believe there must be something more to the phenomenon.

Around 500 B.C., people were staring to talk about eclipses having natural causes rather than supernatural ones, says Tyler Nordgren, an astronomer and professor of physics at the University of Redlands. Ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that the philosopher Thales was able to predict when a total solar eclipse would occur (though how he would have done that is not known). To top it all off, “Aristotle was looking at the shadow that the Earth cast on the Moon during a lunar eclipse, noticing that shadow was always circular and saying that the Earth must be a sphere,” Nordgren says.

One of the scholars who epitomizes the shift from superstition to science was Edmund Halley, now known for Halley’s Comet. In 1715, he published a broadside arguing that people shouldn’t be afraid of an eclipse, after a prominent mathematician had published an apocalyptic-sounding pamphlet claiming an eclipse that year “foreshews the Destruction of the Fruits of the Earth, the Scarcity of Corn and Fruit, and a Danger of a Raging Pestilence.”

In response, Halley used Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity to produce one of the first maps of the path of an eclipse and noted that the natural phenomenon was not “portending evil to our Sovereign King George.” He also described the way the eclipse would work in a manner that 18th-century readers could understand — and that still works today.

“An Eclipse of the Sun,” he wrote, “proceeds only from natural Causes; and is nothing else but the direct [i]nterposition of the Body of the Moon between our Sight and the Sun.”

Barbie has a brand-new job. In the latest iteration of the beloved toy’s “Career of the Year” line, Barbie is has taken up a career as a robotics engineer.

The iconic doll comes with all the tools of her new trade, designed with the help of real-life robotics engineer, Cynthia Breazeal, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and founder of the social robot company Jibo, Inc. Robotics Engineer Barbie comes with a doll-sized laptop computer, a tiny robot with moveable arms, and accessorizes her casual look with safety goggles. It’s also worth noting that the doll has swapped her high heels for sensible flats to make it easier to work in a laboratory all day.

Furing her nearly 60 years in the workforce, Barbie has racked up a very diverse resume. Robotics engineer is a new career choice for her, though. It’s part of a growing list of jobs Barbie has undertaken in science, technology, engineering, and math, including as a computer engineer, astronaut, and video game developer.

It’s all part of Barbie’s ongoing evolution from plastic fashionista to ambitious, science-loving role model, becoming a toy for little girls dream of careers in STEM or perhaps being a robotics engineer when they grow up. Mattel isn’t just letting girls play with dolls and dreaming of careers, though. They teamed up with Tynker, an online platform that provides coding classes to children, to teach aspiring robotics engineers some of the skills necessary to make their dreams a reality. They are offering seven free “Barbie-inspired” coding lessons that will focus on logic, problem-solving, and other skills that a potential robotics engineer will need.

The brainy Barbie, who comes in four skin tones, is available online for $13.99.

Many crises faced by President Harry Truman when he came into office in the waning days of World War II. One of them would plague him for years: What to do with the refugees? By some counts, up to 60 million Europeans had been driven from their homes during the course of the war.

At the time, the U.S. was well-established as a destination for immigrant — despite turning away some migrants during the war — but didn’t have a specific law to deal with refugees per se. In late 1945, Truman signed a directive that allowed faster admission and resident-status changes for some refugees. But a wider-sweeping action would be needed, especially as the quota-based system that governed American immigration applied strict limits to the national origins that had the most need of help. Truman subsequently asked Congress to come up with a law that would address the crisis.

This conversation was taking place in the years before the nascent United Nations — which marks June 20 as World Refugee Day — issued the 1951 Refugee Convention, which set out how the international community ought to address people who had been driven from their homes. But, though the world hadn’t yet agreed on those terms, the conversation about refugees was at a fever pitch; even years after the war’s end, millions remained unsettled.

By mid-1947, when the refugee bill he’d requested was not forthcoming, Truman sent Congress a special message explaining why he considered the move necessary.

Here’s how he explained in that message, the full text of which can be found at the American Presidency Project website, why he believed the United States needed such a law:

In 1948, the Displaced Persons Act — which the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office calls the first U.S. law specifically dealing with “refugees” as such — was passed. Truman, in a signing statement, acknowledged his unhappiness with a law that he saw as a halfhearted measure that was overly restrictive and biased.

“I know what a bitter disappointment this bill is — to the many displaced victims of persecution who looked to the United States for hope; to the millions of our citizens who wanted to help them in the finest American spirit; to the many Members of the Congress who fought hard but unsuccessfully for a decent displaced persons bill,” he said. “I hope that this bitter disappointment will not turn to despair.”

Apple last week unveiled the latest additions to its iPhone lineup: The iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. While they boast improvements like an upgraded processor and better battery life, they certainly aren’t cheap — the iPhone XR starts at $749, while the high-end iPhone XS Max goes all the way up to $1,449.

If you’re finding those prices tough to swallow, there’s another potential solution. Apple on Monday released iOS 12, the newest version of the mobile operating system that powers iPhones and iPads. The free upgrade is reportedly giving older iPhones a performance boost. That means it could help you get more mileage out of your existing device before you upgrade. And Apple tested iOS 12 in a public beta period that (hopefully) helped it iron out any bugs before this week’s formal release.

Here’s how you can upgrade your iPhone or iPad to iOS 12, and what you’ll get out of it.

Before You Update to iOS 12

Before you embark on this upgrade journey, you’ll need to do a few things to ensure everything goes smoothly. For one, you’ll need your iPhone or iPad to be charged to over 50%, though leaving it plugged in while it updates is also an option. You should also have your Apple ID username and password on hand just in case you have to verify your identity before you upgrade.

Backing up your device is also important, just in case something goes wrong during the iOS 12 upgrade process. It will also make it easier for you to switch to a newer device should you decide to get a new iPhone. By setting up a new device from a recent backup, you’ll be able to transfer everything from your apps and notifications settings to your preferences and other changes from your old iOS device to your new one.

Backing up is simple enough, as you can do it right from your iPhone or iPad’s Settings app. From there, tap your name, select iCloud, and enable iCloud Backup (or just hit Back Up Now). You can also connect your iPhone to your computer via iTunes and perform a manual backup to your computer instead of iCloud. If you don’t have enough iCloud storage for a full backup, backing up to your computer is the better choice.

Downloading the iOS 12 Update

You can download the iOS 12 update on your iPhone or iPad over Wi-Fi if it’s plugged into a charger.

In the Settings app, select General, then Software Update. If you’re lacking any extra storage needed to download the update to your device, you can temporarily delete (and automatically reinstall) apps to make room until the installation is complete. You can always schedule the install to occur when you’re not using your phone — perhaps overnight so it’s ready to go when you’re up in the morning.

If you’d rather not go that route, you can always connect your iOS device to your computer and update it through iTunes. Just select your iOS device in iTunes, select the Summary tab, and then click “Check for Update.”

Downloading iOS 12 will bring several new features to your iPhone or iPad, including…

Screen Time Can (Somewhat) Help You Manage Your Bad Phone Habits

Screen Time might be one of the most interesting additions in iOS 12. You probably spend a bit longer than you should staring at your phone, receiving messages and replying in kind with humorous quips and GIFs. Screen Time aims to eliminate those distractions by limiting your time spent in certain apps, and making your phone less attractive to use when it’s time for bed. You’ll see a chart displaying how you spent your time on your iPhone, and which apps are taking up your time. You can also set a restriction passcode to prevent you from bypassing the self-imposed limit.

Unfortunately, Screen Time only works if you allow it to. Since you’re the one with the power to enable (or disable) the feature, making sure it does its job depends more on your willpower than on the feature itself.

Augmented Reality Gives Your iPhone New Utility

Apps taking advantage of the iPhone’s augmented reality feature will let you perform tasks like preview furniture in your home (by pointing your camera at its prospective location) or play tabletop games with no actual game board. But Apple’s own augmented reality app is probably the most useful. iOS 12 includes a Measure app, available on the iPhone 6s and newer devices, which lets you measure real-world objects like boxes, walls, and even the cat if it sits still long enough.

Memoji Makes Messaging More Expressive

Apple’s Animoji use the iPhone’s front-facing Face ID system (available on the iPhone X, XS, XS Max, and XR) to animate characters like robots, aliens, and cats using your own face. Memoji in iOS 12 allow you to make characters that look just like you, as long as you think you resemble a Pixar-esque floating head. You can use those Memoji faces in different apps like Messages and FaceTime, where you can use your Memoji in real-time while you deal with a bad hair day.

Managing Notifications Makes More Sense

Thanks to iOS 12, you can finally make sense of the morass of notifications currently clogging up your iPhone’s lock screen. Group notification management is now available, letting you clear multiple notifications all at once without having to dismiss each one by hitting the small X icon. It also makes managing multiple notifications from apps like Messages a lot easier. Instant Tuning lets you set preferences on notifications as soon as you receive them, which makes silencing or disabling unwanted notifications pretty simple.

Better Password and Security Features

Using SMS to enable two-factor authentication on your apps and services? Now you’ll be able to autofill those verification codes so you won’t have to switch between apps every time. Safari can now create and store randomly generated passwords, reducing the risk of your account getting hacked by someone guessing “password123.” Password manager users can rest easy, too. You’ll be able to use apps like 1Password, Dashlane, and other password managers to automatically fill out login prompts, meaning the days of copy and pasting secure passwords is nearly over.

Bonus: Even Old iPhones Can Get iOS 12

If you’ve still got an old iPhone kept alive through screen replacements, battery changes, and a paranoia that requires it stay in a protective case for eternity, you’re in luck. Apple’s iOS 12 brings a bunch of new features to your device, but it’s also designed to support older devices without bringing them to a slow crawl. Apps launch faster, typing is more responsive, and animations won’t be as choppy even though you’re using an older device. The performance improvements make sense, considering Apple’s work to reduce electronics waste.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will be crystal-clear to astronomy fans in many parts of the U.S. this weekend.

The Leonid shower happens each November, when Earth crosses the orbital path of the Tempel-Tuttle comet, according to EarthSky. This year, the celestial show is slated to begin Nov. 17, with peak viewing hours starting early the next morning, AccuWeather reports.

According to AccuWeather, that’s good news for stargazers in the coastal Southeast, the northern Plains, the Four Corners area and California, where clear skies will make for great viewing conditions. Viewers in the Northeast, Great Lakes region and central Plains, however, may be blocked by storms and cloudy skies, AccuWeather meteorologist Kyle Elliot told the site.

The Leonid is easiest to see in the Northern Hemisphere, AccuWeather adds, with the most meteors falling in East Asia.

Most years, including this one, the Leonid shower produces roughly 15 meteors per hour at its peak. (For 2017, that’s between midnight and dawn on Nov. 18.) But once in a while, during particularly heavy years, it can produce as many as 50,000 meteors in a single hour, Space.com reports.

More than two centuries after July 4, 1776, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence — especially John Hancock — are famous. But the woman whose name also appears on the document, or at least on one version of it, is not as well known.

At the bottom of the first copy of the Declaration of Independence that was specifically intended to be housed in archives, which was printed on January of 1777, this text appears: “Baltimore, in Maryland: Printed by Mary Katherine Goddard.”

Mary Katherine Goddard was the printer and postmaster to the Second Continental Congress in Baltimore, and she may have been the first female postmaster in colonial America, according to the Smithsonian. Publishing was the Goddard family business. Her younger brother started the Providence Gazette, Pennsylvania Chronicle, Maryland Journal and the Baltimore Advertiser. When he moved on to other business ventures, Mary Katherine stuck with it and started publishing the Maryland Journal as “M.K. Goddard.” That same year, in 1775, she was appointed postmaster of Baltimore.

Her paper had a reputation for printing revolutionary statements. For example, one April 19, 1775, letter to the editor (attributed to the pen name “Britannicus”) declared that “a British parliament has no more right to tax an American in anything than they have the right to tax the people in Japan; for by this means you are robbed of the democratical [sic] part of the constitution, the very essence of English liberty.” Goddard also printed an April 26, 1775, speech by lawyer John Wilkes, in which he said, “If we can tax the Americans without their consent, they have… nothing which they can call their own.”

In Goddard, the Founding Fathers found someone who was on the same wave length as they were — radical, and revolutionary for her time.

When British troops got dangerously close to Philadelphia, the Continental Congress evacuated to Baltimore and made the Henry Fite House their headquarters, from Dec. 20, 1776, to Feb. 22, 1777. During that two-month period, Mary Katherine Goddard was not only publishing a newspaper, but also overseeing delegates’ mail and the printing of Congressional documents.

Goddard published a version of the text of Declaration of Independence for readers of the Maryland Journal just a few days after July 4, but six months later she was asked to print a particularly important edition of it. Among the milestones that this printing represents, it’s the only “official” version printed by a woman, the first that lists (most of) the signers — 55 out of the 56 signers are there, sans Thomas McKean, who is thought to have signed the document later — and the first to be entitled “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.” Ten copies of this document, which has also been called the “Goddard Broadside,” survive nationwide.

John Hancock described the importance of the version of the Declaration printed by Goddard in a letter that went out with the deliveries, dated Jan. 31, 1777:

And Goddard took a huge risk printing the document, too. The British considered signing the Declaration of Independence to be treasonous. As Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett has explained, “The Declaration constituted high treason against the Crown. Every person who signed it would be executed as traitors should they be caught by the British.” As postmaster, Goddard was also believed to have paid post-riders out of her own savings during the American Revolution.

But the British wouldn’t be the ones to force Goddard to leave the job. That dubious honor would go to the leaders of the new American government, ironically.

Her patriotism during the Revolution appeared to be disregarded after the ratification of the Constitution. The nation’s first Postmaster General Samuel Osgood forced her out as postmaster in 1789. The official reason was because there was going to be more business travel in the position, and that might overwhelm a woman. But historians believe it’s more likely that Osgood wanted to appoint a political ally to Baltimore postmaster instead; the Smithsonian describes her as “one of the new Republic’s earliest victims of what would become known in the nineteenth century as the postal service’s patronage system.” Friend and colleagues signed a petition to reinstate her, and Goddard appealed to George Washington, but he refused to intervene. Historians think that may have been because she socialized with his opponents, the Anti-Federalists.

Goddard ended up running a shop selling dry goods, stationary and books up until her death on Aug. 12, 1816; her will freed her slave, Belinda, and left Goddard’s possessions to her.

Goddard’s patriotism may not be widely known, but it hasn’t been forgotten. Vice President Mike Pence singled out “patriots like Mary Katherine Goddard” at a Women History Month reception in March, calling her one of “the extraordinary women who’ve helped define America’s history.”

Alain Fontaine leans on the bar at his central Paris bistro, Le Mesturet, dodging trays as waiters weave around him to deliver lunchtime service. “A bistro isn’t just some place for a quick bite to eat,” he says, turning to avoid a glass of red wine colliding with his white chef’s coat. “It’s the home of the Parisian art de vivre—that’s what we’re losing if these places die out: our way of life.”

A distinctive kind of bar-cum-eatery, the bistro offers more substantial meals than a café, but in a more relaxed setting than a restaurant. In some parts of town, they seem to be everywhere, the small zinc-topped tables of their terraces spilling onto street corners. But they’re rapidly disappearing. From 2014 to 2018, nearly a quarter of Paris bistros—at least 300 of them—closed, according to France’s National Statistics Office.

That’s why Fontaine, 60, who worked in bistros all his life before opening Le Mesturet in 2003, is leading about 30 fellow owners in a campaign this year. They want UNESCO, the U.N.’s culture agency, to give bistros and terraces “intangible cultural heritage” status. In September, they will hand their proposal to France’s Minister for Culture, who will then decide whether or not to recommend it to UNESCO. The status would raise awareness and give owners an opportunity for promotion, as well as a way to justify future planning protection from the city council. They might also be able to access some funds: every two years UNESCO hands out cash from a shared pot to put toward practices or events with the classification.

Bistro owners aren’t the only Parisians hoping to secure the designation, which recognizes the cultural value of intangible practices, crafts and events, alongside its more famous physical “World Heritage Sites.” The “bouquinistes” or open-air booksellers along the Seine are also applying, as are the roofers who install the iconic grey tops of most central Paris buildings. Among the practices already recognized in France are a summer solstice fire festival in the Pyrenees, a lace-making technique from Normandy, a centuries-old craft of Aubusson tapestry, and the controversially vague concept of “the French gastronomic meal.”

Bistros first popped up in the city in the early 19th century, as migrants from provincial France opened cheap, unfussy watering holes. Gradually the bistro became a staple of the local culinary scene, providing cheaper fare than its more upscale sibling, the brasserie. Fontaine says that affordability makes bistros a rare meeting point across different cultures and classes. “We have everyone here, blue collar workers, professionals, families, students, tourists,” he says. “They can meet, share, argue.”

A plan by the association to use membership fees to hold artistic events at bistros also revives their long history as a hive of cultural and intellectual activity. In the ’20s, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote at Le Café du Dôme; a couple of decades later, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir argued over existentialism at Les Deux Magots.

Yet to many, the disappearance of Paris bistros comes as no surprise. Soaring rents in the French capital have edged out some owners, while many family-run businesses have struggled to compete with the low prices of chains and fast-food joints that have sprang up over the last few decades. Changing habits are also to blame, as Parisian office workers abandon their traditionally long lunch breaks in favour of a sandwich at their desks.

Nevertheless, for Parisians and tourists alike, bistros remain essential to the city’s history and image. More recently, in the aftermath of the November 2015 attacks that left 130 dead, they emerged as a symbol of the city’s resilience. That night, Grégory Reibenberg was in his bistro, La Belle Équipe, when gunmen opened fire on the terrace. Nineteen people were killed, including his wife and nine friends. “But two days later, it was sunny and all the terraces were full,” he says. Thousands shared defiant photos with hashtags like “Everyone to the bistro” and “I am on the terrace.”

La Belle Équipe closed for four months, while Reibenberg renovated and enlarged the terrace. “I didn’t want it to be the same place,” he says. “I didn’t want anyone to ever be able to point and say ‘That happened there.’” The remodel has a modern feel, with exposed brickwork and a loud sound system—but the relaxed clientele and hearty menu still mark it as a classic Paris bistro. “We need to protect bistros,” Reibenberg says. “What happens inside is life itself.”