Articles

Mont-Sant-Michel is trying an extreme makeover to save its dreamlike setting, Smithsonian magazine, June 2014

“One needs to be eight centuries old to know what this mass of encrusted architecture meant to its builders,” wrote Henry Adams in his book Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. And that was more than a hundred years ago. Mont-Saint-Michel has gone through several major transformations since Adams’ time and is in the midst of another one now…

The Rise and Fall of Right-Wing Populism in France and Italy, New Yorker, May 28, 2014

The extraordinary success of Marine Le Pen’s National Front, in France, and of other right-wing, populist parties has, with good reason, been the main story of last weekend’s European Parliamentary elections. Running on an anti-euro, anti-immigration platform, Le Pen won a historic twenty-five per cent of the vote, handily outpolling France’s main conservative party, the…

Dancing to Nowhere, review of “La Grande Bellezza,” New York Review of Books blog, Jan. 9, 2014

If the character Marcello in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita—played unforgettably by Marcello Mastroianni—had spent another four decades flitting about the high life of Rome he might have turned into someone like Jep Gambardella, the protagonist of Italian film director Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty). A self-conscious twenty-first century version of the Fellini classic, La Grande…

HOW SNOWDEN’S REVELATIONS SAVED SARKOZY, New Yorker, April 18, 2014

One of the most interesting results of France’s nationwide municipal elections was something that didn’t happen. In the weeks leading up to the elections, late last month, a series of potentially damaging recordings of former President Nicolas Sarkozy were leaked and published in various press outlets. If the motive was to influence voters, though, the…

THE FRENCH RIGHT SCORES A HISTORIC VICTORY, New Yorker, March 31, 2014

Sunday’s municipal elections in France offer at least three historical firsts: a historically poor result for the socialist party of President François Hollande; the best-ever results for the right-wing National Front party of Marine Le Pen; and a national record for low voter turnout. The left lost mainly because its own electorate—discouraged by the disappointing…