Articles
AN ANTI-GAY-MARRIAGE TEA PARTY, FRENCH STYLE? New Yorker, March 18, 2014
Last month, marchers filled the streets of Paris and Lyon to protest same-sex marriage, which became legal in France last year. The day after the demonstrations, François Hollande’s Socialist government announced that it would not be putting forward new legislation to make it easier for gay couples to adopt children or have them with the…
Continue readingITALY’S YOUNG PRIME MINISTER IN A HURRY, New Yorker, March 6, 2014
Sixty-three governments in sixty-eight years, with twenty-seven different Prime Ministers—so why should we care that Italy has a new government, with yet another Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi? It is understandable if observers find the dizzying nature of Italian politics exhausting and pointless. It can seem like a merry-go-round: the people on the painted horses change,…
Continue readingHOW AMERICAN IS THE FRENCH PRESIDENT’S AFFAIR? New Yorker, Jan. 15, 2014
In the 1988 movie “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” Steve Martin’s character tries to talk his way out of a French jail by claiming that was framed by a jealous woman. “She caught me with another woman,” he says. “C’mon, you’re French, you understand that!” The police inspector, unimpressed, replies, “To be with another woman, that is French….
Continue readingTHE CASE OF DIEUDONNÉ: A FRENCH COMEDIAN’S HATE, New Yorker, Jan 10, 2014
It’s still early January, but 2014 is shaping up to be a big year for the French comedian Dieudonné. The mayors of three French cities have moved to cancel his upcoming shows, insisting that he has repeatedly violated French laws against inciting racial and religious hatred and denial of the Holocaust. The French-American basketball player…
Continue readingFRANCE’S SEARCH FOR WOMEN FIT FOR THE PANTHÉON, The New Yorker, Dec. 25, 2013
Carved into the façade of the Panthéon, the huge domed stone structure in Paris’s Latin Quarter, are the words “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.” “To the great men, a grateful fatherland.” This is France’s secular temple to itself, a curious necropolis conceived during the French Revolution to celebrate a new cult of the nation…
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