France
The French Obsession with National Suicide, The New Yorker, Dec. 11, 2014
There are few things the French find more annoying than what they call “French bashing”—a term they use in English, despite their insistence on finding French equivalents for foreign words. When Jean Tirole was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, Prime Minister Manuel Valls sent out a tweet of congratulations to “another Frenchman to…
Continue readingCAN THE FRENCH TALK ABOUT RACE?, New Yorker, July 11, 2014
Quietly, the French Ministry of Higher Education last month signed off on implementing a law that had been passed nearly a year earlier but had been gathering dust within the bureaucracy. Many in the ministry had hoped that it would die a quiet and unnoticed death. Following a model developed in Texas and California, the…
Continue readingWILL LE PEN LEARN FROM AN ITALIAN COMEDIAN’S MISTAKES?, New Yorker, May 27, 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…
Continue readingMont-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…
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