France
HOW 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…
Continue readingLeonarda and the School Bus, Nyer.com, October 22, 2013
It is painful to watch French President François Hollande endure one self-inflicted wound after another, the latest being his inept handling of the deportation of Leonarda Dibrani, a fifteen-year-old girl sent back to Kosovo earlier this month. Leonarda’s family—father, mother, and six children—entered France four years ago and had exhausted various efforts to obtain asylum…
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