The New Yorker
THE 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…
Continue readingWhy The French Are Fighting Over Work Hours, NYer.com, October 3, 2013
It’s telling that in France, where several stores are fighting an order requiring them to close on Sundays, retail employees showed up at work last month wearing T-shirts that read, “YES WEEK END.” It was a play on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign slogan, and a symbol of the fact that some in France—where shops have…
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