“Any Paris of the future that is neither a frozen artifact nor an inhabited holding company will perforce involve fear, dirt, sloth, ruin and accident.” -- Luc Sante, "The Other Paris" When we moved to the 17th arrondissement in 2012, a friend who lived in our new...

For one of our first Thanksgivings in Paris, we invited a few French friends over for dinner. We made a few mistakes. One was to assume everyone knew what it was all about. One friend arrived with several bags filled with beautiful presents for the children. When we...

One of the few saving graces of Lockdown 2.0 in Paris: The parks are open. During the 56-day shut-in last spring, they were closed tight. No one even mowed the grass. Now, people are free to enjoy them – if the parks are close to home and everyone wears a mask. We...

Originally published in The American Scholar There are two lessons to be drawn from Europe’s second wave of Covid-19: 1. Getting it right the first time isn’t enough. 2. Messing with dinner time doesn’t work. In the summer, the countries of continental Europe seemed...

I bought a bicycle so I could move around Paris without risk from COVID-19. A month in, I’m not sure the safety tradeoff is working in my favor. Paris, it turns out, is no Amsterdam. While Mayor Anne Hidalgo has opened many new bike lanes and so have surrounding...

President Emmanuel Macron announced a new set of COVID restrictions last night that took aim at one of the most sacred French traditions: dinner hour. Macron imposed a curfew in Paris and other large cities from 9pm to 6am in an effort to reduce the soaring number of...

I just found a spark of joy from an unexpected source: a French civil servant. Not only is my native country a mess, France isn't filled with joy these days. Cases of COVID-19 are on the rise, about 12,000 a day on average. As a proportion of the population, that’s...