In the U.S.A., people in their fifties are Baby Boomers. They love email and are often on Facebook, and they probably work with computers. They mostly have decent jobs. They wear helmets when they ride bikes; they always fasten their seatbelts; they don’t litter and they don’t smoke. In France, people in their fifties are [...]
French women’s much admired skill in tying scarves and not getting fat might make us dream, but it is not helping them economically, during their working years or after. France ranks 46th in the World Economic Forum’s 2010 gender equality report, trailing the United States, most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica. Eighty-two percent of [...]
One of the zillion things I love about France is that very often a shopkeeper won’t, for artistic reasons, upsell you. This afternoon I bought flowers on rue Caulaincourt in the 18th. I asked for 6 stems of gladiolas, to which the fleurist responded, “five or seven–it should be an odd number.” I agreed to [...]
They’re everywhere. I’m not sure, but I think they may even be more numerous than people. That’s right. Dabie to people ratio in my estimation = 3:1. I feel like they may take over the town at any moment and start making me eat Eukanuba with luke-warm water poured on it while I watch them [...]
Paris, the capital of la vie de bohème! The city where artists love and starve together, shock the bourgeoisie, then die tragically young. These myths were set in motion in 1843 by a magazine series called Scenes from a Bohemian Life. They were tales from a hard-up poet named Henri Murger that revealed his own daily [...]
There are many illustrious French kings in the country’s long history, and although I have a soft spot for the Sun King Louis XIV and his great palace at Versailles, my hands-down favorite is Henri IV, aka Le Vert Galant. His history as a Huguenot prince of Navarre during the Wars of Religion who married [...]
Parisians have the reputation of being very blasé, of having seen and done everything and of not being very sensitive to anything. Stéphane Lecourbe had the idea of turning this reputation into a slogan: “I love rien, I’m Parisien,” which not only rhymes perfectly, but also sounds pretty funny. I cannot say it’s a real success [...]
Just who’s more self obsessed? Parisians, New Yorkers, Angelenos? I don’t think there are actually comparative statistics on this; my guess is that they’d all elbow each other out of the way in their fight to proclaim themselves most chic, most au courant, and generally best all around in everything. And Washingtonians? They’d surely be [...]
In Paris instead of seeing large rats hanging out down by the subway tracks I’m more likely to see little mice instead which are not nearly as ugly or threatening as their NYC counterparts. This morning however, everything changed and a barrier was crossed. As I sat enjoying my commute to work as best as [...]
I had a call the other night from Jon Henley of the Guardian, who had reviewed my book and wanted to talk about a piece he was writing about French women. It seems there has been a sudden onslaught of books on the subject, some of them written by Anglo-Saxon women driven by the question: what do they have that [...]
