When you buy a newspaper in France, you enter a time warp. The laws of physics no longer apply. If up-to-the-minute reporting is what you are after, you may be in for a surprise.

Say you want to buy Le Monde, France’s most prominent national paper, on a Tuesday. You go to the newsstand Tuesday morning, but the only Le Monde available is from Monday. That’s because Le Monde comes out at 3pm. So you wait until 3pm and buy the Tuesday paper, but the news in it is from yesterday. In fact, many of the articles on the front page are news analyses of events that happened earlier in the week.

But that was the easy part. When you look at the paper you bought on Tuesday afternoon, it is dated Wednesday. So in fact, you are reading a paper with news from the past that appears to come from the future.

It gets worse. Let’s say you want to get the weekend edition, which has the magazine in it. You waltz up to your local news vendor Saturday morning, full of optimism. But no, the weekend edition, i.e., the Saturday edition, came out Friday. Now you have to wait until 3pm again (it’s still Saturday, remember) to get….the Monday edition. There is no Sunday paper.

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