What would you be willing to do for a friend from 20-odd years ago if you suddenly learned they were on the verge of becoming homeless or found them ...
Tag: France
May 1968 @50
On April 27, 2018, a hundred people showed up at Columbia University to talk about the French student and worker revolts of May–June 1968. Many such conferences are taking place around the world to ...
Women of the Algerian Resistance
On May 8, 1945, France joined the festivities of V-E Day, celebrating the total defeat of Nazi Germany as well as the ...
Keyword of the Week: France
On Sunday, eyes were on the French election as two candidates, Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, advanced to a runoff that will determine the presidency next month. This week’s Public ...
The Intrusion Artist
By the late ’50s, when he was already widely considered one of France’s finest filmmakers, Robert Bresson would confess in interviews that he hardly ever went to the movies. There was something about ...
All About My Mother
In her canonical 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wonders how a coherent past may be reconstructed from countless angles, styles, and past selves. How do we choose from so many ...
Transplant Melodrama
Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants, beautifully translated into English by Sam Taylor and published as The Heart, has been something of a publishing sensation in France, and beyond. I am ...
A Muslim Future to Come?
The devastating attacks of November 13 on Paris’s 10th and 11th arrondissements viciously targeted the “progressive” heart of the city. When I am there, that is where I live. Like many other ...
How Gentrifiers Gentrify
This past spring a new French restaurant opened in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Located on Malcolm X Boulevard, directly across the street from a Crown Fried Chicken, the ...
Modiano’s Memoryscapes
Patrick Modiano’s reputation as a writer of wartime Paris was sealed in 2014 by the Nobel Prize, which recognized him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies ...”
Stunt Double: Twice Fallen
The wounds of civil wars last. You can forgive a stranger, but family and neighbors, that’s another story. In America, the Confederate flag still raises old myths and divisions. In Algeria, the ...
Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest
Reading Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst is eerily similar to contemplating a wound that won’t heal, inspiring trepidation at what might soon—or potentially worse, not ever—change. Such was my ...
Reading Charlie Hebdo across the Atlantic
Like many French citizens, I have never purchased a copy of Charlie Hebdo, the provocative satirical newspaper whose cartoonists were tragically massacred by jihadists earlier this year. A struggling ...
Thérésa Tallien’s Legacy: Style on the rue de Babylone
Since the 18th century, the rue de Babylone has been a site for salons that bring the haute monde into contact with innovative artists ...
“It’s When There Are a Lot of ThemThat There Are Problems”
The sorrow and outrage provoked by the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were underwritten by an all-too-familiar grand narrative: These were not the cowardly misdeeds of a group ...
The History and Philosophy of Adventure
We often think of adventure—it’s hard to avoid, saturated as the culture is with film, television, and books that place it at their center. But what adventure is, what it means to pursue it, and what ...
Democracy’s Candide
The atrocity last month at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo reminds us that a free press is as basic in France as it is in the United States. This is one of the freedoms Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch ...
Paris Streets, January 11, 2015
An estimated 3.7 million people rallied across France this past Sunday, January 11th. Roughly 1.6 million marchers were in Paris, where the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred. Friends report that the ...
Weekend Reading: Laughter in the Dark
2015 has gotten off to an unnerving start, to say the least. The week has been dominated by the attack on Charlie Hebdo and the subsequent standoffs, and the bombing at a Colorado NAACP office, both ...
Eating Galettes in Rennes
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. The sky above Rennes spits gentle rain. In French we call this crachin, from the ...