Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Paris Update on February 10, 2016, but seems even more pertinent today after the latest round of transit strikes. All right, all you youngsters out there, gather ’round and listen: when I was … Read More
My wife Nancy used to be close friends with an American woman who had lived in Paris in the late 1940s and early ’50s. One day they were talking about what the city was like back then, and the older … Read More
For my most recent birthday, a friend gave me a bottle of a Pauillac grand cru classé from 1986. If you don’t have a friend like that, you should get one. It’s not the kind of wine that I drink … Read More
As though we didn’t have enough problems in Paris already, what with facing a cold snap, eyeing a presidential election in May and stomaching a surge in the rat population, now we have wolves roaming the streets. Or at least … Read More
I hate to say it, but if Paris and Rome were pitted against each other in an all-out, go-for-the-jugular cultural history smackdown, Rome would win. It’s true that Paris has the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, Notre Dame, 1.5 godzillion other … Read More
Like all people of any nationality, the French are associated with a number of stereotypes based more on assumptions than facts. The natives of my adopted country are supposedly great lovers and terrible soldiers, well dressed and ill mannered, with … Read More
Paris has long been a magnet for dreamers of all kinds: poets, painters, composers, philosophers, wisenheimers… Oh — and people who are intent on killing themselves in the dumbest but most mediagenic way possible. I was reminded of the last-named … Read More
As I write this, there is an elephant in the room. And a donkey. And an ass. Like so many people, by mid-October I had grown weary of all the scandal-mongering, vicious accusations, desperate rationalizing, empty promises, name-calling and lies. … Read More
Due to humankind’s profligate use of natural resources, the world now teeters on the brink of a planet-wide disaster with no precedent in all of history. Unless of course you count when my first girlfriend in junior high dumped me. … Read More
Like everything else in the universe, the Internet has its advantages and disadvantages. Its main advantage, of course, is that it vastly facilitates communication, making it easy for me to harass women I barely know with “sext” messages. Oops — … Read More
