Author Scott Dominic Carpenter contemplates the longterm effects of Covid on the art of the French greeting known as la bise.
Author - Scott Dominic Carpenter
When you’ve gone around the merry-go-round of life as many times as I have, all you really want for Christmas is a thrill. Fact is, I don’t need more things (though a cattle prod would make a nice stocking-stuffer; I’d use it on those people...
Paris changes, poet Charles Baudelaire wrote, faster than the human heart, and as far as my neighborhood is concerned, he was right. We’d hardly settled into our new digs before people starting tearing things up....
After days of bone-chilling rain, the sun had finally returned. Parisians emerged into the soggy city, shedding umbrellas and overcoats. Bare knees flashed beneath the hems of skirts, and children in shorts whooshed by on kick-scooters. Even our neighborhood...
Most of us agree that America got off to a rocky start this year—all that niggling about healthcare, Russians, and nukes—but sometimes it helps to step back and survey the landscape. After all, couldn’t things be worse? Yes, in fact, they could: we might all...
One Sunday not long ago, on a Paris street that shall remain nameless, I met up with a mustachioed Frenchman we’ll call Gilles. He wore tattered blue coveralls and carried a four-foot-long iron bar. When no one was looking, he pried open a manhole cover, and...
What do you do if you’re in Paris but you don’t want to eat French? Crazy question, right? After all, France pretty much put gastronomy on the map (and in the dictionary). How could you possibly want anything else?
Of course, you can go to the Véfour or the Tour d'Argent, but if you can afford places like that, you should stop reading now, because I'm going to talk about good food at reasonable prices.
In Paris it’s possible to burn through money pretty fast, and you feel awfully vulnerable when you run out. So, let's look at how you can replenish the coffers without paying absurdly high fees, commissions, and exchange rates. Everything from wire transfers...
It was one of those intimate, white-linen affairs—the kind of restaurant that requires me to dig my necktie out of the mothballs, where even the busboys out-dress me. But it was Anne’s birthday, and that called for heroic acts of selflessness. Besides, a...
We’ve been so busy gawking at the sorry slapstick of American politics that it’s easy to forget the other circus acts going on around the Atlantic rim. In France they’re trying to show how many clowns can fit inside the teeny cars of political primaries, and...
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but Paris at least has a late bedtime. Once a year there's the all-night art festival of the Nuit Blanche, but for the other 364 days a year, nocturnal activities are less centrally organized. If you want to push...
