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...
Tag - Understanding Paris
After days of bone-chilling rain, the sun had finally returned. Parisians emerged into the soggy city, shedding umbrellas and overcoats. Bare knees flashed...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
It always starts with the best of intentions. There will be a guest or two staying over, and after dinner we’ll retire to the living room. During a pause in...
What can a simple ride on the RER reveal about the French approach to problem-solving? Join the author as he heads out to Charles De Gaulle airport one day and...
August is a famously sleepy month in Paris, the time when the juilletistes (those French who take their summer holidays in July) switch places with the...
Visitors to Paris, especially those from parts of the world where droughts are common like the Southwestern United States, are often shocked and concerned to...
Update: A year and a half after I wrote this article, and after 51 years of existence, the Pariscope finally published its last edition in October 2016. So I...


