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....
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 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...
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.
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...
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 the conversation, I will raise a finger in a sham of spontaneity, and cry out, “Say, why don’t we go...
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 encounters a problem in need of a solution.
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 aoûtiens (pronounced “ah-oo-sien”, who prefer their vacation in August). For those stranded in the city...
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 see water gushing down the gutters of Paris when it hasn't been raining.
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 guess that answers the question! But it had a good run, and inspired many other Paris events...
