The visiting American writer pieces together how the French culture of comics (bandes dessinées) mixes with their deepening love of Japanese anime’.
Category: Rue Amelot
There is perhaps nothing more foreign about America than its “gun culture,” and of course its plague of mass shootings. For a French-American who has lived her life in Paris, there is a search for understanding with her family in Louisiana.
Why must I feel like a washed-up nobody just because I have no need for a new “data plan”? All I want to do is make (and pay for) a simple phone call.
-OpEd- “Do you get how big this is? It’s been two hours now…” No, I didn’t get how big it was. Mostly, I was amazed that Daniel was both speaking in full sentences and making eye contact — I’d only ever seen him muted and bent over his computer screen scrolling through graphs and columns. […]
European media is failing to state the obvious about electric scooter reality: Our cities have to adapt.
MILAN — There were a few moments of silence when I told my girlfriend what I’d done. I’d kept the information from her for a few days, fearing her reaction and forced to explain: I had chucked a few hundred dollars at shares of the so-called “meme stock” extraordinaire GameStop on the New York Stock […]
We’ve gotten used to too many people dying, and too many dying alone.
The colored tattoo of a fortified bridge towering high over troubled waters takes up almost all of my friend Ivan’s shoulder. In his early 30s, Ivan has a footballer’s build and flawless cockney accent. He’s been a British citizen almost all his life, but was born in Mostar, in present-day Bosnia, in the late 1980s […]
Watching the nightly news on television was a recipe for unhappiness. It’s just one lesson from two years on the road in Europe, even though the depressing headlines will follow you through other channels.
Our New Delhi-based writer will be watching with pride as Kamala Harris becomes the first woman of Indian descent become vice president — but is also very much aware of the glass ceiling the incoming president is breaking.
MALMÖ — On one of the final Fridays of 2020, I passed through the Malmö airport customs and underwent that subtle metamorphosis from The Swede to a Swede. This crossing from the definite to the indefinite is familiar to all returning expats, and its downside (deflated exceptionalism) and perks (nostalgia, familiarity) are felt at the […]
From The Freedom Of Vanlife To A Pandemic Quarantine — And Back Again? RUE AMELOT Pathogens In The Permafrost: A New Climate Change Health Risk LES ECHOS No Work, No Way Home: Russia’s Migrant Workers Trapped By COVID-19 KOMMERSANT Brazil’s Stranger-Than-Fiction Descent Under Bolsonaro CLARIN Quiet Killer: When Coronavirus Got Inside A Capuchin Convent LE […]
COVID Death Toll At 1.5 Million: A World United By Those We Lost WORLDCRUNCH Abidjan Postcard: Black Lives Matter, But They’re Different Here JEUNE AFRIQUE Pandemic Postcard: Nearly Alone As A Paris Museum Reopens RUE AMELOT “Joan Of Arc” In Exile: Can Tikhanovskaya Lead Belarus From Abroad? KOMMERSANT COVID-19, Address To The Nations: Faces Of […]
In the midst of America’s election limbo, our Milan-based writer looks back on the first U.S. campaign he followed — from up close — and wonders what comes next.
From the moment the movie began, I had a funny feeling. First, there were no opening credits — nothing to tell us who the producers or director were nor what famous actors would appear. No sign of even the author’s name, like they showed in The Godfather. But I had seen Batman Begins, so I […]
MILAN — I recently spent a weekend at the Lago d’Iseo, a picturesque area of Lombardy at the foot of the Alps east of Milan, the city where I live. The air was hot and still, resting damp and heavy like a warm towel placed over your face. Dark clouds loomed all day across the […]
A self-described American aesthete has no good answers for her French friends aghast at the reality show in the White House.
I’ve worked from home long before the coronavirus outbreak forced the rest of the world to go remote. When I used to talk about my job as a freelance writer and video editor — and the fact that virtually all my working hours were spent alone in my apartment, on my computer — my friends […]
PARIS — Grandioso, say the Italians. Kolossalt for the Swedes. The Berkeley student newspaper called it monumental, while a Buenos Aires daily was stamping it patrimonio de la humanidad. The world’s popular music critics and other sundry writer types (wink!) have spent the past few weeks trying to size up something that is much more […]
PRAGUE — As I walked down Avenue René Coty on a sunny day in late May, everything was like a Paris postcard — except that my glasses were fogging up over my facemask. But I knew the scenery by heart by then, as I had never left a one-kilometer radius around my student residence during […]
-Essay- MEXICO CITY — I notice some are still touching surfaces, grabbing a pole to hold onto on the bus or the handrails on escalators. With reckless abandon. For me, no sniffle nor sneeze nor little cough escapes my notice. On a city bus, you’d think they would make every effort to “swallow” that cough. […]
Our writer finds the destruction of the natural world, and his own money problems, far more distressing than any pandemic.
-Essay- NEW YORK — They said the devil had traveled in her clothing. Elsche Prösche, née Wohler, wife of Jochim, was in her forties, and lived a life of relative poverty in Kölzin, a village in northeastern Germany. She was my great-aunt, nine generations ago — and for charges of witchcraft, she was burned at […]
VAL D’ARAN — It wasn’t until I’d made may way clear through to other side of the village that I finally crossed paths with another human: A man about my age returning from a walk in the hills with his dog. “The only thing I can tell you is that up along the road, after […]
No, no…not one of *those Yankees! But this lifelong American baseball fan (Milwaukee Brewers was his childhood team) is rediscovering the sport in his adopted home of France.
Should schools add new subjects every year to keep up with the times? Or is their job simply to help students become critical thinkers? A new mother’s musings.
A Colombian-American deals with different misconceptions in different parts of the world. Ask him who he is before you ask him where he’s from.
Every. single. time…
A nation became so attached to a nasty word that it has lost some of its edge, but not all of it.
Three Colombians ended up in Atena Lucana, Italy, instead of Atenas, Greece.
PARIS — Twice a year (for the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl), I renounce my 6-hour beauty sleep and fight timezones to tune in to a bit of live transatlantic spectacle. Blame it on three reasons, ranked by order of importance: my americanophile wife; a chance to take the temperature of U.S. cultural hegemony; […]
From Madrid to Cork to Shanghai, some of the most revered old bookshops are closing doors as they face pressure from big chains and e-readers. But our bookworm writer found some small signs of hope.
NAPLES — It was the last game of 2018, and I was looking forward to it. I had planned to go with my brother, a staunch Napoli fan, my soccer-loving Argentine husband and a bunch of old friends. It was also a symbolic gesture: I am back in Italy after almost two decades living abroad, […]
-Essay- PARIS — This is not news, but dating today is a completely different animal than it was even five years ago, as new apps keep arriving to create “matches’ between people online who may have never come face-to-face otherwise. Personally, online or off, the whole “dating” thing has never really been my strong suit […]
-Essay- PARIS — Growing up in Northern California, acts of public protest were never far away. It felt perfectly natural for me to join fellow students in the annual “Day of Silence,” refusing to say a word in any of my classes to draw attention to discrimination against the LGBTQ community. My favorite English teacher […]
-Essay- “Germans are coconuts, Americans peaches…” In the German Studies department at the University of Michigan, this saying bounced around as a shorthand way for us to describe the supposed social differences between the two nationalities: Germans come with tough shells, but inside lies the sweetness of coconut milk. Americans, instead, are soft on the […]
Categories
National Tragedy In The Age Of Trump
A young American in Paris watches Trump in Las Vegas, in the shadow of Obama and Orlando — and Bush at Ground Zero.
PARIS — I’m on the bus when “Proud to Be An American” pops into my head. Once it was Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved.” Another time, the Frosted Flakes cereal theme song. Nearly a year after moving to France, my brain keeps regurgitating America. I moved to the suburbs of Paris in September to […]
Worldcrunch’s Parisian co-founder knows from up close the challenges that France has faced. Only an open and united Europe can bring a better future.
-Essay- VALENCIA — As a British national living in Spain, it is strange to (still) be an EU citizen and yet start to feel unwelcome in this “European home.” All this thanks to Brexit, that nasty little gnome doggedly making its way through the disbelief of millions. Born in Iran and with nearly 40 years […]