Worldcrunch
-Essay- PARIS — Nothing ruins the cheese course more than the smell of burning tires. Yes, it seems, the hour of camembert and brimstone is at hand. Angry mobs are burning Michelins at the picket lines. Congestion at the gas pump. Travel chaos as metro and rail lines strike. Power outages and the River Seine […]
Each night I return home to one of the greatest luxuries available to human beings: an empty room. There is no one to speak to if I do not wish to make conversation, and no one to make demands of me as I sit idly in front of my window. I only became conscious of […]
PRAGUE — Czech Republic was the first country I visited that wasn’t either Latin or Germanic. Czech, as I found out the hard way, is a very tricky Slavic language, one of those that rarely lets you deduce the meaning of a word and in which entire sentences seem to have been written by somebody […]
PARIS — Our usual spot at Parc Sainte-Périne to plop our blanket and sports equipment for a few hours of recreational escape was already taken when we arrived on Saturday. A group of about 10 young men were sprawled out on the patch, enjoying the sunshine and talking among themselves — in Arabic, I noticed. […]
A South American writer rethinks the soundtrack of his teenage revolution, concluding that his aversion to culturally significant genres was a youthful indiscretion that deprived him of musical riches.