Those little red letters on the eggs? They indicate production method, country of origin, which farm the eggs came from, and the expiration date. Like this:

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Meanwhile, I’ve been enjoying Chiara Barzini’s “Acqua,” which follows the water trail through the ruins of Roman and American empires, and Catherine Ostler’s “The Renoir Girls,” which uses Renoir’s 1881 portrait of Elisabeth and Alice Cahen d’Anvers to tell the story of France during the Belle Époque and the horrors that antisemitism soon unleashed. We have just made it to January 5th, 1895, and the “ceremony of degradation” to which the French army subjects Alfred Dreyfus after he is found guilty of spying for the Germans. “It is cruelly, even camply theatrical,” Ostler writes. “In the night, his uniform has been taken away, the trimmings pulled off and sewn back loosely; the sword broken, and smelted back together, for ease of public breakage.”

I read less fiction than nonfiction and might not have picked up Susan Choi’s “Flashlight” had I not agreed to interview her at the American Library of Paris. Big mistake! It’s the kind of book that made me want to ignore all the usual concerns of genesis, structure, and intention and just talk about the characters like they were real live people. When our hour was up, I realized I hadn’t even asked Choi to explain the metaphor of the flashlight. That’s how good it is. Also: this compendium of Spanish napkins! And a new book from the photographer behind one of my favorite Instagram accounts, J’habite une ville fantôme.

The French journalist Nassira El Moaddem spent six years investigating the massively shady right-wing mayor of Blanc-Mesnil, and he vowed to kill her—outright, in public, telling Le Monde, “I’m going to whip her. I’ll go all the way, she’ll die. I’ll kill her.” Crickets from Macron and his entire government. (It bears remembering that Macron spent forty-five minutes on the phone with Éric Zemmour after someone spat on him in the street.) I also recommend taking some time to contemplate the white South Africans who are migrating to the Mississippi Delta, distinguished by “their extraordinarily short shorts” and “a feeling that they are escaping anti-white sentiment.” The mysterious man knocking on the shutters of elderly women in a Breton village. The way that DOGE weaponized Chat GPT to gut the humanities. The fact that Chat GPT is in extremely dubious hands. I went to see a guillotine in Marseille and wrote about the comeback of capital punishment with tech thugs such as Joe Lonsdale (Palantir) and Elon Musk.

It’s time for some vocabulary. Where did the word “plouc” come from? People moving to Paris from Breton villages like Ploudaniel and Plougonvelin. (The suffix “plou-” means “parish.”) How about “poucave,” which les jeunes—mine included—use to mean “tattletale” or “snitch.” Apparently it comes from “in or around Montreuil” via the Romani language. Now would probably be a good time to know that “le détroit d’Ormuz” is “the strait of Hormuz.” (Yes, that makes the city Detroit the city Strait.) What is the point of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon?

This newsletter is a French football fan newsletter. Congratulations to les Bleus for “outdressing” their N.B.A. counterparts. (Nothing will ever beat Ousmane Dembélé wearing an Agnès B. hat at Roland Garros.) I have acquired a Statue-of-Liberty-inspired vert-de-gris away jersey for the eight-year-old in my life, and am considering one for myself. Take a journey inside the team’s equipment room, where supervisors have basically created a Dewey Decimal system of maillots. Have you heard the French team’s unofficial World Cup anthem? Turns out it’s A.I.-generated, but you have to admit it’s a catchy tune. (Dembélé! Cherki!) When PSG plays Liverpool Tuesday night, don’t forget to say a prayer at Paris’s no. 1 sports church.

Remember Les Grands Buffets? As if too much wasn’t enough, they’re getting a makeover by the maximalist designer Jacques Garcia. While I dream of Narbonne, there’s Paris: last night I met a friend in Montmartre and we had an excellent time people-watching at Le Relais de la Butte.2 (An American guy just chilling on the terrace in white tube socks, sneakers at his side; a policeman chasing a presumptive bag-snatcher while yelling “voleur.” Old-school!) Can’t remember where, but I recently read something where someone mentioned that she liked going to La Mascotte because her parents “used to day-drink there.” Intriguing, no? I can confirm that it’s the ideal destination for seafood platters and moules frites. And the Art Deco interior! Can’t prove it, but I highly suspect that the alluring people drinking at the bar were members of a microscene—I dunno, cabaret groupies?

Stay with me below the paywall for another perfect restaurant, two superb dishes, exhibition picks, and a smattering of spring fashion.

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Almost ten years ago, I started working on what came to be “They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy,” to be published by The Penguin Press. I thought I was writing a book about a massacre and coup d’état that white supremacists committed in Wilmington, North Carolina—my hometown—on a Thursday near…

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1. Can you guess the all-time bestselling PSG jersey? Mbappé? Nope. Dembélé? Nope. (Though I invite you to watch the sickest goal of the week and possibly the season. And to admire its auteur watching tennis in Agnès B.) Zlatan? I know the suspense is killing you, but you’re gonna have to guess again. It’s Kang-in Lee!

2. Let’s say you want to criticize someone’s penmanship in French. The phrase is “pattes de mouche.” Fly’s paw writing, instead of chickenscratch.

3. Or maybe you want ice in your wine. You can ask for a “piscine de blanc” or a “piscine de rosé.” (Proceed at your own risk with “piscine de rouge,” but know that my father-in-law has established precedent.)

4. Mark Twain was obsessed with Joan of Arc.

5. Joan of Arc did not have long, flowing hair. She had a bowl cut.

   

6. If you know here to look, you can find rare vintages of highly coveted wines—Romanée-Conti, Château Lafitte-Rothschild—in the wine departments of certain French supermarkets: the Intermarché La Teste-de-Buch, the Carrefour de la Toison d’Or, the Auchan in Roncq, etc.

7. What’s an “ésitériophile,” you ask? A person who collects transport tickets.

8. The Association of Accidental Americans helps people who hold U.S. nationality by flukes of birth to shed their unwanted passports. “Accidental Americans” is my favorite unintentionally existential bit of legalese since “the right to be forgotten.”

9. The fee for doing so just dropped for $2,350 to $450, thanks to a lawsuit by said association.

10. With 396 million speakers worldwide, French just passed standard Arabic to become the world’s fourth-most-spoken language, behind English, Mandarin, and Spanish. After English, it’s the second most “vehicular” language—a language that circulates beyond those who speak it as a first language.

11. 65% of the world’s francophones reside on the African continent.

12. The column on the Place de Vendôme is made from 12,000 melted down cannons that the French seized from the Russians and Austrian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz.

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La Place des États-Unis was called La Place de Bitche until 1881, when the United States established its embassy nearby and petitioned for a name change.

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Last week I was in New York, planning for the release of my book, THEY STOLE A CITY: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy, which comes out July 14th. (You can pre-order here, and please do because it really makes a difference to the success of a book.) The blurbs are coming in, and, after nearly ten years of work, am I proud. It’s particularly meaningful to me that early readers have homed in on my argument that the Wilmington coup was a critical hinge point in American history, and that they share my understanding of its importance in explaining why we are where we are now. This one’s from Jelani Cobb, author, most recently, of “Three Or More is a Riot,” and dean of the Columbia Journalism School:

“They Stole a City is a brilliant rendering of a history buried in a shallow grave. Lauren Collins has not only measured the weight of a specific and tragic chapter of our past, she has charted the Wilmington Massacre’s bearing upon the present. The origins of our current crisis become more legible in these pages – as do the forces that would just as soon steal a nation.”

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Before I left town, I had one last order of business: seeing “Melania,” the new documentary about Melania Trump. If you haven’t heard, Amazon paid forty million dollars for some shots of her feet interspersed with breathtaking BTS footage of Melania fussing over her Inauguration outfit (“No more turtleneck!”) and Melania planning a donor dinner featuring a literal golden egg. “After a while, “Melania” starts to feel like an Only Fans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories,” I wrote for The New Yorker. Full review here.

The Trumps’ handpicked director, Brett Ratner, who had not worked in movies for years after multiple allegations of sexual abuse, which he denies, turned up in the latest release of Epstein papers. It’s hard to fathom the iniquity coming out of those files, but I want to draw your attention to Epstein’s jawdropping plan for educating boys with video games, in light of my friend Lila Byock’s campaign to keep predatory EdTech out of schools.

What else we got? I bring you France’s most-watched television events of 2025, which basically alternate between rugby games and episodes of the atrocious series “HPI.” I would watch a show about Jacob Helberg, a young, Franco-American official State Department official who wanted to be ambassador to France but lost out to Charles Kushner and now serves as a liaison between Trump and the French far-right. Ditto the Doumbayas—President Mamadi, who seized power in a 2021 coup and First Lady Lauriane, who was born in a village in the Drôme, served as a French gendarme, and is widely rumored to have been a spy.

The Louvre robbery—whatever happened with that?!—got all the air time, but did you know 1) that the Élysée Palace has an argentier and 2) that said argentier was recently arrested for allegedly having pocketed some hundred valuable plates and cups? (Any story with a “thirty-year old porcelain collector living in Versailles” has me from the jump.) The church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Médaille Miraculeuse is little known to Parisians, but draws some three million visitors a year, about the same as Musée d’Orsay. If you want a miracle, I’ve got one: Ousmane Dembélé’s mind-blowing goal against Lille. The beautiful game!

Three goals in life: to interview Dembélé, to have a sandwich named after me, and to figure in a snow globe, ever since I went to the John Singer Sargent show and acquired one featuring his subject, the society gynecologist Samuel Pozzi. The joy this thing gives me. You would not believe. As for sandwiches, I had a deeply satisfying snow-day turkey club at Waverly Diner, my diner of choice in New York City. I have also recently been to the Bahamas (ALL WILL BE REVEALED IN A FUTURE ISSUE OF THE NEW YORKER), where I loved eating chicken souse. I will try to recreate it at home using this recipe. The allspice seems key. Last night I made Melissa Clark’s Parmesan Cabbage Soup; today, it’s less than soupy, and I’m eating it with a soft-boiled egg. I’d never heard of “fried-rice syndrome,” probably because, as this terrific article in Vittles proves, it doesn’t really exist.

I’ve been reading Edith Wharton’s “The Buccaneers” with great pleasure. (Am I supposed to like Guy Thwarte? I don’t, really. Am I supposed to not like Rishi, in “Industry”? Cause I really do.) I tore through Belle Burden’s “Strangers,” admiring the cold fury of her writing. Ben Markovits’s “The Rest of Our Lives” charmed me for the opposite reason, with its forgiving, almost lackadaisical take on the real and pseudo- crises of midlife. I came home from New York with Lauren Rothery’s “Television” and Omar El Akkad’s “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” It was good to get out of Paris for a minute—the other day, I saw a picture of a cave and thought it was a piece by Eva Jospin. After the paywall, what I did in New York and what I’m looking forward to this year in France…

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Researching the Sargent piece, I read Julian Barnes’s “The Man in the Red Coat,” a life of another of the painter’s subjects, the society gynecologist Dr. Samuel Pozzi. Barnes’s writing is as elegant and erudite as usual, and Dr. Pozzi delivers, bumping up against various notables as the Forrest Gump of Belle Époque Paris. “In June 1885, three Frenchmen arrive in London,” the book begins. “One was a Prince, one was a Count, and the third was a commoner with an Italian surname. The Count subsequently described their purpose as ‘intellectual and decorative shopping.’ ” I also read and admired “Happiness and Love,” Zoe Dubno’s gleeful art-world takedown; “The Kingdom of Characters,” Jing Tsu’s chronicle of the battle to transform the Chinese language into a modern technology; and “Careless People,” Sarah Wynn-Williams’s somehow very funny exposé of Facebook depravity.

Intellectual shopping—let’s go. Did you know that Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America, in December 1777? That a “librocubiculariste” is a person who reads in bed? That top footballers are suffering from pubalgia, that Jules Koundé’s nickname is Tchoupi, and that someone’s been massacring trees in the Sixteenth Arrondissement? Save Jimmy’s Corner, please. Delight in other people’s diaries. I was thinking this morning, while walking, that the most pleasing three-street trajectory in Paris has got to be rue Papillon—> rue Paradis—> rue de la Fidélité. That’s Butterfly Street to Paradise Street to Street of Fidelity.

Last Sunday, my untrendy restaurant club held its (now) annual offsite in Strasbourg. We lunched at the Finkstuebel—perfection! I had the jambonneau and cherries drenched in kirsch. My son and I watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.” He was probably a touch young for some of the content, but is now familiar with the English-language term “holiday bonus,” while I learned that the film’s French title is, boringly, “Le Sapin à Boules.” The French supermarket chain Intermarche’s AI-free Christmas ad has gone viral and its makers are “proud to give the Americans a lesson.” I’m making Smitten Kitchen’s French Onion Baked Lentils and Farro, Mario Batali’s Chicken Cacciatore (sorry), and—the second I have an hour—Mokonuts Multigrain Chocolate Chip Cookies from this recipe just sent out. Food, restaurants, presents, and a political fashion faux pas after the paywall…

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Here in France, a “former social media star” known as “Doudou Cross Bitume” did not quite pull off the job. (The nickname is hilariously impossible to translate, but it’s something like “Concrete Motorbiking Binky.”) Back in the late 2000s, Doudou was known for his exploits in the world of urban motorcross. He made a name posting videos of himself popping wheelies on the Champs-Élysées and in front of the Eiffel Tower. If French investigators are to believed, he more recently zoomed through the Louvre’s Apollon Gallery, making off with 88 million euros in jewels. According to Le Parisien, Doudou told investigators that he had no idea he was robbing the Louvre, “thinking that the museum was located only on the side of the glass pyramid.” I regret to inform you that the Hot Louvre Thieves are not real.

Then there’s Nicolas Sarkozy, who didn’t quite manage to scramble the money trail demonstrating that the late Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi illegally financed his 2007 presidential campaign. Sarkozy is incarcerated in a nine-square-meter cell at La Santé prison. He told reporters that he was packing three books: two volumes of “The Count of Monte-Cristo” and a biography of Jesus. OK.

I was gonna tell you I stole away to Marseille, but the too many burgling metaphors alarm is going off. After a good day’s reporting, I went to see Pétanque! at the underfunded but overperforming Musée d’Histoire de Marseille. Then I met Alexis and Vérane at Ciccino, which thrilled the New Yorker in me with its dramatic, tryhard decor. (100% A COMPLIMENT.) It also proved that there is at least one decent Martini to be had in ye ole Hexagone. If I could see another exhibition in France? “SUPERBEMARCHÉ – Papiers d’agrumes & Co” at MIAM, the International Museum of Modest Arts, in Sète. (Yep, it’s really a show about the illustrated papers used as packaging for oranges.) Anywhere in the world? “MONUMENTS” at the Brick and MOCA. Until I make it there—how?—I’m hanging on Siddhartha Mitter and Julian Lucas’s every word.

M le Mag visited Turmus Ayya, a village in the occupied West Bank where 85% of residents are dual American-Palestinian citizens. CNN made a documentary about the Simrils and the Simrills—Black and white branches of the same South Carolina family who are trying, together, to work through their complicated history. (The white Simrils added an extra “l” to their name, it seems, to distance themselves from their Black relatives.) What if instead of stigmatizing immigrants, a government chose to acknowledge them as an economic and cultural boon? Spain did and is enjoying a booming economy, with projected growth of 2.6% for 2025.

Mamadou Garanké Diallo came to France from Guinea as a minor in 2019, earned a CAP certificate, and got an apprenticeship at a boucherie in a village called Darnétal. By all accounts, he was thriving there, until the prefecture ordered him out of the country in 2023. His boss the butcher launched a petition to protest his expulsion. “He is a hard-working, courageous, and determined young man, appreciated by our customers, who, like me, cannot understand this absurd situation,” the butcher wrote. Ten thousand people signed. Diallo was temporarily spared, but, in May, he received another expulsion order. He decided to leave France, and died in Dunkerque on September 18th, when he was hit by a truck while trying to cross the Channel to England.

The French Army, by the way, still maintains a squadron of pigeons. The Arnault family is “tearing itself apart” over what to do with Le Parisien. (Keep losing lots of money or sell to the far-right tycoon Vincent Bolloré, with a presidential election coming up in 2027?) I’ll be interviewing Molly Ringwald at the American Library on November 18th. I wrote about crashing a Parisian house party. I cannot recommend “Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy” by Julia Ioffe highly enough. Neither can the National Book Awards, for which it was recently nominated. There’s a whole lot of France slop out there, and ’s newsletter, How to Get Lost in France, is a solid antidote. It would be a really nice thing to offer the Francophile in your life. Of course, there’s also Lettre Recommandée. After the jump, we’re getting into more books, restaurants, podcasts, and a few things you might want to offer yourself or your proches as the holidays come barreling up.

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Before I begin, an enormous thank-you to Lettre Recommandée’s paid subscribers, who have allowed me to bring you nearly thirty editions of this newsletter, if I can count. Please consider joining them—purchased at a yearly rate, a subscription is $4.15/month.

1. The stylized figures that you often see acting as supports for the balconies, lintels, and doorframes of Paris buildings are called cariatides and atlantes. They became popular starting in the 1860s, after Charles Garnier used them liberally at the city’s new opera house. Cariatides are female figures, often dressed in long robes. Atlantes are male figures, bearing the weight of the world, or at least of several stories, on their shoulders. Here’s a cariatides and atlantes walk you can do in the 9th and 2nd arrondissements.

2. You know that high, messy ponytail that Britney Spears used to wear a lot in the 2000s? In French, it’s called a palmier 🌴🌴🌴.

3. Since 1978, every French prime minister with the exception of Jacques Chirac has planted a tree in the garden of the Hôtel de Matignon. Edith Cresson planted a ginkgo biloba, one of the “survivor trees” of Hiroshima. Alain Juppé chose a caramel tree, while Gabriel Attal selected a cinnamon maple. Pierre Mauroy opted for a Hungarian oak, but it got sick and had to be chopped down after three years 🌳🌳🌳.

4. According to electoral rolls, only ninety people live on the Champs-Élysées, not all of them full-time.

5. Twenty per cent of real estate frontage on the Champs-Élysées is owned by Qatar. There is only one elementary school left in the “Golden Triangle,” bounded by the Champs-Élysées and the avenues Georges V and Montaigne.

6. Soeur has launched a resale site called Soeur Second Hand, and it is without question the most alluring, satisfying, and easy-to-use service I’ve encountered in the secondhand space. On the buy side, everything is vetted by Soeur. You can search by size and style to locate a significantly reduced sandal, or that sweater vest you missed a few seasons back. On the sell side, you take the stuff you want to get rid of, search by style number, and Soeur makes you an offer on the spot. (They are notably generous.) All you have to do is send the items in with a label they provide and, BOUM 💥💥💥, you’ve got a Soeur voucher valid for secondhand and new collections alike. I LOVE THIS SERVICE. BRAVO, SOEUR. I’ll be using my first voucher on a pair of Bala flats in black patent leather.

7. After the Second World War, Vichy collaborators were barred from many professions, including journalism—with the exception of food and travel sections, which were considered too unimportant to matter. I learned this in Vadim Poulet’s fascinating piece about the crime-reporter-slash-food-critic Stéphane Durand-Souffland, published as part of superb special edition on “the greatest food city in Europe.”

8. I also adored Justinien Tribillon and Wendy Huynh’s portrait of Rungis, the world’s largest wholesale food market. I just messaged Wendy to ask if I could buy a print of her photograph of a misty, meat-stained, red-tinged corridor, just after it’s been hosed down for the day. I’m eager for the release of the latest issue of her magazine Arcades.

9. ’s fall museum preview is just out, and, other than “John Singer Sargent: Éblouir Paris” at Musée d’Orsay, the show I’m most excited about is “Les gens de Paris” at Musée Carnavalet, which draws on the censuses of 1926, 1931, and 1936 to create a group portrait of Paris’s inhabitants during the interwar period, when the city’s population peaked at 2.89 million residents. I’m also interested in Beatriz Garrego’s ceramics at La Maison de Commerce.

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Hi! How was your summer? I participated in a défilé nautique (i.e. massive water fight) et bénédiction des bateaux (exactly what it sounds like, except our motor cut out before we got close enough to the priest and his aspergillum, causing me to worry that we’d be destined for nautical limbo, so I started trawling the internet for an officiant to finish the job, but my father-in-law said he couldn’t be Protestant, a joke for which he later apologized by text, saying he hoped he hadn’t come across as sectaire). I did not achieve my longtime summertime goal of participating in the burgeoning aquatic sport of longe-côte, which, as far as I can tell, consists of walking in water. The Ministry of Sport helpfully specifies that it should be “at a level between the navel and the armpits.”

I read Brigitte Benkemoun’s “La Villa,” which I am now dying to visit, and Vincent Latronico’s “Perfection,” which was less deep than I had anticipated but more enjoyable. I discussed art and love with Gerard & Kelly on the Chanel Connects podcast and Americans in Paris with Alexandra Schwartz on The New Yorker’s Critics at Large. I made the case for lunch.1 Emmanuel Macron tested a hydrofoil in Brégançon. In Jablines-Annet, lifeguards hassled a woman who was trying to swim in a lake. (The woman in the burkini is requested to get out of the water IMMEDIATELY.) In the Allier, more than a thousand people dressed up in 1950s costumes and re-enacted the historic traffic jams of the Nationale 7.

Back in Paris, reading about the I.D.F. unit that smears Gaza journalists, I heard a jet screech overhead. It turned out it was a flyover, part of an airshow celebrating la Journée des Oubliés des Vacances—une “journée d’ouf” of fun and excitement, for thousands of kids who didn’t didn’t get to go on vacation. I love France and le Secours Populaire for this. Another national treasure: family-run quincailleries. A Janet Flanner mention of le Monsieur de Paris, as the city’s executioner was traditionally known, sent me down a guillotine rabbit hole, or, more accurately, up a “Dynasties Familiales de Bourreaux” family tree. Executioning was a family business!

Remember “Hang Mike Pence,” the breach of the Capitol Building, the Confederate flag in the halls of the Senate? A man who urged his fellow rioters to “kill” cops has been hired as a senior advisor at the Department of Justice. In a highly pertinent essay, traces the importance of federal jobs for the Black middle class, for Black freedom. Yeah, she writes, Trump’s military takeover of D.C. might be a distraction, but "Trump’s distractions always double as a reiteration of his white supremacist beliefs." Now Trump is purging the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted the January 6th attackers. My book on the Wilmington, N.C. massacre and coup of 1898—a successful overthrow of democracy by white terrorists—and its long-term effects now has a title and a publication date: “THEY STOLE A CITY: WILMINGTON’S WHITE SUPREMACIST COUP AND THE FAMILIES WHO LIVE WITH ITS LEGACY,” coming July 7, 2026.

If only I’d had time to write something about Rihanna and the cahier de vacances, which was invented by a stationery salesman named Robert Magnard in 1934. On the subject of iconic French paper products, French people are refusing to give up their physical checkbooks, with the French accounting for 88% of checks issued in the European Union. (Checks apparently don’t even exist anymore in Sweden and Denmark.) I highly recommend subscribing to The World of Interiors, on paper, and reading this article about the Turkish botanical artist Işik Güner. Also loved reading about felting in Kyrgyzstan and James Baldwin in Istanbul. Also, the students unearthing the colonialist past of a Uniqlo store in Marseille. If you ever wanted to know where the logo that you commonly find on kebab packaging came from, here you have it. On the beach this summer, the churros vendors had a new jingle: “Qui veut chichis / beignets au lait / pour avoir le corps de Beyoncé.”

FALL

OK, fall reading, la rentrée littéraire, here goes: Emmanuel Carrère, “Kolkhoze.” I skipped Carrère’s last few efforts, tiring of the man and his tactics. But I admired his recent portrait of Macron at the “G7 horror show,” even if I found it oddly devoid of politics. This is clearly the book he was born to write—literally: it’s about his formidable-to-say-the-least mother, whom he addressed as “vous” until her death in 2023—and there is nothing I love more than a book a writer could simply no longer elude or avoid. I read the first few pages over breakfast this morning and it’s already clear it’s something major. Vanessa Schneider’s “La Peau Dure,” about her formidable-to-say-the-least father, will arrive tomorrow at my neighborhood bookshop, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it, since Schneider is one of my favorite French journalists. (Her “Successions” series, written with Raphaëlle Bacqué!) It’s not brand-new, but I also want to read “Le Pain des Français" by Xavier le Clerc. “Evenings and Weekends” by Oisín McKenna, Rob Franklin’s “Great Black Hope,” and “King of Kings” by Scott Anderson are at the top of my English-language list. Absolutely everyone must read Angela Flournoy’s stupendous novel “The Wilderness” when it comes out on September 16th.

Tonight, we start the second season of “Wolf Hall.” I’m eager to see “Highest 2 Lowest,” particularly after listening to this fascinating conversation between Vincent Cunningham and Richard Brody, but I’ll have to wait until it comes out in France, on September 5th. After reading this bonkers article about “l’affaire Claustre,” in which Françoise Claustre, a French ethnologist, was taken hostage by socialist rebels in Chad and her husband went to insane lengths to try to rescue her2, I went to see an exhibit of photographs by Marie-Laure de Decker, a French photojournalist who eventually helped to secure Claustre’s release. (I kind of want to write a brisk and passionate book about l’affaire Claustre. Should I?) John Singer Sargent at Musée d’Orsay promises to be unmissable, and I’m intrigued by Musée Marmottan Monet’s upcoming show about sleep. I will get into food and fringues after the paywall.

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People in certain regions of France—predominantly in the East, from Nancy on down to Dijon—habitually put a definite article before a prénom. E.g.: “L’Edmond est parti à la déchetterie.” “Mais qu’est-ce qu’elle fait, la Clémence?”

It’s French memes you seek? Try Mamouz and Yungnat999.

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I don’t write much about parenting. For that matter, I try not to think much about parenting, fearing that overintellectualizing it will somehow dilute or distort my instincts. I read Pamela Druckerman’s still-pertinent “Bringing Up Bébé” when I was pregnant with my first child in 2015. Then I pretty much called it a day. But, as prep for Beyoncé (who assigns themselves homework to go to a concert?), I picked up “Matriarch” by (Ms.) Tina Knowles. Technically, “Matriarch” is a memoir. But, as the title indicates, it’s centered on family, transmission, inheritance, and legacy. As I got into it, I realized it was one of the great parenting books, masquerading as autobiography. What does Ms. Tina counsel? To always, always, always encourage your children’s curiosity and confidence, guarding vigilantly against those would wish, for no good reason, to take them down a notch. (I wish I could give you a quote or two, but I read it on Kindle, which is as useful for retaining and retrieving information as not having read it all.) “You got to be cute on the inside.” Now that’s advice.

I’ve been reading Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal, the second volume to be precise. It was also hot in the summer of 1957 (though not as early or as long). Flanner reports that Paris policemen were “allowed to shed their woollen dolmans, or jackets, and direct traffic in their pale-blue shirts—very smart with their white revolver holsters and white clubs.” A fourth of the riders in the Tour de France dropped out before the third day, while those who pedaled on attempted to cool themselves by stuffing fresh cabbage leaves under their caps. (I recall this as a fairly ineffectual remedy for mastitis, confirming my feeling that we are still often in 1957 when it comes to cures for very painful things that ail women and not men.) Flanner introduced me to a pungent figure of speech, quoting Sartre on the military putsch in Algiers that resulted in de Gaulle’s return to power in May of 1958. “The barrel will always smell of herring,” Sartre wrote, arguing that the Gaullist regime would eternally carry the odor “of the arbitrary violence from which it sprang.” La caque sent toujours le hareng.

Want more? There’s “schmilblick,” recently deployed by Emmanuel Macron while attempting to defend the fact that Christophe Castaner, his incompetent former Minister of the Interior, now works as a “strategic advisor” for Shein, lobbying against laws that would constrain fast fashion. “Schmilblick” means…well, it doesn’t mean anything. The humorist Pierre Dac created it in the 1950s as a sort of nonsense word, and then it was used in a game show that involved identifying a mystery object. Macron invoked the word as a sort of magical wand that could transform things in the wave of a hand. “It’s his life, not mine,” he said, of Castaner. “Just because he works for Shein, doesn’t mean that things will change au schmilblick.” I feel like Macron was pretty much schmilblicking the question, trying to make it disappear. (Using oddbird expressions like “poudre de perlimpinpin” is a classic Macron deflection tactic.) Reading ’s interview on , I came across the delightful expression “pédaler dans la semoule,” which is a way of saying “to keep going, even when you’re not making a lot of progress.” And then there’s this unattributed anthology of bizarreries of the French language. We’re all just pedaling through the semoule with cabbage leaves on our heads.

After the paywall, among other things: restaurant, shopping, and reading recommendations; non-obvious museum shows; a hotel with a pool that I have sadly not swum in but sure would like to; and the baker to go to if you live in Paris and you must have a very good American cake.

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Readers of this newsletter will recall its longstanding interest in nominative determinism. We would like to congratulate Désiré Doué on the rare double whammy, while imploring the orthographically challenged editors of the Athletic to stop fucking calling him Desire Doue.1 (Although, come to think of it, that works too.)

Ousmane Dembélé, who now has his own boulevard in Paris, deserves the Ballon d’Or and then another award for wearing sunglasses better than any man on the planet. (Great hats, too, as recently pointed out.) Fan d’Or goes to Jimmy, of Paris, who went out on Saturday night and immediately got the game’s score tattooed on his knuckles.

Now I want to tell you about a story I published in this week’s New Yorker, chronicling the sweet and sticky saga of El Mordjene, an Algerian hazelnut spread. It went viral last summer and was banned by the E.U. at the height of its success, giving rise to allegations of a nefarious plot by Nutella. I *really* got into this story. It isn’t really about hazelnut spreads. As I write, it’s about nostalgia, memory, injustice, nationalism, globalization, decolonization, protectionism, racism, identity, immigration, invasion—the same things that all arguments are about nowadays, transposed to the realm of spreadable snacks. You can read it here. (And then, if you want, you can read about la Maison Jean Trogneux, Brigitte Macron’s family chocolaterie, which, rather Balzacianly, just opened its first boutique in the capital after a hundred and fifty-three years in Amiens.)

O.K., the Frenchest thing ever. People say that a lot on the internet, but here it really is. Every once in awhile we talk about trading in our car, a Citroën beater which is single-handedly keeping the word “jalopy” alive. We’ll never do it, but nonetheless we talk about it sometimes. I dream of a Volvo. My husband, pitching the new Renault 5 E-Tech Electric, passed me the phone to look at a picture. It was electric yellow. “Hideous,” I said. “No.” The kids chimed in: “It’s got backseat windows that actually go down!” (That is not a feature of the Citroën.) My husband took the phone back. Swiped. I could tell he was about to sortir un argument imbattable. “Regarde, y’a une huche à pain.”

Did you know that, since “pint” isn’t a metric measurement, French bars can basically give you whatever they want if you order a pint? The fearless crusaders at Balance Ta Pinte are on it, avenging the scourge of the fluted glass. That carcinogenic cadmium is “une bombe sanitaire” for French public health and that you need to watch out for what’s in your cereal, pasta, and bread? I mostly stay away from “Americans in Paris” content on Instagram—too close to home—but this sketch about the insidious effects of Franglish really made me laugh. (“It is fatiguing”—me, admonishing our son the other day for speaking Franglish.) I’m not getting near 👋💥👋 LA GIFLE 👋💥👋, but I did love this Quotidien bit: Peut-être qu’elle a juste besoin de tenir une rampe, merde! Below the paywall we’ll be discussing expositions to see, books to read, restaurants to try, and an interesting little summer bag. Yes, I’m Franglishing again.

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I’ve been looking forward to this moment—homeward bound from a week’s work in Tokyo, when I knew I’d have time to sit down and write a newsletter with a pristine white sand plage of fifteen hours’ writing time stretching out ahead. “Plage,” used this way, to mean “period” or “interval,” is one of the French language’s perfect words; one of the ones I reach for, even when I’m speaking English, even at the risk of being that annoying Franglish lady, because I don’t know another delivery method for idea that there is a certain pleasure or beauty or just necessity in being able to focus on something for a long stretch. This second sense of “plage” is a brilliant metaphor, saddling up the word’s dominant meaning and taking it for a sunset horseback ride. “My job—it’s just beach,” Ken told Barbie. Is Ken French?

Another question: who’s your favorite amateur photographer of baroque reception food from the 1970s? Mine’s Bernard Vaussion, a longtime Élysée chef who donated sixty Ektachromes of creations such as langouste en Bellevue and a basket made out of noodle dough and stuffed with bricks of foie gras to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Speaking of la table du temps jadis: mostly for logistical reasons, we recently took my mom to La Rotonde. Don’t sleep on it—mirrored ceiling, conspiratorial red velvet booths (every table is a good table), an expert if very expensive sole meunière. It’s not Paname Boom Boom, exactly, but it’s still got pizzazz.

My untrendy restaurant club recently visited Restaurant Josephine "Chez Dumonet” (quotes restaurant’s own), where we were delighted by an after-dinner mignardise of chocolate-dipped frozen grapes. After the after-dinner we proceeded to Le Rosebud, an Existentialist hangout that was recently taken over by a consortium of actors and artists. Michèle Lamy was there, drinking a cocktail. I went home and Googled her and learned that she is eighty-one, which: 🎩🎩🎩, Madame. The other day, I had occasion to visit Maison Schmid, Paris’s Alsatian traiteur de référence. It’s on rue Strasbourg, just outside the Gare de l’Est. (Logique.) HOT TIP: THEY SELL SOFT PRETZELS, WHICH YOU CAN SERVE FOR DINNER WITH HAM1.

You might think all we do here is eat. That’s not true. We read. I just finished Angela Flournoy’s “The Wilderness,” and, wow, does it nail female friendships and technofascism—yeah, in one novel. While I gobbled down Graydon Carter’s “When The Going Was Good,” I was left feeling that we, the hungry public, had only entered maybe the fourth room2 of succulent anecdotes. Give us another volume! The unexpurgated diaries! (Very looking forward to Michael Grynbaum’s “Empire of the Elite,” and Keith McNally’s “I Regret Almost Everything.”)

For the retour, I have a highly coveted copy of Bryan Washington’s “Palaver”—my prize souvenir of Tokyo, along with a 45R buttondown (it was *a lot* cheaper there) and a pack of Shinkansen Band-Aids.3 I’m intrigued by “Paysannes,” a book of portraits of older French women living in rural parts of the country. My next novel in French will be Delphine Plisson’s “Laisse aller, c’est une valse.” FOLR and restaurant-recommender supreme has a new book out this month: “The Eater Guide to Paris.” And I’m so looking forward to “Mille milliards de rubans,” a history of fashion by Loïc Pringent, one of its most intelligent and lively theoreticians.

What’s in the papers, you ask? I’ve been avidly following the trial of Bill Pallot, (“uncontested specialist of 19th century furniture”) and Bruno Desnoues (“cabinet-maker of genius”) for forging extremely expensive antique chairs. It’s got stakes: one pair of fakes, which had supposedly belonged to Marie-Antoinette, went to the Emir of Qatar for two million Euros. It’s got drama: “I licked the chair and voilà, I could taste the fraud,” Pallot’s former protégé said, explaining that Desnoues used melted licorice to give fresh wood an ancient patina. The story is endlessly entertaining, but I also find it weirdly sad. Desnoues was, by all accounts, a woodworking prodigy—Meilleur Ouvrier de France 1984, winner of the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for “intelligence of the hand.” He went so far as to speckle his fakes with little black dots that resembled fly excrement, leading the Advisory Committee on National Treasures to praise “the extreme quality and finesse of the sculpted décor.” Quel gâchis.

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Terre de Sommières

Let’s say a dinner guest, gesticulating wildly—and you’re not mad at her—knocks over a glass of red wine and the angle of impact somehow sends it spattering so that it looks as though every upholstered surface in your kitchen is covered in bloodstains. You go running to wipe and daub. But this seems like a job for the big guns, so you dial up Jean-François Clément, superstar cleaner to fancy restaurants, billion-star hotels, the Élysée and the Sénat. (You find it fascinating to imagine the stains he’s seen and really must write about this guy one day.) Clément says I’ve got three words for you: terre de Sommières. You acquire said product for €11.50. It comes in a jar that looks like it contains nutritional supplements, but it’s actually a type of miraculously absorbent clay. All you have to do is dump it on the streaks and smears. Wait a few hours and let it do its thing. Then you vacuum it up. The stuff works on everything. It’s even said to be an effective bedbug remedy. Terre de Sommières! Say its name!

Poulet à la Normande

Can’t lie, when Clémence and Edmond—friends, neighbors, outstanding cooks—invited us over for dinner the other weekend, I spent the whole day fantasizing about what they would give us to eat. It turned out to be something I’d never heard of: Poulet à la Normande, a dish of chicken braised in cider, Calvados, and cream. Edmond chose it to rep Normandy, his home region. Some recipes, such as this one from NYT Cooking, use apples. Edmond doesn’t, but he adds some mushrooms to mix. You can go with NYT Cooking, or you can go with Edmond. (🍗 🍗🍗 I will share his recipe in a separate, for-subscribers-only post.🍗🍗🍗) He and Clémence served the dish over mafaldine, just a little buttered. It was one of the great home-cooked meals of my life.

Timothée Chalamet’s Ancestral Village

Sorry, but who could resist a Paris Match article entitled, “Timothée Chalamet, enquête au Chambon-sur-Lignon, le village de son enfance.” Clearly not I. And, wow, does this article deliver, leaving no bit of Chalametiana unreported, from grandfather Roger (a pastor) and grandmother Jean-Elisabeth (a Canadian) and their arrival with five children in the 1960s to Timotheé’s visit with Kylie Jenner in the summer of 2023. “I think they wanted to go unnoticed, but it was a failure!” recalls one neighbor, who spotted the pair biking into the town center in matching hoodies during a heatwave.

Timothée’s father, Marc, admits that the family’s semi-detached house—“in sand-colored pebbledash, topped with a black-tiled roof”—isn’t much to look at, but says that Timothée’s room is exactly the same as it was during his childhood summers in Chambon, because he “likes for things to stay dans leur jus.” Aside from these fun facts, what I really enjoyed were the photo illustrations, including portraits of residents Géraldine (“She sold two pairs of children's plastic sandals to the youngest of the Kardashian sisters”) and Coralie (“She used to go to the municipal swimming pool with Timothée when they were children”). The mayor of Chambon, for his part, has two claims to fame: “He succeeded Éliane Wauquiez, the mother of Laurent Wauquiez. He knew Timothée's grandfather, who died in 1985.” Forget Kymothee. Here at this newsletter, it’s all about Chalawauqamet.

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1. Americans say “cheese” when they pose for a picture. The French say “ouistiti,” which means “marmoset.”

2. Wine, beer, and cider were available in school cafeterias in France until 1956, when they were prohibited for children under 14. Alcohol wasn’t banished from lycées until 1981.

3. The Frenchest thing I’ve ever seen was when a French person of my acquaintance did the volcano experiment with his kid and used red wine vinegar.

   

4. Less than 1% of French men have had vasectomies, versus about 17% in South Korea, 14% in Australia, and 10% in the U.S. Anyone wishing to undergo one is required to complete a waiting period of four months.

   

5. It is considered bad manners to leave the bathroom door open, even when it’s unoccupied.

6. It is considered “bad for your property value” to put a toilet in the same room as the shower.

7. Fun game: ask an American or a Canadian or an Australian or a Brit to hold up three fingers. Now ask a French person to do the same.1

   

8. Every region has its intensifier. So what’s “très bien” in Paris is “fin bien” in Lorraine, “gavé bien” in Bordeaux, and “cher bien” in Lyon. (Get in the comments if you know more of these!)

9. The leading brand of shampoo for French women is Garnier Ultra Doux.

10. The best2 beauty product is Bioderma Photoderm Nude Touch Mineral SPF50+.3

    

11. The best tea is the Oolong Fleur d’Oranger from Sebastien Gaudard. The best cookies—biscuits, whatever we’re calling them—are the navettes from Les Navettes des Accoules in Marseille.4 (Do *not* leave without a macaron aux amandes et au chocolat.)

12. The best museum is Mucem. The one I would most like to visit is the Musée des nourrices et des enfants de l'Assistance Publique.

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Ten days into 2025, Jean-Marie Le Pen died at the age of ninety-six, prompting a “giant apéro” at Place de la République. Marine Le Pen learned about her father’s death on a flight, returning from Mayotte. (Paris Match published a photograph of her exiting the cockpit in tears, but deleted it after criticism.) After long hours of silence, she posted an ambiguously mournful tweet, wishing Papa “good wind” on the high heavenly seas. Here on dry land, you will not find a word about Jean-Marie Le Pen on her Instagram, nor on Jordan Bardella’s—the process of dédiabolisation / desenclavement continues apace. As obituaries go, I prefer this video of Maïté, the retired S.N.C.F. announcer whose earthy cooking show became a 1980s sensation. Eel lovers, I warn you: do not click.

I hope your holidays were both festive and restful. We spent ours with my husband’s family not too far from Bordeaux, where I was happy to reprise our annual ritual of picking up bits and bobs on Christmas Eve, namely wine at Badie and books at Mollat, the most wondrous librairie in all the land. This winter, gray though it is, has been (weirdly but welcomely) less trying for me than usual. I attribute this largely to reading. I cannot recommend a midwinter book binge highly enough. There is only one way to do this. Delete social media apps from your phone. Then put it somewhere where you can’t reach it.

You’ll find yourself with so much extra time you might spend fourteen years constructing a miniature model of Paris in your parents’ garden. (H/T .) You could make this mapo ragù, recreating one of my favorite restaurant dishes ever. Reserve a table at Jip or Scarpetta. Learn Arabic, unlike all but 0.2% of French middle-school and high-school students. Read the Urkel memoir, or just this brilliant review. (The title alone. Who came up with that?) Treat yourself to the most beautiful cutlery I’ve ever seen. Watch what Inkoo Kang and I agree was the best television show of 2024. Whatever you do, don’t go see “Conclave.”2 Am I the only person in the world who found it as thrilling as boiling an egg?

On Substack, I was pleased to answer Irene Kim (김애린)’s questionnaire about my highlights of 2024. (The prompts really made me think.) has launched a daily briefing on the news from the U.S.A., written in French. I am radically, predictably opposed to many forms of A.I., but my friend ’s love letter to ChatGPT made me think twice about how welcome chatbots can be for people who hate to write. You know what AI is really bad it? Translation. Subtitles. “Salut, le miel. Vous voulez un déjeuner?” Eva Longoria says, on “Desperate Housewives,” vouvoyer-ing her husband, a pot of honey.

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1. A “coquille” is a shell, but it’s also a typo. Why? Two theories. The first holds that printing presses used to be cleaned with egg whites, and that, sometimes, bits of shell would get stuck on the printing plates, causing errors. The second holds that, one day, Le Journal Officiel, the official gazette of the French government, left out the letter Q in "coquille,” rendering it “couille”—a.k.a. “testicle.”

2. A chapon is a castrated chicken. I was listening to a radio show about holiday cooking, and one of the guests counseled listeners to seek out a “chapon raté.” Meaning, a fowl whose castration didn’t quite take. They’re cheaper, evidently. (“Chapon raté, chapon bon marché.”)

3. Alone among European militaries, the French army still counts among its ranks two hundred carrier pigeons.

4. The pink-breasted shrike was the first bird to go extinct in France in the twenty-first century.

5. At the height of their success, there were almost five hundred buffets de gare in French train stations. You can visit this spectacular-looking abandoned one in Saint-Quentin, in the Aisne. (I certainly plan to.)

6. 33.6% of children born in France in 2024 had a least one parent who was born in another country. 65.2% of French children are born outside of marriage.1

7. There is an entire theme park just west of Paris featuring replicas of famous sites such as Mont Saint-Michel, the Chartres cathedral, and a Basque village rendered at exactly 1/30th their actual size.

8. You *could* buy holiday stamps. You *should* buy patisserie stamps. Bruno at La Poste likes the mille feuille. I’m partial to the éclair au chocolat.

9. Van Gogh’s “Red Cabbages and Onion” (Paris, 1887) was called “Red Cabbages and Garlic” until 2022, when a Dutch chef visited the Van Gogh Museum and alerted curators that they had their alliums wrong.

10. In 2016, the art historian Bernadette Murphy uncovered the identity of the woman to whom van Gogh presented his severed ear. Her name was Gabrielle Berlatier and she lived near Arles until her death in 1952.

11. You know how English speakers call a disaster a Waterloo? French people call it a Bérézina.

    

12. There is an elaborate Art Nouveau door featuring a huge penis at 29 Avenue Rapp.

13. There is an elaborate tomb featuring an effigy of the republican journalist Victor Noir at the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Visitors have stroked a prominent lump in his trousers so frequently that it gleams bronze (the rest of the statue is oxidized) and is said to enhance virility.

14. One reason Bretons are partial to beurre salé? The region was exempt from la gabelle—a notorious salt tax—levied in the Middle Ages and under the Ancien Régime.

15. Tons of French cafés2 are called Le Balto in hommage to Baltimore, a stronghold of the American tobacco industry. If you find yourself having a drink in a Le Maryland, a Le Narval, a Le Marigny, or a Le Chiquito, it’s because those used to be the names of brands of cigarettes.

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In case you’re wondering what’s going on in France, I’ve got 8000 words for you in today’s New Yorker. The piece covers the increasingly surreal French political scene from Macron’s decision, in June, to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale, to the fall of Michel Barnier’s government on Thursday of last week. I interviewed Lucie Castets (whose “Warholian summer” took her from anonymous civil servant to prime ministerial candidate), Marine Tondelier (the pugnacious head of the Green Party), Dominique de Villepin (the former French prime minister, who kicked off the freedom fries nonsense of the early 2000s with his now historic speech denouncing the Iraq War), and many others, including députés from all the major blocs except the R.N. (They didn’t want to talk to me, so I went to their rally in Nice.)

Petit teaser:

Macron pitched the dissolution as “an act of confidence,” but it radiated desperation. “He would say it’s de Gaullian, but it’s Bonapartian,” Corbé told me. “It’s this idea that you can get on your horse and take your sword, that even when you’re stuck somewhere there’s always a way to escape.” Given the massacre of the European Parliamentary elections, Macron’s decision seemed more akin to falling off his horse, losing his sword, and still insisting he held a strategic advantage. Had he done nothing, he would have had to swallow a humiliating loss, but he could have continued to govern more or less as before. Now he was risking his group’s relative majority and opening a path for the R.N. to take power.

The Second Sunday of Advent was supposed to be a triumph for Macron, marking the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, five years after the cathedral nearly burned to the ground. The political situation ended up somewhat, but not totally, eclipsing the extravagant ceremonies, which, like those that opened the Olympics, took place under an unforgettably pounding rain. What I loved most were the Mondrian-meets-stained-glass liturgical vestments by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. (Thanks to , I now know they’re called chasubles.) As I write in The New Yorker, the aggressively-paced restoration was Macron’s pet project and the result stands as “a vindication of French aesthetic splendor and technical prowess and even, yes, a certain headstrong style of leadership,” yet “today’s ultimatum is tomorrow’s obsolescence.” It seems like a lifetime ago that I donned my audiovisual vestments and went to talk about the American presidential election on Quotidien, the French version of Colbert. I’m glad I put aside my embarrassment about my accent and got out there and participated in the life of the country I’ve chosen to live in.

Researching the politics piece, I somehow stumbled onto this remembrance of Marie-France Garaud, proto-spin-doctor and “snipeuse” to Pompidou and Chirac, known for her knack for the stinging political insult. “I thought Jacques Chirac was the marble from which statues are made, but he’s actually the earthenware from which bidets are made,” she said, after a falling-out. Take that! I should also tell you that a “catherinette” is a woman who is “still” single on her twenty-fifth birthday. Traditionally, catherinettes were celebrated on November 25th, the feast day of Saint Catherine, virgin patroness of young girls. That “nyctalope” is not a gros mot. That an American company has bought the French one that makes Doliprane—the official favorite medicine of the medicine-loving French—leading Le Gorafi to joke that it will now be available in “goût burger.”

You know what I find intriguing? The steadfastness of Megan Marshack, who was with Nelson Rockefeller in his last moments, and who remained silent about them until she died. (Loyalty is in the process of morphing from virtue to vice. This is the beautiful kind.) The idea that Martha Stewart shouldn’t have been annoyed upon finding a professional caterer cutting an orange with a paring knife. (You won’t find me defending Martha on much else, but MARTHA WAS RIGHT ABOUT THE KNIFE!) Or how about petrostate thalassotherapy: the Azerbaijani practice of bathing in crude oil. Hell on the bed linens, apparently.

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