Last night’s marathon debate between FrancoisHollande (PS) and ‘exiting president’ Nicolas Sarkozy (UMP) was scheduled to last two hours.  In fact the historic, one-match only confrontation began promptly at nine pm and ended near midnight.  By that hour presumably some proportion of the millions of spectators had thrown in the towel, either because they […]

  Place de la Bastille, Paris The French version of the movie is called ‘La Taupe’  (The Mole) because the nursery-rhyme richness of ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ does not translate into French, period.   ‘La Taupe’ is a nearly flawless piece of acting and cinema craft, filmed mostly in a British Burberry palette of beige, gray […]

All’s well that ends well.  N’est-ce pas, Dominique? On the 23rd of August 2011 in New York City the criminal case brought by the Guinean immigrant chambermaid against the French ex-IMF head and former presidential favorite fizzled to an end– not with a jury trial, but a sneer.  The prosecutors ‘couldn’t credit her version of […]

From the Los Angeles Times, 08/08/2011 ‘London Riots Cause Alarm. A march in the Tottenham area of north London to protest the shooting of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in a police operation to control firearms two days earlier turned violent late Saturday. Buildings were looted and torched, 26 police officers and three civilians were injured, and […]

In French it’s called a ‘rebondissement’: an event that startles the reader awake with a major upset to the nicely stacked apple-cart of plot.   Today the Supreme Court of the State of New York wrote a  ‘rebondissant’ next chapter in the unfolding, sticky, sordid tale of Dominique and Ophelia.  As all the world knows, at […]

In his May 19th letter of resignation and ‘infinite sadness’, the former head of the IMF said he wants to ‘deny with the greatest possible firmness all of the allegations made against me’ and to ‘protect this institution which I have served with honor and devotion.’   Let’s pass over the honor part, and contemplate devotion.   […]

On the evening of May 11th I found myself briefly barricaded inside my building by a red and white do-not-pass tape strung awkwardly around various sidewalk posts and poles.   Fire-trucks, ambulances and police cars clogged the street.  Noise and lights blaring.  Smoke rising over the little park down around the corner, and a ladder extended […]