We have made it to the end of the French hunting season, which is a bit of a relief. More than 1.2 million French citizens had hunting licenses for the five-month 2015-16 season, which ended today (along with February), and we saw more than a few of them out and about on weekends in this […]

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I pretty much never shout in anger. Except when I am alone inside a car and in a hurry. In that case, anything is possible. Or even likely. Even when driving to church.

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Today was the rainiest day I have encountered in France and while cooped up in the rental home I read the whole of Kurt Larson‘s 1999 book Isaac’s Storm. That is the book that launched Larson on his career of “popular narrative nonfiction”, as the New York Times described it. Or to explain a little, […]

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It was getting to a point where the old joke seemed appropriate. “If only Sunil Gulati were alive …” For years, the U.S. had seemed a fellow-traveler in the ranks of regional soccer — let alone having any weight in the global governance of the game. Trinidad’s profoundly corrupt Jack Warner controlled Concacaf, the regional […]

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This English-language aggregator of news in France sometimes generates lighter items about culture and life for anglophones in La France. One of them is a list of rural French habits we might pick up while living in small-town France. One of them, the first … yes, I can see already. This saying “bonjour” to literally […]

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It is not clear to me where this idea originated, but it’s ridiculous: Kevin Durant ready to sign on with the Golden State Warriors as a free agent this summer. I know this is a slow time on the U.S. sports calendar, and we might be willing to talk about really stupid ideas, given we […]

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Many of us naively thought that getting rid of Sepp Blatter would be a big first step toward cleaning up Fifa. But it is becoming increasingly likely that soccer’s governing body will be mired in the same old problems after the 209 member federations vote Friday to elect a replacement to Blatter. The favorite to […]

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Heretofore, “Emirates” was a name American sports fans saw just about only on the jerseys of prominent European soccer teams. Real Madrid. Arsenal. PSG. AC Milan. This season, the logo of the aggressive, Dubai-based airline, will be seen in a baseball stadium for the first time — behind home plate and at the foul poles […]

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Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn still holds a supremely important place in American literature. No less than Ernest Hemingway said of it: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn’.  It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has […]

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So, nine anglophones go into a small-town-France bar … Ah, this is not headed for a punchline. Instead, it was the setting for a fine dinner (among folks with a certain amount of life experience) of that French winter staple cassoulet — which you would not want to eat every week but certainly do not […]

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