Impressions

On a bright December morning I was headed across the footbridge the Pont des Arts to the Institut de France to learn about the 350th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences and about Louis Pasteur's archives, recently listed in the Memory of the World Register.

The terrorist attacks in Paris and Saint-Denis on November 13 killed 130 people and left hundreds more wounded. The immediate target was joie de vivre in the City of Light: the pleasure of sharing a drink or a meal with friends, of listening to music, of strolling down the street, of kissing on the sidewalk, of men and women mingling and dressing freely, of gathering comfortably with strangers, of being young in years or young at heart, of openly celebrating life. Those are all things that you, the visitor and the return traveler, look forward to when you imagine (re)visiting Paris.

You know it’s summer in the capital when… you’re walking along rue des Francs-Bourgeois on your way to get ice cream in the Marais and you notice the seagulls celebrating the return to their Paris pieds-à-terre in Paris. (See videos)

On January 11, the day of the massive march that followed the terrorist attacks, news networks set up shop on Place de la République, the square whose central statue became one of the unofficial memorials for the attacks. CNN was among those networks. Visiting the square in the evening as the crowd dispersed, I came across...

I have two bad habits with respect to my writing. 1. I don’t immediately type up my notes. 2. I lose my notebooks. So how to deal with a notebook thief?

Some travelers are so focused on the pleasures of good food and drink in Paris that they aren't aware that the powers that be are equally concerned about the other end of the digestive tract. As a reminder, Paris is giving a lesson in colon care on one of the major squares of the city.

The week after terror attacks that targeted journalists at Charlie Hebdo and Jews at the kosher grocery millions of people bought the survivor edition of Charlie Hebdo out of solidarity with the victims and what they represented. But did any think of buying kosher food?

Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Beckett, Miller, drama, poetry. On her first visit to Paris, Scottish playwright Morna Young is looking for something as she wanders through the celebrated bookshop Shakespeare and Company but she doesn’t know what… until she finds it.