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Ever since watching the French Netflix movie Lords of Scam (reviewed here), I’ve been curious about the Parisian neighborhood of Belleville. This documentary traces the rise and crash of scammers who conned the EU carbon quota system and pocketed millions before turning on one another. Much of the action unfolds in Belleville,…
I’ve been reading John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis, in which Green shows how cultural norms and unscientific assumptions shaped society’s view of tuberculosis and its victims over the centuries. In the 1800s, people thought TB affected the pure of heart, the highly intelligent, the emotionally sensitive, and the artistic. Being…
In the recent reports of the Louvre break-in, many accounts mentioned the Louvre’s heretofore most famous heist. In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, now one of the Louvre’s most prized possessions, was stolen. In an earlier post, I wrote about several aspects of this famous robbery: the Mona Lisa’s…
It’s been a month since thieves broke into the Louvre and absconded with a valuable stash of crown jewels. In many of the early news reports, reference was made to an earlier and equally spectacular heist at the famous museum. On a summer morning in 1911, an employee of the…
Yesterday marked ten years since the worst terrorist attack carried out on French soil. On November 13, 2015, eleven terrorists, backed by the Islamic State (Daesh), entered Paris and carried out a series of coordinated attacks throughout the city. Over the last week, French media has been filled with recaps…
What happens when one-fifth of a country’s population participates in a genocide? In the case of the Rwandan Civil War, the horror was so widespread that those left staggering in its aftermath were struck dumb, either vowing to forget the past or silent victims of post-traumatic amnesia. In Jacaranda, Gaël…
Last month, I picked up a gently used copy of short stories by Guy de Maupassant. I’d put off reading his work for too long and was happy when a friend from my book club chose the classic tale, Boule de Suif, for this quarter’s read. The short collection, titled…
This week, I began working on a post about the theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. I’d read several articles and listened to podcasts about the heist, which is full of surprising twists. However, on Monday morning, as I perused a list of Le Monde’s top…
