Nov 10, 2024

For the past few years, I’ve kept a list of places where I could envision living out my retirement. I kept up-to-date on the candidates. Every time I proposed an addition to or deletion from my list, my friends rolled their eyes.

November 16, 2024

I am grateful for having the frustrating, attention-demanding process of applying for a French visa as a distraction from the news…

November 27, 2024

Snow is falling in slow motion silently outside the window of my temporary residence in Montparnasse. It’s a good day to be indoors — except for the fact that indoors is where all the bureaucratic and financial consequences of my decision to move to France have also taken up residence.

December 3, 2024

The genial bank employee nodded his head. I pressed ‘submit’ on my phone. Two days late, my first month’s rent shot off toward its intended target, my new and understanding landlords. What feels like a heroic three-week battle came to a triumphant conclusion. Not only did I pay my rent, I also let an unfamiliar feeling sink in: I am solvent in France.

December 14, 2024

Billie lies on the floor next to her dog bed. Her snout is not pointed in my direction. Yet, I know every nerve sensor in her slightly wet nose is on red alert for the moment when I start cooking my dinner. Every afternoon, after she finishes her dinner, she grows impatient. She associates the end of her dinner with the start of mine…

December 21, 2024

I ran my fingers across a white dinner plate with a Royal Blue garland looping around the broad rim. Little braille-like bumps between the garland’s loops slowed my hand as I examined the design. It was one of a set of six plates sitting on a shelf in AXS Design, a shopwell worth seeking out.

December 30, 2024

Private health insurance — where it all goes wrong. I return to New York.

Jan 10, 2025

It might strike you as a bit rich of me to compare my current situation in Paris to that of the character Frances McDorman plays in Chloe Zhao’s film, “Nomadland, that is to say, “houseless.”

January 17, 2025

I owe the happy conduct of my life as a soloist partially to the internet. I first signed up for an electronic mail account in 1985, when I entered grad school at the University of Toronto. Not many civilians had access to email then.

February 5, 2025

Edmond Dédé, composer, musician, and African American, starts to get his due.

February 14, 2025

If I could have closed the book on my failed attempt to emigrate to France without returning to Paris, I would have done so. Instead, here I am, boxing up the few clothes I left behind, adding to them the few I brought, and filling the now empty space in my suitcase with vinegars, tins of olive oil, a few antique stoneware bowls, and a de Buyer crepe pan.

February 28, 2025

You can’t claim to know a country you love until you break up with it or it breaks up with you.

March 23, 2025

Every transition in life, like the one I’m in the middle of, comes at a price but also with gains. From Californian condo-owner to failed emigrée to middle class nomad and eventually (I hope) once again a home cook in my own kitchen, the way I see myself has undergone change after change after change over the past 6 months while who I am remains the same.

April 16, 2025

A few mornings ago, I was making Melissa Clark’s pozole-like soupy stew, a project meant to focus my mind on a Substack post about cooking while traveling. In the background, I heard Billie barking outside in the enclosed space behind my townhouse in Uptown New Orleans.

May 11, 2025

Pope Leo XIV’s family history reminds Americans of what makes New Orleans so special.

June 1, 2025

(Liz, star of @gloriousbroads on Instagram)

It’s time I cleared something up.

June 16, 2025

I find echoes of our political climate in Virginia Woolf’s most intimate writing.

July 19, 2025

What do you do when you’ve given away almost everything you owned?

August 1, 2025

Who did Virginia Woolf keep her diary for?

November 4, 2025

I will give you two reasons to read Nicholas Boggs’s 746-page Baldwin: A Love Story, 620 pages of which constitute the main text. I’m not suggesting the obvious reason, that is, your love of James Baldwin’s writing.