News & Notes
Bees in the Backyard
It was one of those long days when I had to occupy the children while my wife caught up on her sleep after a night shift at the hospital. I heard that there was a man in the nearby village of Saint Etienne les Orgues who kept bees that were so gentle that children could pet them. So off we went. Continue reading →
Spanish Love
My Shakespeare and Company/Paris memoir was recently released in Spain under the title La librería más famosa del mundo and there has been a curious stream of positive reviews, including this lengthy piece in one of the country’s leading newspapers, El Mundo.
Drugs! Drugs! Drugs!
These graphs are for my L2 law students at Aix-Marseille Université, although they would probably be interesting for anyone concerned with drug policy …
Writing, A Bewildering Friend
Let’s start with what I find so awful about writing. The compulsion to make every phrase as evocative and precise as possible combined with the anguish at seeing the gulf between the mind’s perfectly imagined sentence and the inevitably imperfect sentence that appears on paper. Continue reading →
The Podcasts I Love
The truth is I have been in something of a podcast rut. About six years ago, I discovered a flurry of brilliant podcasts – This American Life, RadioLab, Wiretap – along with a some major ear candy – Guardian Football Weekly – and I became a podcast devotee. But, sadly, I haven’t found a new podcast to love and live by for months, maybe even years. Continue reading →
On Acting
It wasn’t quite the cliché of being discovered in a grocery store but almost. It was actually my friend Laura who was in the grocery store when a casting agent heard her speak French with a heavy English accent. Continue reading →
