Vive le dessert! Right now, if you head to Madison Avenue between 71st and 72nd, you can treat yourself to some of the most celebrated macaroons in the world. Maison Laduree, the French pastry house credited with inventing the double-decked version of the confection, opened its first New York location at 9:00 a.m. today. Read More
“Let me just say this: I don’t seek out the high-profile cases, but any lawyer who would tell you they don’t want a high-profile case wouldn’t be telling you the truth,” said Kenneth Thompson. “If you look at my background, yes, I’ve done some high-profile cases, but I’m not a high-profile guy.” He was sitting behind his desk in the sleek law offices of his firm, Thompson Wigdor, which currently represents Nafissatou Diallo, the victim of an alleged sexual assault at the hands of ex-I.M.F. chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.
A month earlier, however, at an impromptu press conference on the steps of the Manhattan Supreme courthouse, a high-profile guy is exactly what Mr. Thompson looked like. He spoke in the cadence of a seasoned trial attorney as he described the alleged events of May 14. In graphic detail, he narrated the account of the assault Ms. Diallo alleges to have suffered at the hands of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in room 2806 of the Midtown Sofitel.
“She was told no one was inside that room,” Mr. Thompson intoned, “and she went into that room believing that no one was inside that room. And then Dominique Strauss-Kahn came running out of one of those rooms, naked, towards her. And he grabbed her breasts first and started to attack her. He then grabbed her vagina with so much force that he hurt her. He grabbed her vagina with so much force that he bruised her vagina. When she went to the hospital later that day, the nurses who examined her saw the bruises on her vagina that were caused by Dominique Strauss’s hand … Read More
"It's all my friends and I talk about these days," Marc Gross, a Harvard-educated American running one of Paris's few vegan eateries, Bob's Juice Bar, tells me. He's talking, of course, about Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the I.M.F. chief and French presidential would-be accused of sexually assaulting a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in Midtown. It sounds Read More
BAM is to host a near-month-long retrospective of Catherine Deneuve's films, from March 4 to March 31. The season will be a high-water mark in New York's interest in French cinema--March 3 to 13 will see the "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" series at Walter Reade, which opens with a Deneuve performance in the new Read More
Michel Houellebecq may once have been France's controversy-prone outlaw novelist, but he now resides comfortably within the establishment.
After years of being denied the honor, the writer will receive this year's Prix Goncourt, the AP reports. The distinction — France's top lit award — counts Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir among its recipients.
"After all, Read More
Michel Houellebecq, the man considered by many to be among the Francophone world's leading literary treasures, has been accused of ripping off entries from — where else? — Wikipedia.
The French Slate, Slate.fr, found certain passages in the writer's new novel The Map and the Territory eerily reminiscent of entries on the user-generated encyclopedia. The Read More
Despite evidence pointing to his complete non-existence Jean-Luc Godard is in fact still alive, his extremely brief interview with The Australian proves. What's more, the legend of cinema is actually aware that he will be awarded an honorary Oscar.
On Aug. 26, the Academy assigned flacks to the impossible task of convincing the notoriously private filmmaker to come Read More
It's our world. The French only live in it.
France in the third quarter had its first quarterly home-price decline in almost a decade, and the Celtic Tiger, Ireland, Read More
The young blond Frenchman, dressed all in black down to his leather wristband, drinks champagne with foie gras and consults his cell phone every few minutes. His pretty raven-haired girlfriend, sunglasses on top of her head, dines more modestly on a salad and Coke. Along the banquette, another man in black, conspicuously sporting an early-60’s Read More
The young blond Frenchman, dressed all in black down to his leather wristband, drinks champagne with foie gras and consults his cell phone every few minutes. His pretty raven-haired girlfriend, sunglasses on top of her head, dines more modestly on a salad and Coke. Along the banquette, another man in black, conspicuously sporting an early-60’s Read More
Grégoire Bouillier is a writer from Paris, and on Monday, Oct. 23, during his first American book tour, he slouched into a chair at N.Y.U.’s Maison Française for a reading.
“I am sorry for my so-bad English … ,” he began shyly. Mr. Bouillier’s book, The Mystery Guest: An Account, had just been translated and Read MoreThe Frenchman was urgent. Still youngish, maybe 45, he had moved to New York City to catch his breath after a life spent in the intellectual atmosphere, antic but finally stultifying, of home. He did not use George Orwell’s phrase about “smelly little orthodoxies,” but that is clearly what he believed he had fled: a Read More
It’s World Cup time, and soccer is coming of age in New York.
Sort of. “What an ass!” screamed Charles Guder, when the TV at Nathan Hale’s restaurant downtown showed national team coach Bruce Arena. “Look at him, he’s smiling now. He’s gone. He’s got to get fired.” Whether it was the soccer nerds in Read MoreA friend invited me to row up the Hudson yesterday and I met Rob and his mates at Croton Point—very pretty, and dominated by a massive landfill now covered in grass, with a plant to burn off the methane. A few miles brought us to Indian Point, the nuke plant. Dog With Indian Point Nuke Read More
