I’m back after a little break to visit family in the states and return to Paris just in time to get knocked out with covid for a week. I’m sounding more like myself and ready to record new interviews for the remainder of season 5! So thanks for your patience. To kick things back off, I’m joined today by someone with a mission to fill in the gaps where French authorities fall alarmingly short. Kryssandra Heslop is the co-founder of the non-profit called Soul Food, an organization she launched in 2018 to expose migrant youth to cultural events and artistic environments, meals, and language activities, in an effort to provide intellectual and cultural stimulation, facilitate positive integration experiences and encourage novel levels of autonomy in their new home country. On top of that, they also create opportunities for cultural exchange between migrant youth and local French teenagers. Kryssandra joins me today to talk about building this mission, who she and her co-founder are helping, and the challenges specific to carrying out this project in France.

Soul Food 

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Soul Food MERCH

This episode was recorded April 25, the day after the conclusion of the 2022 French presidential election. That means, the first day of knowing Macron will continue to govern France after his first term officially ends on May 13. To some, this feels like a bandaid on a gaping wound. To others, a sign that reason has won. Whatever your perspective, there’s a lot to discuss about this experience and what Macron means for us moving forward. I’m joined today by someone I’ve wanted to invite on the show for a long time — Chris O’Brien, an American journalist in the Paris region who has reported about technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship for more than 20 years. He previously covered Silicon Valley for the LA Times and brings a deep understanding of start-up culture and technology to the French landscape. We talk about the way the global media has helped normalise extremists, Macron’s highs and lows, the French tech scene’s evolution, and what to know about Macron’s second chapter.

Mentioned in this episode: 

Chris on Twitter

Chris's viral twitter thread about the NYT’s obsession with Marine Le Pen

The French Tech Journal

Understanding life in France and the foundation on which identity is based, requires an understanding of certain words, themes, and ideas. Words like terroir, laïcité, entrepreneur, and travail, among countless others. Grasping their complexity is not only important to cultural integration but to being able to navigate daily life. It’s also the focus of a podcast called Navigating the French, hosted by fellow journalist Emily Monaco. She joins me, the day after the first round vote for President, to discuss the words and ideas worth knowing in order to make sense of this election, the candidates, and how the population feels about both.

Navigating the French podcast

Emily on Instagram

Salon de l’Agriculture: politically charged

One of the first English-language journalists in Paris covering women’s issues both in France and abroad that I first connected with online was today’s guest, Megan Clement. Her reporting has appeared in The Guardian, Bloomberg, The Sydney Morning Herald, Al Jazeera, The New Humanitarian and many other publications. She is now editing Impact, a bilingual weekly newsletter dispatch by Les Glorieuses, which may be familiar to you if you’ve read my second book, covering feminist movements and women’s rights worldwide. She also teaches journalism at the Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Given our impending Presidential election, the repercussions of the pandemic on women and their advancement, and the ongoing struggle to curb violence against women, it felt like the right time to discuss it all with Megan.

Mentioned in this episode:

The Wolfpack case Spain

Malta’s view on abortion

Malta continued

Impact interview with Mariana Ardila on Colombia’s historic abortion victory 

The situation for women in Poland

One of my goals with The New Parisienne was to highlight the richness of talent coming from women in and around the capital. There’s tremendous creativity, knowledge, innovation, and inspiration and it’s these women and so many others who fuel my own work and thinking. Rahaf Harfoush, one of the women in the book and a longtime friend, is one of the women I admire and whose research, writing, and thinking on technology and the culture of work has been endlessly illuminating.

She joins me today to talk about the research she’s been doing, her work with a French commission on the digital space, and how we can all exert control over technology’s impact on our daily lives.

Rahaf Harfoush's work

Running a restaurant in Paris is fraught in the best of times but the last several years have presented additional challenges. Some have closed as a result but I’m happy to report that many of the city’s best independently run establishments spanning street food to fine dining have held on and even grown stronger. I know my own desire to support them has grown — certainly a result of having experienced more than 6 consecutive months of restaurant closures between 2020-2021 — as well as my desire for more immersive, memorable dining experiences. One of two meals that delivered that for me in the last year was at Comice, a contemporary family-owned fine dining restaurant in the 16th arrondissement run by Canadians Noam Gedalof, the chef, and today’s guest, Etheliya Hananova, the sommelier. She talks about the journey from Montreal to Paris, the type of dining environment she and Noam set out to create, and what it means to be working in wine, in Paris, on her own terms.

Links:

With less than three months to the French presidential election, 59 days to the first round to be exact, there are a number of worrying discussions taking place online and in the media that risk distracting from the most pressing issues for French citizens but have taken up considerable airtime. In 2020, that was the controversial idea of islamo-gaucmhisme, or islamo-leftism. Since, the buzzword in heavy rotation trotted out by talking heads and politicians has become wokism, a term that has become completely bastardised and distorted from its original meaning, weaponised in political discourse and used pejoratively to condemn both political correctness and perceived excesses of social and racial justice movements. All across Europe, the anti woke brigade has been in full force and that includes France.

To talk about this term, how we got here, how it has been weaponised, what it means moving forward, particularly as we anticipate election debates, I’m joined by Cole Stangler, a French-American journalist who regularly covers labor and politics.

Mentioned in this episode:

France's New Culture Warriors (Cole for The Nation) 

France is Becoming More like America. It's Terrible. (Cole for NYT)

At the very end of 2021, one of the highlights was getting to meet a whole new batch of readers when I did a book signing for The New Parisienne at the home goods store Landline which I discovered during the lowest moments of Covid. This is in the 11th arrondissement which is an area I know intimately. The French American owner Caroline Morrison opened the doors to her nostalgic general store at the end of 2020 and has become, like the most charming independent bookstores and thoughtfully designed toy stores of yesteryear, a space I not only feel joy being in but can also feel good about buying from.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year thinking about consumption and needs vs wants. Finding satisfaction in reusing and repairing. The most sustainable way to shop, realistically, is to not, and to wear and use what you already own. But for the moments you do need a new pan, a pair of slippers, or an indestructible kid’s toy you can pass down, there’s an opportunity to make the right choice. That’s what drew me to Caroline’s store and I why I wanted her to help me kick off this new season.

Landline

Landline on Instagram 

If you’ve followed the news out of France in recent weeks, you know a couple of things. One, France has entered campaign season, with the Presidential election awaiting us in April 2022. Two, among the many disconcerting absurdities in said campaign, we have a far right, antisemitic, misogynistic pundit whose message at his first public rally last weekend played on the French perception and panic surrounding their own country’s decline and took an expected anti-immigration, make-France-Great-Again style stance. The left is in disarray, to put it politely, the right has a real challenger, and Macron hasn’t formally begun his reelection campaign yet but is surely analysing this hot mess of a political landscape.

Making sense of the French political apparatus to even begin to follow this election process means understanding a whole number of historical events that are rarely explored in any great detail in foreign media.

That’s where Manu Saadia has stepped in. The author-historian started a free newsletter called La Campagne where he digs into the political machine, the perspectives and key moments that have shaped policy and thinking, and what to know about the coming election. His dedication to this storytelling, as you’ll hear me tell him, is nothing short of a public service.

A recent New York Times story had a lot of us Parisians up in arms. It’s mayhem on rue de Rivoli and streets across Paris, we’re told, as bikes take over and the mayor pursues an ambitious goal of making the city a European cycling capital by 2024. The journalist includes comments such as “it’s like anarchy! everyone is just doing as they please. There are no police, no fines, no training and no respect.”

Not only did it sound like a car wrote most of the piece but it was sensational and in many cases, incited fear of a process that is quite standard. The growing pains of a city in the midst of a transformation like this are to be expected. But the automobile lobbies make a lot of noise and so, what is a necessary change to the very urban fabric of Paris is seen as an unbearable complication to daily life.

To talk about this cycling revolution in the city I’m joined by a former guest of the show, Nicolas le Goff, an urban scout, author, and longtime cyclist. How safe is it to ride in Paris? You’ll find out.