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Recent articles

  • Razing Hell
  • You Lose-Lautrec! The famous artist’s family gets grifted out of the family château
  • Off with Their Perks! – How “Penelopegate” sentenced a leading French pol to prison and shook the country’s ruling elite
  • Director’s Cut – Silvia Fendi and Luca Guadagnino and this spring’s most inspired clothing collab.
  • Is Paris Fuming? – Life in France during the nationwide strikes, now in their third month
  • In Cold Blue Blood – The mystery of the missing French aristocrat who vanished after murdering his wife, children, and dogs
  • Viva Zapata!! – The inventor of the Flyboard channels his inner Tony Stark
  • Fawlty Towers – The château that ate Provence
  • Monsieur Mediocre – Now out in Paperback!
  • In Gad We Trust – Gad Elmaleh, France’s biggest comedian, is about to make you laugh…in English.
  • Gloria Vanderbilt: The last American aristocrat
  • Stella McCartney leads the next British Invasion
  • The Risk-Taking, Mood-Making Magic of Haider Ackermann
  • French vacances: Six weeks of not so great time off
  • Veronique Nichanian – Hermès’s Wizard of Oz

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John von Sothen

an American writer in Paris

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Opinion
  • Off with Their Perks! – How “Penelopegate” sentenced a leading French pol to prison and shook the country’s ruling elite

    On May 14, 2011, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director of the I.M.F. and then considered the front-runner in the 2012 French presidential election, was arrested in New York City for sexual assault and attempted rape of a chambermaid at the Sofitel hotel in Midtown. At the time, the French public was shocked, not just by […]

    2020-07-18
  • Is Paris Fuming? – Life in France during the nationwide strikes, now in their third month

    Although Sam Mendes’s 1917 debuted in Paris theaters January 15, I, like many of my friends here, have been reluctant to see it. We’re going through our own form of PTSD right now, and frankly anything involving tear gas and chaos, sirens and claustrophobia, isn’t something we need more of. When I moved to France […]

    2020-02-01
  • Monsieur Mediocre – Now out in Paperback!

    A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ. Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don’t get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we […]

    2019-05-06
  • The Post-Trump American in Paris: the newly registered sex offender

    Since the Trump election, living in Paris as an American is kind of like being a registered sex offender.

    2016-11-29
  • This time the Trump joke’s on us

    Following Donald Trump’s stunning win, America’s knee jerk reaction has been to “find humour in it all,” which JOHN VON SOTHEN finds downright pathological, especially considering it was partly responsible for Trump’s victory in the first place. 

    2016-11-17
  • The 10th arrondissement – Paris’s secret garden

    JOHN VON SOTHEN reveals why Paris’s most diverse and hipster arrondissement has become France’s Ground Zero.

    2015-11-23
  • Schizofrench at Mediapart

    For the past two years, I’ve been a contributor for the online publication Mediapart thanks to a column they’ve given me called Schizofrench. It’s a sandbox of sorts; essays and rants ranging from my love of Moleskin notebooks to my hatred for French flea markets, to the way Airbnb has changed my neighbourhood sitcom. All of it, of course, is super serious and fits in […]

    2014-10-01
  • Flea Markets: France airs its dirty laundry

    A flea market (vide grenier) visit ranks up there as one of the things people most romanticize about France. Don’t believe the hype says JOHN VON SOTHEN, who’s had his share of an institution that has seen better days

    2014-07-17
  • The Mid-Atlantic: the future voice of Europe

    The European elections will soon be upon us, yet it seems I’m the only one who cares. And I can’t even vote! But my interest lie less in the politics of Europe and more in imagining what Europe would look like if they really did go all the way, as in the full federal sense, […]

    2014-05-13
  • I want my LBP

    I don’t care if Liberation folds. I really don’t. I’m done with mourning newspaper deaths, and ever since my native Washington Post sold out to Amazon, I swore I’d never get attached to one again. I also don’t really care if Liberation becomes a Starbucks either or a Foundation Cartier or an Office Depot. What I […]

    2014-04-12

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