Author Archive
Courage
Guest post by tf
Daniel Schneidermann lost his job because he spoke out. Now his associate, Judith Bernard, has had a job offer withdrawn because she, too, spoke out.
Schneidermann is the host of Arrêt sur Images, the television show that analyzes television, shown every Sunday at 12:36pm on France 5. He was also a columnist for […]
Chartjunk
Guest post by tf
As of November 7th, Le Monde has changed its look. The new format makes greater use of color photos, eliminates the short resumés that used to precede articles, and provides a cleaner appearance in general. Readers in France have argued one way and the other about whether the paper is more ergonomic […]
Reading
Guest post by tf
Fifteen percent of French students leave elementary school without being able to read properly, according to Ministry of Education statistics. The Education Minister, Gilles de Robien, blames this on the whole word method of teaching, which emphasizes word recognition, over the phonetic method, in which children spell out words syllable by syllable. […]
Represent
Guest post by tf
What is the CRAN? If you rely on The New York Times for your news, you don’t know. Same thing if your source is The Wall Street Journal. Or The Washington Post, or the Los Angeles Times, or the The Boston Globe, or The Miami Herald. The only major daily paper in […]
Fair Use
Guest post by tf
The French government plans to introduce a draconian copyright law, the DADVSI, to be discussed in parliament on December 20th and 21st, as Eric Nunès reports in Le Monde. DADVSI would impose criminal penalties for activities that until now have been considered fair use, such as making backups of music or video […]
Skype Out
Guest post by tf
Each French cabinet ministry has its own official responsible for the national defense related aspects of that ministry’s work. For the Ministry of National Education, Higher Education, and Research, that official is Bernard Vors, who, in September, acted boldly to protect France from the malign influence of a dangerous piece of software, […]
Blackboard
Guest post by tf
Blackboard is an online system used by many universities, in the United States and elsewhere, to animate classroom discussions beyond the classroom, through forums and other web-based tools. Administrators at New York University (NYU) are pioneering a new use of Blackboard: to spy on faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
Graduate students who work […]
Hydrant Envy
Guest post by tf
Does Paris suffer from a lack of fire hydrants? Look, not a hydrant in sight:
It took me several years of living here to recognize this absence. And now I understand better how gazing upon this lack, this empty space where a hydrant should be, has been at the root of a deep-seated […]
Sang-Froid
Guest post by tf
I often hear people in France expressing fascination with guns in the United States. Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine was a big hit here, and Moore was on magazine covers across the country:
With all this talk, a person can get nervous heading back to the States. Especially when, traveling on French […]
Bus Lanes
Guest post by tf
The streets are a mess in Paris, as the Delanoë administration carries out its Mobilien project of constructing reserved lanes for several of the city’s bus routes:
Taxis can also use these lanes. As can bicycles; interestingly, as one would think that cyclists would feel uncomfortable with enormous buses looming behind them, but […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
