Precisely at the moment when “French” has become a synonym for wickedness, all things French seem to be doing very well in the realm of popular culture, from Madeleine Peyroux to the Oscars, to speak nothing of fashion and food, which never entirely fall out of touch with the Hexagon. The success of Ratatouille in particular reflects the complexities of contemporary Franco-American cultural relations.

A 2002 feature on the French author Michel Houllebecq in The Guardian describes him as “a particularly unstunning, monosyllabic, frequently drunk fortysomething-year-old who has been known to make passes at interviewers” (enough to make me a bit sad I'm not interviewing him). In The New Yorker, John Updike calls his recent novel The Possibility of an Island “90% hateful”; eight days before September 11, 2001, the Morocc...

The thing about Paris is, you're always running into the ghost of someone famous. I'm sure Paul Valéry stayed in lots of houses in his time, but come around a street corner, look up, see this sign and it's like Paris is actually someplace like, well, Paris, where simply everyone you've heard of — and some folks you haven't — did the things that are the reasons you've heard of them. On Wednesday of last week I walked by a group of s...

Having spent the better part of yesterday playing a fantastically designed new bicycle racing game (and, let it be known, for those of you who are waiting for it, the lesser part of yesterday working on an essay that's due tomorrow), I find myself awake at midnight but knowing that the discretion of sleeping so I can write my essay tomorrow (after waking up at 6:30 to watch the amazing second mountain stage of the Tour de France) is the bette...

The dawn of the era of human rights in the West corresponds almost exactly with the dawn of the era of criticizing other people for not respecting human rights. It also corresponds, rather sadly, with the era of saying that certain people can't be granted human rights because they're too uncivilized. For instance: in the early 1800s most European countries were outlawing torture (the first really popular criticisms of torture appear in the mi...

Whatever happened to the American love affair with France? In an interesting article from 2003, Brookings fellow Justin Vaisse tackled the question. The short answer is that when Chirac opposed the invasion of Iraq, Fox News threw a switch marked Hate.

The other day I saw someone wearing a shirt that said, "I hate Michigan so much, I'd root for France to beat them." Ahh, France. Where would American nationalism be without you? The left-wing blogs have been full of criticism of various Fox News types for measuring possible benefits of the London bombings. But Brit Hume and his buddies would be surprised, I think, to find an ally in Pierre Assouline, who blogs about literature for Le Monde. I'...

Lance Armstrong is going to win the Tour de France again this year, making millions of Europeans angry. That's partly because lots of people will resent a winner (I never really liked Michael Jordan), but also because sports figures almost always function as national allegories (a fact everyone remembers with some pleasure every four years at the World Cup, when the efficient Germans, the tough Englishmen, the creative Brazilians, and the ath...