"The Grand Modern Ambitions"

"Of course, the very quality that made neon fixtures a poor choice for interior lighting made them perfect for signs, de Miranda notes. The first of the neon signs was switched on in 1912, advertising a barbershop on Paris's Boulevard Montmartre, and eventually they were adopted by cinemas and nightclubs. While Claude had a monopoly on neon lighting throughout the 1920s, the leaking of trade secrets and the expiration of a series of patents broke his hold on the rapidly expanding technology.
"In the following decades, neon's nonstop glow and vibrant colors turned ordinary buildings and surfaces into 24/7 billboards for businesses, large and small, that wanted to convey a sense of always being open."

Sarah Archer at The Atlantic calls neon "the Ultimate Symbol of the 20th Century."

"No System Can Remain if It Does Not Integrate the Majority of Its Poorest Citizens"

"The change is not down to a conspiracy, a wish to cast aside the poor, but to a model where employment is increasingly polarised. This comes with a new social geography: employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialised regions, rural areas, small and medium-size towns are less and less dynamic. But it is in these places–in 'peripheral France' (one could also talk of peripheral America or peripheral Britain)–that many working-class people live. Thus, for the first time, 'workers' no longer live in areas where employment is created, giving rise to a social and cultural shock."

Christophe Guilluy at The Guardian explains the rise of the gilets jaunes movement in France.

"The Revolution That Almost Was"

"Much about our modern times can be traced back to a single summer and what changed--or more accurately, what didn't."

Julia Alekseyeva at The Nib provides a cartoon history of May 1968.

"Burning Conviction, Solidarity, Euphoria"

"Since 1968, America has gone off in a different direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution, however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set politics off in the wrong direction."

Alan Wolfe at The New Republic looks back fifty years.

"Be Reasonable–Demand the Impossible"

"If your mind was ever open to that year's mixture of subversion and confrontation, it will probably have stuck with you. Most of the time, mundane reality wins out, but from time to time, an explosive critique of modernity bursts through and demands action, even if it just as quickly recedes."

John Harris at The Guardian writes about "the essential story of 1968 and its enduring legacy."

"The Culmination of a Patient Strategy"

"The Obama administration has enacted important reforms to prevent a Great Depression, reform health care, overhaul the financial system and education, and craft important breakthroughs with Iran and Cuba. But climate change occupies a category of its own. The damage from climate change is irreversible. Melted glaciers cannot be easily refrozen; extinct species cannot be reborn; flooded coastal cities are unlikely to be rebuilt. Action to mitigate climate change has an urgency nothing else can match."

Jonathan Chait in New York reacts to the Paris climate agreement.

"Now More Than Ever, This Is What the Republican Party Needs to Hear"

"'America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country,' said Bush in his remarks at the Islamic Center in September 2001. 'Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.'"

Jamelle Bouie in Slate argues that only George W. Bush can stop Republican "anti-Muslim sentiment."

"Refuse to Give in to Fear"

"Take, for example, Jeb Bush's declaration that 'this is an organized attempt to destroy Western civilization.' No, it isn't. It's an organized attempt to sow panic, which isn't at all the same thing. And remarks like that, which blur that distinction and make terrorists seem more powerful than they are, just help the jihadists' cause."

Paul Krugman in The New York Times warns that "the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire."

Rollback or Containment?

"Rather than assuming an offensive posture, the West should revert to a defensive one. Instead of attempting to impose its will on the Greater Middle East, it should erect barriers to protect itself from the violence emanating from that quarter. Such barriers will necessarily be imperfect, but they will produce greater security at a more affordable cost than is gained by engaging in futile, open-ended armed conflicts. Rather than vainly attempting to police or control, this revised strategy should seek to contain.
"Such an approach posits that, confronted with the responsibility to do so, the peoples of the Greater Middle East will prove better equipped to solve their problems than are policy makers back in Washington, London, or Paris. It rejects as presumptuous any claim that the West can untangle problems of vast historical and religious complexity to which Western folly contributed. It rests on this core principle: Do no (further) harm."

Andrew J. Bacevich in The Boston Globe argues that American and European leaders "have enmeshed the West in a war that it cannot win and should not perpetuate."

"One of the City's Most Legendary Clubs"

"'It was in the great European tradition of funky music halls,' says Rosanne Cash, who played the Bataclan in 1990. Tucked away in the city's 11th arrondissement, north and east of the major tourist thoroughfares, the venue opened in 1864. It was originally called the Grand Café Chinois in honor of architect Charles Duval's design–a multi-colored imitation pagoda that topped off the building. Eventually renamed after the French operetta Ba-ta-clan, the space presented the famous singer Piaf in some of her earliest performances.

"The venue started booking rock acts in the early 1970s. In 1972, what was intended to be a Cale solo gig turned into a Velvet Underground reunion when Cale invited Reed and Nico to join him for unplugged but thrilling versions of 'Heroin,' 'The Black Angel's Death Song' and 'Femme Fatale,' along with solo Cale and Reed songs."

David Browne at Rolling Stone discusses the history of Paris' La Bataclan, "the site of the worst massacre in rock history."

"The Brunch Is All the Same"

"And so a vivid and storied layer of authentic Paris is being wiped out not by not-in-my-backyard activism, government edict or the rapaciousness of Starbucks or McDonald’s but by the banal globalization of hipster good taste, the same pleasant and invisible force that puts kale frittata, steel-cut oats and burrata salad on brunch tables from Stockholm to San Francisco."

Thomas Chatterton Williams in The New York Times laments the gentrification of Paris's Pigalle district.

"The Book Business Is the Business of Life"

"Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.       
"Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed."

Marlise Simons in The New York Times writes an obituary for George Whitman, proprietor of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris.

A Spectre Is Haunting Europe

"The revolutionaries, he argues, were overmatched by near-impossible challenges that sound remarkably familiar today. They had to wrestle with the demons of nationalism, which threatened to drag liberal revolutions down into the muck of ethnic conflict. They had to forge new constitutional orders that could temper violent radicalism. And they had to confront the grinding poverty and social misery of the freshly empowered masses, who had unattainable expectations for economic growth and social equality. The book’s descriptions of impoverished serfs and alienated city dwellers could equally well be about peasants in the Chinese countryside and migrant workers in Beijing and Chongqing today."

Gary J. Bass in The New York Times reviews Mike Rapport's 1848: Year of Revolution.

"I Feel Like Explaining Something"

"He founded a rag called the Paris News Post—'sort of a fourth-rate version of the New Yorker,' he drolly croaks here. He got Plimpton very, very high on Easter Sunday in 1952, and it is worth tuning in to Doc just to hear Plimpton's voice rise when he imitates his own stoned giggle of that afternoon. Somewhere in there, the Paris Review started. Humes claims that the magazine evolved from 'a conversation between Jimmy Baldwin and myself.' George, Being George, the new oral history of Plimpton's life, suggests that Peter Matthiessen nudged Humes toward the idea partly because Matthiessen was working for the CIA and needed a good cover. Everyone agrees that Humes was too wild actually to manage a publication. Still, it was poor form for them to knock him down the masthead, where, for a time, he dwelled ridiculously as the advertising manager."

Troy Patterson in Slate reviews a new documentary about the life of writer H.L. Humes.