Puyloubier, France April 15, 2023 Yesterday at 6:00 pm, the French Constitutional Council, the 5th Republic’s version of the U.S. Supreme Court, announced the outcome of its review of the constitutionality of the new law reforming France’s sprawling retirement system. The Council validated the central provisions of the law —…

Monday, March 20 Our flight from Boston to Paris arrived at 5:30 am on Monday, March 20, the morning of the day the French National Assembly was scheduled to vote on two motions censuring the government of Emmanuel Macron. Just days before, Marcon’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, had invoked the…

March 6, 2023 Last week I received an email from my alma mater, Colorado College, announcing its decision to withdraw from the U.S. News college and university rankings published each fall, and sending college and university administrators and trustees into fits of braggadocio or, just as likely, anxious and defensive…

April 28, Puyloubier, France GARDANNE IS A SMALL INDUSTRIAL CITY in southern France, roughly 10 miles from the regional capital of Aix-en-Provence. In the 1830s, significant deposits of coal were discovered in Gardanne, and it's been coal ever since. The miners came first, then the industries that require cheap and…

Thursday, June 29, 2023 In a decision that surprised exactly no one, the Supreme Court announced today its decision in Students for Fair Admission, Inc. v President and Fellows of Harvard College: the affirmative action admission policies and practices that have been followed for decades by most colleges and universities…

What Now? Privileges, Preferences, and the End of Race-Conscious Admission March 15, 2023 It now appears virtually certain that the Supreme Court will rule that the affirmative action policies and practices of most U.S. colleges and universities are unconstitutional, bringing an end to decades of effort and modest progress in…

Yesterday NASA revealed the first batch of images from the James Webb Space Telescope. It was a much anticipated, heavily marketed, and precisely choreographed event concluding three decades of painstaking and elaborate effort and the expenditure of $10 billion of public funds. Or perhaps beginning is the better word. For…

On June 23, 2022, I gave a talk at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, titled “Merleau-Ponty, Descartes, and the Meaning of Painting.” The talk was based in part on research I’d done in the library’s rare book collection on first editions of the works of the French…

April 8, 2022, Puyloubier, France WHAT A DIFFERENCE A MONTH MAKES. In early March, polls for the first round of the French presidential election showed the incumbent, Emmanuel Macron, with a wide 12-point advantage over his closest pursuer, the extreme-right candidate Marine Le Pen. The war in Ukraine had been…