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View from Rue Saint-Georges

A blog about expatriate life in Paris. Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of a memoir, Losing My Cool. He is at work on a book about how we define race in America, told through his own experience of growing up with a white mother and black father, and of raising a blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter in France.

PREVIOUS POSTS

Reaching Out

The best way to escape our current political predicament is to keep talking

You Must Be Joking

A comic book, a movie, politics, and race

Language Unbound

How the words we use influence how we think

On the Turning Away

Our tendency to ignore human suffering

License to Chill

Life slows down when you can’t drive

Existential Split

On feeling the pull of home

A laptop sits open on a rustic wooden table next to a coffee and an evocative travel photograph

Too Much of a Good Thing

Relief at the end of summer vacation

Priceless Moments

How having children focuses a writer’s mind

Life on a Razor’s Edge

The hidden joys of shaving

Children on an amusement park swing

The Battle of All Against All

What would a truly equal society look like?

Close-up of basketball

Better Than the Real Thing

The strange pleasure of sports highlights

Two children, one black and one white, play in an airport terminal in the 1960s

Life in Black and White

A new volume commemorates the work of a brilliant photographer of the 1960s

People ride e-scooters through a Parisian plaza

Scootering Around Town

The automobile’s appeal is in decline thanks to the proliferation of alternatives

Disconnection in a Connected Age

On the mixed blessing of technological advancement

Skin Deep

You can’t fight like with like

A Loss to Paris and the World

The fire at Notre Dame should remind us to see the world’s wonders while we

A Life Off-track

A talented historian’s tragic end

Family Matters

Closing my distance from a distant relation

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