Brb 🇫🇷
No episode this week, but we’ll be back soon!
We tried to record this week, but the universe had other ideas. Instead, here are a few things we’re reading, watching, and listening to these days:
🗞️ Battle Rap’s Unwoke Representation Politics (Jay’s latest New Yorker piece)
🗞️ Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia
📺 Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Plus, a dispatch from Tammy, who’s finishing up some travel abroad:
Bonjour, TTSG, from the 19th arrondissement of Paris!
I’m here on a quick trip to do research and take care of some personal business. My secondary goals are to re-up my French and conduct my usual, informal investigations of democratic socialism (postal banking, other public stuff!) and S/SE/E Asian immigrant culture.
Compared to when I spent significant time in the city (2001 and 2005; I’ve made only a few short visits since), there are many, many more diasporic, and Asian-touristic, storefronts. Bars-tabacs (working-class cafe-corner stores where I like to have coffee) are increasingly owned by Chinese-French people. The caliber and specificity of Asian food (Balinese! Nepali!) has improved. (I had a fantastic, actually spicy Sichuan lunch.) It seemed fitting that, at the G7 this week, France and other European nations recommended a strategy of “de-risking not decoupling” from China as a riposte to Washington.
I like to take long walks (or, the other day, lap-swim at a public pool) in Paris's ethnic neighborhoods and observe layers of duration and class. Who’s a tourist versus a long-term student versus an artist or merchant or third-generation hyphenated French? When, and how, are Asians treated differently from Arab or African/Caribbean Black people? What programs are available to the poor?
The recent labor uprisings in town are no longer visible, but there’s a widespread sense, even among capitalists, that Macron badly mishandled the retirement issue. A strike has yet to interrupt my adventures on public transit or at the national library—but I still have a couple days to go.
Bises,
etk
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