I’m a Paris-based writer, journalist and critic, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a former Rome Bureau Chief and European Culture correspondent for The New York Times. → More
RECENT HIGHLIGHTS
For The Atlantic, I wrote about the collapse of Macron’s technocratic centrism in this summer’s snap elections. For The New York Times, I wrote a front-page story about how rare editions of Pushkin and other Russian 19th-century classics have mysteriously vanished from libraries across Europe. For The New York Review of Books, I wrote about Georgia Meloni’s rearguard culture war and the normalization of the far right.
I also explored for The Atlantic how Meloni became the first far-right leader in a pillar of the EU and the first woman to lead Italy and reported for The New York Times on how far-right Marine Le Pen has so much support in rural France.
For Villa Albertine, French cultural services in the U.S., I hosted a podcast interviewing French cultural figures and for The New York Review of Books I wrote about how Russian-born French writer Nathalie Sarraute wanted to liberate identity from biography.
In 2022, I traveled to Kyiv to profile First Lady Olena Zelenska for Vogue, an extraordinary experience. She opened up to me about the emotional toll of the war, as did President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The photos by Annie Leibovitz started a global conversation.
LITERARY
I’ve written an open letter to Elena Ferrrante speculating on her identity, reviewed Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and interviewed Ferrante via email for The New York Times. I’ve also explored the (lost) battle to save James Baldwin’s House in the South of France, Post-Apartheid fiction in South Africa, Nadine Gordimer’s falling-out with her biographer and debates over race in Pippi Longstocking in Sweden. My profiles include the Nobel Laureates in literature Svetlana Alexievich, Patrick Modiano and V.S. Naipaul, as well as Joan Didion, Hanif Kureishi, Kate (now Kae) Tempest, Michel Houellebecq, Emmanuel Carrère, Helen Vendler, Dany Laferrière and the literary archive agent Glenn Horowitz. My reviews include work by Bernard Malamud, Deborah Levy, Jan Morris, Philippe Sands, and Mona Chollet.
CULTURE
I’ve reported on artists facing censorship or self-censorship in Russia, Turkey and Iran, visited Leo Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana, written on restorers preserving the museum at Auschwitz, ideological battles over a museum in Poland dedicated to World War II, an opera calling out anti-Semitism in Hungary and artists capturing the Maidan Square uprising in Ukraine. I’ve interviewed the artist Marina Abramovic, film directors Maren Ade, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Alexander Sokurov, and directors influenced by the films of Chantal Akerman. I’ve written about crowd control at Europe’s museums, the Middle Eastern magazine Bidoun, the art scenes of Beirut and Brussels, the Venice Biennale and Dokumenta when it was held in Athens. For The Atlantic, I’ve written on how #MeToo has affected the Nobel Prizes and the debut of DAU, an epic thought-experiment film set in the Soviet Union.
JOURNEYS
For Travel + Leisure, I took a road trip through Provence looking at art. For The Atlantic, I’ve traveled to Omaha Beach on the 75th anniversary of D-Day; Greece’s Moria refugee camp, a blot on the conscience of Europe; and Barcelona to investigate the Catalan independence movement. I’ve also written on Paris in August, the experience of being an American abroad and what Brexit meant for my generation. My travel reportage includes “Venice in Winter,” “Seduced by Naples” and “Stepping into the Frame in the South of France.”
ITALY
Italy remains an abiding preoccupation. For The New York Review of Books I wrote about Georgia Meloni’s rearguard culture war, and for The Atlantic, I wrote about how Meloni became the first woman to lead Italy and first far-right leader in the heart of the EU. I’ve also written for AirMail on a family feud over a Roman villa with a Caravaggio ceiling. For The Atlantic, I’ve profiled Nicola Gratteri, a leading Italian anti-Mafia prosecutor, written about Italy’s Covid “patient one” and the vicissitudes of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. In addition to hundreds of news stories, my features for The New York Times have explored a massive rare-book theft in Naples; why Italians gesticulate; a history of pasta; Amalfi lemons; a family of centenarians in Sardinia; a Bangladeshi Cricket league in Rome; Eike Schmidt, the first non-Italian director of the Uffizi; the work of Alberto Moravia and Roberto Saviano; and the films of Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone, and Gina Lollobrigida. I’ve also covered the Vatican and interviewed a president of the Vatican Bank and other Vatican officials.
FRANCE
For The Atlantic, I’ve explored French laïcité; the Yellow Vest movement, France’s crisis of representative democracy, debates over race, the response to the 2019 fire at Notre-Dame, and the initial French response to #MeToo. For The New York Review of Books I’ve written on how the pandemic has challenged President Macron. For Vogue, I’ve profiled the new creative director of the historic fashion house Chloé. I’ve also followed a high-profile French terrorism trial and for the Times I embedded with the staff of Charlie Hebdo as they put out their first issue after a deadly terrorist attack. I’ve covered the Cannes Film Festival, written on the films of Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Audiard, and Agnès Varda, as well as on French feminist Mona Chollet and French cultural figures obsessed with a perception of French decline.
POLITICS
My recent political profiles include Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, and Sanna Marin, the millennial feminist environmentalist prime minister of Finland, for Vogue. For The Atlantic, I’ve written on the seemingly unstoppable rise of Matteo Salvini, Italy’s social-media-savvy right-wing populist, and later on a left-wing civic movement that pushed back against him. I’ve explored parallels between Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump and profiled Manuel Valls, a former prime minister of France when he was pushing national boundaries by running for mayor of Barcelona. At The New York Times, I covered three Greek national elections and the dramatic social toll of the Greek economic crisis. I was among the first foreign journalists to interview Greek leftist politician Alexis Tsipras when he held the fate of Europe in his hands, and for The Atlantic I later wrote about his bad-boy finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.
