Emily Monaco is without question one of my favorite people in all of France — when I returned to Paris after my landlord had moved all of my things to the identical apartment one floor higher, she was the one who got my video tour of the new space (basically a 30-second video of my plants and bed and books and me screaming the whole time, about how bizarre the whole experience was). She’s also a journalist and food expert who’s hosting not one but multiple retreats in France in the upcoming weeks and months: The Nantes Writers’ Workshop, a weeklong writing retreat in Nantes, and a ceramics and food trip called Terre/Mer in La Ciotat, on the Mediterranean coast. (I want to do both of them, of course.) I thought it would make sense to talk to her about those events, and to ask her all the questions I forget to ask her when we’re out and about. So you’re working on two separate events: a fiction workshop in Nantes and a ceramics + …

Amazon stocks a lot of “French pharmacy” products — but it’s quite a weird assortment, so I thought I’d dig in and see what’s good, what’s weird, and what’s a super good buy. A trip to Paris will definitely still be a better way to do a proper French pharmacy haul — and Amazon has had very many complaints about poor quality products (or outright fakes). Many of the brands below operate their own online US shopping sites, so you can go straight to the source, if you prefer. As has also been widely reported, there seems to be some sort of advantage for Amazon in presenting search results that are at best disorganized and at worst chaotic — it really took a minute to sort through what was sponsored and what was not, and to simply distinguish brands that were, in fact, French — from the decidedly not-French brands like Tatcha and Murad, which also showed up in my results. All those caveats aside, sometimes you just want to try something new, and get it with …

Paris is a city of immense beauty, but also immense, if occasional, complication. These are my best Paris travel hacks for navigating the city. 1. I feel safe here, but property crime is real. Within the city limits, I’ve never felt unsafe in Paris — not even walking home solo at 2 a.m. I don’t know anyone who’s been the victim of a violent crime. I feel physically safer in Paris than in the other big cities where I’ve lived — New York, San Francisco, London, and Rio — and I’ve never walked into a mall here looking for the exits in case some lunatic starts shooting up the food court. That said — that said! — property crime here is real. Pickpocketing is real. I feel like relative to NY and SF, you’re less likely to get your bag back if you leave it in a restaurant. And — pièce de résistance — earlier this summer a thief came through a window into my apartment and swiped my laptop. Bizarrely, parallel-ly, I feel like …