Before Donald Trump took office, optimism about his presidency was the lowest of any president-elect since at least the 1970s.
There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded.
One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.
The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French.
The French aren't known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they'd say 'French what?'
Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what's specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection.
One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.
I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.
Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage.
Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I got a letter from France's interior ministry informing me that I was now French. By the time it arrived, I'd been French for nearly two weeks without even knowing it.
Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage.
Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.
We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them or whether they're good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces.
When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, 'The optimism.' I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are 'It's not possible' and 'Hell is other people.' I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.
Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what's specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection.
I'm always hoping no one is following me around with a camera.
We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.
How hard or easy it is to raise kids, especially while working, is a big part of people's well-being everywhere.
Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide.
Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'