Paris is Hot AF

Beyoncé, canicule home remedies, herring barrels, schmilblicks, the best parenting manual that never intended to be one, American in Paris birthday cakes

July 1st, 2025—The best month in Paris went out in a manic climax, a too muchness calling out for still more. It’s hot. So hot my kids couldn’t go to school today. So hot that what was once exceptional is now commonplace. So hot that metaphor and meteorology are melting into an indistinguishable mess. Everything is accelerating, overheating, combusting. It’s like a Billy Joel anthem sung in a Gallic register. Beyoncé, birthday, Fête de la Musique, NATO, Gaza, Iran, Pharrell, Zohran, Hockney, kermesse, heatwave, Jeff Bezos filling Venice with private jets (and incomprehensibly hideous gray carpet¹) while cutting ties with climate funds. The French weather service is saying that, by 2100, the canicule could last two continuous months.

I don’t write much about parenting. For that matter, I try not to think much about parenting, fearing that overintellectualizing it will somehow dilute or distort my instincts. I read Pamela Druckerman’s still-pertinent “Bringing Up Bébé” when I was pregnant with my first child in 2015. Then I pretty much called it a day. But, as prep for Beyoncé (who assigns themselves homework to go to a concert?), I picked up “Matriarch” by (Ms.) Tina Knowles. Technically, “Matriarch” is a memoir. But, as the title indicates, it’s centered on family, transmission, inheritance, and legacy. As I got into it, I realized it was one of the great parenting books, masquerading as autobiography. What does Ms. Tina counsel? To always, always, always encourage your children’s curiosity and confidence, guarding vigilantly against those would wish, for no good reason, to take them down a notch. (I wish I could give you a quote or two, but I read it on Kindle, which is as useful for retaining and retrieving information as not having read it all.) “You got to be cute on the inside.” Now that’s advice.

I’ve been reading Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal, the second volume to be precise. It was also hot in the summer of 1957 (though not as early or as long). Flanner reports that Paris policemen were “allowed to shed their woollen dolmans, or jackets, and direct traffic in their pale-blue shirts—very smart with their white revolver holsters and white clubs.” A fourth of the riders in the Tour de France dropped out before the third day, while those who pedaled on attempted to cool themselves by stuffing fresh cabbage leaves under their caps. (I recall this as a fairly ineffectual remedy for mastitis, confirming my feeling that we are still often in 1957 when it comes to cures for very painful things that ail women and not men.) Flanner introduced me to a pungent figure of speech, quoting Sartre on the military putsch in Algiers that resulted in de Gaulle’s return to power in May of 1958. “The barrel will always smell of herring,” Sartre wrote, arguing that the Gaullist regime would eternally carry the odor “of the arbitrary violence from which it sprang.” La caque sent toujours le hareng.

Want more? There’s “schmilblick,” recently deployed by Emmanuel Macron while attempting to defend the fact that Christophe Castaner, his incompetent former Minister of the Interior, now works as a “strategic advisor” for Shein, lobbying against laws that would constrain fast fashion. “Schmilblick” means…well, it doesn’t mean anything. The humorist Pierre Dac created it in the 1950s as a sort of nonsense word, and then it was used in a game show that involved identifying a mystery object. Macron invoked the word as a sort of magical wand that could transform things in the wave of a hand. “It’s his life, not mine,” he said, of Castaner. “Just because he works for Shein, doesn’t mean that things will change au schmilblick.” I feel like Macron was pretty much schmilblicking the question, trying to make it disappear. (Using oddbird expressions like “poudre de perlimpinpin” is a classic Macron deflection tactic.) Reading

Melanie Masarin

’s interview on

Feed Me

, I came across the delightful expression “pédaler dans la semoule,” which is a way of saying “to keep going, even when you’re not making a lot of progress.” And then there’s this unattributed anthology of bizarreries of the French language. We’re all just pedaling through the semoule with cabbage leaves on our heads.

After the paywall, among other things: restaurant, shopping, and reading recommendations; non-obvious museum shows; a hotel with a pool that I have sadly not swum in but sure would like to; and the baker to go to if you live in Paris and you must have a very good American cake.