Show Time

A T.V. premiere, a political crisis, and a very special glass of grape juice.

Laurent Sola, Cap d’Agde, 1982. Via Mucem.

“KILLER LIES: Chasing a True Crime Con Man,” a three-part documentary series based on my 2022 article about Stéphane Bourgoin, premieres tonight on National Geographic and streams from tomorrow on Hulu. I hope you’ll watch! (It’ll be out in France later in the year.) For decades, Bourgoin was France’s foremost expert on serial killers. He told people that he had a personal stake in the subject: his first wife, whom he called Eileen, had been murdered in Los Angeles in 1976. This was a heartrending story. But it wasn’t true. As The Fourth Eye—an anonymous collective of suspicious fans—revealed in 2020, Bourgoin had made the whole thing up. At various points in his career, he played every role in the repertoire: victim, investigator, media, law enforcement. (Officials bought his act and invited him to train police officers and magistrates.) His story is a double whammy—one of the twistiest, turniest tales I’ve ever tried to follow, overlaid with another, even more complex one about the true crime industry, going beyond whos, wheres, and whens to deeper hows and whys. What initially drew me to it, and continues to fascinate me, is that it’s true crime story about true crime.

Emmanuel Macron, two and a half months after dissolving the government, finds him in what can charitably be called une situation politique inédite. Yes, France has faced periods of cohabitation before—from 1986 to 1988, with Mitterrand and Chirac; from 1993 to 1995 with Mitterrand and Balladur; and from 1997 to 2002 with Chirac and Jospin—but never has a French president been obliged to name a prime minister after a legislative election that produced no absolute majority. Macron seems to consider the clock his friend here. But, after an Olympic hiatus, and with the rentrée scolaire looming, his prudence is starting to look like dithering. “There’s absolutely no reason to keep procrastinating,” the center-right leader Laurent Wauquiez said today, after a “disappointing” consultation at the Élysée, as though Macron were a shiftless student who had failed to turn in his homework. Meanwhile, Fabien Roussel, of the Communist Party, accused Macron of committing a legal coup d’état “of unspeakable brutality” in failing to select Lucie Castets, the candidate of the left-wing coalition Le Nouveau Front Populaire. I am working on a long piece about all of this, so IF YOU HAVE TIPS, YOU KNOW WHERE TO SEND ‘EM.

It really was nice being able to spend a few weeks focusing on things like conga lines, which in French are called “chenilles,” or caterpillars. Like Lazy Susans (!), they are apparently making a comeback. At the recommendation of my pal Sutanya Dacres, I took “Lost Hearts in Italy” with me on vacation, and now I am deeply into the glamorous, wistful, worldly writing of Andrea Lee, the O.G. American-woman-of-letters-in-Europe. For the second summer running, I am obsessed with Raphëalle Bacqué’s and Vanessa Schneider’s “Successions” series, about France’s most powerful business dynasties: the Saadés of Marseille, I learned, are making an intriguing push into media, while the Rothschilds raise boy children in the Jewish faith and girl children in the Catholic one.

I enjoyed this essay on place names, too, and I’m thrilled to see that Victor Luckerson has launched Run it Back, a newsletter about Black history that you don’t learn in school. I don’t entirely agree with the notion that the Olympics presented the same “rêve d’une ville vitrifiée” as “Emily in Paris,” but it’s a thought-provoking argument. And I have to salut El Pais for its analysis of the collective good mood that overtook the country this summer, as stealthily as a Ukrainian race walker. France, the paper observed, “seems to have taken a vacation from itself.” Supporting this hypothesis is the fact that I went to buy some fruit in a busy market and the boss primeur had outfitted her entire staff in t-shirts that read “Nice Attitude Club.” Shout-out to Maxxi Beignets, donut vendors whose fluorescent uniforms accidentally set off a fashion craze.

How did I miss all of the city’s church bells ringing in unison at 9 P.M. on August 24th, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris? (Did you know that American officials insisted on an all-white victory procession? That George Dukson, a Gabon-born war hero known as “the Black lion of the 17th arrondissement,” crashed the parade anyway?) Why am I so endlessly amused by the Instagram account Putain Ils Ont Osé? Will we ever, Jamelle Bouie asks, get a Civil War film that tells the truth? Can Barcelona, Lisa Abend wants to know, survive mass tourism? (Journalism secret: when a headline poses a yes or no question, the answer is usually no.) When are we riding the direct train between London and Bordeaux?

One of the things I love about the rentrée is the endless elasticity of the word itself: