Hello and welcome to my website.

I’m a journalist, a columnist, a documentary producer and the author of five books including Bringing Up Bébé, which has been translated into 31 languages (including Mongolian!) and optioned as a feature film by Blueprint Pictures.

Bringing Up Bébé was a #1 best seller in the U.K. (Sunday Times); a top-ten best seller in the United States (The New York Times); and has appeared on best-seller lists in Germany and Brazil. Its UK title is French Children Don’t Throw Food.  (These are the same book, we just changed “mom” to “mum.”)

For eight years, I wrote a (mostly) monthly column on France for The New York Times. I turned one of these columns, What You Learn in Your 40s, into a book about midlife called There Are No Grown-Ups. I also penned the Dress Code column for 1843/The Economist. My op-eds, essays, articles and reviews have been published in The Atlantic, Le Monde, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, the Financial Times, Harper’s, New York Magazine, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair France, Madame Figaro, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Times (UK), The Sunday Times (U.K.) and many other publications.

I won an Emmy for The Forger, a New York Times documentary about a French teenager during WWII. The film was a finalist for the Peabody Award and won prizes from World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International and NPPA. Also for The New York Times, I also won an Overseas Press Club award for “best TV or video spot news reporting from abroad” for coverage of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

I’ve appeared as a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Good Morning America, the Today Show, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, France24, PRI, the CBC, BBC Woman’s Hour, Europe1, Le Grand Journal, On n’est pas couché, France24 and Oprah.com. I’ve delivered speeches and done public conversations around the world at forums including Tedx Paris, Live Magazine and Brain Bar Budapest. For the OECD, I’ve moderated panel discussions on topics ranging from global healthcare to the aging workforce. I was a judge for the American Library in Paris Book Award; I often speak and moderate events there.

In March 2020, at the start of the Paris lockdown, my husband and I co-founded PANDEMONIUM U, a series of free Zoom classes – mostly about France – taught by world-class experts, with sponsorship from The Federation of Alliances Françaises USA and The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S. It was an all-volunteer effort. Here I interview Barnard Professor Caroline Webber in a class called Proust for Beginners.

In a past life I covered Latin America. From 1997 to 2002 I was a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and New York. While in New York I studied improvisational comedy at the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

I grew up in an air-conditioned shtetl in Miami, then got a B.A. in philosophy from Colgate University and a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University. In my free time, I like to write songs and play tennis. Thank you for reading this far. Now tell me about you.