Figure 1: Non-safe-injection site behind Paris’ Gare du Nord, February 2016 (all photos by author).The first time I ever saw a person shooting up was right behind Paris’s Gare du Nord railway station in 2015. He was crouched in front of the low concrete wall in the picture (Figure 1). I had met André[1] when I volunteered at …
Citizens, governments and academics spend much time these days with one activity: making comparisons.[1] National response strategies to cope with the coronavirus are compared, as well as whether these strategies are based upon expert knowledge and/or political decisions. These comparisons have a strong national focus. Why nations with a large spread of the virus – such as France, Italy …
Note — this text is an updated version of an article published in French by Analyse Opinion Critique (AOC) on April 3rd, 2020.
On March 13th, 2020, an aircraft lands at the airport in Rome and stops on the tarmac. Nine people get off the plane and immediately stop next to the jetbridge for a group …
A quarter-century after it was written, Hervé Guibert’s Cytomegalovirus reads both as a vital document of a particular moment in the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and as a wonderfully spare account of the banal humiliations and little triumphs of hospitalization in the shadow of a then-terminal illness. Republished with a luminous Introduction by David Caron and a wide-ranging and
Richard Keller’s Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003 is a careful accounting of the toll the heat wave took on those most vulnerable in the neighborhoods surrounding Paris. The book is about the shape of vulnerability and its amplification over time — in fact, Fatal Isolation requires us to pause on the ideas of risk, vulnerability, …