Tax season. I had a chat with a Canadian accountant about how I would deduct all expenses when I lived in the USA so I would pay, effectively, as little tax as possible to the state and federal governments. She looked at me askance and said, “In Canada, we pay our taxes. It benefits our friends and neighbours.” And then I thought about how paying tax is one of the most patriotic things you can do. I will add that it’s an easier justification when I know I’m getting a lot for

There are a host of frequent refrains you hear from American conservatives around elections and one of them is laughing at celebrities who don’t move to Canada after the Republican candidate manages to win the US presidency.They’re right. You hear a lot of noise from artists who say they’re going to move away, but then they don’t. So it got me to thinking: why not? Apart from pure patriotism, what makes them stay in the USA? I think I may know. The ones who are middling weal

No one is more American than an immigrant. I think of my family when the US  immigration reform discussion crops up again because we are all of us born in France and new to America. Yes, it is a peculiar feature of my life that despite having the most French of families my own mother and her parents lived outside of Chicago starting in 1953. In fact, they lived the American Dream. Their house in the suburbs. I think only a family as art directed by a French woman could captur

Cars are good and useful tools that I enjoy. No one on Earth can parallel park a GMC Suburban in Beverly Hills like I can. And no one loves a road trip as much as I do either. I’ve traversed the USA in various vehicles, done the south island of New Zealand, zipped back and forth across southern France. I’m a road trip fiend. Here you see me thrilled to set off from Los Angeles for a grand, four-week long road trip. So I tell you from personal experience that Americans have a

I’m reading a horror story. It’s a true story written by Howell Woltz called Justice Denied. You should buy his book and read it, too. His courage will amaze you. I first intended to write a long post about the injustice of the American penal system but I’ve become overwhelmed by all of the examples I could use to elucidate Mr. Woltz’s experience. It’s a a tangled knot. On the one hand, I’m a big fan of paying taxes to government and providing public services that everyone ca

I was talking to a friend about how American aggression always feels most apparent to me when I go back there after a long absence. He lives in America and couldn’t really understand what I meant since he’s not aware of his country as being more or less aggressive to some other place. It’s simply the world he lives in. I had a hard time articulating how I sense a low-level aggression from people just traveling through the USA–much more than compared to other nations. In sever

The longer I watch the struggle in the United States over the health insurance coverage the more I am convinced that tying health care to employment, instead of making the system single payer, is the road to madness. And by “convinced” I mean I have heaps and heaps of statistics that back me up. It is now quite famously known that the US spends more money per person on healthcare yet has worse outcomes compared to other Western nations. And don’t get me started on the ethics