Joan Z. Shore

The election of Socialist François Hollande to the French presidency shouldn't come as a surprise.

The Socialists have been out of power for 17 years. The country slogged along under Jacques Chirac for 12 years. (His first term was the usual 7 years, and then he proposed, and passed, the...

Forget about the stuttering King George, forget about the vile-mouthed John Galliano. The big news right now is that Americans can speak their mind whenever and wherever they like, with the blessing of the Supreme Court.

Of course, it must be related to "public issues". Therefore, anti-war...

Movie remakes are rarely as good as the original version. Updating a classic film is like trying to translate a classic text.

"Traduire c'est trahir" is the French expression for this -- literally, "translation is treason". There is always something missing, something wrong, something compromised. Dictionary...

Do we, as supposedly liberty-loving Americans, really support people's revolutions?

Or do we impose our own idea of revolution on others?

We faced this quandary many times in the last century: Russia, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Iran come immediately to mind. Sometimes we...

The memorial event in Tucson last week was not especially memorable -- except for the rowdy cheering and chummy hugging and the fact that President Obama himself gave a lengthy speech that was lavishly praised by nearly everyone.

Not by me.

While it was touching to limn the...

In a shocking display of contempt for jurisprudence and human rights, Iran has executed 63-year-old Ali Saremi -- a political dissident since 1979 who spent a total of 24 years in prison, and was hanged on December 28 for "waging war against God". Many European nations have already condemned...

It would take the sharp satire of Aristophanes, Voltaire, or Jonathan Swift to accurately describe the political landscape in America these days.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can't do it. And their Rally (with a capital R!) in Washington last Saturday was arguably the most infantile and useless...

The makeover of the Oval Office -- the inner sanctum of the American presidency -- has been greatly criticized, and with good reason.

It is a bland wash of beige, with bulky sofas and...

The Tea Party has it all wrong for this simple reason:

America's descent into calamity, corruption and godlessness didn't begin with the Obama administration. It began at least eight years earlier, when George W. Bush moved into the White House dragging along his venal vice president and their conniving...

The best news to emerge in the debate over the Ground Zero mosque is the opposition from some Muslim quarters: They are actually against the project!

While true-blue Americans continue to preach the First Amendment, and hoist themselves up as paragons of tolerance and camaraderie, a few clear-eyed...

It is probably the most overrated painting in the history of art -- the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

This murky portrait, hanging behind protective glass at the Louvre, draws thousands of visitors a day. It has inspired volumes of essays, research, speculation, a film and at...

Clearly, it's another pharmaceutical gimmick -- developing a pill for women that will kickstart their libidos. Here's why it won't work.

Psychologists tell us there are three reasons for female frigidity: hate, fear and guilt. Loathing one's partner is clear enough: Change your partner! Fear of pregnancy? Use a...

It is not merely ironic: it is simply ludicrous that an ethnic group that denies equality within its own ranks demands equal treatment and respect from a host country.

I am referring, of course, to the Swiss vote opposing the erection of more minarets, and the cry of...

Had it been a Christian or a Jew who slaughtered thirteen people in one mad frenzy, I doubt there would have been much psycho-analysis of the murderer and his motives. It was a ghastly criminal act, period.

But the murderer is a Muslim, and rather than examining...

So women are not as happy as they used to be.

That's what Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers claim in their much-touted book, The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness.

Let's first define "happiness," because even our founding fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, simply said it was "an...

I've had it with the Swiss.

I used to admire them -- their clean, orderly, decorous way of life. Their stubborn independence and self-reliance. I forgave them for the years they never joined the United Nations, and even now, not joining the European Union.

When I learned,...

Sometime in the Fifties, William Buckley, Jr. wrote a scathing essay about his university called "God and Man at Yale." He was deploring the free-wheeling liberalism of his alma mater: its "godless" academic tradition.

What would Buckley think of Yale today? The Yale University Press is releasing...

A lot is being written about this wonderful man who has left us, and there is little that I can add. But my memories are very precious.

We met just over 30 years ago, when I was a junior correspondent in the Paris bureau of CBS News....

Perhaps even more than America, France insists on the separation of church and state. France also strongly defends women's rights. Today, these two principles happen to coincide: girls in public high schools are not allowed to wear headscarves, female excision is outlawed, and so, too, is bigamy (although many Muslim...

I am personally intrigued by what is going on in Iran these days. And I am amused by America's bemusement. Here's why.

Almost 31 years ago, in the fall of 1978, the Ayatollah Khomeini was granted asylum in France. He set up his modest headquarters in Neaufle-le-Chateau, a...