Does Paris Have too Many Café Terraces These Days?

Plus, grappling with the new, scalding reality of traveling to Europe in summer...

Dear Subscribers,

It’s been a while since my last exclusive post, and for that I must apologize. I was away in the US and Canada for a month visiting family, and partly owing to some difficult family circumstances, I wasn’t able to get to my desk much during that time.

Then, as soon as I returned home and was gearing up to get back to it all, I contracted what turned out to be a surprisingly nasty case of Covid— the first time I’ve ever had one confirmed by a test.

Leaving me with debilitating flu symptoms for three days (and I’m not yet fully recovered), the arrival of the spiky little bugger into my system came as a reminder: even being fully vaccinated and double-boosted isn’t a guarantee that catching Covid won’t knock you back a bit. I had wrongly assumed it would amount to nothing worse than annoying cold symptoms.

I stand corrected. And I now recommend masking up again on planes and in international travel hubs like airports, if you want to avoid catching what seems to be a pretty harrowing new variant going around. This is all anecdotal, of course, but outlets such as the Washington Post have been reporting that a significant new wave of infections may be upon us— and testing for it has become much more challenging.

Of course, being vaccinated (and boosted) dramatically lowers the risk of serious illness and hospitalization. But having endured several days of what felt like the worst flu I’ve had in years, I’m now leaning more in favor of taking some sensible precautions, at the very least in big travel hubs where masses of people from around the globe assemble.

And as the past three years have taught us, international travel, as much as it represents so much of what I love and value, makes an excellent partner-in-crime for novel viruses.

Moving on from all that, The New York Times recently featured a cover story with a headline that couldn’t be ignored if you work in my beat: “Can There Be Too Many Cafés in Paris”?