Cars I’ve driven a number of electric cars sold on their “sporting character,” and the verdict keeps coming back the same: plenty of shove, rarely any sport. These cars put on a convincing show to 60 mph, then hit a wall whose cause isn’t the battery everyone blames but the motor’s field weakening, compounded by the near-universal single fixed ratio. Eco tires, a chassis tuned to match them, power that swings with state of charge and pack temperature, braking handed to a regen-friction blend that is never quite repeatable: on every one of these counts, sportiness demands a consistency that electric cars don’t yet deliver. There’s nothing reactionary in saying so, since what’s missing is identifiable and therefore fixable. What lingers is the unsettling question posed by the Ioniq 5 N and its simulated gears: if the simulation becomes indistinguishable from the driver’s seat, will there be anything left to object to?
Artificial Intelligence On September 8, 2026, OpenAI announced that a swarm of 10,000 agents had solved Navier-Stokes in 88 hours, an Anthropic researcher resigned accusing the labs of gambling with our lives, and the OECD published the worst PISA results in French history. The night before, on LCI, a presidential candidate had found nothing to say about Pompidou. One thread runs through all of it: everyone is speaking in the future tense, and no one is rereading the past. Some because they are manufacturing the future by the token, others because they no longer have a past to draw on. The question for France is not whether AI will kill us. It is who, here, will still be able to read the proof.
Artificial Intelligence An AI text detector isn’t a flawed tool that better engineering will eventually fix: it’s an impossible one. Large language models are trained to minimize the Kullback-Leibler divergence between their own distribution and that of human text; making statistical distinction impossible is their explicit objective. A score of “87% AI” is not evidence: it’s a probabilistic estimate over overlapping distributions, produced by a system its own makers refuse to stand behind in a disciplinary setting. OpenAI pulled its own detector in July 2023, admitting a true-detection rate of just 26%; the arms maker concedes its radar is blind, and universities keep buying licenses. To condemn a student on that basis is to punish an unlucky statistical draw: a wrong, not an error of judgment.