Philosophy Desire feeds on uncertainty, a relationship promises security, and we spend our lives locking up what ought to breathe. From the Capilano suspension bridge to Tristan and Isolde, the thrill binds us far more tightly than constancy ever could, right up to the point where vertigo becomes a fall. An interview with Amélie Nothomb opened a door I had never thought to push: fidelity rests on a promise, exclusivity on a fence. To love someone who could leave, and who stays, may be the only vertigo that wounds no one.
Society McDonald’s is putting $8.5 billion into repairing a promise it broke itself: the fast-food chain has become slower than a brasserie, more expensive for less on the plate, and too dirty to make you want to sit down. One Sunday, there was not even any meat left. Three merits still hold, and no more: a partly French supply chain, the absence of halal meat, and hours almost no one else offers. Without them, I would rather suck on pebbles than leave this chain so much as a cent.
Politics On September 25, Emmanuel Macron was hoping for a state visit: the Republican Guard, the Legion of Honor, a few minutes with the pope inside Notre-Dame. Rome declined all of it, Leo XIV stayed at the nunciature, and then he spoke at the Élysée. Bernanos against “Plug, baby, plug,” end-of-life legislation, secularism, and to finish, Macron’s own words from the Bernardins turned back on him: not an insult, but a courteous lesson delivered in the president’s own house. That is precisely what makes it so formidable.
Society No society has endured without the sacred, and France has let its own die out. The republican mystique held the country together for a century, then nothing replaced it, while forty thousand churches crumble in the care of a Republic that owns them but has walked away. I argue for a laïcité that owns who we are: complete freedom of worship for all, but public upkeep of Christian buildings and Christian visibility protected by law. This is not an anthropological necessity; it is an identity choice, and I own it. The state oversees the stone, never the faith.
Technology Daniel Selsam has worked on capabilities at OpenAI since 2022, has not resigned, and on September 14 had a former employee of the lab publish a statement making this argument: models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe nobody is watching. Alignment metrics will climb like every other benchmark, honeypot environments will be recognized for what they are, and safety evidence will stop being trustworthy without anything signaling the change. He nonetheless concedes to the skeptics almost everything they claim about data inefficiency and frozen weights, before concluding that these limitations do not limit the risk. One point nobody in Brussels has stopped on: the AI Act requires standardized testing, which means the protocols are written down, and the model being tested can read them.
Culture Japanese has a word for the light that filters through leaves, English borrows terroir for lack of anything better, and French had to wait for the Franks and the Arabs before it could name the color blue. These words are not travel trivia: each one is a distinction that generations judged worth keeping, and a language’s vocabulary is the archive of what its speakers took the trouble to notice. Because words do not only describe what we see, they teach us what to look at. Which is what makes the simplification of school texts so strange: replacing a rare word with a vague one does not lighten a sentence, it takes from a child a distinction he may now never make.
Politics A butler at the prime minister’s residence taken into custody over a cocaine handoff. An adviser to the prime minister carried out of a party by paramedics after an overdose. A former Attal spin doctor who says he was “blowing his brains out” on coke while at the finance ministry. A France Télévisions journalist describing deliveries made within steps of government ministries. In June 2026, Sébastien Lecornu had his ministers, their staffs, his prefects and his ambassadors tested for drugs, then refused to release a single figure. Parliament, which writes the country’s narcotics laws, called the idea of testing itself “ridiculous.” This piece asserts nothing and proves nothing. It lines up three years of public facts and asks the one question they leave open: since when does an institution refuse an exam it is certain to pass?
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.
Cars Before long, driving a car by hand will be illegal as ordinary transportation, the way smoking on an airplane eventually became unthinkable. It won’t start with a decree but with an insurance premium. The Cybercab launch in Austin, Waymo’s 200 million driverless miles, and France’s six-week reversal on Tesla’s FSD all point the same way. This piece makes that case, states plainly what could prove it wrong, and ends with a confession: writing it mostly made me want to go driving.
Surveillance and civil liberties I rented a camera lens, and thirty minutes after delivery my phone warned me that an unknown AirTag was moving with me. Under the foam padding sat a tracker with an inventory number written in marker: AT 102. Protecting an asset handed to strangers is entirely legitimate, but a tracker that sleeps at my house for five days does not record a lens moving around, it records me. I only found out because of Apple’s anti-stalking alert, and not because of a line in the rental terms. The case does not turn on the principle of tracking. It turns on the silence around it.