Philosophy When a carmaker discovers a defective part, it issues a recall notice. France has never done so for its intellectual products. Yet Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze supplied the mechanisms that American campuses assembled into an identitarian war machine, with no manual and no safeguards, while their authors looked on, flattered. Forty years later the product is coming back to us by the containerload, and indictments are no longer enough. Here is the recall notice, and the warranty work starts now.
Politics Every year in France, nearly 50 billion euros in public funding flows into the nonprofit sector. Behind the legitimate delivery of public services hides a major democratic drift: the funding of organizations whose sole activity is manufacturing rules and influencing policy. Subsidized by the very State they claim to watch, these groups use taxpayer money to wage permanent legal warfare, paralyzing projects and replacing the voters’ ballot with litigation. By losing their financial independence, these precious countervailing powers have changed in nature. Our democracy’s watchdog has become the administration’s lapdog.
Economy A few days ago, I woke up firmly resolved to go do a little shopping. Those who know me will appreciate the scale of the sacrifice: wandering strip malls under fluorescent lights appears nowhere on my list of earthly pleasures. But sometimes you have to force yourself, if only to replace a pair of shoes […]
Politics Eric Zemmour’s debate with François Bayrou is the best France has seen in a long while: two speakers who listen, argue, and summon French history without demonizing each other. But debating well is not the same as debating the right thing. Behind one man’s civilizational hierarchy and the other’s fiscal alarm lies a shared blind spot: the 1.7-trillion-euro state machine that produces both crises at once, and that neither proposes to dismantle. With every figure checked, from the foreign holders of French debt to the wealth gap with the Netherlands, this article shows why the face-off replays Marc Bloch’s strange defeat in miniature. And why 1958, which Zemmour invokes, was saved not by an orator but by an economist.
Economy For two years now, my Logitech PRO X 2 headset, connected over Lightspeed to an Apple Silicon Mac mini, has been dropping out without warning, in total silence, taking the machine’s entire audio subsystem hostage along the way. Cross-referencing other users’ reports, the conclusion is beyond dispute: it is neither my bad luck nor my setup, but the collision of two fragilities, Logitech’s proprietary wireless and the macOS USB audio stack, made worse by its G Hub software layer. The January 2026 expired-certificate fiasco, which paralyzed G Hub on macOS alone, is the glaring proof. The Bluetooth fallback offers relative stability, but at the cost of latency and quality, which is to say a confession of failure dressed up as a feature. At 300 dollars, that is a disappointment that has cured me of the Astro A50 X and made me hesitate over my future MX Master 4.
Democracy Only a few years ago, a truck used to come down your street. You set the bin out the night before, and by morning it was empty. The service was delivered, paid for by the household waste collection tax, and written in black and white into the intercommunal budget. That truck is slowly fading from […]
Democracy 
This spring, a handsome poster made the rounds in Saint-Marcellin. It celebrated the municipal cemetery as a heritage site worth visiting, complete with a guided tour and a poetic theme devoted to the passions of the departed, all under the banner of the Printemps des cimetières, France’s national weekend of funerary-heritage discovery. The intention is […]
Digital sovereignty There is a sound I have learned to hate. It is not the neighbor’s power drill on a Sunday morning, nor the shrill chime of an incoming email, nor even the synthetic voice of the GPS scolding me when I miss an exit on purpose. No. It is that soft little “bloop,” followed by a […]
Digital sovereignty Qobuz has just announced 45.7% growth and a move into the black, a fitting vindication for a French company that bet on uncompromising quality rather than ad-funded free tiers. As a loyal user of its purchase-and-download service alone, I see in it both an aesthetic pleasure and an act of sovereignty. Yet thirteen years after paying for it, the very “Hotel California” that introduced me to the platform is now denied to me for re-download, its rights revoked by the label, its invoice vanished along with it. This mishap raises the real question, that of a “purchase” that is in truth only a revocable access license, and it reminds us that a digital good slips from our grasp the moment an intermediary holds it in our place. The only ownership that counts is the kind you bring home and hold physically in your own hands.
Philosophy If our loves last less than our parents’ did, it isn’t that we love any less well; it’s that the bars that once held couples in place, shame, religion, economic dependence, have fallen away, and that for a long time they stood in for something they were not: love. The numbers bear this out, from the peak of divorce around 1980 to its retreat among the most educated, by way of that curve of marital happiness that climbs again late in life only because the unhappy ones divorced along the way. But being in love is not love: it is merely a biological intoxication in which we project our own desires onto another, and true love begins precisely where that magic dies, in the demanding choice to take in a real human being, cracks and all. Stripped of every constraint, this discipline now rests on qualities that most people demand of others while never cultivating them in themselves. And so trust collapses, not under the blows of a few monsters, but under the millions of small cuts inflicted by perfectly ordinary people who, every time, had a good reason.