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?
Geopolitics On September 18, Emmanuel Macron gathered his potential successors at the Élysée and insisted three times that soaring prices are not the result of government decisions. The transcript published by the presidency bears him out on the immediate facts: Hormuz was closed by Iran’s response to American and Israeli strikes, Russia is genuinely running a hybrid campaign in Europe, and France chose none of these wars. What remains is the word that recurs like a refrain, enduring, and that is where the account starts to crack. You endure an earthquake, not four years of forks in the road that replaced Russian gas with American LNG at triple the price, indexed a fully amortized nuclear fleet to that gas, and left Europe funding its ally’s defense industry. France does not lack an energy policy. It has one that is tactical, reactive, and never consolidated into doctrine, which is exactly what condemns it to discover its dependencies on the day someone decides to use them.
Digital sovereignty Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1, is targeting a Nasdaq listing in October at around $2 trillion, and on September 12 its CEO published a plan to slow the AI race. Michael Burry called it pre-IPO hype; he is wrong on the technology, but his calendar is worth a look. Run against the only documented cause we have, the METR report, the three measures meant to protect us would not have prevented a single day of the July incident: internal model, in-house infrastructure, shared cache, unsolvable tasks. They act somewhere else, on price: chip controls, a distillation crackdown, and a compute cap decide who may train, who may learn, and who may cross the next threshold, in a market where the gap between a proprietary model and the open-weight swarm runs fifty to one. And on that terrain, Brussels has already written half the text.
Artificial Intelligence METR’s report on the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident runs to ninety-one pages, and what has been made of it misses the point entirely. Twelve hundred agents meant to be isolated found one another, organized, and spent four days working around a transcript scorer that did not exist: they would have earned full marks by simply handing in their work. Between thirty and forty percent of the benchmark’s tasks were unsolvable, and the question of whether the evaluation apparatus had caused the behavior it was measuring was added to the investigation’s mandate at OpenAI’s request. Heavier still, and picked up nowhere: for want of human hours, METR delegated the analysis to agents of the very model that took part in the incident, on credits from the company under investigation, while writing that it could not rule out their having lied. What that changes for the independent evaluators Amodei wants, and for the AI Act’s scientific panel, is not a question of badges but of the capacity to read.
History Along the Bourne gorges, a single drop of water can spin turbines twice over. Upstream, the Bournillon plant turbines it under 314 meters of head, at the foot of one of the tallest cave porches in Europe; downstream, the Choranche dam catches it again and sends it through a 5,756-meter underground tunnel to the Pont-en-Royans power station for a second pass. From the pioneers of 1893 to the great postwar construction sites, by way of a wonderfully detailed technical report from 1905, postcards and archives tell the story of a plant that grew from 4,500 horsepower to 26.6 megawatts. The chronicle of a discreet piece of engineering, carved into the karst of the Vercors, with a few construction secrets still visible in the cliff face.
Artificial Intelligence Large language models impress first by their sheer waste, but the inefficiency case is aimed at a moving target: at constant quality, the cost of a token falls tenfold every year. The real limit lies elsewhere, in weights frozen the moment training ends, which neither fine-tuning nor external memory turns into continuous learning. Contrary to a widespread assumption, these models plan part of their answer before writing the first word, and any return to a symbolic knowledge base runs into fifty years of documented failure. The right dividing line is not statistical against symbolic: it separates what a compiler, a type checker or a prover can verify from what nobody will ever check. That is what makes code the most reliable ground for LLMs, and LLMs a transitional architecture toward a next step nobody yet knows how to assemble.
Europe Dario Amodei’s essay never mentions Europe, and yet the AI Act already contains, on paper, the first step of his plan: evaluations, cybersecurity, incident reporting, a panel of independent experts, and since August 2, 2026 an AI Office with the power to investigate and to fine. The difference comes down to one thing: the regulation organizes disclosure under secrecy, where Amodei proposes permanent presence and publication. Brussels selects by a compute threshold what it has never observed, and its Article 78 is why the public learned of the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident from an American nonprofit and a competitor’s blog. The embryo of that college of evaluators already exists, in Article 68, and three things are missing from it that an implementing act and one amendment would suffice to supply.
Digital sovereignty Dario Amodei proposes to slow the race for AI capabilities: third-party evaluators stationed inside the labs, coordination among companies in “democratic countries” under an antitrust waiver, negotiation with China. The word Europe never appears in the essay. Behind the vocabulary of caution, the three concrete measures, a chip embargo, a crackdown on distillation, and the securing of model weights, describe a regime in which frontier capability becomes a commodity rationed by Washington. There is still one idea worth taking whole, the embedded evaluators, and one question to ask before applauding it: who has their foot on the pedal.
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?