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.
Justice The murder of little Lyhanna Rameau Bernard revived, within hours, the two totems of the news cycle, the death penalty and chemical castration, the latter backed by 83% of the French in a CSA poll. We pretend not to know that it has existed since 1998, that it remains tied to medical consent, and that the word “mandatory” shatters against the refusal to conscript a doctor. But the real scandal lies elsewhere: triptorelin, used to chemically castrate an adult rapist, is exactly the molecule, Decapeptyl, that we inject into children, within its marketing authorization for precocious puberty and off-label as a “puberty blocker” for minors questioning their gender. Here is the world turned upside down: what we hesitate to impose on our worst criminals in the name of bodily integrity, we administer to healthy children in the name of a fashion, without the slightest proof that the effects on bone and brain are reversible. For what would have saved Lyhanna was not a syringe, but a justice system that acts on complaints instead of filing them away.
Cryptocurrency A crypto trading bot seduces the developer because it weds technical mastery to the promise of passive income, and that is precisely what should raise a flag. The decorrelation argument has collapsed: the correlation between Bitcoin and equities now peaks during crashes, exactly when you would want it to vanish. The supposed edge of an amateur bot does not exist against algorithmic firms, and paper trading systematically lies upward by ignoring the slippage and taker fees that devour the alpha on every round trip. Even when justified, a crypto sleeve is sized in a risk budget and falls to 1 to 3 percent of capital, a stake utterly out of proportion to the engineering effort a bot demands. That leaves only the honest question: are we after a technical hobby or a wealth-building tool, since automated DCA and rebalancing by API serve real capital where the bot serves only a fantasy.
Cars I haven’t given up on the 24 Hours of Le Mans out of weariness: the racing has never been stronger, yet the experience offered to the spectator has never been worse. Soaring prices, crowds crushed onto the Dunlop bridge, public access points sold off to private enclosures, and a logistical rout that begins well before the turnstiles: you pay more and more to see less and less. The root of the problem is simple: the ACO is an automobile club that masters the track, but welcoming hundreds of thousands of people is a profession in its own right, one that should be handed to specialists in managing large public crowds. That it can be done, the Nürburgring proves every year, drawing as many people as Le Mans across twenty-five kilometers where you can finally breathe. Until the Sarthe treats its spectators with the same seriousness it gives its drivers, I have taken to voting with my feet, and heading to Spa.
Artificial Intelligence US export controls were meant to strangle Chinese AI; instead they taught it frugality, and frugality became its pricing weapon. DeepSeek, Qwen, and the swarm of open-weight models now deliver good enough at a fraction of the Western price, which is all it takes to tip the overwhelming majority of use cases. But the market hasn’t tipped where people think: the absolute frontier stays American, and the real moat, distribution, already has the hyperscalers reselling the Chinese commodity on their own compute. For Europe, defaulting to the Hangzhou API means swapping one suzerain for another, when the only real exit, self-hosting open weights, is no free lunch. What remains to be seen is whether the continent will build the conditions, regulatory and industrial, that make this reflex something more than the gesture of an enlightened minority.
Artificial Intelligence On June 8, 2026, Apple unveiled the third generation of its Foundation Models, with one of the most ingenious on-device architectures on the market: AFM 3 Core Advanced stores twenty billion parameters in flash memory and activates only a few of them, routing its experts by prompt rather than by token. Yet the feat is nothing spontaneous, since it is the industrial extension of the 2023 paper “LLM in a flash” that Apple’s marketing would rather leave unmentioned. But behind the on-device brilliance sits a heavier surrender: all five models are co-designed with Google, pre-trained on its TPUs, and the most capable of them runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google Cloud. The company that had made vertical integration and “designed by Apple” its creed now rents its cutting-edge horsepower from a competitor, precisely where it had promised the most independence. And all the while, the Digital Markets Act keeps Siri AI off Europeans’ iPhones and iPads with no timeline, a fitting illustration of a continent that excels at regulating a match it no longer plays.
Economy 780 arrests, two deaths, bus shelters in flames: every big match now replays the same ritual, in which winning is little more than a pretext. A good moment to think back on 1998, the most fully realized World Cup down to its smallest detail, and the last one you could watch anywhere, in the clear, with no subscriptions to stack. Back then soccer was a commons, and the elation spilled into the streets without setting them alight. Twenty-eight years on, the spectacle has been walled off behind a paywall, and the celebration has slid into mere venting. Scrambled on one side, burned on the other: in between lay a kind of soccer you could still love without paying twice.
Digital sovereignty The PEA was created to finance European companies, and yet millions of French savers use it to bet on the S&P 500. The key to this paradox lies in a little-known contract, the swap, which lets a fund hold European shares while paying the saver American performance. Far from a makeshift, this arrangement exploits an American tax quirk that often lets it beat physical ownership, but it rests on three dependencies you do not control: a bank, a foreign tax authority, and a regulatory framework. The replication is excellent and the returns are there, but you do not own America: you are leasing its performance. And that distinction, painless as long as all goes well, takes on its full meaning the day something seizes up.
Economy Michelin isn’t a company that’s dying: it posts 1.7 billion euros in profit, announces a 2-billion share buyback, and in the same breath eliminates up to 1,500 jobs in France, two-thirds of them white-collar. This isn’t bankruptcy, it’s arbitrage: employing people in France has become a cost line that a champion in perfect health coldly optimizes. When the CEO himself points to a punitive regulatory environment, this is no longer about the economic climate, it’s a verdict. You don’t feel the debt, but 1,500 jobs in Clermont, you feel. The country doesn’t collapse all at once: it empties out one announcement at a time, cleanly, politely, voluntarily.