Politics We keep hearing that the French Grand Prix vanished because Formula 1 got too expensive, but money is only half the story. The real lock is political: in a country where the car has become a negative symbol and every public euro is scrutinized, no leader can fund luxury race cars without setting off a firestorm. France isn’t alone in this, either; F1’s economic model is driving the entire old continent out in favor of the Gulf and the United States, customers who pay cash and decide without asking the public’s opinion. That said, the bill is real and the return on investment seriously contested, which makes the taxpayer’s skepticism perfectly defensible. So this absence isn’t an anomaly to be corrected, it’s a revelation of what we’ve become.
Artificial Intelligence There are two ways to read the announcement of dynamic workflows in Claude Code, published on May 28. The first, the one everyone will repeat, fits in the tagline: work you used to plan in quarters now wraps up in a matter of days. The second hides in a quiet note, repeated twice in the […]
Economy At the corner newsstand, a front page catches my eye, I hand over a few coins, and I walk off with the paper, with no one asking me to commit for twelve months. Online, that instinct hits a wall: the article I want, I can’t buy, I’m offered only a subscription at “1 € for the first month,” an auto-renewal trap calibrated on my forgetfulness. Yet the willingness to pay is there, and so is the micropayment plumbing; if it isn’t offered to me, that’s not technical incapacity but commercial calculation. The rare platforms that tried pay-per-article didn’t die for want of readers: they were smothered by publishers bent on protecting their subscription funnel. So I take a pass, every time, and each locked paywall loses the euro it could have collected on the spot.
Cars Ferrari has unveiled its first electric car, the Luce, designed by Jony Ive and his studio LoveFrom: 1,050 horsepower, 550,000 euros, and the silhouette of an iPhone on wheels with nothing Italian left about it. The reception has been brutal. Montezemolo fears “the destruction of a myth,” Briatore piles on, and the stock has plunged six to eight percent in a matter of hours. Behind the car lies an entire Europe, one capable of regulating its decline but no longer of building its future, ready to sacrifice Scaglietti and Pininfarina on the altar of a transition nobody asked for. Which leaves the real question: does our civilization still have anything to offer, or must we now look to Cupertino for what Maranello once knew how to invent?
Cars Two euros to inflate your own tires is air resold at forty times its cost, a markup of nearly 4,000%. The richest part is that the motorway network, no stranger to easy rents, guarantees free air precisely where safety demands it, while your corner station bills you for it. You can invoke maintenance, real estate, or razor-thin fuel margins all you like: between a defensible few dozen cents and two euros collected, the gulf stays wide open. A small, barely approximate calculation of the most discreet racket on the forecourt.
Culture For weeks I believed I had coined a word the language was missing: “simplexity,” that quality of things that look simple yet conceal a perfectly tamed complexity underneath. One quick check, and the whole thing collapsed: the word already exists, signed Alain Berthoz (Collège de France, Académie des sciences), complete with a book, an English translation, and a conference. Worse, Berthoz didn’t coin it either. But this is where the story gets delicious: going after a simple word and landing on a complexity that’s already mapped is precisely what simplexity describes. I set out to name the thing, and the thing ended up naming me.
Cars A phone maker just beat Audi and Porsche at the Nürburgring with the YU7 GT, and its electric motor already speaks our language: torque, efficiency, rpm, internal components. Mechanical fascination isn’t dying, it’s just changing addresses, and the very name of the unit, “V8S EVO,” gives away that the mystique of the combustion engine is still the most powerful selling point of all. But let’s distrust formulas that are too neat: this is neither an eternal recurrence nor a clean substitution. It’s a molt. The machinery persists and even hardens, the geek joins the mechanic rather than replacing him, and the sensual side reinvents itself in the whine of a rotor at 28,000 rpm. One question remains: will we know how to pass the old thrill on to those who will only ever have known the new?
Economy In May 2026, an audit uncovered management failures at Duralex and put court-ordered restructuring back on the horizon, within two weeks of the deadline I had predicted six months earlier. Behind the genteel language of “approximations” lies a perfectly clear mechanism: the former director’s son catapulted into the role of chief financial officer, a symptom of cooperative governance that ended up reproducing the worst habits of the most dysfunctional family-run business. But the worker cooperative is only a surface-level factor, because keeping a mass-production glassworks running in a country that is busy deindustrializing, all while maintaining some of the highest labor costs and energy prices in the world, was a near-impossible mission from the start. The most galling part is that the audit now dismantles a miracle the State and the media had themselves stage-managed, with a heavy dose of emotion and public subsidies. Hats off to the workers, the only people in this whole story with nothing to answer for.
Artificial Intelligence Clients ask me to bolt an AI chatbot onto their sites all the time, and those sites run on everything: Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, sometimes abandoned custom builds. But “which plugin?” is never the right question: an AI chatbot is two layers people almost always conflate, the widget delivery and the brain that answers. The entire decision sorts onto a single scale, from locked-in turnkey where you control nothing, all the way to a pipeline you fully own. For a single client, turnkey is plenty; for an agency banking reusable knowledge across a whole fleet, owning the brain becomes an asset. Here’s the framework I use to decide, CMS by CMS, with Shopify leading the way.
Artificial Intelligence I get asked constantly to bolt an AI chatbot onto client sites, and those sites run on everything: Shopify, WordPress, Drupal, sometimes some abandoned custom build. But “which plugin?” is never the right question. An AI chatbot is really two layers that almost everyone lumps together: the delivery of the widget and the brain that does the answering. The entire decision sits on a single scale, running from the locked-down turnkey solution where you control nothing, all the way to a pipeline you own outright. For a single client, turnkey is more than enough; for an agency looking to build up reusable knowledge across a whole fleet of sites, owning the brain becomes a real asset. Here’s the framework I use to settle it, CMS by CMS, starting with Shopify.