Our relationship to children

Two weeks ago my oldest had some fever. Result is he didn't go to school and stayed at home with us. Since Mat went to Paris I was alone with both kids on Thursday. We dropped the youngest at school and then, I spent the whole day with the oldest. There were many scenarios for this specific day. The most common one being: putting the kid under the 'digital nanny' supervision -- aka movies on the laptop -- and trying to work as much as possible in the meantime.

I chose another one: dropping everything I 'had to' do for work and spend the whole day playing, discussing, cooking, exploring with him. We're still early 2024 but I can tell this was my best day of the year so far.

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Assorted links from week4, 2024

I decided lately to bookmark the best pieces of content I was coming across. You can find everything in this collection on Sublime.

🎶 Yancey talks about Pitchfork, music criticism, and culture after prestige in The prestige recession.

Instead, art and culture have been safely neutralized as interchangeable commercial objects just like everything else. […]

At its best, cultural criticism is love and art that exists to give love to other expressions of art. It’s beautiful in its indulgence. A positive feedback loop that gives everybody exactly what they desire. Gods, scribes, muses, an audience, a culmination. This is what we want out of art. Something that feels grand, meaningful, connected to the ages. That doesn’t happen on its own. It needs context, dedicated space, deeper knowledge, appreciation.

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Assorted links from week3, 2024

I come across a lot of content during the week. I detailed some of my habits in how I read. I decided lately to bookmark the best pieces. So if you're curious or want to dig more, you can everything in this collection on Sublime.

✈️ Mat gives some backstory about her, Max and I and how our relationship with obects got impacted by our lifestyle during the past 15 years: 18 moves across 4 continents. Which also lead to Objet at the end.

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What I've read in 2023

I don't really remember why exactly I started such a list back in the day but it is now a ritual I'm eager to go through. It makes me reflect on the past year through unexpected ways and discover some hidden trends about me, or see the impact of some changes in my life. Previous years are here: 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. Numbers wise it goes like this: read 21 books in 2019, 26 in 2020, 28 in 2021, 30 in 2022, and 31 in 2023. Last year being still fresh in my mind, I do remember last quarter was more challenging. I was at 24 books read by the end of August -- typically I read 6 books in 2 months during my summer in the US -- and then only 7 between Sept. and Xmas. Which is not that big of a deal in terms of number or anything, just a reminder to me than the last 4 months of the year, back home, with both kids back to school, were more agitated than planned initially.

I detailed how I read recently. I start 2024 with a little change: no more online reading during weekends; magazines only. I'm loving this already.

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Week2, 2024 assorted links

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Welcoming a bunch of my oldest friends home for Christmas, and talking with them about all their family dynamics, I realised some impacts of the current trend: less kids in total; that you start having later in life.

A study recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explored how the size and structure of families will change by the end of the century.

And yes, it’ll mostly mean: “smaller family networks, more great-grandparents, and fewer cousins.”

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Some intentions and desires for 2024

Happy new year y'all. I don't really know what to think about the New Year's resolutions tradition. Which made me curious about the whole thing in the first place: where did New Year's reolutions come from? I learnt a few things:

  • Ancient Babylonians might have been the first people to make New Year's resolutions 4,000 years ago
  • Romans apparently did the same in 46 BC. Something I had no idea: January's name was inspired by Janus, the God with two faces -- one symbolically looking back, and one looking ahead

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Your decision-making skill, focus and working hard

I decided to launch my first startup I was still a young 20-ish student. Back in 2011 in France, there weren't much to rely on. Which - in retrospect - was most probably the beauty of it all. And I've to say this kind of wild-west created very strong and authentic bonds between many 'players'. Typically in my case, we rented out one little room in the basement of the first office of a fresh brand named Jimmy Fairly [still around and thriving -- think of it as the french version of Warby Parker] and that's also where I met Stan; now Dust co-founder.

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Logging nov. 21st, 2023

11:37am

This morning while bringing the kids to school, I realised there were more bicycles than I first thought. Usually, when it rains and the temperature is cold, we're one of the very few on the road. But this morning was different. Not only were there more bikes than anticipated [which is great], I also noticed how well equipped for rain everyone was; with rain overpants, poncho and all. When you look at data around why people don't ride bikes, weather is one of the top [beyond security of course; and terrain]. So this morning was a great sign.

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