We mistakenly reason in terms of the whole and the average, without realizing that what really matters lies in the extremes and their frequency. Yet today, “standard deviations”—which measure the dispersion of data around the mean—are increasing in nearly every…
Listening to the debates in France today—which, for the moment, resemble those that preceded the election of a village mayor in 1920 more than a presidential campaign in 2026—I get the feeling that too few candidates understand, or are willing…
If we want to avoid stumbling over an obstacle, it’s best to walk with our eyes open. Yet when we suggest adopting the same attitude toward the future, we’re labeled pessimists or Cassandras—and all too often discredited. Today more than…
The terrible wildfires currently ravaging the world—and France in particular—are a manifestation of today’s generation’s lack of respect for the past, the present, and the future. For the past, because these fires are the result of excessive human interference with…
When asked a few days ago on France Culture by journalist Guillaume Erner about the modern resurgence of antisemitism—at the very moment that Marc Bloch, a French Jewish historian executed by the Nazis for his resistance activities, was being laid…
What connection is there between a contemporary French environmental activist and a great Italian novel written seventy years ago? In *The Baron in the Trees*, Italian novelist Italo Calvino tells the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a twelve-year-old aristocrat…
As populist parties are set to come to power everywhere, we must return to the fundamentals: I have often pointed out (particularly in *The Nomadic Man*, published in 2003) the fundamental distinction between two ways of life: nomadic and sedentary….
There is a temptation as old as nations themselves: that of owing nothing to anyone, of closing one’s borders to create a self-sufficient territory, sheltered from shifting alliances and supplier blackmail. This temptation has resurfaced with a vengeance since the…
At a time when the world is undergoing a multifaceted crisis whose scope and depth few people are willing to acknowledge, and when the most astonishing technologies are severing our connection to reality and work, in most democratic countries, political…
