Articles and reflections

It is a late-summer afternoon and the beach is starting to empty. A little further along there is a group of friends I know well: beach umbrellas set close together, a shared cool box, someone loudly telling a story the others have already heard, and everyone laughing as if it were the first time. My son watches them for a while, then turns to me and says, with that disarming naturalness only young people have: “But they can’t stand each other. And yet they’re always together.” I didn’t answer straight away. I had spent a lot of time with that group, gladly and with the kindness I try to show everyone, and I had never really asked myself what held it together. Yet the clues were there. In the confidences I received, each of them had something to say about the others: judgements whispered after a dinner, ironic remarks about whoever had just left, the openly admitted weariness of having to meet up again the following Saturday. And the following Saturday, without fail, everyone met up...

What gets decided in the few seconds when a teacher doesn’t answer First day of lessons with a first-year class. We are still taking each other’s measure: I don’t know their names, they don’t know who I am. A girl is sitting with her back to me. I ask her, kindly, to turn round and not to stay facing away while we’re having the lesson. “Bro, fuck off.” For those who don’t spend their mornings in school corridors: “bro” comes from “brother”. Among teenagers it’s a familiar way of addressing each other, almost a verbal tic. Aimed at a teacher you’ve only just met, and followed by those two words, it becomes something else. It closes the distance and strikes at it in the same moment. I didn’t answer straight away. I stayed silent for a few seconds. It is those seconds I’d like to write about. A sentence said in front of everyone An insult received one to one can sometimes be allowed to drop. In front of a class it’s different, because a class is an audience, and an audience waits...

It’s almost half past eleven. After an argument, you want to write a message to say sorry. You’ve started three: one too cold, one too long, one that sounded like an excuse. So you open an app and type: “Help me apologise sincerely, without sounding syrupy.” A few seconds later the text is there. It is balanced, warm, even beautiful. Your finger hovers over “send”. Do those words really say what you feel? Or do they express something that sounds good, but that you haven’t yet made your own? The question concerns artificial intelligence, but it touches an older one: what makes the words we address to others our own? An old kind of help Asking for help to find the words is nothing new. People who could not write could turn to a public scribe. We buy greeting cards with ready-printed phrases. We ask a friend to read over an important letter. A card bought at the stationer’s doesn’t necessarily make the affection of the person who signs it false. And someone who struggles to express...