Documenting January's artistic vandalism in the underground — Last month, I wrote about vandalised advertising posters in the Paris metro — and my ongoing efforts to document them. Since then, I’ve been taking the project more seriously than ever. And boy, has January been a fruitful month. While walking through subterranean tunnels, I’ve found dozens of posters bearing…

The story of a design icon in the City of Lights — What’s the most iconic thing in Paris? If someone asked you the question, you’d probably say the Eiffel Tower. And you’d be right. But there’s another icon in the City of Light that, in my view, should be as celebrated as Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 edifice — the famous green SENAT…

A review of Guy Deutscher's 'Through the Looking Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages' — When you study translation theory, you quickly establish a couple of things: 1) Academics can’t agree on anything; and 2) Reading articles about language can be pretty tough-going. Like many academic articles, pieces on language can often suffer from turgid prose. But thankfully, not all authors possess the gift of…

Enhance your imagination, one exposure at a time — Writing and photography might seem pretty odd bedfellows. While the former traffics in words, the latter is decidedly visual. What’s more, since writers tend to think more in words than in pictures, photography might not seem the most obvious hobby to practice. But in my experience, photography is the ideal…

Documenting artistic vandalism in the French capital's underground — At the end of Federico Fellini’s 1960 film La Dolce Vita, a group of adults pull a mysterious sea creature out of the ocean. While they’re inspecting its large vacant eyes, Marcello Mastroianni’s character notes that it “insiste a guardare”. Although dead, it “insists on looking” anyway. I sometimes think…

How I made an ad about New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's baby — When Jacinda Ardern was Prime Minister of New Zealand, she was a rock star of global politics. …

A photo essay of Paris amidst a garbage collection strike — For the last few weeks, Paris has been slowly turning into a landfill. Ever since fonctionnaires, or civil servants, went on strike to protest the government’s retirement age reforms, rubbish hasn’t been collected in 10 of the capital’s 20 arrondissements. The result is that, over the course of a month…

I wish I could forget it — Of all the photos I took in 2020, this one lingers the longest. I was walking through the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris when I came to a bridge that connected the forest with Neuilly. …

Imagining an AI chatbot that can automate the advertising client feedback process — There’s currently a lot of talk about how artificial intelligence can generate art, copy and structural unemployment. But while AI may eventually replace creatives, no one has brought up how AI could do away with the people on the other side of the presentation room — the clients. If coming…