I once overheard a woman on a train say, almost to herself, "We don't buy time, we borrow it." It lodged in my head like a pebble in a shoe. Within a few hours it had become the scaffold for an essay — not because the sentence was perfect, but because it offered a hinge: a surprising claim that...
Sep 28, 2026
• by Élise Laurent
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I started doing a small experiment on a bleak November evening, partly because my mornings had been a battleground of nagging to-dos and low-grade dread. The idea was absurdly simple: before bed, spend five minutes scanning the room and naming aloud five objects that mattered for the next day—keys, wallet, train pass, gym kit, work laptop. The rule was strict only in its brevity. No lists on my...
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I have long believed that a single fruit can anchor a year of meals, small moments and gatherings. Pears do that for me: they’re gentle, versatile and forgiving, slipping from crisp snack to melting poached jewel with the same kind of humility I admire. In this piece I share idées gourmandes à base de poires — 20 recipes, approaches and riffs that let you enjoy pears all year round. I’ll...
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I have a soft spot for small, inexpensive objects that unexpectedly change the way I think. A cheap Muji notebook—thin paperback, minimal cover, cream paper—has become one of those modest allies. There is something about that blank grid or ruled page that invites a kind of attention apps and endless tabs rarely coax out: the kind of thinking that is slow, visible and amendable. I started...
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I have a small ritual that has quietly changed the way I move through cities and cafés: the five-minute café question. It’s a tiny conversational experiment — equal parts curiosity and constraint — that turns a brief, awkward exchange into something unexpectedly warm and human. Over time I’ve used it to open conversations with strangers while waiting in line, sitting at communal tables,...
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There’s a book on my shelf that I never open. Not because it’s rare or valuable, or even because it’s terrible—but because it feels like a small archaeological artifact of a person I used to be. When friends notice it they often ask, half-joking, “Do you still like that?” and I give the practiced shrug of someone who knows better than to explain. The book stays. It stubbornly refuses...
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I spent a month photographing empty chairs. It started as an experiment — a small, quiet challenge to myself to notice the everyday furniture that usually disappears into the background of life. I wanted to see what an ordinary object could reveal about presence and absence, about the things we assume are neutral but that in fact carry stories, habits and ghosts of conversations.Why...
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I found the postcard wedged behind a stack of mail on the windowsill, face down, its stamp still crisp and the handwriting faintly tilted as if whoever wrote it had been in a hurry and also smiling. I had known it was there — I remembered putting it on the sill a year ago when work felt hurried and the day felt full — but I hadn’t opened it. Not then. Not for a long time. Leaving it unread...
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I have a small ritual for walks now: before I step outside I ask myself, "What would a stranger notice?" It sounds like a strange prompt — intentionally so — and it has a way of changing the geometry of attention. The question nudges me out of familiar routes and habitual gazes and into a state of gentle curiosity. Over the past few years, asking it has turned ordinary walks into short...
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I own a shelf of mugs. That sentence sounds trivial until you notice, as I often do, that one of them is very much not like the others. It’s smaller, its glaze is a different kind of blue, there’s a faint hairline crack near the handle and a sticker from a weekend pottery market still clinging to the base. The rest of the collection obeys a palette — soft creams, speckled stoneware and a...
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I once found myself standing in a small supermarket aisle at three in the afternoon, staring at the back of a biscuit packet as if it might reveal some private truth about the world. It sounds ridiculous — who studies the ingredients on a family-size pack of Hobnobs for fun? — but that quiet piece of plastic taught me more about cultural history than a semester of lectures ever did. The...
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