7/22/20
I published a new Vlog yesterday :) been a while!
6/27/20
Ok.
So let’s say I’m changing my first name… Would it make you look past the fact that I’m not as fair-skinned as other names? Like, if I get a “whiter” French name… What’s the idea, that I’ll whiten over time ? Oh sure, you “don’t even see color”. You have “a friend of a friend that’s even blacker than an Arab”, sorry.
If I was Asian and I changed my name, would that be easier for you to pronounce than “rice-paddy” ? What if I move somewhere else, do I have to change again? Is there like a clever bland name that can bypass your anger? You know, I think even if I got a more French-sounding name, you’d assume something’s up, and at some point in the conversation, you’d be like “…but what’s your real name ?”
And if I change my name, do I have to change anything else for you ? I wanna know that. Are you gonna decide how I should dress, or not dress… or if I’m a woman, how I should undress at the beach ? By the way, it’s not a great look these days, to criticize a woman for “wearing too much”. Just sayin'.
Okay, if I change my name, would you also want to change other words, that aren’t French enough for you? Like, in everyday life ? It’d be tough in the corporate world. They’ll be lost without anglicisms. No more “I’m sending it ASAP ! " “Let’s make a conf-call ! Why not ? Yes, let’s get lunch sometime ! "
Alright, if I change my name, what are you willing to change ? Say I’m down for the switch, what do you switch ? Are you gonna chill a little ? Maybe ease up a bit ? Because to me it looks like you’re just scared.
Scared to see your world change, at the hands of people like me, when you’re the one who wants me to change in the first place. I don’t even know what you want, actually. I can’t figure it out, because… You want me to change so I feel more integrated, but when I do, you think I’m “Great Replacing” you ?
If I change my name, will I finally not have to justify myself when someone who looks like me, commits a crime that doesn’t ? Or, since I’ll have changed my name, I’ll now have to apologize whenever Nicolas or Patrick screws up ? You know, as they do. Oh no you’re right, these names never need to apologize.
Alright, granted. Would it change anything for you, if the French soccer team won the World Cup twice, thanks to Frenchmen with not-so-French names ? See I’m being sarcastic, that’s as French as it gets. Ok.
Stop. Tell the truth. I was born here, but you’re still terrified
Stop. Tell the truth. You know I’m here, but you always act surprised
I’ll stop. And tell the truth I tell jokes, but that’s not really what they are.
I’ll stop. And tell the truth. I hate it, that you need to hear the truth
Stop. Tell the truth. Tell the truth. Tell the truth.
6/8/20
“France has fared better than many in the pandemic, especially when compared with the United States, Italy, Spain and especially Britain. Just don’t tell that to the French, who resent Mr. Macron for it more than ever.”
This is what I refer to when I say that my French people tend to be unreasonable… Nothing is ever good enough, regardless of results! 🤷🏻♂️
6/5/20
This week has been draining.
It’s no longer possible to stay on the sidelines and watch the situation silently. What’s happening now in the US is a fight that also happens here in France, and in many other places across Europe and around the World.
As a light continues to shine on societal inequalities in the US and the world, these are resources I have discovered that are helping to educate me on anti-racism and systemic racism. I’d like to share them below, in the hope that it helps others learn more about the situation impacting African-Americans and the Black community as a whole.
Buy some books from a local, independent, preferably black-owned bookstore. I read some of these and ordered a few more that I’m looking forward to go through this weekend:
And to my French community, most of them should be available translated in French too.
For every single one of these points, a quick search online is all you need to be literally inundated with suggestions, so please don’t be lazy.
And I’d be more than happy to look into this some more if anyone wants to reach out privately too. And obviously, feel free to share this list around you and let me know if you were able to experience some of these resources!
I hope this helps, and I look forward to living in a better world with all of you!
8/30/19
"My Kindle could’ve been a hub for all of my reading, from newsletters to newspapers to subscription sites to books. Instead, it’s a thin electronic paperback book, and that’s all. That’s not nothing—but it could’ve been so much more."
[=]
4/4/19
“I believe more travel is good for humanity. The increasing availability of travel to people of every class all over the world creates far more than economic activity. Travel dramatically increases cultural liquidity. Like financial liquidity, it is a necessity for peace, prosperity, and common human purpose.”via @mhkt
2/9/19
Today I’m turning 28.
The past year has been a whirlwind of change, between moving to Dublin, continuing to work remotely as an independent freelancer, establishing our life in Europe, and recently getting engaged and preparing to marry the love of my life and move to Paris.
I’m getting ready to join an exciting company on a full-time job for the first time in 4 years, and moving back to Paris for the first time since 2012.
Everything has had some sort of purpose and yes: only after looking back can I finally connect the dots and experiences that life has taken me through.
Today I’m turning 28. And the future’s never looked brighter!
1/11/19
For the first blogpost of 2019, allow me to start off by wishing you a Happy New Year 2019!
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last email, and the end of the year for Shana and me has been simply focused on our Winter break and on planning to move out of Dublin.
Over the first week, we left Dublin and traveled back down to the South of France to stay with my family. We spent a few days close to the seafront, meeting up with old friends in Antibes. Then we followed it with a few days in the mountains, to ski/snowboard, and celebrate Christmas all together.
Shana had only been skiing a handful of times before but she did really well and we had lots of fun taking this time to relax and appreciate our family.
She said Yes!
After the French trip, it was time to fly over to the US and spend some time with Shana’s family. This year, we hadn’t been able to make it to Thanksgiving, so it was important for us to be able to see Shana’s parents, her brother, and her sister-in-law this winter.
We had a packed week, and it’s going to take me a while to get me back to normal after all the excitement, the food, and the jet lag.
An interlude:
Shana and her brother Jason have been ice skating from a very young age, for over 20-25 years. Growing up on the ice, she competed at the highest level and even trained different teams and younger skaters. However, I had never been able to see her on the ice.
This was only my second trip over to Maryland to spend some time with Shana’s family. This time was going to be an incredibly important one: with the help of Shana’s family, I had planned to have a surprise private session at the ice rink — it was made easier by the fact that Shana’s mom is actually the director of the local ice rink.
So on Saturday December 29th 2018, after dinner, Shana, myself, her brother, Jason, and his wife, Keri, were able to skate all together. It was nothing short of amazing to see both brother and sister navigating so smoothly on the ice. Later on, I’d joke that Jason and Shana skated even better than they walked. It was a lot of fun to be introduced to something that had been such a formative part of Shana and Jason’s lives. I had seen videos of them on the ice before, but I had never witnessed it in person.
I had another surprise for Shana that evening. We had been talking about the future of our relationship, and about our aspirations in life. We were already planning to leave Dublin and we should be able to move to France together this year, going after new job opportunities and a much improved quality of life for both of us. The driving force behind these many conversations we’ve had over the past few months was our motivation to make a great life for ourselves, and build something strong together.
I had arranged to have a playlist ready to play on the speakers at the rink, and at around 10:30pm that day, I knelt down on the ice, and proposed to her. She said Yes!
Over the next couple of days, Shana and I would spend our time hanging out with her parents, her brother and sister-in-law, and her loving grandmother. We also went back to Baltimore and Philadelphia, and even spent a whole day and a half in Washington DC, staying at a hotel. As a present, Jason even invited us to see Justin Timberlake live at the Capitol One Arena, the local venue where the local NBA (🏀) team plays. Shana and I had gone there last year to see the Washington Wizards play against LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers.
Needless to say it’s been one of the most important, most meaningful, and most fun weeks of my life and I couldn’t be more grateful to be well on the way to entering another family, counting a new brother and sister (Jason & Keri), as well as having Shana’s parents into my in-laws.
So there it is: Shana and I are now engaged. For the rest, we’re planning to move to France around February/March and this should coincide with both of us finding new job opportunities as well. Once again, lots of changes, but we wouldn’t have it any other way.
12/7/18
After exploring Malaysia together, we traveled back towards the west, stopping for a week in Dubai!
Over the course of a few days, we rediscovered the old town together, as well as the Burj Khalifa — the tallest building in the world — and finished it off with an amazing safari in the Emirati desert!
12/5/18
11/6/18
“I believe it’s wrong to separate work and morality. [...] It means you should check whether the ethics and values of your employer align with your own. Especially in technology, where the impact of your work is felt by thousands or millions or even billions of people, it’s worth asking yourself more often: is the world I spend eight hours every day creating truly the world I want to live in myself?”
— @KaiBrach for @DenseDiscovery
9/18/18
I’ve been a supporter of @AS_Monaco since I was 7 years old, for the past 20 years. But what Paris has been able to accomplish from a Branding and Marketing perspective is nothing but impressive!
If you’re interested in Football/Soccer Culture and want to learn more about what France’s #ParisStGermain has been able to accomplish, this is for you!
9/2/18
Long-time and highly respected writer-turned-VC Om Malik is leaving Facebook.
“I don’t need [Facebook] and don’t miss it. (...) I left because it was making me someone I am not — someone who lives life through the eyes of others. There is a hard edge in Facebook life. People are always fronting — putting their best life forward. Just like startup life these days.”
I’ve been thinking about this for years, but while I wish I could go through with it, being an expat and living in an international relationship where both my partner’s family & friends, as well as my own, are thousands of miles away, it is near impossible to keep in touch with the Big Blue.
It’s not from lack of trying, using emails, or setting up a /now page. But the truth is that the family members and the ‘normals’ of this world (as opposed to tech-savvy or tech workers) are simply too unlikely to move away and too dependent on the platform and its services.
From the newsfeed, to Instagram, to WhatsApp and Messenger’s dominance, it’s very hard to change someone’s daily habit(s) when they’ve never given too much thought or consideration about the services and platforms that power their day-to-day.
8/3/18
From cries about “ethics in journalism” to “fake news,” journalists have been increasingly targeted by people acting in bad faith who do not care about the work they do, the challenges they face, or the actual context of their statements. Online trolls and harassers want us, the Times, and other newsrooms to waste our time by debating their malicious agenda. They take tweets and other statements out of context because they want to disrupt us and harm individual reporters. The strategy is to divide and conquer by forcing newsrooms to disavow their colleagues one at a time. This is not a good-faith conversation; it’s intimidation
7/12/18
My dad found these photos from 20 years ago on the day, when France won the World Cup back in 1998! #WorldCup #FRA #AllezLesBleus #FiersDetreBleus
6/22/18
6/13/18
@adders:
“I'd rather enjoy myself creating stuff for a smaller, more forgiving and more engaged audience, than exhaust myself competing for an ever-bigger audience. That, after all, was the idea behind working part time, and staying self-employed, rather than continuing to crawl my way up the corporate ladder”
[=]
6/7/18
We’re trained from an early age to associate the word “luxury” with the spending of money; with gilded extravagance and overconsumption. But the world, life, is full of tiny luxuries: indulgences of the sort that are easy to overlook if you’re not seeking them out and paying close attention.
5/31/18
Like Casey Newton mentioned in his amazing newsletter: “The Interface”, the interview of Snapchat’s CEO Evan Spiegel at this year’s Code Conference is well worth watching!
[Spiegel is] his company’s most effective salesman by far.
5/26/18
5/24/18
So Instapaper is temporarily shutting off access for European users due to GDPR…
But the comment of the day goes to:
Thankfully, a handful of privacy-minded fellow europeans came to the rescue in the comment section: 
5/17/18
5/16/18
If you’re in the US, you should really support and have a look at Within
Personally, I’d love to support these amazing women, but I can’t justify $30 shipping fees on top of a $40 project backing. However, I’m happy to share the word to support this amazing project!
5/15/18
ICYMI, the latest episode of The Verge’s Vergecast Podcast is incredibly thoughtful.
Over the hour-long episode, it sums up a lot of my own interrogations, fears and doubt about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and the ethics behind these emerging technologies that haven’t matured and for which no one has a blueprint yet.
These are things that have been on my mind for the past few years, and especially this past week with the Google Duplex news (aka a Robot Assistant pretends to be human and schedules stuff for you.)
5/15/18
”Today many crypto investors are drunk with greed. They believe the Big Lie that this is a democracy where they can now get rich like all the venture capitalists, because they hear it wherever they go to read about investing in crypto.”
5/11/18
Holy Smokes, this new season of Atlanta was even better than the first: slower, realler, darker, and overall so much better!
I really hope FX renews it for another 2/3 seasons!
5/10/18
(This book was recommended by a heavy-reading couple of friends — thanks a ton Daniel & Kim!)
Looking back in the past few years, the Syrian Crisis and related forced migrations might have been one of the biggest and most important stories of the decade.
This is the background for Mohsin Hamid’s book “Exit West”. Despite the several surrealistic elements, it is a book that looks at the present and tries to paint a difficult if optimistic snapshot of what the world is, and what it may turn out to be.
Through the perspective of two young lovers (and countless other migrants around the world), we are transported throughout the globe, left to reflect upon man-made crisis and how to deal with influx of migrants in the most humane way possible.
This book does a lot in terms of empathy towards people facing difficult conflicts, and although the plot tends to accelerate or jump ahead of time quite a bit towards the end, it does so as a way to push you deeper into its character’s’ story.
I really enjoyed this book and it’s been a while since something hit me in the feels the way “Exit West” did.
5/9/18
With Shana being away this week, I’m treating myself by going to the movie. As it happens, our local indie cinema is showing Road-themed movies in their mobile cinema truck this week.
Tonight, it’s all about ”Drive”
5/9/18
4/30/18
