Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Mar 13, 2025 | worksinprogress.co | Ruxandra Teslo |Samuel Watling |Étienne Fortier-Dubois

In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of North American supermarkets, courtesy of the agrofood company Del Monte. It was a new type of pineapple, called the ‘Pinkglow’, notable for the color of its flesh: not the typical yellow, but a striking pink. It retailed for US$49, ten or twenty times as much as a regular pineapple. The hefty price tag was justified by the Pinkglow’s long development time. Del Monte claims it spent 16 years genetically engineering it.

Feb 26, 2025 | hopefulmons.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Forget the sparkles; the trendy metaphor in the AI world lately is the deep. For too long, automated research tools have only be able to scratch the surface of the vast ocean of knowledge. If you wanted to dive, to delveinto the hidden depths where the true secrets lurk, you needed human researchers, librarians, intrepid explorers of the web.

Aug 28, 2024 | hopefulmons.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

What does evil look like? Darkness. Tones of black and purple and gray, dulled, lifeless — evil looks like death. It looks like the absence of anything good. It looks like emptiness. It looks like The Void. Quite often evil also has the brown or bluish guise of foulness: buzzing insects and spreading fungus. But equally often it looks like danger. If a bright color is involved it shall be red: the red of blood, the red of violence.

Aug 8, 2024 | etiennefd.substack.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

The Olympic Games, probably the most prestigious sports event of all, are going on in Paris as I write this, in 2024. The Olympic Games were also created in Paris, in 1894, at a congress convened by Pierre de Coubertin at the Sorbonne, which would evolve into the International Olympic Committee. The first games were held in Athens in 1896 and the second in Paris in 1900, during the Universal Exhibition. In 1894 Paris was the center of the world, more or less tied with London.

Jul 31, 2024 | etiennefd.substack.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Sometimes life sends you a sign that, try as you might, you are an inferior blogger than the ones you look up to. I wrote a big review of a book about pharaoh Akhenaten, entered it into the ACX book review contest, and didn’t make it to the finals. I know why: my review was missing some contemporary insight that would transcend the book and make it more than just a retelling of Akhenaten’s story, which is already well-known (among history nerd types, at least).