Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Montreal

Writer, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters at Freelance

this world is indistinguishable from magic (and so are you) 🏙 🌇 🌃 🌌 working at @elicitorg

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Articles

Atlas of Links #2

1 week ago | hopefulmons.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Previously: Atlas of Links #1I. Last month I published (and crossposted here) an article on the history of pineapples at the always excellent magazine Works in Progress! Really fun to dive deeply into such a nice topic, and learn all sorts of random facts about the fruit that used to be the supreme luxury item.
Multi-country civilizations are good, actually

1 month ago | elysian.press | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

The year is 2033, and a unit of the People's Liberation Army has just stormed the Presidential Office in Taipei, forcing the President of the Republic of China to surrender. Thus ends the full-scale invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, recently elected to a fifth term as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, has long dreamed about. From afar I follow the news, and wonder: why? What was the point of this? Who will actually benefit?
King of fruits - Works in Progress

1 month ago | 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.
Deep Into the Depths

1 month ago | 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.
Poetic Prose on Evil, Written on the Occasion of Having Purchased a Venus Flytrap

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.
The Enduring Prestige of Belle Époque Institutions

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.
The First Culture Warriors

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).
Mythical Wealth-Creation Machines

Jul 11, 2024 | etiennefd.substack.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

Many if not most magical artifacts from mythology are weapons. Many more consist of some other type of equipment or jewelry, like shields and rings. They usually have impressive but ultimately boring powers that have to do with violence, like protecting the wearer from the negative effects of violence, or allowing the wielder to cause violence with great efficacy. Much more interesting, but also rarer, are the mythical artifacts that create infinite resources.
How to Win an ACX Book Review Contest

Jun 20, 2024 | etiennefd.substack.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

I participated in the Astral Codex Ten book review contest thrice. The first time I wrote about the history of the scientific journal Nature and became one of the fifteen finalists. The second time I wrote about Jane Jacobs, cities, and separatism, and somehow I was a winner, although barely: I got third place, and only because Scott Alexander, who runs the contest, disqualified his own entry, which readers had voted as the winner.
Doom Is Too Simple

Jun 6, 2024 | etiennefd.substack.com | Étienne Fortier-Dubois

These days, some of the tech-savvy kids worry about extinction from rogue AI, and the rest worry about extinction from climate change. Before, we worried about nuclear winter or overpopulation. There was peak oil. There was and still is the threat of deadly pandemics. Self-replicating nanobots. The inversion of the magnetic poles, the explosion of a supervolcano, a disruption of the sea currents leading to a global freeze.