L’écrivain – essayiste, poète, dramaturge… – est depuis longtemps fasciné par la photographie. Ainsi, le recueil « Une éclosion continue » le voit s’emparer de ces images fixes pour les faire entrer dans le grand mouvement du temps et du langage.

L’auteur nous parle de ses rencontres avec les ouvrages d’Aimé Césaire, d’Ahmadou Kourouma, de Gabriel Garcia Marquez et… d’Arthur de Gobineau.

Chroniqueur au Figaro Magazine, critique cinéma au Figaro, critique livres au Figaro Littéraire, Éric Neuhoff vient de recevoir le grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand.

À 35 ans, cet enseignant angevin vient de publier son deuxième roman. Comme le premier, il mêle subtilement histoire de l’art et trajectoires intimes.

‘I can’t remember anything’ is a common complaint these days. But is it because we rely so heavily on our smartphones? And do the endless alerts and distractions stop us forming new memories?

Last week, I missed a real-life meeting because I hadn’t set a reminder on my smartphone, leaving someone I’d never met before alone in a café. But on the same day, I remembered the name of the actor who played Will Smith’s aunt in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1991 (Janet Hubert). Memory is weird, unpredictable and, neuroscientifically, not yet entirely understood. When memory lapses like mine happen (which they do, a lot), it feels both easy and logical to blame the technology we’ve so recently adopted. Does having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our heads? Am I losing my ability to remember things – from appointments to what I was about to do next – because I expect my phone to do it for me? Before smartphones, our heads would have held a cache of phone numbers and our memories would contain a cognitive map, built up over time, which would allow us to navigate – for smartphone users, that is no longer true.

Our brains and our smartphones form a complex web of interactions: the smartphonification of life has been rising since the mid 2000s, but was accelerated by the pandemic, as was internet use in general. Prolonged periods of stress, isolation and exhaustion – common themes since March 2020 – are well known for their impact on memory. Of those surveyed by memory researcher Catherine Loveday in 2021, 80% felt that their memories were worse than before the pandemic. We are – still – shattered, not just by Covid-19, but also by the miserable national and global news cycle. Many of us self-soothe with distractions like social media. Meanwhile, endless scrolling can, at times, create its own distress, and phone notifications and self interrupting to check for them, also seem to affect what, how and if we remember.

The decline in deliveries by the electric carmaker in the second quarter was the first drop since the beginning of 2020. The main culprit was factory shutdowns in China.