I left one unread article sitting in my browser for a full week, not because I forgot it, but because I wanted to notice what would happen if I resisted the small reflex to click, skim, and move on. It was a simple thing: a long read about attention, saved in a tab with a name I could barely...
Nov 12, 2026
• by Élise Laurent
Latest News from W Oswald Co
I kept one playlist unfinished for an entire year. Not unfinished in the casual way we abandon things—no, this was deliberate, a small experiment in memory and attention. I named it "2025 (still)" and added tracks as the months unfolded, sometimes curating whole clusters for a week, other times dropping in a single song that snagged me on a commute or in a café. I never hit “Done.” I never...
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I decided, on a rainy Tuesday in March, to stop paying attention. Not permanently — that would be dramatic — but for a fortnight I turned off the small electronic faucets that drip pings, banners and vibrating little demands into the stream of my day. My phone's push notifications were mostly silenced, Slack was muted, and I closed the tab for my email client. The experiment was simple: see...
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I often find that a single dish can act as a passport: it compresses geography, history and personal memory into one sensorial moment. Lately I've been on a small, delicious mission to trace the many ways recettes de boeuf caramélisé inspirées dAsie manifest across kitchens and restaurants — from Hanoi street stalls to modern izakayas, from family kitchens in Seoul to French bistros with an...
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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 invited questions. Overheard sentences are little detonations of curiosity. They are half-formed...
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There is, in my kitchen drawer, a small card that is as misbegotten as it is beloved. The edges are softened from years of handling, and a sticky smear of something brown — jam? sauce? — has become part of its patina. On it, in my grandmother’s looping hand, is a recipe for an apple cake that never looks like the photographs in cookbooks. It’s uneven: proportions scribbled, an instruction...
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I decided, almost as an experiment and partly as an humility practice, to spend a month replying with three small words more often than I normally would: "I don't know." Not as a conversation-stopper, but as an opening—an honest admission of uncertainty that might invite curiosity rather than close it down. I wanted to see what would happen to my thinking, to the tone of my relationships, and...
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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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