I’m beginning to think that you should ignore travel guides entirely. Take Marseille, France’s second city after Paris and before Lyon. Everybody tells you to visit Notre-Dame de la Garde, a basilica built in the 19th century at the top of a hill… just like the Sacré-Cœur in Paris and Notre-Dame de Fourvière in Lyon. If you’ve never been to one of these gaudy Neo-Byzantine churches, then by all means, go ahead and visit the kitschy “Good Mother” of Marseille. I hope you love climbing treacherous steps, waiting for the only public bus that’ll spare you the painful experience of climbing those treacherous steps, or paying extortionary prices to take the ridiculous “small train” that’s even slower than the public bus.

Or you could visit La Major, one of only three cathedrals built in France in the 19th century, a beautiful polychrome building that features an idiosyncratic blend of occidental and oriental influences. Or Les Réformés, one of the rare churches with colourful stained glass on all sides and all levels, which has more than a passing resemblance to Reims cathedral. Both are far less crowded and far more interesting than Notre-Dame de la Garde, and both are better stops on the route to somewhere else, the sea front for La Major and the Canebière for Les Réformés.

The Mucem features high on the must-visit lists. Do yourself a favour and skip what pass as exhibitions in this pathetic excuse for a museum. You don’t need a paying ticket to go up to the terrace, through the high footbridge and down to Fort Saint-Jean and the Old Port. If you want to learn a thing or two about the Mediterranean civilization, you’re better off visiting the small Marseille History Museum. The surrounding neighbourhood of Belsunce will teach you everything you need to know about the enduring influence of Greek, Roman and North-African cultures.

Marseille might be “the gateway to the Orient”, but it reminded me of the Paris of my youth, before it was thoroughly gentrified. It’s rough around the edges, it has far too many cars and far too little public transport, it’s one of the dirtiest cities in France, but it’s also a bustling metropolis bursting with joyous energy — even in the midst of a mistral storm. I’m not surprised to have seen a lot more tourists than in my hometown of Lyon, but i’m disappointed that they won’t get to see the best parts of the city if they blindly follow common advice.

Most of them will stroll around the (admittedly charming) Panier neighbourhood, but will never set foot in the (decidedly gritty) La Friche, a cultural complex built around a former tobacco factory. It’s a shame, because the surrounding area is far more authentic than anything you’ll find in travel guides. As we like to say in French, it’s stayed “in its juices”. These juices might taste of danger, but this is French cuisine we’re talking about, which means that it’s more drama than actual risk. (I wouldn’t say the same of some parts of the northern neighbourhoods.) And by the way, the food is really good too.

Apps

Current. Built by Terry Godier, of “phantom obligation” fame, Current is an RSS reader that wants to break free of the e-mail mould. It uses a lot of highfalutin words to describe familiar concepts: the “river” is a feed, “currents” are folders and “releasing” is marking as read. Worse: although Terry says that “Current has no unread count“, it has multiple counts, and even reading stats.

The mere presence of a list of items with different states implies that you should “process” your feed. Case in point: when you’ve read everything, Current tells you that you’re “all caught up”. And Sift, “a mode designed for the way people actually triage on a desktop”, falls back to the classic e-mail layout.

If you manage to tolerate the smell of the designer’s farts and the many layout bugs, though, Current has more than a few good ideas at its core. Velocity defines how long an item stays visible before fading out: breaking news gets three hours, articles get eight to eighteen, evergreen content lasts seven days. The “Voices” tab isn’t just a “Blogs” folder, but an interesting “Twitter meets Instagram Stories” way of surfacing personal blogs.

In a way, Current reminds me of the late Fever, which is still my favourite take on RSS. Terry’s even thinking of reimplementing Fever’s most distinguishing feature, “story threading”, a way to group related articles from different sources into narrative threads. Current is buggy and pompous, but at least it’s opinionated. Oh, and it’s priced at a flat €9.99. What a breath of fresh air.

Links

“How I’m dealing with the pressure to adopt AI as a designer” by Martin Wright. ″You should be playing with AI″, Martin writes, “experimenting builds vocabulary, shapes instinct, and helps form the opinions you’ll need when clients ask the big questions about where AI fits.” But “put the work at the centre of all your thinking, and opt out of the hype cycle.” Easier said than done, because the bubble’s pressure keeps on growing.

“We mourn our craft” by Nolan Lawson. “I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that of a glorified TSA agent”, Nolan laments, “reviewing code to make sure the AI didn’t smuggle something dangerous into production”. I find it fascinating – but utterly logical – that software developers are the main victims of software development. But i’ve used Claude Code, and i don’t think that true craftspeople have anything to worry about, on the contrary. People who think that software development is nothing more than writing code, on the other hand, have it coming.

“Thousands of CEOs just admitted AI had no impact on employment or productivity” by Sasha Rogelberg. On a completely unrelated note…