Heir mess

The Hermès heir has reportedly triggered a battle over his inheritance that's worth more than a few Kellys and Birkins.

Is Gag City still accepting resident visa applications? Or is admission via a referral code? Because if 2023 is the year of fantasizing about bubblegum pink utopias, 2024 must be the year we collectively migrate to one (minus one or two people).

While we’re still on this lovely planet, though, welcome to Quality Sheet! Read on to question your life choices, specifically, why you lacked the foresight to become a gardener for the Hermès heir and stand in line to receive his $11 billion inheritance.

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Nicholas Puech is 80, doesn’t have children and lives in a Swiss mansion. He’s also a member of the Hermès family, owns around 5% of the luxury goods firm and is keen to give his money away. But Puech’s plan to adopt his 51-year-old gardener as his rightful heir faces a legal hurdle much bigger than a jumbo Haut à Courroies, thanks to the fact that Puech already pledged his billions to a foundation—and they’re not pleased at the prospect of being pushed aside.

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“Can any of us claim never to have disguised a criticism as a compliment or ‘forgotten’ to fulfill a request from someone we were secretly angry with? We do this not because we are power-crazed and manipulative, but because we retain a childlike fear of our own aggression and the terrible consequences it might entail for us.” Professor Josh Cohen in The Economist on where passive aggression comes from within us and what it reveals about our fears and intentions when we deploy the tactic. 

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Las Vegas, famously the entertainment capital of the world, is also…the Excel capital of the world? The Wall Street Journal’s Robert McMillan takes us to the city, which recently hosted the Microsoft Excel World Championships, where Earth’s most competitive spreadsheeters take part in a challenges for a cash prize and a trophy. The event sounds like pure theatre—the finals were apparently marred by a computer glitch that threatened to dethrone the reigning winner. Plus, there does exist a ‘LeBron James of Excel’. And an unofficial ‘Clippy’ mascot.

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French-speaking West African countries like Senegal, Togo and Mali are spinning new yarn from colonial remnants, tweaking the language to reflect the diversity of the people who speak it. Almost two-thirds of daily French speakers live in Africa, the New York Times’ Elian Peltier reports. “If French becomes more mixed, then visions of the world it carries will change. And if Africa influences French from a linguistic point of view, it will likely influence it from an ideological one,” Josué Guébo, an Ivorian poet and philosopher, tells Peltier.

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“Why is there so much stigma around periods?” Refinery29’s Andrea Cheng asks. Lingering shame around menstruation means millions of people who have periods face barriers to accessing sanitary products, a challenge that’s “associated with higher risk of infection and lower health quality of life,” one doctor tells Cheng.

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The four-day workweek movement is gaining steam in many parts of the world, thanks to positive outcomes for “employee well-being, retention and business” results, according to Josh Bersin in the Harvard Business Review. Not all trials for the experiment have been successful, however. Here’s how to make it work.

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Lastly, the 2024 U.S. election is certain to be the “most online” poll ever as candidates vie for attention from new audiences. But Nieman Lab’s Stephen Fowler suggests political journalism should beware relying too much on what’s happening on social media to get a full picture of the national mood. Here’s why he argues 2024 should be the “touch grass” election cycle.

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Thank you for reading. Share to sweeten someone’s day—and have a lovely rest of your week.

Isabel :)

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