Five Things: 10 Stupid Years, Brain Health, Parking, India, SkyLab
Sunday Morning starts here. But if you're too busy waking up, you can read this in the afternoon as well.
Howdy! Thanks for opening this email. Now enjoy this edition of Five Things!✌🏻
Hi, my name is Nico and I’m a very curious person who likes reading great journalism, well argued opinion pieces and lengthy articles full of research. Every Sunday I put together an email with links to five articles which I find really interesting. The selection of the articles is based on my current interests. I sincerely hope that you find these articles as worthwile your time as I did. I don’t wan’t to ruin your Sunday. 🤓
In Germany, the months of April and May are filled with church holidays (most people probably don’t know what the holiday is about, but gladly have a day off work) and so it is no surprise that we get to talk about the 4-day work week. I could get used to it, as I usually sit down on a Sunday evening thinking “now the weekend could start!” - what I find really interesting about the debate is that people always think of so many reasons why it cannot work, instead of trying to figure out how it could work. As a student of the workers’ movement, at lot of the arguments against the 4-day work week remind me of the arguments factory owners had in the era of industrialization when they explained why people should not get too much time off.
Have a great Sunday and enjoy Five Things! ✌🏻
Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
This is a really strong essay about the impact of social media on politics, not just in the USA, but in Western liberal democracies. “The stupefying process plays out differently on the right and the left because their activist wings subscribe to different narratives with different sacred values.” Also, kudos to the author to quote Otto von Bismarck in this piece. (The Atlantic)
The Link Between Highly Processed Foods and Brain Health
This is amazing and frightening at the same time. Also, on a personal note, I’m really thankful for my wife cutting most of the processed foods from our diet. She does that by insisting that we buy lots of fresh stuff at the farmers’ market and then has me cook it. (The New York Times)
Make Parking Impossible
“Metropolitan Houston has 30 parking spaces for each of its over six million residents, using a land area nearly 10 times the size of Paris.” - that’s insane. And while I hate the daily search for a parking space in our neighborhood, I know that me having a car is part of the problem. I blame it on the kids, or having too many of them. And being lazy. And on the weather. (The New Republic)
Here...comes...INDIA!!!
This is a really good write-up on a country that most people still do not have in their focus. While everybody is looking at China, India is coming up strong. (Noahpinion)
A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco
I’ve met Jeff Jarvis a few times on the media innovation conference circuit, but I didn’t know about his past as a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner. This is a really fun story about a time without the internet and a different news cycle. (SF Gate)
That’s it. Have an amazing Sunday!