Five Things: Anti-Semitism, ICE, ADHD, Reddit, Sun
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Yesterday afternoon a message appeared on my Sidekick browser, telling me that I will no longer be able to use the browser after August 3. I had feared this message would come for a few months now, hoping that they’d conveniently forget to shut down the browser after the announcement las year. But now they are actually doing it. This means that my working environment is changing and I have to relearn setting up and using a browser. I know that this sounds bizarre, but once I have found a setup, I hate to change it, even though it is only a matter of days until I am used to the new setup. I spend most of my time working inside my browser, so this is really important to me. Also, as I usually don’t like to use what everybody else is using, I am not using Chrome. Not because it is a bad browser, but just out of principle. Currently I am trying out Comet, which was just released by Perplexity.ai, and which has been suggested by Sidekick as an alternative. To make my setup even more interesting, I am using mostly Google products, just not inside of Chrome. I’d really like to have an AI that magically configures everything the way I want it instead of me remembering exactly how I want something. Switching browsers is a bit like moving houses, every time I do it, I toss stuff I haven’t been using in a while or I simply forgot why I had been using it in the first place. All these new AI-based tools and assistants have interesting new privacy implications, which now even Americans notice.
Aside from these very personal challenges I am facing with my browser setup right now, I also unlocked a real personal achievement last week. After 16 years, I do no longer have a kid in elementary school! (We did have a small break between kid number two and number three, but that was so long ago, it doesn’t really count.) Our youngest daughter just finished elementary school and I am still a bit baffled that this time went by so quickly. She had a great experience at the school with a truly wonderful and creative teacher. School’s out for the summer now and in six weeks we will only have two school kids, which is also pretty weird, and a much reduced complexity as both will be going to the same high school.
My brother gave me a book for my birthday and I just finished it: The Wolf Hunt, by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. It’s about a family with a teenage son, about Silicon Valley, Israel, school, anti-semitism, living abroad, love and death. You should read it, it’s really good! I never liked writing book reports. Just read it yourself!
Have a great Sunday and read these Five Things now!
My inconvenient Jewish fear
I’ve always known antisemitism existed on the far right. It’s been there in plain sight. The conspiracy theories. The slogans. The swastikas. The tiki torches. That kind of hatred wears no mask.
What I did not expect was to see its shadow growing in places I had always trusted. In rooms that had always felt safe. Among people who say they stand for the vulnerable.
Since October 7 I have seen so many people on the left openly displaying anti-semitism. It left me speechless. Then I remembered how the far-left in post-war Germany had strong ties to PLO and other organizations. It still baffles me how these people think there is a justification for their anti-semitism. There is not and there will never be, no matter how they phrase it.
ICE Risks Overplaying Its Hand. We’ve Seen It Happen Before.
As unprecedented as all this might seem, we’ve been here before — and there is a warning in it for the president. In the 1850s, the federal government enforced a brutal dragnet aimed at hunting down and returning “fugitive slaves” — formerly enslaved persons who had escaped captivity and fled north. Authorized by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a combination of federal officials and private slave catchers compelled Northern white citizens to cooperate with the arrest of formerly enslaved people, or else risk arrest themselves. The law introduced the brutality of slavery into free Northern communities. The use of armed soldiers in civilian settings, the arrest of free Black people — similar to today’s indiscriminate arrests, which have ensnared immigrants with legally protected status — and the erosion of political liberties long enjoyed by free citizens all presaged the current environment.
Hopefully the backlash happens before the USA have turned into a full-fledged fascist state. I’d hate to see another civil war in the USA, this time between the blue and the red states. This has to be avoided at all costs!
Rethinking adult ADHD
The rise of the #ADHD world also created some money-making opportunities. Many ADHD posts touting lived experience linked directly to purchasable products or services such as supplements or coaching. Most notably, several large-scale digital startups seized an opportunity in the midst of relaxed US laws for prescribing stimulants (the main class of medications for ADHD), and began offering quick and easy online diagnoses to support their economy-of-scale business models. They unleashed a sea of digital ads upon their potential consumers (like the post that caught Rebecca’s eye). These ads also may have influenced self-referral rates for ADHD – through a digital startup or otherwise.
I have been doing some reading on ADHD and I am currently getting tested for it myself. Let’s see how that turns out.
The Website at the End of the Internet
This isn’t just a feeling. Reddit, after two decades of gradual and uneven growth, is exploding. According to Similarweb, it’s one of the largest properties online; if you take away social apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, and utilities like Google and ChatGPT, its closest competition among websites is Wikipedia. In 2023, according to the company, Reddit had around 60 million unique visitors a day; its latest earnings report puts the number at 108 million a day, 400 million a week, and, according to conservative estimates, well over a billion different people using it every month. About those earnings reports: In 2024, Reddit went public. Its stock price popped, then climbed alongside its traffic. Revenue is way up, and after years of losses, the company eked out a slim profit in the last quarter.
I still remember when our son told me about Reddit and how much he liked it. I then looked up the date when I joined Reddit and he was astonished that I’d been on Reddit since before he was born. Even though I probably have totally different interests than my son, I also use Reddit daily.
The New Sun Worship
By the end of the decade, tanning’s appeal had faded. Americans became more aware of the health risks, and the recession shrank their indoor-tanning budgets. But now America glows once again. The president and many of his acolytes verge on orange, and parties thrown by the MAGA youth are blurs of bronze. Celebrity tans are approaching early-aughts amber, and if dermatologists’ observations and social media are any indication, teens are flocking to the beach in pursuit of scorching burns.
Tanning is back. Only this time, it’s not just about looking good—it’s about embracing an entire ideology.
Now that tanning is back and more political than ever, my whiteness can be seen as a political statement. Actually, I always wanted to get a nice tan. It never really worked. As a readhead, I go from white to red when I get exposed to the sun. So obviously I use sunscreen excessively. Only during my time in the army did I get a tan, the so called NATO-tan. My arms, neck and face where tanned, the rest was white.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico