Five Things: Antisemitism, America's Allies, Textile Mill, AI and Big Tech, Reading and Politics
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I am a bit grumpy these days as I simply cannot get rid of a stupid cold that has been annoying me for three weeks now. I’m sneezing and I have a headache most days and every time I think it is getting better, it gets a bit worse the next day. How annoying.
I did go to the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg this Friday to see The Complete Piano Etudes By Philip Glass and it was pretty amazing. Also I only started to cough in the last few minutes. This was my first concert in the Elbphilharmonie, which philistines like me casually call Elphi and it is one of the most amazing buildings I have ever been to, built on top of an old warehouse for just 850 mio € and ten years of construction. Why Philip Glass, you might ask? Because somebody pinged me on facebook and asked if I wanted his tickets because he had to cancel the trip. I’m happy I took the tickets and of course I had no idea who Philip Glass is... 🤓
Here are five great articles for you to read!
Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.
Antisemitism is sometimes described as “the oldest hate.” It dates at least to ancient Greece and Egypt, where Jews were mocked for their differences and scapegoated for societal problems. A common trope is that Jews secretly control society and are to blame for its ills. The prejudice has continued through the Inquisition, Russian pogroms and the worst mass murder in history, the Holocaust, which led to the coining of a new term: genocide.
In modern times, many American Jews believed that the United States had left behind this tradition, with some reason. But as Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish writer and politician, noted, “Antisemitism is a light sleeper.” It tends to re-emerge when societies become polarized and people go looking for somebody to blame. This pattern helps explain why antisemitism began rising, first in Europe and then in the United States, in the 2010s, around the same time that politics coarsened. The anger pulsing through society has manifested itself through animosity toward Jews.
The surge in antisemitism sickens me. We have the same pattern in Germany and I think that civil society has to step up and be louder in condemming antisemitism. We can never allow this to be normal. Never again.
America’s Allies Must Save Themselves
U.S. allies often trusted in the United States and in American values more in hope than in expectation. But that trust was real, and now it is fraying. Trump invites a different sort of trust in the United States: the certainty that Washington will seek to act ruthlessly in its own self-interest and use its might to extract the best deal for itself. Future U.S. leaders may try to restore the country’s moral leadership, but trust once lost is hard to win back. Trade deals come and go, but if the light on the hill shines only for Americans, Trump will have ushered in a darker world for everybody else.
This is a huge break-up for post-war Germany. It kind of feels like our parents kicked us out and we’re on our own now, all of sudden. Of course, we could have seen a focus on the trans-pacific relations under Obama, but our leadership didn’t want this fact to be true, so they ignored it and hoped Biden would stay President for ever. Now we have to deal with this and make sure that we formulate our own objectives and goals.
A Risky Plan Made in America
Mr. Long was restless in his finance career and during his years in Europe had become enamored with Italian craft manufacturing. His investment portfolio included a Tuscan winery, and he was trying to wrangle the funds to buy a distressed firm in the region of Veneto that made fish soups and sauces.
Riding home on his bicycle after the drink, Mr. Long wondered: “‘Do I want to do fish soup and sauces, or do I want to do textiles?’”
He spent the next six months reading everything he could about textile manufacturing and made five trips to see the mill, which is 30 minutes northeast of Hartford in the small town of Stafford Springs. A woolen mill had operated there since 1842. Loro Piana, which bought the facility in 1988, poured more than $30 million into the operation to modernize the machinery, and brought over from Italy a textile engineer, Giuseppe Monteleone, to train the local workers and run the plant.
The revitalization of local industry sounds like a good plan, but is very hard and complicated in practice. I think it’s wonderful that people try to do it nonetheless, especially when it comes to textile mills as I think it’s worth it to neglect fast fashion.
How AI Will Disrupt Big Tech
Since the invention of modern computers during World War II, technological progress has enabled us to make computers ever more convenient for normal humans. But all those systems have continued to rely on rigid, highly structured ways of programming and using computers. This is true even of many consumer applications: Think of how we search for information, fill out forms, navigate screens, create spreadsheets, and specify document formatting.
But with the advent of AI, that is starting to change.
This sounds too good to be true. AI will change business models, but it is still Big Tech that pushes AI forward, along with a few new challengers. I remain doubtful that AI will really break up Big Tech. But it is an entertaining possibility.
Is the decline of reading poisoning our politics?
In the view of some analysts, these trends don’t just threaten to curtail bookworms’ literary lives or stunt young Americans’ intellectual development. Rather, digital media’s displacement of books is propelling our species back to an ancient mode of cognition and communication: After a brief dalliance with literacy, humanity is returning to its oral roots.
It’s always easy to blame the present and to point to out the glorious past. Media consumption has been in a constant change and we as a society have to adapt to this. I’m also reading less books, but I’m listening to books now on my dog walks and runs. This is amazingly efficient. Also, I do watch too many reels as well.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico