Five Things: Dementia, Athletes, Washing Machines, Kidney-Shaped Pool, Olympic Spies
Five Things: Dementia, Athletes, Washing Machines, Kidney-Shaped Pool, Olympic Spies
Grab a coffee, sit down and read this now.
Hello and welcome to Five Things again, your trusted source of delightful distraction that comes into you inbox every Sunday!
So I am back in Hamburg and still adjusting to getting back from sunshine and 32°C to rain, clouds and 20°C. But we do save a lot on sunscreen! Speaking of which, two weeks in the sun left me with a tan that came mostly from running on the trails and along the coast and not from sunbathing at the pool, so it reminds me a bit of my time in the army basic training 30 years ago, we called it NATO-tan back then. Face, arms and neck show a bit of a tan, the rest is white. But now sunburn so far this summer, which is always an achievement for me.
The biggest story of the week is not really my tan, or lack thereof, but rather how the Democrats in the US have gained so much momentum in such a short time that they are walzing (see what I did there? ha, so clever…) all over the Midwest setting the right political agenda and leaving the MAGAGOP without an edge. I hope the German parties SPD and Greens learn from this and start formulating their own agenda instead of doing what currently most parties do: trying to beat the right-wingers by slowly moving to the right. This is just wrong and Harris/Walz show that people are susceptible to a narrative of hope and modernity, if you tell it right.
So without much further ado, here’s today’s Five Things!
That Time Trump Nearly Died in a Helicopter Crash? Didn’t Happen.
News outlets should report it like it is: Donald Trump is mentally unfit for the office of the President of the USA. He clearly is demented and it is getting worse every single day. Also, his mind was never any good to begin with.
Why the world’s greatest athletes don’t get paid like it
Speaking of insanity, how can it be that so much money gets poured into the Olympic Games and yet a lot of the athletes are living in financial insecurity? The host countries and cities are investing enormous sums, the sponsors are investing enormous sums, and the atheletes might get enough money to barely get by? Sure, this is nothing new, but it still this is a truly unjust system.
The Charming, Eccentric, Blessed Life of Lee Maxwell
I have heard about many weird items people collect, but this is really something. What a charming story.
The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool—and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture
I always love it when I find out that stuff I like is somehow connected. In the 80s, I was heavily into skateboarding and later I came to appreciate midcentury-modern architecture. And now I know how these two things are connected. Amazing. And Alvar Aalto was really one magnificent architect and designer.
At the 1960 Olympics, American Athletes Recruited by the CIA Tried to Convince Their Soviet Peers to Defect
Are you surprised? I’m not, but every once in a while I like reading a nice spy story. As today is the last day of the Olympic Games in Paris, I thought this is a nice reminder about a time when the Olympics also weren’t just about sports.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
Great weekend reading!