Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Summer is over.
The kids are back in school and the heatwave in Northern Germany is now in the distant past as we experience plenty of rain mixed with some sunshine. Yikes. We always had changing weather conditions here in the North, most due to the North See and the Baltic Sea, which are close by. The temperature used to fluctuate between 15 degrees and 28 degrees Celsius, now it looks more like 10 degrees all the way up to almost 40 degrees Celsius. That’s insane. We need to do more to stop climate change, otherwise we will have even more flood, droughts and fires. It’s crazy that we still don’t do enough.
But it is good to have the kids out of the house again, even though they have a different opinion on that. Now we are trying to find our daily school routines again, which is always a bit messy for the first couple of days.
I sure hope that summer returns again in September, I am not done tanning!
Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored
One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. Everything is about the future of this, the future of that: the future of work, the future of humanity, the future of the planet. It’s as if everyone is screaming (some ecstatically, most terror-stricken): robots are taking over the world! Meanwhile, you can’t put down your phone, unplug, delete your AI apps, tell Zoom to piss off; it feels as if you are racing toward something, and can’t stop, or look back, or think straight.
But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. It comes from somewhere. It wasn’t inevitable. Things could have turned out differently. They still can. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw our present when it was still the future. They thought it might turn out fabulously, a computer utopia. And they worried it might turn out disastrously. Above all, they issued warning after warning about the rise of what I call the artificial state, the replacement of the liberal democratic nation-state, the consent of the governed, with the rule of people by machines. They warned of a future in which democratic deliberation would be replaced by prediction by calculation, the public sphere would be supplanted by data-driven commerce, and drones would take the place of the demos. Why didn’t anyone listen?
I remember when I first got online over 30 years ago and I thought this would be the best thing for our Western democracies. We were so enthusiastic back then and saw participation on the rise, expected online deliberation and a bright future. Instead we got right wing trolls flooding the zone with shit. I am still hopeful that we can reclaim the net and our liberal values. We need more and better regulation, that#s for sure.
Nobody reads anymore
When things are easy, we often come away with the false impression of learning, knowledge, and comprehension. We think we know something when we actually don’t. The process of struggling with material, of grappling with new ideas, of trying things that are difficult, both mentally and physically, is how we learn to do the thing, how we grow, how we go from thinking we know to actually knowing.3
I never thought I’d put reading books—something I find so inherently pleasurable—in the bucket of desirable difficulty, but here we are. Reading is no longer seen as something pleasant and worthwhile, but as something that distracts us from time that could be spent…well, doing what, exactly?
Of course you still read, and I appreciate that. I still read a ton, just not books. That’s a habit I need to get back to, but in the meantime I use audio books, which is of course not the same, but I can walk the dog while doing it or cook dinner.
Pickle Flavor Is Taking Over the Snack Aisle
In the last few years, nearly every snack food giant and retailer has piled on the trend—and for good reason. Pickle-flavored items are flying off the shelves.
According to Circana’s data, pickle-flavored snacks grew 30% in sales over the past year, compared with a 3.8% growth in the snack category overall. The same goes for categories that don’t seem traditionally fermentation-forward: Pickle-flavored trail mix grew by 10%, as opposed to 4% for the general category.
Some of this growth may come from the influx of new pickle-flavored items. But companies keep releasing them because existing pickle-flavored products are selling so well. Whole Foods began selling Daily Crunch’s Dill Pickle Sprouted Almonds in 2024, and within a year and a half, the product saw an 812% growth, the retailer said.
I am trying to not eat too much junk food or too many snacks, but whenever some company slaps “new!” onto their packaging and offers some new and bizarre flavor combination, I’m game. So I am a big fan of the pickle trend and genuinely like pickles in all sorts of styles and flavors, but I did notice that my family didn’t share my excitement about pickle-flavored mustard. I, on the other hand, watch reels about pickles on Insta, what does that say about me?
The Gulf Oil Shock Is Pushing E.V. Sales to New Heights Globally
Electric car sales are on track to hit record highs this year, with 29 percent of all new cars purchased around the world expected to be either purely battery-powered models or plug-in hybrids, according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency. That’s a sharp increase from just 4 percent in 2020.
The boom in sales was somewhat unexpected. Some analysts had predicted a slower market for electric vehicles this year — until the U.S. war with Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz caused oil and gasoline prices to spike. That has led to a frenzy of electric car sales in many unexpected corners of the globe.
My mother firmly believed that people would rethink driving everywhere when the price of a liter of gas would be around 5 DM. She wanted to get to the price point much quicker when we talked about it in the early 1990s, shortly before she passed away. She was convinced that people will only change their behavior when it became way too expensive to drive.
Inside the Billion-Dollar Industry That’s Keeping Your Beer Cold—and Saving Lives
Ice was everywhere, and with Stuart’s machines, it was in seemingly infinite supply. Europeans may have evolved to survive tepidity and would likely be appalled by the ice-to-Aperol ratio of a Texan’s spritz, but Americans have come to crave cold in the century since refrigeration became the norm. “I would confess I can’t stand just about any drink without ice in it, and a lot of that has to do with temperature. But a lot of it has to do with the sound of ice hitting the side of the glass,” says Rees. “Europeans think we’re completely insane. Who wants to water down your drink just for the temperature? But we do. Almost overwhelmingly.”
In a 2020 survey of two thousand Americans commissioned by home-appliance company Bosch, over half the participants said they will not drink water unless it’s cold: Give us condensation on the side of the glass, or give us death. The survey estimated that an American consumes over four hundred pounds of ice in a year. Stuart’s ice machines could have been the end of the packaged-ice industry, but today Reddy is bigger than ever. That’s because in the U.S. demand is also seemingly infinite, and not just because we prefer our beverages frosted. In so many ways Americans never consider, ice has become a critical public utility. We’re hooked.
When I was a kid in Northern Germany in the 70s, I only got ice cubes in my soda when we were eating out and when somehow my parents deemed it appropriate to have one or two ice cubs in my drink. My parents believed ice cold drinks would lead to stomach pain. When I first visited the states in 1989, I was really irritated about the amount of ice in my drink, but I liked it. And I didn’t get any stomach cramps. Somehow over the years ice cubes in my water became less and less necessary, but my kids use ice cubes excessively and when we are out of ice cubes, my kids are really grumpy very fast. It’s interesting, how important frozen water can be.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico