Five Things: Estonia, Pizza Hut, Zionism, Bob Dylan's Mind, Emoticon
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Every morning I look at my wife and she gives me a very annoyed look. When I ask her what’s going on, she looks at me, shakes her head and screams: “that idiot again!” - and you probably experience the same since Trump was sworn in again. Every morning we wake up, only to find out that the level of idiocy has been raised once again. Do you remember the good old days when the media was pinpointing every politician who did a flip-flop on an important issue? With Trump it is much more than that, it is a flip-flop-flip-flip-flop-flop-flip-flap-flip-flap-flop-flip and this all happens during the course of a week. Tariffs up, down, good, bad, whatever. The leader of the Western world was never bright to begin with, but has clearly lost his marbles and the only two things he cares about is creating a financial windfall for his family and destroying democratic institutions.
Last evening while we were in the car, my wife noticed that I got a push notification from The New York Times. She said to me: “don’t you want to check what it is about, maybe Trump has died!” and I remarked: “if that had happened, the streetlights would be flashing and fireworks would go off!”
Honestly, we are normalizing idiocy and somebody has to tell him to check into a mental institution. And no, we cannot legitimize a Russian war on the Ukraine and give Putin what he wants. That is insane! Also, will the real conservative people please stand up and stop the flirting with authoritarian disaster!
Here are this Sunday’s Five Things - enjoy!
The Hottest Border
Being here feels puzzling. At times, it’s like I’m in an imaginary place. But then I feel like I’m in the exact right place to grasp the mechanisms of this geopolitical gridlock that causes Estonia to remain stuck between imperial legacies: passed back and forth between the German Empire and czarist Russia, then between the Third Reich and Stalin’s USSR. On top of that, amid the chaos of Putin’s war and Trump’s presidency, it is caught up in tensions between Russia and the West, NATO and the European Union.
The first time I went to Estonia was almost 10 years ago. Estonia is a fantastic country, very modern with a strong focus on technology, and at the same time it feels like it is stuck in time with so many artefacts from the soviet times. The proximity of Russia is constantly on the mind of the Estonians and when I remarked that my hometown of Hamburg has more inhabitants than Estonia, my counterpart quipped: “but we have an army!”
In 1990, One of the Great Forgotten Acts of American Subterfuge Unfolded. It Involved Pizza Hut.
Skimehorn was exactly where she wanted to be—in a job she loved, in her small Midwestern hometown. And then, on a Sunday morning in 1990, she got an unexpected call.
The man on the other end said he was from Pizza Hut’s human resources department. He told her that Pizza Hut headquarters had a new job for her—that corporate wanted to send her overseas. At first, she thought it was another manager playing a joke on her. But this offer was completely real. The HR guy told Skimehorn to pack her bags; Pizza Hut was going to Moscow, and so was she.
Looking back at the 80s and 90s it was really interesting how a company like Pepsi could poke holes into the iron curtain. I remember two vacations in Hungary in the Mid-80s when Pepsi was available everywhere, but you had to know where to go and how to ask to get the real stuff: Coca-Cola. I also remember a very long line in front of the McDonalds in Budapest. So the experience of opening a Pizza Hut in Moscow must have been wild, especially in the years after the iron curtain fell.
Is Zionism Colonialism?
Colonial movements, by definition, involve settlers serving the interests of a mother country. British colonists in Australia remained British subjects, advancing London’s imperial ambitions. French settlers in Algeria were instruments of Parisian policy. This metropolitan relationship – with its flows of authority, resources, and loyalty – defines the colonial structure.
Jewish immigration to Palestine lacks this essential characteristic. When Jews fled the Russian pogroms of 1881-1906, they represented no imperial power. Holocaust survivors arriving in the 1940s served no European state’s interests. Even during the British Mandate period (1920-1948), Jewish immigrants often acted in direct opposition to British policy, particularly after the 1939 White Paper restricted Jewish immigration precisely when European Jews most desperately needed refuge.
Of course not. Zionism is not colonialism. And it doesn’t matter how many people scream that at demonstrations. Oftentimes it helps to to look at history to understand the present or even get ideas about the future.
Mapping Bob Dylan’s mind
Dylan’s lyrics invite us to return again and again, each listen revealing a new meaning or shade. The biopic A Complete Unknown (2024) renewed public interest, but my reasons for a deep dive were already both personal and technical. My research uses AI to trace cultural messages across networks, and I wanted to test whether the same tools could illuminate Dylan’s work as well. Could machine analysis measure the qualities that make Dylan’s songs resonate – how complexity arises, how new images mix with the familiar, how ambiguity threads through songs?
The times they are a-changing. Bob Dylan’s music stays.
In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon
Two days after Swartz’s initial proposal, Fahlman entered the discussion with his now-famous post: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.” He added that serious messages could use :-(, noting, “Maybe we should mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.”
What made Fahlman’s proposal work wasn’t that he invented the concept of joke markers—Swartz had done that. It wasn’t that he invented smile symbols at Carnegie Mellon, since the \__/ already existed. Rather, Fahlman synthesized the best elements from the ongoing discussion: the simplicity of single-character proposals, the visual clarity of face-like symbols, the sideways-reading principle hinted at by Hamey’s {#}, and a complete binary system that covered both humor :-) and seriousness :-(.
We’re standing on the shoulder of giants. Without pyhsics, emoticons would not have been invented. :p
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico