Five Things for the last Sunday before Christmas
Now all new and in technicolor.
I don't know if you noticed, but this email looks a bit different as I had to switch newsletter providers. Thanks to Elon Musk I had to figure out a new setup as he decided to kill Revue, which was acquired by Twitter just last year and which I had been using for a few years. Well, now I’m on Substack and we’ll see how that goes.
Five Things will stay Five Things, so I will continue to carefully curate five articles that you can read on every Sunday morning. Also, there’s something new I want to try: you can now pay for Five Things - because you like what I do and what you read and you want to support me and my work and you want to show some appreciation and you basically are a very nice person. But wait, there’s more in it for you! You’ll get a fifth newsletter to your inbox every month. This newsletter will be exclusive and it will be something like the director’s cut. So you won’t get the articles that didn’t make the cut each, but you’ll get five more articles that are extremely awesome to read. I hope a lot of you try this new idea, because then I can better justify being distracted on a Saturday evening while writing the newsletter.
This week was again a very busy one with the kids getting more and more anxious about christmas, my job being really demanding and my wife as well as she somehow wants us all to get into a festive mode while at the same time realizing that we still need to get a lot of things done. And among all this crazyness it was really good to sit down and watch David Lettermann interview Volodymyr Zelenskyy - it made me reflect on what we have and how peaceful our lifes are and what others have to endure at the same time.
Anyhow, here are the five things you should read this week, based on my own amazing opinion.
The price of ‘sugar free’: are sweeteners as harmless as we thought?
This is one of those articles I really didn’t want to share, not because it is not interesting, but rather because I know for a fact that when my wife sees this article she’ll come over to me with a big “haven’t I told you this for years and years?” smile on her face. The findings of numerous studies and a WHO report indicate that indeed sweeteners can have negative effects on your health and won’t help you lose weight.
Concrete Built The Modern World. Now It’s Destroying It.
I grew up in the 70s when concrete was the solution for everything. And then the world found out that concrete doesn’t age beautifully. Now we have to realize that concrete is a huge contributor to global warming. Also it is probably not a good idea to tear everything down, but instead we should repurpose it.
Fighting While Female
The Russian war against Ukraine also has a strong feminist perspective, especially when the Russian leadership and their tactics get compared to the Ukrainian response.
The World-Changing Race to Develop the Quantum Computer
Quantum Computing will change everything. It’s pretty geeky stuff, but amazing tech that will have tremendous impact on our society. And we’ll have totally new discussions about ethics and computing once we start to understand what’s going on.
What if failure is the plan?
Danah Boyd has been researching social media platforms since before we knew the term social media. When she writes about twitter, we should pay attention.
So, I know this edition of Five Things felt weird with a new layout and everything, but I sure hope you liked the first edition of Five Things on Substack. Oh, and since christmas is right around the corner and maybe you don’t know what to give to your loved ones, here’s a brilliant idea that doesn’t even need wrapping paper:
That’s it, really.