Five Things: News, Vance, Hendrix, da Vinci, Ideas
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
This week everybody talked about Elli and when Elli finally came, it was just some snow and some wind. Elli of course was the name of the blizzard that was expected to hit Northern Germany very hard. In Hamburg we had that much snow some 15 years ago or so, but to me it just felt like winter. Still, people were worried and stacked up on food and whatnot, in Hamburg the schools were closed on Friday and we had this eerie homeschooling feeling again just like during COVID-19 and the streets were empty, but honestly: it was just winter. And winter had snow, we should not forget that.
I love it when it is cold and snow sure beats rain at 2°C, but I prefer snow on Christmas, afterwards it is just a bit of a hassle in the daily life of people. What I find terribly annoying is the way everybody overreacts when some snow is expected. Sure, it will have an impact on our lifes and there might be inconvenient snow on the sidewalk or the streets, but it’s not that we cannot cope with this. The way people expect that magically the city deploys a gazillion people with snow plows and shovels is just nuts. If it snows, it snows and then it takes a while until the streets are cleared again. Until then, help your elderly neighbor on that slippery sidewalk and stop complaining! It’s just snow, it will melt and turn into slush real soon now!
With that plowed out of the way, enjoy these Five Things! 🕺
The news is terrible, so how do we not feel terrible all the time?
Ken and I watched Taylor Swift: The End of an Era recently, and I was struck by something Kamilah Marshall, one of the backup singers, shared. Her mother died in 2021, and Marshall talked about how the Eras Tour was one of the happiest times of her life, but also one of the saddest, because her mom couldn’t be there to see it.
“In the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to lean into and accept that two things can be true at the same time,” she said.
I think many of us feel like that every day. As we move through the world, we see tragedy and injustice all around us, but in our daily lives, there is laughter, joy, and love. There’s also boredom, mundanity, and frustration over dumb shit. And that’s OK. We can’t be in a state of moral outrage 24/7. And if you need to protect yourself by tuning out the news, that’s OK, too.
I am a total news junkie myself, so it is really hard for me to slow down on my news consumption, but I am trying not to read too much currently. It is just too absurd and too infuriating.
A Heartbeat Away from the Presidency, J.D. Vance is Just Dangerous
I’ll admit I once underestimated Vance. For years, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author turned Ohio republican senator appeared to be little more than a lightweight charlatan, a shape-shifting chameleon who warranted about as much attention as any GOP politician auditioning for Trump’s attention on Fox News. In other words, about as much as the loose change found under the cushion of a badly used sofa. As others have described him, a “shill-billy.” During his rise from the senate to Trump’s running mate in 2024, Vance did what other Republicans have done. He abandoned the party of Lincoln and Reagan for a seat at the Trump big-boy table, with his vomit-inducing parroting of the Dear Leader’s racist lies about the Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs during the 2024 campaign. Just before he was sworn into office, the vice president-elect pivoted into more reasonable sounding yet naive territory, stupidly opining that Trump would never pardon all of the rioters and insurrectionists on January 6th, only to have the 47th president demonstrate that he was deadly serious about being a “dictator on day one.” Vance apparently learned something from that episode. To keep his seat at the table, he needed to understand the U.S. Constitution was on the menu.
Every time I think “I hope they finally put that demented idiot monster into a madhouse!” (which is at least a couple of times daily…), I remember that the VP and his hordes of sociopaths will be still around when Trump is gone and I fear that they will be much more focused on destroying what’s left of Western liberal democracies and a rule-based world-order. Yikes.
Acid Blues (Slight Return)
In the new millennium, we’ve come to see Hendrix as a braid-weaving common denominator: Western, African, Native American, urban and cosmic, outlaw and citizen, radical and patriot, combative and peace loving. He was also bluesy, metallic, pop, avant-garde. His music took startling risks that paid off. His verve and swagger onstage and in the studio amounted to a flagrant diss of not just the warmongers but also the music industry’s corporate mentality in its quest for blue-chip profitability. Hendrix paid for his attitude big-time, with humiliating royalty percentages and circumscribed airplay on Black and white radio stations—all this before his chronic insomnia led to his accidental overdose on alcohol and his latest girlfriend’s Vesparax pills at age 27. All he’d wanted was a decent night’s sleep.
I have to listen to more Hendrix again!
The Real da Vinci Code
Identifying Leonardo’s DNA could not only help pin down the origin of disputed pieces such as Holy Child, but might point to biological traits underpinning his genius, although some scholars resist chalking up his abilities to his genes. “I tend to explain Leonardo more as the result of a favorable cultural and economic context,” says Leonardo expert Domenico Laurenza, an art historian at the University of Cagliari.
Yet some of what made Leonardo unique seems rooted in biology. His extraordinary ability to capture subtle shifts of light and motion, for example, has long hinted at exceptional visual acuity. LDVP aspires to one day find genetic variants that could account for it, says Gonzalez-Juarbe, who works at the University of Maryland. “Our hope is to open a door to explaining what was so unique about the smartest guy in history.”
This is just really fascinating stuff, don’t you think? Just imagine how much we would get to understand about da Vinci and the influence he had on modern life.
The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026
Negativity bias rules everything around me
People sometimes talk in a high-minded way about the concept of media literacy, which I think refers to the ability to separate truthful news from disinformation and misinformation and other forms of information with prefixes. That’s all fine, but if I had one hour to teach Americans about the news industry, I think I’d spend most of it talking about the concept of “negativity bias creep.” I’ll define negativity bias creep here as the tendency of ideological media—or news media with a point of view—to recognize over time that audiences prefer negative stories to positive stories and thus, in an attempt to reflect audience preferences, to become more negative over time.
This is such a great list of ideas, but the negativity bias is really the most interesting part for me. It seems we’re stuck in a spiral we cannot get out of. I think we need to focus more on the good things in life.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
That negativity bias point from Derek Thompson's list is pretty crucial. The way media platforms inadvertently train themselves toward bleaker content creates this weird feedback loop where audiences and creators both feel trapped. I've been trying to limit morning news consumption cause it genuinley affects work focus, but it's hard when the algortihm keeps surfacing catastrophe. The winter overreaction bit also rings true, people forget how to function in normal seasonal weather.