Five Things: NUR DER HSV!
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I’m exhausted. What a week! On Tuesday and Wednesday the OMR Festival took place in Hamburg with more than 70k people, dubbed as the Coachella for digital business. I started the week with an HR Executive Dinner hosted by LinkedIn, where I gave a talk about AI changing the way we work. Then two days of OMR with plenty of side-events and little sleep. On Tuesday we finally got a new federal government in Germany, which was a bit of a nail biter, but now my friend Lars is Finance Minister and Vice Chancellor. I am sure he’ll do a great job!
And when I came home on Wednesday evening, I was informed that I had to drive up to the island of Sylt, which is a little more than two hours away, close to the Danish border. Well, actually that’s the time it takes to get to the train station where you have to drive your car onto a train to get piggybacked across the dam to the island. I had to go there because of a suspected norovirus outbreak at the hostel where my youngest daughter stayed with her class. The authorities explicitly disallowed the kids taking the train back. So I went there, grabbed my kid, went to the beach to enjoy the sun and the view and the smell of the salty air, only to drive back after being on the island for little more than an hour. As Sylt is to Hamburg what the Hamptons are to New York City (it’s simply called “The Island” here), the news of a suspected norovirus outbreak among school kids made the headlines in the tabloids. Turns out my daughter just had a stomach bug, but better safe than sorry, I guess.
Then, on Saturday Evening, it finally happened. After going down to League Two in 2018, the glorious HSV finally secured one of the two spots in the leaderboards to get back up into League One. I know, it’s only soccer. But wow. I’m exhausted just from watching this. At the end, everybody stormed the pitch and when I turned off the TV after 10 minutes or so the goals were already dismantled by the fans. When I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s, the Hamburger SV was the best soccer team in Germany and also one the coveted title of European Club Champion in 1983, when I was 10. As I grew up in a small town near Hamburg, I was a fan, naturally. And then in the next decades HSV played below its potential and eventually went down to League Two. Until today. Finally. What a relief. Hamburg won 6:1 in the final home game of the season. NUR DER HSV!
Have a great Sunday! Oh, and please read these five articles I picked out for you!
We Are Still Fighting World War II
World War II certainly brought the strands of world history together, with its global reach and its acceleration of the end of colonialism across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Yet despite sharing this international experience, and entering the same order built in its wake, every country involved created and clung to its own narrative of the great conflict.
Nazi Germany finally capitulated on May 8, 1945, but 80 years later we still deal with the outcome of the war in many ways.
The Sycophantic Web Is Winning
The promise of AI was never that it would have good opinions. It was that it would help us benefit from the wealth of expertise and insight in the world that might never otherwise find its way to us—that it would show us not what to think but how others have thought and how others might think, where consensus exists and where meaningful disagreement continues. As these systems grow more powerful, perhaps we should demand less personality and more perspective.
Just remember to say “please” and “thank you” when talking to AI, you never know…
The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump
In essence, Trump and the forces arrayed behind him—the legacy organizations, a new and well-financed right-wing Jewish media, and the Christian evangelical world that blindly supports Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu—have offered American Jews a kind of devil’s bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value and that have provided the foundation for all they have been able to accomplish as Americans. Who’s in?
It’s the classic Trump playbook of creating lots of distractions to continue dismantling democratic institutions.
My Miserable Week in the ‘Happiest Country on Earth’
In mid-March, the 2025 World Happiness Report was released. It was the longest one to date, a 260-page PDF bursting with data. The United States had dropped one spot since the previous year, to 24th place. Finland sustained its winning streak.
I love Finland. It’s a strange place where you have to take off your shoes and put on comfy slippers when you enter an office. And it is not uncommon to have a sauna in the office. I have been to Helsinki many times, but I don’t think I have ever seen the sun. Yet I’d encourage everyone to visit Finland.
The Hell’s Kitchen room that monitors every subway train in New York
The six-wire is basically an analogue telephone, a relic from the 1950s. It’s not the system’s only antique. Some of the subway’s signals, which control the flow of its trains, date to the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. These run analogue, “fixed-block” signalling, which controls trains by large, 1,000ft chunks of track. In other rooms, far less grand than this one, workers pull physical levers to shift subway tracks. The move to smoother digital “communications-based train control” has been slow and is incredibly expensive.
Ok, I admit, I find the New York City Subway system deeply fascinating.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico