Five Things: Orban, Curiosity, Billionaire Ranches, Darwin, Brady Bunch
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Have you ever heard of Plattdeutsch? Or plattdüütsch? “Low German”?
I somehow stumbled into a plattdüütsch rabbit hole this week. First I read the Synthszr newsletter by Mattes Schrader and found out that I could switch the language to plattdütsch, which is a great way to consume tech news. Plattdüütsch is the local language that is still being spoken in Northern Germany, but it is dying. I never learned to speak it, I only know some words and phrases, but I can understand most of it. When I was a kid, everybody in the country side spoke platt and my parents also were able to speak it. My father was a politician and of cource had to speak platt with the farmers. I still remember one afternoon when my mother, who was from Lübeck, talked platt to my stepdad, who was from Hamburg, and to my granduncle, who was from Wismar, and they all three spoke different dialects and talked about the nuances of their command of platt.
Anyhow, this Saturday was the fifth annual Plattdüütsch Dag to raise awareness for this language and I saw something about it in the local news.
And now for the really hardcore part: the song Hamborger Veermaster is now stuck in my brain and I have a few versions for you to listen to: Freddy Quinn - Der Hamburger Veermaster - Blow, Boys, Blow (Germany’s version Frank Sinatra meets Johnny Cash, a member of the German Country Music Hall of Fame, which I didn’t know existed, but that is a rabbit hole for another day…) or Achim Reichel: Hamborger Veermaster, who was once the bandleader of The Rattles, Germany’s short-lived answer to The Beatles. What a great song, but I was a bit irritated when I didn’t see any gold on the banks of Sacramento.
Where was I? Right. Enjoy these Five Things!
The far right has moved on from Orbán
The centre right has increasingly moved towards the far right in the last ten years – especially on issues around identity, immigration and Islam. That shift has turned the EU into Fortress Europe, which has allowed the far right to become increasingly open to working with it – and within it – instead of simply opposing it. Meloni, who became prime minister in 2022, embodies this realignment more than anyone else. Whereas Orbán had a fractious relationship with the EU – even while Fidesz remained in the EPP – hers is remarkably harmonious. Orbán’s election defeat might not be the end of the European far right, but the close of its performatively Eurosceptic phase.
Finally, he is gone. Now we quickly need to reform the EU institutions so that no single country can hold the whole continent hostage all the time.
I am not so sure though about the Eurosceptic phase of the far right. They have achieved a policy shift in the last decade and I am sure they will continue to bash the EU when the next opportunity arises. Realigning farm subsides is always a welcomed topic for outrage.
Curiosity Is No Solo Act
The conceptualization of curiosity as an individual drive to discover something for society’s benefit persists today. But imagine a curiosity that is more social and praxiological than it is individual, intellectual, and acquisitional. Imagine a curiosity that aims less to know and more to make connections, build constellations, find links, and follow threads, functioning within a webbed network of relations between knowers, methods of knowing, and knowledges.
Last week I had an article about ADHD being seen as hypercuriosity and now we again deal with this topic. It seems as if I am curious about curiosity.
Fortress Yellowstone
Wild Eagle Mountain is one of a growing number of billionaire-owned ranches in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which encompasses some 12 million to 22 million acres (depending on how you measure) and supports the largest concentration of wildlife in the contiguous United States. As such places grow increasingly rare—a 2021 study estimated that only 3% of the Earth’s land area retains all of the species that lived there 500 years ago — proximity to Yellowstone has become an increasingly valuable commodity. In recent years, the ultra-rich have been buying up slopeside mansions, frontage on trout rivers and great swaths of land here in one of the last nearly intact ecosystems left on Earth. And it’s not only in Montana: This influx of wealth has made Teton County, Wyo. — on the other side of this ecosystem — the richest and most unequal county in the United States.
We need to regulate more and better to make sure that people don’t become billionaires. They always do this at the expense of others and then also have too much power.
The California town with less than 30 residents begging for young people to move in
The gold that once drew opportunists to this slice of California now attracts a new generation of grubstakers, eager to mine the modern currency: content. The town’s largely aging residents, who fled metropolitan areas seeking solitude in the desert, don’t understand why the internet has such a fascination with ghost towns. They simply want to be left alone.
“People live here,” the small plastic sign continues, one of just a few that remain in their original location. The wind can whip through Darwin, elevation 4,800 feet. Without much to break the gusts, many of the warning signs have come down. Longtime resident and artist Kathy Goss had posted them in prominent places around town, but she knows the desert reclaims everything eventually.
Darwin, California. Just in case you want to relocate. My wife and I once looked at a house in a small village about 45 minutes away from Hamburg and the landlady said: “I doubt you even call to say you are not interested.” - she was right. And that village was about five times the size of Darwin. I often phantasize about living somewhere where there is just scenery, but I don’t think I could live there longer than a few days. Would you move to Darwin?
Here’s the Story … of a House Named Brady
Sherwood Schwartz was driving around Los Angeles when he spotted 11222 West Dilling Street, a midcentury modern with angular clerestory windows in the San Fernando Valley.
Over the next five years — and for generations to come as “The Brady Bunch” became a fixture in syndication — the house would become an international icon. Last month, in a rare move, the Los Angeles City Council declared it a historic and cultural monument.
I’m pretty sure that I watched every single episode of the Brady Bunch. It was constantly on when West Germany got cable tv in the 80s. I don’t think this show would work nowadays…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico