Five Things: Technology, Nostalgia, Israel, Coffee, CIA
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Last Thursday was Ascension Day, but in Germany it’s called Father’s Day, which is always followed by a so called bridge day - everybody takes the friday off and gets a bridge into the weekend. So essentially we had a three-day work week, which was not too bad, unless of course you want to get some work done. Good luck, Germany basically shuts down and nobody in their right mind is in the office.
The German Father’s Day tradition commands that men pack beer into a cart and then pull the cart through the countryside together with their friends and be as loud and obnoxious as possible. Ever since I have been a father, I didn’t have time for that. Also, my family thinks I am obnoxious enough even without Father’s Day.
We rather spontaneously decided to pack some of the kids into the car and drive over to Groningen in the Netherlands. What a fantastic city! We strolled around the large pedestrian area in the city center, tried not to get run over by all those people on their bikes, ate too much fries, had some Eierbal, which was strange, yet not totally unappealing fast food and went up to the rooftop terrace of the newly built library to soak in the views.
Here are five great articles for you to read!
The Reenchanted World
The experience was the opposite of momentous. The computer was not charged with anything, neither meaning nor the future; it was just a box in a basement den in a house in a river landscape at the edge of the world on a black and wet autumn evening in 1984.
Forty years on, the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world. This lately feels like serious neglect. To keep somewhat informed about the political situation in the world is a duty, something one has no right to turn away from. Shouldn’t something similar apply to technology, given the immensity of its influence?
Trump and the Troubled History of Trying to Turn Back the Clock
Today, society no longer sees nostalgia as a disease. Instead, it is thought of as a fuzzy, seemingly benign feeling about an idealized past. But the profound economic disruptions of the last few months might push analysts to revisit the idea that nostalgia is a grave, even life-threatening condition. American policies based on the premise of restoring past greatness—the mythical and opaque “again” of Make America Great Again—have worsened lives both within and outside the United States.
The Flashing Signals That I Just Saw in Israel
When this war is over and Gaza is saturated with international reporters and photographers free to roam, the level of death and destruction is going to be fully reported and pictured — and that is going to be a very bad time for Israel and world Jewry.
So, Golan was right to warn his nation — bluntly — to stop now, forge a cease-fire, get the hostages back, get an international and Arab force into Gaza and deal with the remnants of Hamas later. When you are in a hole, stop digging.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu has insisted on continuing to dig, claiming that he can bomb Hamas into giving up its remaining 20 or so living Israeli hostages — and because the religious-nationalist members of his coalition have essentially told him if he stops the war, they will topple him. So, the Israeli military is going after more and more secondary targets, and the result is Gazan civilians being killed every day.
From the Mouth of the Gods
Visiting origin is a badge of honor for coffee professionals (baristas, roasters, importers, people who produce coffee-related content beyond an IG of a cool latte flower) not only because it’s these exact coffee professionals who spend decades obsessing about the details of coffee through cupping notes, roasting profiles, extraction percentages, and general nerdery at the café level, but because origin represents the essence of the progressive third wave, which has helped evolve long-followed standards like “direct trade” into sophisticated sourcing practices in an attempt to put the farmer’s well-being first.
I’m a big fan of coffee and when I read this article, I found out that Geoff Watts was an undergrad at UC Berkeley probably at the same time I was there and went to my favorite coffee place at that time: Caffe Strada. That was really amazing coffee. So I read the article and learned a ton about coffee.
The CIA Secretly Ran a Star Wars Fan Site
The site looks like an ordinary Star Wars fan website from around 2010. But starwarsweb.net was actually a tool built by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to covertly communicate with its informants in other countries, according to an amateur security researcher. The site was part of a network of CIA sites that were first discovered by Iranian authorities more than ten years ago before leading to a wave of deaths of CIA sources in China in the early 2010s.
Bizarre this is.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
The way you describe taking tech for granted hit home. It does feel like living in a country where you never learned the language.Curious if there’s a specific tech moment that did make you stop and notice