Five Things: Terror, Culture, West Bank, NVIDIA, Crows
It's Easter Sunday. Read this now, then eat some eggs.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
Easter is one of my favorite church holidays. I do love a long weekend and in Germany we get a holiday on Good Friday, Easter Sunday and then Easter Monday. This is really practical, as we Germans tend to be, because we can stock up on food on Thursday and then use the Saturday to make sure nobody has to starve on Sunday and Monday. Having two days off, just like on Christmas, where we also have two Christmas Days, makes it easier to coordinate everything with the in-laws. Easter is also one of my favorite holidays, because I really do like chocolate eggs filled with marzipan. I also like the old pagan tradition to light a bonfire in the spring which was morphed into Christian traditions and now takes place on Holy Saturday. Bonfire, beer and brats, you cannot go wrong with that combination.
Oh yes, I am not religious, but I do like some of the holidays. And I am now old enough that I do not care anymore about the Tanzverbot (“dance ban”) on Good Friday as this is a so called silent holiday and therefore dancing in public is not allowed. Also, certain movies are not allowed to be shown on TV, like “Life of Brian” and some 500 other titles. The protestant and catholic churches still have a strong influence on German public life, even though only 21% of the Germans are protestant and 24% are catholic. 47% of Germans are without a confession, roughly 4% are muslim and 4% are other.
Anyhow, we had a nice Saturday evening at a bonfire in a more rural part of Hamburg and it was great to have all four of our kids around for that occasion.
Have a great Easter Sunday!
State Terror
If citizens endorse the idea that people named by authorities as "criminals" or "terrorists" have no right to due process, then they are accepting that they themselves have no right to due process. It is due process, and due process alone, that allows you to demonstrate that you are a citizen. Without it, the masked men in the black vans can simply claim that you are a foreign terrorist and disappear you.
I recently read or rather listened to “On Freedom” by Timothy Snyder and what he writes on Substack about Trump is always on point.
How the Radical Right Captured the Culture
As America loses the superficial liberal flavor of pop culture, we’re losing culture’s transformative power entirely. Good storytelling challenges its audience; it encourages people to question their assumptions instead of accepting the status quo. The surprises matter because characters are changed by what they find; the mere novelty isn’t the point. We’re left with a future in which completely AI-generated families undertake increasingly surreal rituals designed to recall distantly remembered household traditions. This isn’t about ideology. The algorithm doesn’t care what you watch—just that you never stop watching. Just keep the screen on. Auto-play to infinity.
We need to tweak the mighty algorithms in a way that benefits us people. It’s long overdue.
After Nonviolence
Palestinians were clearly outgunned, but nonviolent protest could, theoretically at least, turn this asymmetry to their advantage. Images of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators being tear-gassed, shot, and otherwise brutalized spread around the globe. Nonviolent resistance made the violence of the occupation visible. If the world had a conscience, it would pressure Israel from without. Israel’s dependence on billions of dollars of military assistance from the United States and Europe made it uniquely vulnerable. That was the gamble, anyway.
The settlers in the West Bank and the right-wing politicians are doing everything to make sure a peace process won’t work.
Jensen Huang: the man who powers AI
Huang is co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, a manufacturer of high-end microchips known as GPUs which are vital to AI systems. In recent years it has become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Huang is married to a woman he met at university; they have two children. He rarely opines on politics and has not as yet floated any theories about the apocalypse. He doesn’t post memes and he doesn’t cage-fight. Other than wearing a leather jacket at all times, he does not appear to suffer from excessive vanity. Huang is, as Stephen Witt’s biography The Thinking Machine makes clear, an exceptionally driven individual who can be ferociously unpleasant to employees who displease him, but he does not appear to be as emotionally unbalanced as other billionaire CEOs. This might have something to do with where he came from.
I have to admit that I didn’t know much about Jensen Huang and this is a really interesting profile of him.
A crow's math skills include geometry
Crows are able to look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don't, according to a provocative new study.
It's the first time a species other than humans has been shown to have this kind of geometric intuition, says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
While I find this fascinating, I am really just including this article to see if my wife is reading my newsletter this week. She usually observes some crows in the tree in front of our house and finds them remarkable. I assume they have been casually solving math problems while sitting in the tree.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
Wow. Great recs this week, Nico!