Weekend Reading
On Fridays I suggest worthwhile weekend reading that’s guaranteed to improve your posture, your online dating prospects, and make you an all around better person. Read all this and probably, you’ll lose five pounds.
But first, the weekly photo challenge. See if you can guess what city this is. All eyes are on Ukraine there days. Ukraine has borders with seven countries and this week’s city is the capital of one of them. If you can name Ukraine’s neighbors, you have a 14% chance of getting this one right without even trying.
Answer at the bottom.
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Common Sense and Whiskey subscriptions start at the entirely reasonable price of free, so get yourself a subscription. Only takes a second.
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I don’t think any of these links need a subscription, although you may need to register for some. Here’s some worthwhile reads:
How We Ruined Airline Jobs: “Nobody wants to be a pilot anymore. As the airlines tell it, a so-called pilot shortage has made it impossible to staff their fleets, forcing them to cancel flights and park hundreds of airworthy planes in the desert. … Flying, meanwhile, has also become unbearable for passengers.” This article, from before the pandemic, explains why.
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Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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Bank tellers are both surprisingly inexpensive relative to the degree of trust placed in them but surprisingly costly relative to people like cashiers at the Sav-A-Lot down the street. The infrastructure behind ATMs.
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Robert Kaplan’s book Balkan Ghosts, coinciding with the 1990s Balkan wars, was formative for me. Kaplan has gone on to travel with the military, visit some of the world’s most dangerous places, counsel presidents and at times, grow ponderous. John Gray takes a long view of his career in Robert Kaplan’s Tragic Realism.
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There’s one person in the world who can juggle eight clubs for 16 catches, and that’s Anthony Gatto. It’s difficult to even hold seven clubs without dropping them; your hands aren’t big enough. Gatto can juggle seven clubs for more than four minutes. The Greatest Juggler Alive.
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There are national elections in Nigeria tomorrow, but nobody knows the size of the electorate. Huge population growth in Lagos is happening in urban areas across the continent, too. By 2011 the UN projects that Africa will be home to 3.9 billion people, or 40% of humanity. How coastal west Africa will shape the coming century.
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That "Reichsbürger" group of politically radicalized Germans that tried to overthrow the political system in Germany in an armed coup last fall? They were nuts. Luckily around around 3,000 German officers and investigators were around to stop them. The Motley Crew that Wanted to Topple the German Government.
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Japan has made a significant policy change to allow it to get the ability to strike other nations, a move widely seen as a major step toward rearming the nation more than seven decades since it demilitarized after World War II. Japan Gets Defensive.
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The United States lost part of its position in Asia, while China found its gains an unexpected burden. The resulting cold war between the United States and China became the defining feature of geopolitics in the Asia-Pacific in the middle of the 21st century. The Sino-American War of 2025.
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For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. If that’s a new concept for you, the BBC has an explainer. The first I recall reading about two sleeps was in Lars Mytting’s really atmospheric 2018 book The Bell in the Lake, about a rural town in nineteenth century Norway.
A fellow Scandinavian, a Swedish zoologist named Johan Eklöf has a new book, The Darkness Manifesto, reviewed here in the New York Times. If it piques your interest, here are two more books for you, one a history of nighttime, At Day’s Close by A. Roger Ekirch, and the other, a look at life in the days and nights of two sleeps, A World Lit Only by Fire by William Manchester.
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This week’s photo quiz answer is: this is Minsk, Belarus’s capital city. There are a few more photos in the Belarus Gallery at EarthPhotos.com. Tomorrow I’ll write about my only tourist trip to Belarus, and we’ll try to figure out where Belarus really stands in this war. We’ll also look back at the week and see if we can figure out what just happened. Please ask someone you know to join you, and please subscribe. See you tomorrow.
