Five Things: Free Speech, American Authoritarianism, Damascus, Coffee, Smartphones

Hello and welcome back to Five Things!

This last week was full of travel. I went to Berlin on Monday, which was a wonderful trip because I reconnected with an old friend whom I lost track of, so we had lunch and talked about lots of things. This was also the first time I went to the remote southwestern part of Berlin since the 80s, when my mother had a boyfriend in Berlin and we visited the city often. In the evening I went to a late summer event hosted by my party, the Social Democrats (SPD). I met tons of people and it was wonderful to reconnect with old friends. I usually joke that the best part of Berlin is the last train home to Hamburg, but this time I was wrong. Currently the train has to take a detour between Berlin and Hamburg, so it runs almost three hours instead of 1:45. But on Monday night there was a fire somewhere so instead of being home a bit after 1 am, I got home a bit before 3 am. This was no fun, especially since I had to get up in the morning to wake up the kids, as I promised them. Around noon I took the train to Cologne to attend a digital marketing trade show that I have been attending most years for the last two decades. I spent three days in Cologne and since I worked in Cologne for two years, this was another nice trip down memory lane. I even had plenty of Kölsch beers, which is something I usually don’t drink. But as a waiter explained: it’s good to rinse your kidneys every once in a while.

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Without free speech, America is nothing

The government forcing a private company to cancel a comedy program it doesn’t like already constitutes the most significant attack on press freedom in a generation. But the Trump administration has signaled that this is only the beginning of a much broader, deeper government campaign to stamp out opinions it doesn’t like.

This is such an evil shitshow.

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The Weakness and Incompetence of American Authoritarianism

What is therefore worth stressing is the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has been unable to autocrat its way out of a paper bag. To be sure, Trump has cowed some institutions into submission, and he has a few competent subordinates eager to carry out his pet peeves edicts. But he has also appointed some of the dumbest, most craven motherfuckers on the planet, and these underlings have no idea how to autocrat.

My uncomfortable feeling is that Trump and his croonies might be weak and incompetent, but they will nonetheless push forward and make the lives of many Americans miserable by taking away their personal freedoms.

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48 surreal hours in Damascus — an Israeli reporter’s travelogue from an enemy capital

We are invited to sit and offered water and coffee, as two gentlemen collect our passports and disappear to process our entry, and Rasha Ghannam from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and her elegantly suited colleague from the protocol department tell us that we are most welcome in Syria.

This is quite a story. Just imagine traveling to a neighboring country that has just ended a civil war, but you travel as a Jew to a country that used to have many Jewish communities and now only six Jews are still living there. This must be an emotional rollercoaster.

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Coffee naps might be the weirdest—and smartest—way to recharge

Both naps and caffeine can reset the brain—naps by clearing out adenosine, caffeine by blocking it. But, some have long wondered, might a short nap after a cup of coffee amplify the stimulant’s effect?

This is what home office was invented for.

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You're being rude. Put away your phone.

We are ruled by our phones. The phone sets the pizzicato of Americans’ daily lives — a constant, unignorable mental plucking that sounds at all hours and shapes the substrate of our days. It has bestowed on us an infernal mental itchiness, and it whispers, ceaselessly, to take a break from whatever else we’re doing and look at the phone again.

And yet, smartphones are so wonderful if you want to get distracted.

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That’s it. Have a great Sunday!

— Nico