Recommended Reading 2019

I enjoy reading about a variety of topics, especially on long train rides and on lazy Sunday mornings. In “Recommended Reading”, I regularly collect articles that I have read on Pocket and found inspiring. The list below covers the year 2019.

In English #

• Waste Not, Want Not (The Baffler): about the Zero Waste lifestyle on Instagram
• The Man Behind Most of the Ski Maps in America (Outside): A fascinating story about hand-drawn maps
• Whether a Husband Identifies as a Breadwinner Depends on Whether He Respects His Wife’s Career — Not on How Much She Earns (Harvard Business Review)
• He Knows the Stars’ Dirty Laundry. Because He Washes It. (New York Times): about a German guy who runs an instant dry-cleaning business for rock bands since the 1980s
• Rebooting Communist Kicks for Modern Sneakerheads (Bloomberg): fascinating article about sneakers in the GDR
• A History of Pizza (History Today)
• Markets to Build in 2019 (Pioneer): very interesting thoughts, but notoriously optimistic about the slim changces for startups to create a new market
• How Fancy Water Bottles Became a 21st-Century Status Symbol (The Atlantic)
• The Thrill of Uncertainty (Collaborative Fund): Why intelligent people are convinced that they can beat the stock market
• For Christina Tosi, Building a Dessert Empire Is Not All Milk and Cookies (New York Times): About a pastry chef in New York
• A New Generation of Food Magazines Thinks Small, and in Ink (New York Times): about a new trend for culinary journalism
• Being Frugal is for the Rich (The Outline): One hidden truth behind the whole “financial independence” movement: Frugality is helpful, but it does not move the needle without an extremely high income
• Is Mansa Musa the richest man who ever lived? (BBC): “Mansa Musa let such a memorable impression on Cairo that al-Umari, who visited the city 12 years after the Malian king, recounted how highly the people were speaking of him. So lavishly did he hand out gold in Cairo that this three-month stay caused the price to plummet in the region for 10 years, wrecking the economy.”
• McDonald’s Bites on Big Data With $300 Million Acquisition (Wired): How McDonald’s is using predictive analytics (or is plannng to use it)
• What I learned from a year of working Danishly (Quartz / World Economic Forum): Presenting a Scandinavian approach that focuses on quality of life
• “You have no idea how much better I could make you look”: The woman who turns Hollywood men into style icons (Washington Post)
• How sausage flavours the German language (BBC): A bit clichée, but sausages are indeed part of German proverbs and aphorisms
• The Battle of the Button-Downs (Racked)
• What do so many global cuisines have in common? A bright yellow package of Maggi magic (Washington Post): How Nestlé managed to adapt Maggi to local cuisines
• Behold the Beefless “Impossible Whopper” (New York Times): How the market for meat replacements is growing
• Inside the world of football analytics and how professional number crunchers are giving clubs a competitive advantage (The Indepdendent)
• The Phoenix from Aschheim (Süddeutsche Zeitung): About Wirecard and the accusations of dodgy business practices
• Writing Docs at Amazon (Medium - Noteworthy): An interesting approach how Amazon structures meetings and documents
• Make Your Meetings a Safe Space for Honest Conversation (Harvard Business Review): Reflecting about business practices
• Why Do Rich People Love Endurance Sports? (Outside)
• This German Baker Makes What May Be The World’s Best Pretzel (Saveur): I’m from the same region and every time I’m around, I enjoy the amazing bread and pastries by Arnd Erbel
• The shockingly simple way to make packaging more sustainable (Fast Company): About a startup that sells household detergents as pills that are put in spray bottles and to which water needs to be added
• These ads think that they know you (New York Times)
• Are the hyper-specialist shops of Berlin the future of retail? (The Guardian)
• What “Good” Dads Get Away With (New York Times): About the distribution of care works between parents
• Goldman Sachs, Patagonia, and the Mysteries of “Business Casual” (New Yorker): Amazing first paragraph: “The other day, on the subway, I observed an American male in contemporary business-casual costume. The color of his trousers was richly nondescript. He wore the clean good sneakers of a cautious wonk working on the weekend.” (And amazing last paragraph!)
• How exactly Stitch Fix’s “Tinder for clothes” learns your style (Quartz): About Stitch Fix’s structured and data-driven approach to learn about their customers’ preferences
• Woke-washing: how brands are cashing in on the culture wars (The Guardian): About capitalistic brands that suddenly discover a message
• A Behavioral Economist Tries to Fix Email (The Atlantic): About the social cost of e-mails. (I like the batch idea.)
• Nothing but the truth: the legacy of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (The Guardian): “It must be said that Trump is no Big Brother. (…) He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator, but not the discipline, intellect or ideology.”
• The Case for Rooms (CityLab): About the disadvantages of open-concept interior design
• An Ode to Running in the City (Outside): About the secret of good city trails
• An AI crushed two human pros at StarCraft - but it wasn’t a fair fight (ars technica): Interesting insights about Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence
• Google Tried to Prove Managers Don’t Matter. Instead, It Discovered 10 Traits of the Very Best Ones (inc.)
• Inside the Secret Cities That Created the Atomic Bomb (CityLab): About the architecture of the Manhattan project, for example in Los Alamos
• For most clubs, losing a star like Frenkie De Jong would be a killer. For Ajax, it’s their business model (ESPN)
• How the artificial-intelligence program AlphaZero mastered its games (New Yorker)
• Paper straws won’t save the planet - we need a four-day week (The Guardian)
• Would You Return This Lost Wallet? (New York Times)
• How A British Punk Album Revolutionized Rock ‘N’ Roll: 40 Years Of ‘London Calling’ (Forbes)
• A Quiet Revolution: More Women Seek Divorces in Conservative West Africa (New York Times)
• Do Not Disturb: How I Ditched My Phone and Unbroke My Brain (New York Times): Two observations from everyday life: 1) On my way to work, I try to not use my smartphone. Once I started actively looking around, it’s amazing how many people (of all ages!) are smartphone zombies that play mindless games like Candy Crush Saga. 2) I realized that my stress level increases when my phone buzzes, for no specific reason. Turning off most notifications truly helped me to stay focused.
• On Moving from Statistics to Machine Learning, the Final Stage of Grief (r y x, r): A good point on the main difference between statistics (in academia) and machine learning
• Margaret Hamilton: “They worried that the men might rebel. They didn’t” (The Guardian): “Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter, Lauren, into work with me. (…) She liked to imitate me – playing astronaut. She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon. The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission. I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake. Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. The Lauren bug! It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured. After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.”
• How Designers Engineer Luck Into Video Games (Nautilus): On designing luck in games, while accounting for human errors related to perceptions of probabilities
• Notre-Dame came far closer to collapsing than people knew. This is how it was saved. (New York Times): A detailed recount of a summer evening (and a bitter fight about human errors)
• How R-Ladies made data science inclusive (Quartz)
• How Copenhagen plans to reach carbon-neutral status in just six years (Fast Company): “We created a new vision for transportation: the “five-minute-city,” we called it, which means that the city is planned in a way that it only takes you five minutes to walk from your apartment to a kindergarten, to shops, to public amenities.”
• Climate change is a remorseless threat to the world’s coasts (The Economist): About the climate crisis and our costs
• Why I Make Boardgames With My Daughter (Medium.com): Extremely inspirational piece on creativity
• Deep Work: How to Develop the Most Valuable Skill of the 21st Century (Medium.com): While I don’t agree with everything in the book (and it’s sometimes based on massive assumptions), this article offers a concise summary.
• “CrossFit is my church” (Vox.com): An interesting analogy between CrossFit and religious services. “The same is true with CrossFit. People come because they want to lose weight or gain muscle strength, but they stay for the community. It’s really the relationships that keep them coming back. That need for community was something that was so strong in our research. People were longing for relationships that have meaning and the experience of belonging rather than just surface-level relationships.”
• The Constant Consumer (Real Life): As globalized platform consumerism erases more of what preceded it, replacing intricate social arrangements with individual links to large impersonal systems, it’s harder to remember what we’ve lost. Less and less equipped to imagine ourselves as anything but customers or users within those systems, we adopt the desires that companies like Amazon can best satisfy: convenience, choice, and frictionless consumption.
• The Climate Issue (The Economist): What is less obvious, but just as important, is that, because the processes that force climate change are built into the foundations of the world economy and of geopolitics, measures to check climate change have to be similarly wide-ranging and all-encompassing. To decarbonise an economy is not a simple subtraction; it requires a near-complete overhaul.
• What Omnivores Get Wrong About Vegetarian Cooking (New York Times): Practical recommendations for everybody who wants to cook tasty food with less meat
• The Clash of Palladium and Silver (PetaPixel): A celebration of the “London Calling” album cover by The Clash
• Sitzfleisch: The German Concept to Get More Work Done (BBC): This article about German work attitude resonated very well with me
• Nike’s Fastest Shoes May Give Runners an Even Bigger Advantage Than We Thought (New York Times): A data analysis of runners wearing the Nike Vaporfly
• How millions of French shoppers are rejecting cut-price capitalism (The Guardian): About a food cooperative in France that uses DIY methods and market research with its core users to convince retailers to get on the shelves with more ethical products

In German #

• Katzenstreu aus Windeln (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Pampers versucht, benutzte (!) Windeln zu Katzenstreu zu recyclen
• 100 Jahre Bauhaus: Und wo sind die Frauen? (ze.tt)
• Kaufen! Sie! Jetzt! Schnell! (FAZ). Über künstliche Verknappung bei Angeboten im Internet
• Hart im Cremen (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Wie man Pflegeprodukte speziell für Männer vermarktet
• Die Schweiz, eine Gleichstellungswüste (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Wie die Schweiz sich weigert, eine väter-, frauen- und familienfreundliche Politik zu betreiben - immer mit dem gleichen Argument: es sei zu teuer - einem der reichsten Länder weltweit
• Pierre Maudet: Am Abgrund (Die Zeit): Eine Aufarbeitung der Affäre Maudet - eigentlich ein Genfer Ereignis, aber inzwischen auch mit Auswirkungen auf die gesamte Schweiz. Und toll geschrieben mit gelegentlichen Spitzen wie: “Der Genfer Radical faszinierte auch in der Deutschschweiz. Zumal er geradlinig und fleissig wie ein Deutschschweizer daherkommt.”
• Arabischer Friseur: Integration beginnt am Kopf (Die Zeit): Eine kleine Reportage über Friseursalons in Deutschland
• Von einem, der auszog, die Klingen zu kreuzen (brand eins): Über ein Startup, das versucht, die Systemrasierer-Dominanz von Gillette und Wilkinson zu brechen
• Steuerdeals im Oberland (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Über ein Detail des Schweizer Steuersystems, die es Gemeinden ermöglicht, massive Anreize für reiche Ausländer zu schaffen
• Irgendwann passiert alles zum letzten Mal (Die Zeit): Thomas Pletzinger begleitet Dirk Nowitzki bei seinen letzten Wochen als Basketball-Profi
• Die Gedanken sind frei (Die Zeit): Über Literaturwerkstätten und Lyrik im Gefängnis
• Supermarkt senkt automatisch die Preise, wenn das Haltbarkeitsdatum näher rückt (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
• Ohne Italos keine Krippen (Die Zeit): Emanzipation durch Migration in der Schweiz - mit einigen gruseligen Beispielen, die erstaunlich kurz zurück liegen
• Wie viel Adi Dassler steckt noch in adidas? (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
• Die Reste einer geschmolzenen Stadt, angespült am Strand (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Mehr als 70 Jahre nach dem Atombombenabwurf von Hiroshima finden Forscher im Meer Glaspartikel, die vermutlich in dem Moment der Zerstörung dieser Stadt entstanden sind. Ein weiterer gruseliger Hinweis, wie Entscheidungen von Menschen dauerhaft unseren Planeten beeinflussen.
• Wider die hingeschwurbelte Geruchspoesie! (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Max Scharnigg grantelt über sinnlos parfümierte Produkte
• Drei Wochen, 12 000 Chinesen (Süddeutsche Zeitung): “Es ist die größte Reisegruppe, die die Schweiz je besucht hat: Ein Kosmetikkonzern schickt 12 0000 chinesische Mitarbeiter auf Tour. Das hinterlässt Spuren im Stadtbild von Luzern und reichlich Geld in den Kassen.”
• Der Louisiana-Effekt (Die Zeit): Über das Louisiana Museum of Modern Art - das grossartigste Museum, in dem ich bislang war
• Schach im “Parc des Bastions” (NZZ): Über die Schach-Szene in einem recht zentralen Park in Genf und ihre Binnen-Soziologie
• La Vie en Vert (Die Zeit): Über eine mögliche “grüne Welle” bei den Wahlen in der Westschweiz
• Der Maler des Mikrokosmos (FAZ): Über die Dürer-Ausstellung in der Wiener Albertina
• Umfragen sind besser als ihr Ruf (Süddeutsche Zeitung): Eine Daten-Analyse zur Qualität von Wahl-Umfragen