All Picks posted by David Iselin
If you are arriving in Zurich on a Sunday evening at 10 pm you want to shoot yourself out of despair. If you are lying in the Summer evening sun at the lake or the Limmat you can hardly imagine a more gentle place on earth (unless the [more]
How does a country in crisis feel? Would you feel anything? Are you the famous frog, slowly boiling alive, which rather will not perceive the danger and will be finally cooked to death? You might be it if you have been living in the same country for a long-time. [more]
I’ve written an article for DAS MAGAZIN, which will be published Saturday, about the process of automation and its consequences for human labour. It basically takes the arguments of Race Against the Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. They argue that the jobs in the US which [more]
Went to Winterthur (#JourTag13) this evening to hear Daniel Binswanger (DAS MAGAZIN) giving a speech about the situation of journalism. Daniel was one of the keynote speakers at the yearly conference of the Association of Quality in Journalism. He compared the latest developments in journalism to bubbles in financial markets. [more]
Tuesday. Work. “Don’t cry – work” (to be found on the back page of Rainhald Goetz’s novel Irre). Tuesday. Tennis. Schlieren. It was raining. Depressing. Normality. Things seemed to be different though. Won the first set. And then I lost the second. All back to normal. Federer lost [more]
Not 100% sure if round table is the correct English word for the German Tafel, at least the “Internet” says the translation of Die Ritter der Tafelsrunde is Knights of the Round Table. Evgeny Morozov might add that the “Internet” doesn’t exist. So be it. I’ll be participating in [more]
There was a guy in the train from Paris to Basel who had the annoying habit of repeating every sentence, every word at least three times. He said “the rich in France pay 75% taxes, that’s too much, that’s too much, that’s too much.” Then he asked his [more]
Doesn’t happen too often but I was for once ahead of the FT. Vanessa Friedman met Joel Arthur Rosenthal, the owner of JAR (or even JAR himself), aka the Fabergé of our time, for the Lunch with the FT series. It was some years ago when I had [more]
It’s always the same kind of feeling when you leave Basel by train, heading North or West. Direction France or Germany. The land gets flat, the horizon opens. It’s starts in St. Louis or in Weil am Rhein. You know that you are still in the Oberrheinische Tiefebene where you [more]
Went to a ghost walk through Zurich, organised by the British Swiss Chamber of Commerce. Obviously not many ghosts in this town, they had to invent some. I like the British humour, just nastier than the Swiss (and the German) one.
I went to Kunst Zürich, the foremost Zurich art fair (is it?), based in Oerlikon. First of all, if you want to eat dinner after 10 pm in Oerlikon go home, head to McDonald’s or le Muh (what a name) near the train station. The interior is a [more]
From time to time I debate with people who are somehow proud of their birth place. I always tell them that it was just luck or an accident that they were born in Basel, Zurich, Switzerland in general. Not much to do with them. Maybe their parents chose [more]
I learnt a word today. It was adiabatic which means something like “without passage”, describing a thermodynamic process where there is no heat exchanged between a system and its surroundings (correct me if I am wrong). It would be a nice word for a game a friend once [more]
Some statistics of fuenfnullzwei.de/60pages (until October 27): 60000 visitors No. 1 day so far was October 21 with 2,330 views Anne Philippi and The Tills are the most visited 60people. The top three posts are: Was machen wir mit den restlichen Wiesn Fotos? Kapitalistischer Realismus (3) Michael Althen And [more]
‘Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde’ is an exhibition now running at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as I was informed by the Financial Times today. One year ago I went to Moscow with a friend to see another friend. As the latter left when we arrived (it was [more]
You have your frequent flyer status and you somehow care about your environment (although someone once told me that no plane has ever left because he was on board. But if you spin that further, your single action would never have any consequences. You don’t have to vote [more]
Like I wrote yesterday, I usually play tennis Tuesday night in Schlieren (no big deal). Last time my opponent brought bananas with him because they were rotting in his start-up office nearby which attracted fruit flies. “Those little bastards”, he said. Almost everybody thinks fruit flies are bastards, [more]
Every Tuesday evening I am playing tennis with a friend in Schlieren, a suburb of Zurich. The first thing you want to do after arriving in Schlieren with the S-Bahn is jumping in front of the next incoming intercity train from Bern or Basel. In other words: Schlieren [more]
When you part from each other what stays? You meet somebody for lunch, coffee, G&T (everybody on 60pages seems so obsessed with, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, and here, and here, here in a way, here, here, and here, and here). What stays? A feeling? [more]
Nate “Gold” Silver is hiring. And when the wizard of data (journalism) is hiring you should be listening. If you want to work for FiveThirtyEight, Silver’s company/blog, you have to be a kind of wunderkind, a techy journalist, a journalistic techy. FiveThirtyEight is looking for people with an outstanding combination of [more]
It was an early evening in May. The evening light wrapped Jerusalem in a golden veil. We were heading towards the apartment of Abir and Lihi. They don’t live far away from Israeli president Shimon Peres’ house. So you might consider their neighbourhood posh. But there is no [more]
Who is your peer group? Who do you compare with? Your work colleagues? Your friends? Your enemies? Dead people? Successful people? Scientists? Artists? Journalists? Rich people? The people who are attending the same birthday party? The beautiful?
What is it with you lawyers (and judges and anybody involved in law) that I hardly ever understand what you are talking about? I remember having classes in private law at university. I didn’t get one single sentence you said. I remember having dinner with lawyer friends of [more]
We went to see the Trial (Der Process) by Franz Kafka in the Schauspielhaus Zürich. They played well, but something was missing. The desperation, the solitude? The solitude of today which probably was already the solitude of Josef K. I asked a young couple (or maybe it was not [more]
It was two years ago when I went to see Franz Gertsch’s seasons in the Kunsthaus Zurich over lunch time. Maybe I got hooked by the sheer size of the paintings, I still don’t know, maybe I was just hungry, but I left the museum with a huge stuffed animal gorilla [more]
A few people (at least two) asked if I post the speech I held last Saturday at a friend’s wedding in Tokyo. Not that I am famous for speeches, but I told everybody I met in the last two weeks (at least three people, what makes two a [more]
We were running through Tokyo yesterday. We started at Shibuya crossing where you can run through hundreds of people and then we went up the Aoyama Dori, the blue (ao) or green mountain (yama) street (dori) as in Japanese ao can mean blue or green, up to the [more]
Being in Japan means being a stranger confronted by three questions: 1) Where are you from? 2) What are you doing here? 3) When are you leaving again? 1) Being from Switzerland means you have a very good image (chocolate, cheese fondue, Heidi). 2) Being here for a [more]
We still don’t know if it was all fake. The fake Catholic chapel? The fake Caucasian priest (with his perfect Japanese that still sounded wrong)? The fake nuns with their big cross necklaces? The fake blossoms we were throwing at the newly wed. The fake Olive tree we [more]
Everybody has their city. Some may have Berlin, London, Paris. For me it’s Tokyo, at least as long as I understand a little what people there are talking. Good night, Tokyo. It’s late and I have a wedding ceremony to attend today.
I went with some friends to the Shinjuku Golden Gai (新宿ゴールデン街). Although it has become a merely hang-out for gaijins (foreigners) like myself, it is still an amazing place to get to talk to Japanese people. Usually there are only around 4 to 6 seats, so if you happen to [more]
If you are interested in business cycles, you may wonder what their duration could be. Two years ago, Deutsche Bank published a research note where they claimed that the business cycle has become shorter in recent years “because cycles were artificially long in what Deutsche dubs the ‘golden [more]
I started to read Simon Schama’s book The Story of the Jews. There was a place called Elephantine where there was a Jewish community avant le livre. * I realised once again in what kind of globalised world we live. I was buying presents for my godchild which is Japanese [more]
It was a Thursday afternoon in August in San Francisco. The boats in the race for the America’s Cup were chasing each other in the bay. We had rented bikes. It was windy. Headwind anywhere we went. Good for the boats (as they were enigmatically always coming in [more]
Coffee in Italy. Autobahn in Switzerland. Searching for a radio station while driving. Reading the review of Jonathan Franzen’s new book on Karl Kraus. Drinking white Merlot. Playing silly card games. Jumping into Lake Maggiore. Eating stuffed peppers. Listening to Georges Brassens: En ce temps-là, je vivais dans la lune [more]
There is a bar in Brissago, the last Swiss village before the Italian border at the right coast of Lake Maggiore, called Flamingo Bar. We usually arrive Friday evening late for a weekend in Brissago (a kind of Tyler Brûlé sentence, Brissago replaced with St. Moritz or Tokyo). [more]
I’ve come to the conclusion that the average researcher in an average university assumes that he’s pretty pretty ironical (speaking from experience, not from research). He is like the flatmate who puts a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip on the fridge which stays there for the next 10 [more]
I stumbled over David Bowie’s top 100 must-read books recently published in the Guardian. I saw Bowie last year in the Three Lives & Company bookshop in New York, I am sure he got there one book for his list. The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby (2008) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar [more]
Today a friend asked if I have read The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri because I was telling her that I will pay for my sins with 10000 years in the Purgatorio before I go to hell. No, I have not. It’s not that I am completely unfamiliar [more]
When I was studying in the city of Bern, I took diving lessons offered by the university’s sports department. The lessons took place on Fridays at noon in the indoor swimming pool Wyler. We were usually around four people. My diving teacher, Andrea Geissbühler, a copper (since Luther [more]
I usually start reading magazines and newspaper articles from the back part. First the books and arts section in the Economist then the rest. First the last paragraph in an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung then the rest. I am not the only one, I know. Today I [more]
A Sunday goes by that my memory will obliterate the first second Monday starts (Austrian elections don’t change this, believe me). I was listening to Matthew Gurewitsch talking about his life soaked up in culture in the radio show Musik für einen Gast on Swiss Radio. Then I heard Herta Müller [more]
I kind of missed it (apparently, haven’t been going out in Basel enough), but now you are not allowed to smoke anymore in Basel’s bars (actually you weren’t allowed before, but that’s a different story). I don’t smoke, but I prefer bars where you can. Why do you [more]
What is the difference between the 5.00 pm and the 5.34 train from Zurich to Basel? Not much. 1.30 Swiss francs. COCA COLA ZERO PET CHF 4.10 – ICE train at 5.00 pm COCA COLA ZERO PET CHF 5.40 – SBB train at 5.34 pm or at 4.34 [more]
I assume, I wouldn’t have got to know Armen Avanessian without 60pages. And even if I had in another context, I guess he wouldn’t have given me a book in little Pakistan Lichtenberg called Realismus Jetzt. Realismus Jetzt is a collection of essays, edited by Armen, mainly from [more]
We had dinner in the Italia in Zurich. I don’t go there too often, but I like it. It was probably one of the last nights you could sit outside this year (I also had a swim in the early evening in the Limmat which was surprisingly nice). [more]
I once was participating in an ecological project on the West coast of Mexico. We were saving turtle eggs, mainly from the hawksbill sea turtle (“Karettschildkröte” in German, which sounds much more interesting), as turtle eggs are a delicacy in Mexico (and supposedly good for your virility). Very [more]
I was moderating (just as a sidekick, not the whole event) today our institute’s 75th anniversary at ETH Zurich (with Josef Ackermann, Swiss Federal Counsil Schneider-Ammann, SNB President Thomas Jordan among others). Whereas I thought my jokes were pretty funny (in a Larry David way of being pretty [more]
I haven’t followed the German election too closely, except for the rise of the somehow very strange “Alternative für Deutschland” as Mr. Lucke is a well-known economic professor who also writes for an economic blog I am in charge of. Still, I was surprised to find Berlin, at [more]
We finally got to see Christopher’s tower in Lichtenberg (it’s not Christopher’s alone). Everybody who went up was behaving similarly, approaching the abyss frightened and lured. And if you ever wondered who we actually are, check out the growing number of people in our picks section.
Every three months or so I get a haircut near Central in Zurich. It’s always the same procedure. I go in before noon. Sit down. I ask one of the guys standing around – there are only a few girls – to shave my hair 6mm short (sometimes [more]
If you really going to work in Seattle the first thing you should do is going for a Microsoft’s employees’ house cruising tour on Lake Washington.* That’s what I told A. today when we had lunch together. I don’t think A is going to do it. She’s right [more]
I had coffee with my friend Matthis this afternoon in a “Altweiber” café close to Hottingerpatz in Zurich. Matthis is writing his doctoral thesis in law (don’t ask me what about exactly. I think doing a PhD sounds good enough, you should never have to explain what you [more]
Daniel Dafoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, was known as the ‘Sunday gentleman’ because after having failed one of his businesses and not being able to satisfy his creditors, he only could appear in public on Sunday, when no debts could be collected. Last Saturday, I went to [more]
I am reading Urs Widmer’s autobiography “Reise an den Rand des Universums” (journey to the end of the universe) with great interest (review in the NZZ here). In a strange way, his account is like a distorted and reverted echo of my own upbringing with a gap of [more]
Why the #FT #weekend is so excellent (it’s not the colour: apricot)*: It’s James Blitz on Syria. In “A long week: Putin’s diplomatic gambit” he shows day by day how Russia has outplayed the US over Syria within one week. It’s John Gapper on Tina Brown. “Tina Brown [more]
It’s Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) and Nassim #Taleb and Rolf #Dobelli are throwing shit at each other. I reviewed Taleb’s book ‘Antifragile’ some months ago for DAS MAGAZIN (as I also did with Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’, where, I guess, Dobelli has found even more [more]
Tuesday and again yesterday I went to hear Robert B. Laughlin giving the so called Paul Bernays Lectures at ETH Zurich.* Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize in physics 1998, started Tuesday evening by talking about his popular 2006 book “A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down”. What he said [more]