Good morning, Quartz readers!
Hold my beer.
It’s a phrase one backyard-barbecue goer says to another, encapsulating a moment of supreme clarity of vision and outcome—just before his physical stunt goes cringingly wrong.
Lately, it’s also how social media joke-makers are describing public relations misfires. Pepsi started the recent spate with their tone-deaf advertisement trivializing Black Lives Matter. Hold my beer, said United Airlines, before they violently forced a customer off of a full flight, sending him to the hospital. No, hold my beer, the internet imagines Sean Spicer thinking, as he fatuously compared Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria to Adolf Hitler’s in Nazi Germany. That gets us to Tuesday.
This isn’t just the week of hold my beer. We now live in a hold-my-beer world. Is humanity becoming stupider? It may just be that our world is so much more connected. Boneheaded moments that would have faded into the ether a decade ago now course through the internet like heroin in a junkie’s veins. We’re desperate for another fix of schadenfreude to cackle or cluck over.
But when we ruefully shake our heads at every blunder, it becomes easy to lose sight of truly alarming developments. As tensions mount on the Korean peninsula, the world learned that US president Donald Trump realized the situation there was complicated only after a 10 minute history lecture from Chinese premier Xi Jinping. So, while Trump was preparing to ask someone (Sean Spicer, perhaps?) to hold his beer while he fixed Korea, Xi—leader of the US’s biggest regional rival—grabbed him by the arm and explained the epic faceplant he was about to inflict upon America.
The rumblings are North Korea may test a nuclear device today—possibly as you’re reading this email. US Navy vessels are in position nearby, but thanks to Trump’s doctrine of unpredictability, no one knows if their rules of engagement are preemptive, defensive, or retaliatory. Perhaps even the troops themselves are in the dark.
It’s not always possible to stop an unfolding disaster, but the world needs more arm-grabbing and less beer-holding. The freude (pleasure) we feel when watching someone fail isn’t worth it if the schaden (damage) blows back on us all.–Paul Smalera
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No one is prepared to stop the robot onslaught. So what will we do when it arrives? Advances in supercomputers and neural networks are combining to create a revolution. Some economists say nearly half of all workers in the West could lose their jobs to automation over the next two decades, writes Steve LeVine. Forty percent of Fortune 500 companies could vanish entirely. Unless every major industrial country agrees to forego the vast productivity gains that come from automation, this is what the future probably looks like.
Nasty, brutish, and short—the next Korean War. It’s getting harder to dismiss North Korea’s attention-seeking military stunts. Some analysts believe the Kim regime could reach US cities with nuclear-tipped missiles within a few years. A first strike by the North would almost certainly amount to national suicide. But at the same time, a conflict looks inevitable. Steve Mollman asked the experts what that fight might look like.
Learning a language is a form of political resistance. Whether it’s through generating empathy for other cultures or better understanding your own, speaking a second language isn’t just good for your brain—it’s good for democracy, too. As Ed Cooke writes, extending our vocabulary beyond our mother tongue is a concrete action we can all pursue as a potent corrective force against narrow-mindedness.
German drivers aren’t on board with electric vehicles. It’s all about RIP: range, infrastructure, and price. The government has committed to investing €300 million into charging stations. But the current network is a mess of different ways to pay, writes Jill Petzinger, adding to drivers’ anxiety about being stranded. And the price of entry is still a huge deterrent. Electricity is cheap today, but electric cars can still be twice as expensive to own than their diesel or gas counterparts. Even a 10-year exemption from car taxes amounts to annual savings of only around €50.
It takes more than a gym membership to seduce the scarcest talent. Christopher Groskopf sifts through three different US census datasets to tease out the latest on the state of working from home. The data show that programmers take home that top perk, in that they are more likely to be allowed to WFH than professionals working in art, design, management, or business and finance.
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Marine Le Pen has a path to victory in the French presidential elections. At a campaign rally deep in the French countryside, Le Pen supporters chanted “Rothschild!” in reference to her main opponent Emmanuel Macron’s banking career—in American English that loosely translates to “lock her up.” The dynamics in France look entirely familiar and utterly unstoppable. “Only a fool, after Brexit and Trump,” writes Roger Cohen (paywall) in the New York Times, “would suggest otherwise.”
Most historians never saw Trump coming. They say the conservative movement began when William F. Buckley Jr. denounced “the political surrealism of the paranoid fringe” and ushered in the center-right Reagan era. But this official history is far too polite, Rick Perlstein writes (paywall) in the New York Times. Perlstein, a historian himself, argues his colleagues must confront the far right’s ugly history of embracing fascism, con-men, and white rage before it can make sense of the forces that gave rise to Trump.
A neuroscientist says our thinking about emotions is mostly wrong. Contrary to popular belief, no two frowns (or smiles) tell the same story, says Lisa Feldman Barrett, in an interview with the Verge about her new book on emotions. Nor are all humans capable of the same emotions, especially if they live in different cultures. If we can better understand that our emotions are constructed from our past experiences, Barrett believes, we could become curators of our future emotional experiences.
We don’t know much about modern AI, even though we built it. The inner workings of AI used by Facebook, Google, and Microsoft (and every other tech company) are so complicated, even computer scientists can’t unravel what influences them to make one decision over another, according to Will Wright. The problem? When these algorithms are used to trade stocks or predict crime, understanding how they work is as crucial, or more so, as understanding whether they work.
Even Indian women with power have their narratives told by men. Starting with Hindu myths, Aditya Desai traces a path to contemporary Indian and Indian-diaspora literature. As he wrestles with whether to accept an arranged marriage or attempt to date in the modern style, he explains how modern feminism in the country is still inexplicably dictated by men, echoing India’s epic mythologies.
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