Last week I was swamped with a torrent of lectures with up to eight academic hours per day; one and a half migraines and a sore throat; and sudden hailstorms between bouts of snow. Yup, April. Thus, regrettably, I didn’t finish any blog posts. But I published two more albums on Flickr, Stuttgart I and Stuttgart II, and I also started t...

Unsurprisingly, things look every bit as bleak in terms of prevention and vaccination in Germany as experts have predicted—where by “experts” I of course mean actual experts, not shady rent-a-scientists like you-know-who. It’s pretty weird to experience a major crisis in a country that’s comprehensively underorganized and overregulated...

Not much has changed since last year this time, except that the virus has become more varied and more viral; that Germany dropped the ball in terms of prevention and vaccination; and that the world doesn’t look so well in general, even though one of its most destructive forces is off the board since January 20. Besides all that, March ...

Evidently, today isn’t Friday—I decided to push this newsletter’s regular release date to Sunday. To have more time to get stuff done, that’s one thing. As another, it feels better to let these little retrospectives not end the old week, but start the new one! In the U.S., Japan, Israel, and many other countries, Sunday is the first da...

If one thing has become clear during the past weeks and months of the pandemic, it is that Germany's government agencies and political parties are singularly inept at doing the right thing, and that everybody—barring a miracle—can kiss their summer vacations 2021 goodbye. One of the most outrageous things happening with regard to the p...

Some of you may have noticed that I have a new* email address j.martin@hey.com. Essentially, HEY.com is a paid webmail service. But you get an incredible amount of mileage out of your bucks, trust me! Remember how I always told you, use messaging, don’t send me emails? That’s history. Email’s become fun again! So don’t shy away any lon...