Friday's Five ✋ #439
History
Happy Friday! ☀️
Hello from the week’s end with mostly highs and a low. A team coaching day in Düsseldorf with my very first coaching client from 2018 and good progress on a number of current projects. For the past three weeks, my colleague Jeroen and I worked extensively on a pitch for a year-long executive development programme at a large pan-European company. We are proud of the work we delivered, the process of creating the proposal, and what we learned along the way. Unfortunately the company went with someone else. You win some, you lose some. To us, it was a net win.
What I’m reading 📖
Another book that has been on my To Read list for more than ten years is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian dissident. On a walk in 2024, my friend Eric told me more about the book and his experience reading it and since then, my urge to finally get to it increased. Yet again, I am listening to it as an audiobook and it’s a show of force in literacy. Russians who in Russian often say that the language can be so poetic and that it’s impossible to convey the feeling of it in translations. That’s how it feels reading this book. It documents the brutal reality of the Soviet forced labor camp system (the Gulag) between 1918 and 1956. Combining personal memoir, hundreds of witness testimonies, and historical investigation, it exposes the widespread repression, arbitrary arrests, and systemic inhumanity of the Soviet regime. And it does so with poetic prose that at first feels unfitting for the theme. More about the book.
What I’m listening to 🎧
From the makers of Serial, likely the first breakout podcast that started the renaissance of the podcast genre in 2014, comes a new podcast called The Idiot.
For decades, M. Gessen simply disliked their cousin Allen — a pompous "international businessman" who bragged about shady deals and drove fancy cars. Then Allen was arrested for trying to put a hit out on his ex-wife. He's just an idiot, right? Not a would-be murderer?
What I’m watching 📺
This week I watched Nuremberg. Rami Malek plays the U.S. Army psychiatrist tasked with investigate the personalities of high-ranking Nazi officials in the lead up to the Nuremberg tribunal. The most prominent of the 22 inmates was Hermann Göring (played by Russell Crowe). Watch the trailer.
What I’m thinking about 🧠
“History does not begin anew with each generation; it is a reservoir of interpreted experience that must be worked on and reinterpreted.” – Jürgen Habermas
What else?! 💯
In 2008 I signed up for a SoundCloud account, a little before starting to work at the company in 2009. Because it was early and it was available, I was able to secure the handle /david for my account. Today, while trying to log into my account, I noticed that my credentials were rejected. Visiting /david I noticed that the profile is empty or has been claimed by someone else. I submitted a support request and am waiting for a response. Crazy to think that this can happen, I am curious to learn more about what happened.
Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!
David
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