🏡 post-pandemic pilgrimage.

on the agenda this week: strawberry sellers, volkswagen’s megafactory reopens & the post-pandemic pilgrimage.

May 04, 2020

📖 reading time: 6m 30s.

👋 happy (bank holiday for some) monday!

i have a nice lineup for you today to peruse over breakfast or a lazy coffee. as always, feel free to skip any section that doesn’t interest you or reply directly to this email to provide me with feedback.

on the agenda this week: strawberry sellers, volkswagen’s megafactory reopens & the post-pandemic pilgrimage.

⚡️ tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain!

📝 a note on: the great online migration.

i feel particularly proud about where i work. if you want to come and work with me, consider looking at our open jobs list and getting in touch if you find something that may be a good fit for you. i do not get a referral bonus.

now — more than ever — we’re enabling the global shift from offline commerce to online commerce. there have been countless examples of this over the past few weeks but this twitter thread (i’ve converted it to a paragraph for legibility) about strawberry sellers in the mountains of chamonix, france sums it up ever-so-succinctly:

radical times force us to embrace change when we are naturally not inclined to it. my parents have been selling fruits and vegetables on farmers markets in the mountains of france for their entire life. i grew up helping them. with covid, they’ve not been able to sell their products as farmers markets are mostly closed. which means no revenue whatsoever for an unknown period of time.

for a small (very) traditional business, this is a dramatic situation! so over the weekend, my brother and i helped them pivot to an online delivery business where people can order a weekly box of fresh fruits and vegetables delivered to their door.

48 hours after launching, they received 130 orders!! my dad spends hours fixed to the screen watching new orders come in. in the matter of 2 days, they went from only ever accepting payment in cash to receiving money through @stripe before even sourcing the products.

they now have their own facebook page and use google sheets to track orders and organise their work...they feel like they’re launching a start-up at 60yo. let’s see what the future holds… this little example shows that change is within all of us and that creativity and innovation spark in times when all seems doomed. if my parents can do it, we can all do it!

fun fact: i had been pushing them to setup an online delivery business for years. their answer was always ‘no - we’re too old for this’...i guess not.

📚 word of the week:

`“sedentary”.`

there is no more apt a word right now than sedentary, “accustomed to sit or rest a great deal or to take little exercise.”

his love of books, his sedentary habits, and quick wit on matters of learning, led those interested in his fate to consider him fitted for the church, and therefore, he took priest’s orders.

- mary shelley, the fortunes of perkin warbeck, 1830.

🤪 mildly humorous:

outtakes from the twitter-sphere.

PJ Vogt @PJVogt

It’s still crazy to me that the only person who has ever deleted their popular app because they were worried it was wreaking havoc on society was the inventor of Flappy Bird.

Talia Lavin @chick_in_kiev

anyone else ok for days at a time and then seized by a red surge of raw despair and terror

Ron Iver @ronnui_

Me and the boys made Guy Scouts and we are thriving I just got a badge for having too many HDMI cables and Dave got a badge for emotional honesty

🧠 brain candy:

`🚗` `the return of wolfsburg`.

volkswagen reopened the world's biggest car factory at wolfsburg in germany on monday after the coronavirus forced it to shut down for the longest period in its 82-year history. the factory churns out roughly 3,500 cars per day.

here's what volkswagen had to do:

wolfsburg will restart with one shift of 8,000 production line workers instead of the usual 20,000. hours will initially be reduced for some employees, with shift changes arranged so that workers arriving don't meet those that are leaving. workers will be expected to check their own temperature and change into their uniforms at home each morning, rather than on site. they will be asked to use elbows to open doors and walk in single file once inside, following markers on the floor to keep space between people.

social distancing will be enforced during team meetings and over lunch breaks, with reduced seating in common areas and conference rooms converted into office spaces. canteens will remain closed and workers asked to bring their own lunch. water dispensers have been temporarily removed to reduce the likelihood of infection and air conditioners set to circulate as much fresh air as possible.

tools will be disinfected after every shift and workers will no longer pass them to one another by hand, instead setting materials down in containers so that others can pick them up at a safe distance. several hundred additional hand washing facilities are being installed throughout the plant.

👉 read more via cnn business.

`📚` `tolstoy together.`

the tolstoy together project is a community reading project taking place on twitter using the hashtag #tolstoytogether. the discussion is led by yiyun li, a novelist and professor of writing at princeton university.

at a prescribed 30 minutes a day (some 12 to 15 pages), readers move at a peculiar, slowed pace through battles and duels, deaths and marriage proposals.

“war and peace”—originally titled “the year 1805”—is widely considered the world’s greatest novel. it is also among the most daunting, acknowledged richard pevear, one of its translators, “as vast as russia itself”. its huge canvas encompasses not just napoleon’s wars against the russian and austro-hungarian empires from 1805 to 1812, but a cast whose actions and emotions span the breadth of human consciousness. as james wood, a literary critic, has noted, tolstoy is the supreme novelist of human contradiction. his epic is an unparalleled examination of how people respond to the pressures of both war and ordinary life.

so large is tolstoy’s world, ms li reckoned, that there could be no better companion for people trapped in isolation. she conceived of a virtual book club to sustain readers through the lockdown. participants around the globe would plough through this doorstopper together and share their thoughts on social media. with brigid hughes of “a public space”, a literary review based in brooklyn, she christened the project #tolstoytogether. it would be an anchor in unsettling times. to their amazement, when it began in mid-march 3,000 people on six continents signed up.

👉 read more via the economist.

`🏡` `post-pandemic pilgrimage.`

what company would be better placed to both anticipate and be affected by the current pandemic than airbnb. the home-rental company defined the travel industry after the last cataclysm, but may be less suited for what’s next.

“i’m not sure if there’s a more difficult thing that a ceo of a travel company could ever do than go through this,” chesky says. “you feel like you were t-boned, or like a torpedo has just hit the ship.”

chesky started airbnb in the middle of the last global cataclysm. to homeowners struggling through the u.s. foreclosure crisis, airbnb offered a way to help cover the next mortgage payment. to would-be travelers who couldn’t afford fancy hotels, it played up the character of the rentals its cash-strapped “hosts” were offering. why stay at a cookie-cutter hotel in a financial district when you could rent a room in a cool-but-gritty neighborhood in brooklyn or the mission and stay a few more days?
bookings crashed after china put hubei province and its capital, wuhan, where the virus originated, on lockdown. then came europe, where airbnb generates roughly a quarter of its revenue. “you could put it on a plotted curve, and you could say, well, united states is italy, just two weeks behind,” chesky says. “you started getting this very visceral, ‘wow, the world’s going to be different.’ ”

👉 read more via bloomerberg.

👂 earworm: giveon.

“you know what it is whenever i visit
windy city, she blowin' me kisses, no
thirty degrees, way too cold, so hold me tight.”

stream now:

drake’s earnest re-embrace of his most emotional self peaks on “chicago freestyle,” on which he reviews his past relationships while wondering whether or not he’ll find real love in this life (“maybe i’ll love you one day/ maybe we’ll someday grow”). while drake’s been down this road many times before, giveon’s silky feature elevates the track into a mellow, heartfelt standout that’s not only gorgeous but timely.

social distancing is lonely and, for better or worse, it provides the time and space to evaluate and reevaluate every relationship you’ve ever had. consider this your new quarantine soundtrack.
- time magazine.

listen to giveon on spotify or on apple music.