Food: Champagne
My first champagne in months. This was to celebrate mother’s day for my wife – a week late, as last week was spent at home cake-baking. I also had mutton curry for lunch, while wife wisely chose the Caesar’s salad. I paid dearly for the choices I made – curry and champagne do not work well for afternoon run: I had to pause a few times during the run. That has not happened in years. I made up for it by doing a repeat this morning, and was glad I completed the course as usual without rest in between.
Love: Roar – a girl’s theme song
One of my daughter’s classmates had a birthday party over the weekend. It was conducted on Zoom. The birthday girl invited about ten or so friends to join her for an afternoon of chatting, riddles, and Kara-OK.
At dinner, my wife asked what songs they sang. My daughter only knew two of the songs because they were from the Frozen series. My wife decided to teach her to sing Katy Perry’s Roar – it would make a good theme song for any girl, she said. Prior to this, I didn’t realize the official music video has 3 billion views on YouTube!
Growth: Running podcasts
I used to work out with gym music – my favorite is this: a compilation of motivational speeches. The heavy beats are especially great for timing lifting of weights and burpees.
Since the pandemic, I decided to change things round a bit and listened to podcasts during my run instead. My favorite is the weekly Wired UK’s podcast. The most recent one is a pub-quiz, which was actually quite fun. I especially enjoyed the “Guess the noise” round – very nostalgic. I replayed it for my wife and daughter after that, and my daughter turned out to be quite good with the “Animal” round, thanks to the science books we bought her.
On days without Wired UK, I turn to other podcasts, e.g. Stephen Dubner’s Freaknomics Radio and Michael Lewis’s Against the Rules.
Investment: Post-pandemic Offices
Over the past couple of months, there have been numerous articles about what the office will look like post-pandemic. Most of these argue that the office will never be the same again and that more and more people will work from home. The continued unraveling of WeWork adds to the impression that this is the beginning of the end for offices.
These views are evident in the market for US REITs:
While US REITs fell with the broader market (S&P500) since mid-Feb, its recovery since late March has not caught up with the broader market. Year to date, S&P500 fell 12%, while US REIT is down twice as much. Looking back to history, the current level of US REIT is back to that last seen in 2016.
So the sun is setting on the industry, or so it seems.
Two articles I came across over the past week, however, expressed very different views.
Lucy Kellaway, an ex-Financial Times columnist who had switched to teaching and leading a non-profit focused on getting matured professionals to teach, argued: “We will miss the office if it dies.” She counted numerous benefits of the offices, including it allowing us to escape from our usual selves and even finding work husbands. She went as far as to think the homily “No one ever said on their death bed: I wish I’d spent more time in the office” is quite mistaken. To her, “to wish for more office time is an entirely reasonable thing to say with your dying breath. I spent 35 rich and happy years in offices. I fear that my children won’t get that chance.”
1843, a sister publication of The Economist, reaches a similar conclusion in an article titled, misleadingly, “Death of the Office”. “Humans need offices”, said the author. She cited the reversal in growth of records and physical books as evidence that “these days, the ‘hyper-physical is so cherished,” and argued that the “chemistry of the unexpected” that one gets in person cannot be replicated in online interactions.
Awe: Three-body problem, for real
In his Three-Body Problem trilogy, Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin described an alien civilization that had to contend with the implications of three stars oscillating around each other. This led to irregular periods of advancement of the civilization and frequent destruction that brought them back to square one.
In real life, scientists discovered the “nearest black hole to Earth”, which happened to be discovered because of its interactions with two other stars. See here for an animation of how these three bodies move around each other. Perhaps there might be life in the surrounding planets?