Elon Musk – the 21C’s Henry Ford. Do Good People go into Politics? And how Parking Places Killed Urban Spaces. Plus more! #165
Grüezi! I’m Adrian Monck, and welcome to this newsletter featuring seven things that caught my attention this week.
Also in this edition – trash-stalking robot jelly-fish, helping everyone make it to the beach and a little shameless promotion for my daughter’s choir.
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1️⃣ Elon Musk – The 21C Henry Ford
20C automobile legend’s legacy has lessons for the 21C.
The most famous industrialist of the 20C? Henry Ford.
The most famous of ours? Elon Musk.
You can visit the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, in the late tycoon’s Michigan birthplace.
Someday – maybe on Mars – there’ll probably be a Musk museum.
Buried on the Ford museum’s website is a page called Henry Ford and Anti-Semitism: A Complex Story:
“The most controversial and least admirable aspect of Ford’s career was his descent into anti-Semitism.
“Convinced that ‘bankers’ and ‘the Jews’ were responsible for a whole range of things he didn’t like, from the world war to short skirts to jazz music, Ford used his newspaper ... to carry on an active anti-Semitic campaign...
“Seen within the context of the times, they demonstrate the sharp realities and tensions that emerge in societies undergoing profound cultural, economic and political change.”
Future Musk museum curators will probably be able to crib this weaselly text direct, since the 21C billionaire’s continued flirtation with far right memes and conspiracy thinking has now reached the dark shores of anti-semitism.
After George Soros’s fund dumped $16m of Tesla stock Elon Musk tweeted:
Of course, criticizing George Soros doesn’t make you anti-semitic. And if you want to know who exactly Magneto is – here’s a rabbit hole.
But according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry:
Musk’s tweet “smelled of anti-semitism...[and] immediately brought a flood of antisemitic conspiracy theories.”
I’m not much on predicting the future, but expect the Musk museum’s media presence to feature Elon Musk and “____”: A Complex Story. And remember:
“Seen within the context of the times...”
⏭ Musk has promised to continue saying whatever pops into his head.
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2️⃣ What Makes People Politicians?
Not everyone is in public life for the wrong reasons.
Ed Davey leads Britain’s Liberal Democrats. We were casual acquaintances as college contemporaries and later when he was an MP.
I never knew his story until this week.
When Davey was 4, his father died. At 9, his mother contracted breast cancer. He and his brothers became carers. When she died, he went to live with his grandparents. But then his grandfather died suddenly.
Through his career in politics Davey’s wife – also a politician – has faced up to life with multiple sclerosis, and the couple are raising a child with a serious disability.
One thing shone through in Davey’s story, however. Resilience.
“The summer after my mum died, in the kitchen by myself, I had loads of work to do.
“I thought, ‘I’m not going to do it.’
“Previously, I studied to make my mother happy. Because that’s what you do as a kid. Are your parents proud of you?
“It was a real Rubicon moment for me. That’s when it could have gone wrong.
“But Mum had been a massive influence in my life, and I went the right way, rather than the wrong way.”
I don’t share Ed’s politics.
But the importance of love in creating strong human beings who can deal with adversity? Immeasurable.
⏭ Ed was a cabinet minister in the Cameron-Clegg ‘austerity’ coalition.
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3️⃣ How Solving Parking Dissolved Cities
And why a reasonable plan was defeated by doing nothing.
Parking is not a modern problem. Horses required stabling, and stables attracted flies, filled up with excrement, and smelled – well horse-y and manure-y.
The United States solved parking for the internal combustion age by requiring buildings to come with parking places.
This ‘rational solution’ changed America, as Henry Grabar explains in a new book “Paved Paradise.” A reviewer explains:
“Intended to insure that parking was paid for by the private sector, the system instead swallowed up vast tracts of what ought to have been public and pedestrian space.
“The American town lost its heart, became strip-malled and overrun, because the street front had been consumed by places to put the cars that brought you there.”
The solution to this soulless de-civilising of cities?
Ignore the problem.
It turns out that not requiring parking with new builds and forcing people to find their own solutions works wonders.
In downtown LA, lifting parking requirements brought people back. The parking-place-less population tripled in the first two decades of the 21C.
⏭ The Swiss, fond of engineering challenges, built carparks underground.
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4️⃣ Need Help on the Beach this Summer?
Greece has you covered.
⏭ Tips to make travelling with a disability easier.
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5️⃣ Nasty Chemicals of the Green Transition
Tough choices or tough regulations?
⏭ Some toxic chemicals can be broken down by bacteria in waste water.
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6️⃣ Trash-Stalking Robot Jellyfish
They’re more robot than jelly.
⏭ They’d have to go pretty deep to clean up wrecks like the Titanic.
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7️⃣ When A Capella Meets The 1975
A little musical family-related promotion for the weekend.
The talented soloist above is Emma Hughes. My daughter Ella is in the backing chorus singing away below.
Also – singing is good for you, join a choir!
⏭ Reading over singing on Bea’s book club podcast.
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If you enjoy this newsletter – please recommend it!
Best,
Adrian
