Dear Reader,
Firstly, apologies im Vorraus for the morose tone of this first newsletter of the year. Reading the news after two weeks spent with friends and family - time taken up with music, laughter and games - is a sobering experience. Once again, one enters a world where the human experience is reduced to a series of numbers, charts and indexes.
The first three news bulletins I read this morning: Niger - hit by a terror attack over the weekend - is number 189 in the UN index on human development; the number of people employed in German dropped by 1.1% in the year 2020; and the UK, where a mutant coronavirus strain is spreading, has seen 57,000 more cases.
Perhaps this affinity for numbers is a particular trait of German journalism - in a country more technocratic than democratic, the apparent certainty provided by Zahlen has a particular appeal. More likely though, it is part of an icy trend among opinion makers and politicians across the western world towards trying to fit all hum…
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