Six Secrets has become The Brief: Spy agencies brief people in power. We brief you. Each week we’ll bring you one story that matters, plus a few that don’t!
Your Brief for April 18, 2024: Tesla gets overtaken, Polaroids from Pompeii, the origins of Sudoku and more!
News
Tesla Gets Overtaken
The flag is down and the racers are off! China and America are head to head, racing to become the world's largest seller of electric vehicles. At the end of 2023 Tesla dropped into second place, losing their majority share of the market. Chinese electric car maker BYD pulled into first place and Tesla’s shares dropped 5%.
2024 didn’t start out as planned for Tesla, selling roughly 90,000 fewer vehicles than investors expected in the first quarter. Talk about feeling the pressure! And earlier this month the company posted its first decline in year-over-year sales since 2020. A leaked company memo has revealed the tech giant plans to let go over 14,000 employees. This race isn’t really just BYD vs Tesla, it’s a key element of USA vs China. The odds seem to be in favor of BYD, but surely Elon has a plan?
Arts & Culture
Polaroids From Pompeii
What if you could see photographs taken 2,500 years ago? What was important then, who was celebrated? Archaeologists at Pompeii have just uncovered some incredible snapshots of the past: frescoes and a mosaic showcasing mythic figures including Apollo and Helen of Troy!
These works may actually have been more Netflix than Polaroid. Gabriel Zuctrica, Director of Pompeii, believes the magnificent mosaic featuring more than a million white tiles would have been lit with shimmering lamplight to tell stories inside the large banquet hall during evening festivities. The walls of the hall were painted blacked to hide the smoke stains from the lamps.
If those walls could still talk, what stories would they tell us today? Like a box of old Polaroids found in the attic, these works offer us a glimpse into a world long gone but still very much worth a visit!
Technology
Dogs To Make Moon Maps
The moon may soon become weirder than ever…
Spirit, a robo dog, was recently released on a mission to the rocky hills of Oregon’s Mount Hood for testing, having already conquered the beaches of California. The mission? To train Spirit to quickly adapt in harsh environments in preparation for a trip out of this world.
NASA has been quietly funding the development of a robo dog in hopes of launching it out of the stratosphere on a space adventure to the Moon and possibly beyond. How sci-fi is that! LASSIE (Legged Autonomous Surface Science in Analog Environments), received a two-year $2 million grant from the American space agency and is manned by a multidisciplinary team of engineers and scientists hailing from multiple American universities. Their goal is to send a pack of robot dogs to map the surface of the moon and assess ground conditions, improving future robot and vehicle exploration. Don’t forget to pack doggy bags NASA!
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Prepare yourself for a covert mission straight out of Hollywood. It’s May 1945 and the echoes of World War II linger. As millions of Europeans are seeking a return to a brighter life, some dark figures hide in the crowds of refugees and Holocaust survivors, plotting to escape justice!
Among them is one of the key organizers of the Holocaust, a man responsible for the death of millions of Jews, Hitler’s security chief Adolf Eichmann.
Eichmann, like many surviving Nazis’, is desperate to disappear. Where can he hide? Armed with a forged identity, he slips past the eyes of the law using the infamous 'Ratlines'—a covert network designed to smuggle Nazis out of Europe. By 1952 Eichmann was living a relatively normal life in Argentina, under the alias Ricardo Clemen. But the hunt for Eichmann is still on!
Threads of Eichmann's story start to unravel as the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad begins to piece together his whereabouts and embark on an audacious mission to capture Eichmann and bring him to justice! Extracting Eichmann is a captivating story told by the descendants of central figures inside Operation Finale, the daring Mossad mission.
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Film
Angels From Berlin
There’s more to Berlin than spies and the Cold War. We want to show you a different Berlin.
Two angels from this storied city set out on a quest to understand the human condition. On their journey they encounter a lonely trapeze artist who changes them forever. As the Angels explore the human world, they anonymously interact with those around them, witnessing joys and sorrows and capturing the silent dialogues we have with ourselves, constantly confronted by the profound beauty and pain inherent in the human condition.
“Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there?”
Cozy up for a poetic journey through the streets of Berlin and the compelling cultural scene of the late 1980s with Wim Wenders' award-winning film Wings of Desire.
The angel protagonist Damiel falls in love with the contrasts of life, he is sick with the absence of pleasure. A desire for the warmth of a cup of coffee on a cold day, the embrace of a friend, and the intense joy of love - feelings we all seek.
What will become of his human dreams? Wings of Desire is a conversation, a poem and a visual representation of the struggles of being human and our ability to find beauty in a fragile existence.
Puzzles
Saturday Puzzle Fever
Disco wasn't the only fever born in the Big Apple in the 1970s. Far from the bright lights of Studio 54, puzzle guru Howard Garns was busy crafting his new puzzle Number Place based upon the Latin Squares game of 18th Century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. The work that Garns was doing would send the timeless puzzle on a journey around the world.
Across the pacific, another puzzle-obsessed nation caught wind of Number Place. Maki Kaji, President of the Nikolo puzzle company in Japan, tweaked Number Place and renamed it Sudoku which translates to ‘numbers must remain single’. Kaji's innovative twist on the game was to specify that each number on the 9x9 grid must appear just once in every row, column, and block. Boom! A new fever was born and this one went on to outlast Disco!
Are you good at solving? Try your luck at puzzle extraordinaire Val Melius’s crossword ‘Problem Solver’.
Ever thought of swimming to Europe from America? Probably not. Well maybe you should because you certainly can! Take a trip to Silfra in Iceland, jump into a drysuit and hope your nose doesn't freeze as you enter the icy water. Silfra is a special place that justifies your risk. It’s the only place in the world where you can swim from America to Europe. Silfra is a deep fissure between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. The fissure formed in 1789 following a major earthquake and the plates continue to move apart by roughly 2 cm each year!
Silfra sits in the heart of Iceland’s Þingvellir National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The fissure is part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which stretches a massive 16,000km and features many other chasms, some of which enable you to walk from plate to plate.
If you need further convincing, Silfra is also home to another marvel; its icy water is the clearest on the planet, boasting over 100 meters of visibility!
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