NSFW

Sadly, Chris Rea passed away this week.

Let me chose one of his greatest hits (no, definitely not this one, the other one!) to be the NSFW. BBC has a long obituary, mentioning that he survived pancreatic cancer for 25 years.

I remember hearing this song during a (Pre-)ERASMUS-stay in Paris (at Paris II) in autumm 1989, when the Berlin wall was falling.

Retrospect

#arsboni

I did one final interview for 2025 with Marguerita Sedrati-Müller (Counsel/ Director People & Culture) und Andrei Salajan (Director Legal Tech & Innovation) from Schönherr - one of Austria's leading large law firms that is very active in legal tech.

It was a very open and constructive discussion. The amount of new questions arising after the talk is probably higher than before, but this tends to be a good sign for the quality of the debate. I was (and am) in particular interested on te impact of AI on the labor market for young lawyers, as one can probably see in the debate as well.

Reach Out

At the end of the year, let me share some insights on my attempts to reach some audience.

#arsboni

The amount of subscribers on YouTube is still growing (slowly, but steadily)

although Spotify has, probably, become more important (also for Video-content).

Interestingly, a very legal episode with Dr. Julius Schumann was among the most popular ones on all platforms

Education related episodes performed well too, such as this one with Katharina Bisset.

The last episode in 2024 had the number 544, we stand at 608 this year (+ 20 editions of the LLP-podcast Recht neugierig, plus diverse special events without numbering) which means that I am still at somehow 2 pieces of content per week.

I am still rather happy with the laundry, despite some flaws in the technical set up (Why am I so yellowish in the streams? Is the sound as good as it can be? Should I invest into a second camera? Etc.) and am still learning that most people do not really care about such things.

Other Instruments

#arsboni is, probably, still my most important communication channel, although LinkedIn and, in particular, this channel have gained importance in 2025. I moved the Weekly to Ghost earlier this year and I am still rather happy with this decision. Major drawbacks so far are that Ghost doesn't seem to have a full text search/archive which makes it difficult to find my own content sometimes and that I ran into a spam filter issue so that most UNIVIE-readers didn't get the weekly delivered for several weeks. The latter problem seems to be fixed now, which I am grateful for.

The amount of subscribers here is rather small and grows only slowly, but I really like the weekly as a very intimate way to communicate with 'family and friends' and as a personal diary.

Despite this being my most personal and person focused channel, the audience is very international so that I am happy with the decision to write this (almost) exclusively in English.

My LinkedIn, somehow, replaced Twitter for me. I switched to a paid account this year (still pretty unsure whether it's worth it) and have a timeline that, sometimes, brings relevant news. For news, I prefer Bluesky and Mastodon, but the first lacks discourse and debate, the second is still very geeky - but with much less marketing noise and more high quality content than LinkedIn.

I stopped using Twitter and Substack and am still not on TikTok. I continue to keep my Insta on private (although nothing private happens there either) and am every now and then considering to change that. Facebook is almost irrelevant. Reddit that I use very often but only passively continues to be an excellent resource for my niche interests (such as mechanical keybords or life in Japan).

The importance of legacy media - both, those of general interest and those specialised in law - have further decreased for me in 2025 - both in my media consumption and in my content creation and I don't think that this trend is going to change in 2026.

Prospect

We are hiring

We will grow further at the department. Without any promises and details yet, I can announce that most likely we will open positions for a postdoc and at least one pre-doc in the next weeks to come.

In addition, we have a student-assistant position open at the moment.

I would love to hear from you.

Look and Feel

Helmut Lang

The Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) has a Helmut Lang retrospective.

Wheras, in my view, the museum as such is in poor condition and one could criticise (and improve) a lot, I enjoyed the exhibition (in principle). Falter (Paywall), Der Standard (here and here as well), Profil (written by Stefan Grissemann!), Die Presse (Paywall), FAZ (Paywall), Welt (Paywall) and others report, Falter also has a podcast (with Cordula Reyer!)

Vice chancelor Babler did a Facebook Reel with an excerpt of his opening speech one could say a lot about too.

This was - like remembering Chris Rea - a travel in a time that is, one the one hand, unbelievably far away (how sensational could it be to do a fashion show on the internet?) and on the other hand still so very present.

Yoshua Bengio

Stefan from the department pointed me to this remarkable interview with the world's (allegedly) most cited (living) scientist, Yoshua Bengio on the implications of AI and AGI (artificial general intelligence) on society.

It's a little of another "We are all doomed" story (and therefore possibly distracting from other existential risks such as climate change or war), but however worth being listened to, in particular in its thoughts on the interplay of AI and political power (Imagine, just for a minute, what could happen if any of the world's now acting major political leaders had AGI in their hands).

Bengio was lecturing in Vienna in May 2024 (I attended this, see Weekly 19/2024) and the stream from his UNIVIE-presentation with similar arguments is still available.

Daisy

wishes Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year as well.

Have a wonderful week and a wonderful 2026!

Thank you. It's a privilege I am grateful for every day to have you listening (and sometimes even responding) to me. I wish you the very best for the days and weeks and years to come.

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)