NSFW (Nikolaus' Song For the Week)

This week's song is beautiful and haunting, but mainly beautiful: EELS, Deconstruction.

YouTube:

Wikipedia describes the styles of the corresponding album as: orchestral pop, power pop, psychedelic pop/rock, indie/alternative rock and post-modern pop - whatever, I like it. Reviews are not always friendly either, but who cares.

Retrospect

AI and Law

I rarely write about teaching here, but make an exception this week as Michael Friedmann was lecturing this week. Michael is a legal tech veteran, founder of frag-einen-anwalt.de, 123recht.net and prime.legal. His company, QNC, merged with anwalt.de recently and Michael is member of the board and chief legal innovation officer there now.

I was very impressed about the openness he was talking about the impact of AI and in particular LLMs on their business (model). The yearly figures are put upside down by LLMs and its very hard to forsee where thix is leading to.

European Research Council

The biggest and most prestigious European Funding Scheme has published its figures for Consolidator Grants in this round.

I was in the jury for SH2 - Institutions, Governance and Legal Systems - here's the full list of researchers and projects that were selected to be funded. The statistics show that Austria is performing quite well here (but clearly worse than Switzerland, for example).

Prospect

Data Protection Moot Court

On Monday, December 15th, at 17.00 CET the grand finals of this year's Data Protection Moot Court will take place. This is a teaching format in which students from all over the world compete in a simulated trial.

Ivan Krastev

It has become a tradition, that this hero of my intellectual work gives an outlook on the year to come in Concordia in a conversation with Mirjana Tomic. This is a by invitation only event and I am only on the waiting list too, but do hope that I will be able to join and that it will be recorded again.

For the meantime, it's absolutely worth watching (again) what he had to say last year.

Look and Feel

Florian Paul und die Kapelle der letzten Hoffnung

The band gave a wonderful concert in Szene Wien on Tuesday. It started decently but escalated quickly. 😄

The songs are a beautiful mixture of melancholy, rhythm and melodic beauty. Here's one of the very last songs they played - a reference to Vienna.

Isn't it funny that still so many musicians write songs about Vienna (see, for example, Weekly 46/2024 or 20/2025 for further examples)?

They have very nice merch too that I bought and wore immediatly.

The song the cap is referencing to was NSFW in Weekly 08/2025. Some more about the band comes from SZ (and SZ), Laut.de - and here's an excerpt (and one more) from Inas Nacht.

Their Insta has several Reels with live snippets from concerts of this tour (such as this one or this one).

Daisy

sees the light behind the window.

Have a wonderful week!

Kind regards

Nikolaus (Forgó)