Day: June 6, 2020

Gitte Klitgaard experienced déjà vu recently while taking bacon and eggs from her freezer to thaw for breakfast the next day.

“Wait, I just did that?” she asked herself, thinking she had done exactly the same thing earlier in the day. Or maybe it was the week before. It was hard to tell because her days were becoming indistinguishable from each other.

As Klitgaard thought about it, she realized she was having more of these surreal moments ever since shelter-in-place rules went into effect in her country, Sweden, in March. Working from home day in and day out because of the coronavirus pandemic was taking a mental toll on Klitgaard, a software development consultant and regular speaker at tech conferences.

Her days were becoming more repetitive, blurring into a loop, akin to what Bill Murray’s character in the 1990s movie Groundhog Day experienced, minus the jokes. “I was shocked when I started counting and realized I had been home for eight weeks,” Klitgaard says. “I would have guessed four or five. Days are blending together.”

Klitgaard’s feeling of monotony is becoming increasingly common for workers who are still under shelter-in-place orders, according to several mental health experts. Additionally, people are …

Christoph Koch didn’t get into activist investing to boost his stock portfolio. He did it for his honeybees. 

In the spring of 2008, the German beekeeper nearly lost his livelihood when his bees started dying—at first in small numbers, then in big bunches. Up and down Germany’s Upper Rhine valley, honeybees perished by the millions. It became national news, triggering an investigation that pinned the likely cause of death on the pesticide clothianidin.

Even before the die-off, most beekeepers and farmers knew all about clothianidin, a bestselling insecticide developed by Bayer Crop Science, a division of the German agrochemical giant. It’s designed to keep crop-munching pests out of the cornfields. A growing body of scientific research, though, says the pesticide does real harm to pollinators like honeybees too. Clothianidin is the neonicotinoid family, so named because it’s chemically similar to nicotine, and some pollinators get hooked on it, studies show.

By the spring following the great bee die-off, Koch had become a Bayer shareholder and started protesting at annual shareholder meetings (AGMs, as they’re called) in Bonn. In subsequent years he got inside, where he addressed the board directly at the AGMs. 

Each year Koch makes the strip to Bonn to …