Kickoff For June 3, 2019
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I’ve found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.
The results of the poll are in: keep the Monday Kickoff the way it is. As you’ve spoken, so I’ll obey. More or less. I do plan to occasionally publish special editions of the Monday Kickoff that focus on a single topic. When that will happen … well, I don’t even know yet. So stay tuned!
With that out of the way, let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Productivity
Focus as an Antidote for Wanting to Do Everything, wherein Leo Babauta teaches us that we can fight our urges to do as much as we think is possible, or help as many people as we can, and focus on what we really need to do and who we really need to help.
I love my ‘dumb phone’. It’s just so slow on the uptake, wherein we learn the joys of using a mobile phone as just a phone, and the sense of calm that can come with disconnecting in this increasingly connected world.
Should You Fix Weaknesses or Focus on Strengths? Here’s How to Decide, wherein Scott H. Young offers some advice about when and how to decide which aspect to focus on.
Environment
Louisiana’s Disappearing Coast, wherein we learn about the attempts over the centuries to control the waters in Louisiana, attempts that are becoming more desperate as the state steadily loses ground to the sea.
Are our cities effectively planning for climate change?, wherein we learn that even cities whith plans for balltling climate change need to do much, much more.
Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA: Part 1 (and Part 2), wherein Jenny Price ponders nature in the City of Angels, its diversity, and where to find that diversity of nature.
Arts and Literature
On reading, publishing and being working class, wherein Noel Murphy argues that it behooves the publishing world, and society as a whole, to get even more working class people reading and, inevitably, writing.
Home Taping Is Killing Music, wherein we relive the music industry’s hysteria of the 1980s, which proclaimed that taping off the radio and off vinyl would put an end to music (and the industry’s profits). What’s new is old again, indeed.
Does Talking About Books Make Us More Cosmopolitan?, wherein Tim Parks ponders the nature of reading and how it’s an intensely personal experience, an experience which isn’t the same for all readers of the same book.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.