Kickoff For September 20, 2021
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.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Arts and Literature
The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Piles, wherein Antoine Wilson looks at stockpiling books and sees it not as obsession or boarding, but as a source of pleasure and literary discovery.
The changing art of the subeditor: ‘You had to read the type upside down’, wherein Suzanne Warr looks back at how newspaper copy editors did their jobs in the days before it all went digital.
The Death of the All-Powerful Director, wherein we discover how the failure of Heaven’s Gate, and the behaviour of its director, changed the way in which Hollywood studios green light and fund movies.
Productivity
Hundreds of Ways to Get S#!+ Done—and We Still Don’t, wherein we learn why it’s so hard to make a to-do app that works, but why people often feel so distraught by their hunt for the perfect organizational system.
Use the Two-Minute Rule To Stop Procrastinating, wherein Fadeke Adegbuyi explains how knocking those little jobs that accumulate in our task lists can lead us to increased productivity.
How Productivity Tools Can Waste Your Time, wherein we learn something I’ve been saying for a long time: searching for that perfect app isn’t going to make you more productive. Doing the work is.
Odds and Ends
Baseball and Japan, wherein we get a brief look at how America’s favourite pastime became such a huge phenomenon in Japan.
How are cassettes still a thing?, wherein Radio New Zealand reporter Tony Stamp delves into why the venerable tape format has persisted even though there are more modern options for storing and sharing audio available.
The strange 19th-Century sport that was cooler than football, wherein we learn about competitive pedestrianism, a wildly popular professional sport in the 19th century, which spawned spectacles, highly-paid competitors, and rabid fans.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.