Kickoff For October 24, 2022
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.
It’s Labour Day in this part of the world, which means a long weekend. I could get used to this …
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
How to Embrace Doing Nothing, wherein Arthur C. Brooks looks at how difficult it can be to put your feet up, at the value of leisure as opposed to rest, and why learning to do nothing is good for us.
The ejector seats that fire through the floor, wherein we learn a bit about the history of pilots being able to abandon military aircraft in mid flight, and how engineers had to come up with some radical solutions to help crew safely exit stricken jet craft.
What We Gain from a Good Bookstore, wherein Max Norman argues that bookstores are more than just physical spaces for buying dead-tree tomes, but are places of discovery (in many forms).
The Story Of Neil McCauley And The Real Heist That Inspired Michael Mann’s ‘Heat’, wherein we learn a bit about the career, mindset, and eventual downfall of the consummate real-life criminal immortalized in the 1990s heist classic.
Long Live Participatory Socialism!, wherein Thomas Piketty details his ideas around reducing or eliminating inequalities by changing the legal, fiscal and social systems of individual countries.
Could learning algebra in my 60s make me smarter?, wherein writer (and confessed math-phobe) Alex Wilkinson recounts how his struggles to try to learn some basic mathematics and what he learned not only about math but also about himself.
The yodeler who sued Yahoo, wherein we learn about Wylie Gustafson, the singer behind the search company’s distinctive yodel, and his struggle to get payment for those iconic three seconds after Yahoo! used his vocal in ways that was contrary to their original deal.
The Garbage Dumps of Mars, wherein Caleb Scharf looks at another downside of living on the Red Planet: all the waste that colonists will generate, and what will happen to it.
Tripping the Late Capitalist Sublime, wherein Jason Blair explores how corporations co-opt art and culture to keep us consuming and, in some ways, under their thumbs.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.