Kickoff For November 21, 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.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
The Dark Side of Collaboration, wherein Margarita Leib explores collaborative dishonesty and how teams can avoid unethical behaviour when working together.
Alexander Helphand — impresario of revolutionary disaster who smoothed Lenin’s return to Russia, wherein we learn about the forgotten late 19th/early 20th would-be revolutionary, a socialist who made and spent several fortunes yet was only a footnote in the one revolution he helped foment.
Without a Rosetta Stone, can linguists decipher Minoan script?, wherein Ester Salgarella looks at how close we are to finally deciphering an ancient script, and the difficulty of completing that task without the help of bilingual text.
Heartlands: Dipping into the retro riverside of Tamagawa, wherein Tokyo resident Rebecca Saunders takes us on a tour of some of the sights and attractions of a riverside community a short distance away from the city’s centre.
How the Physics of Nothing Underlies Everything, wherein we learn about the different types of vacuums (from the perspective of physics), and how understanding those vacuums might help scientists better understand the universe.
Why You Keep Doing Productivity Systems That Don’t Work, wherein Dan Shipper looks at what he calls Productivity White Whales and outlines some strategies to avoid or beat them.
“A Great Ox Stands on my Tongue”: the Pitfalls of Latin Translation, wherein Jaspreet Singh Boparai examines the difficulties in translating not just a dead language like Latin, but living languages as well.
How To Write History While It’s Happening: Lessons From Tacitus, wherein Richard Cohen looks at how the writing of the Roman author developed, and at how he chose to chronicle the events of his time.
How mindfulness can make you a darker person, wherein we learn that there are negative outcomes to the popular form of meditation, ones that bring out some of our worst character traits and drives.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.