The Monday Kickoff

Start your week with nine curated reads, served fresh each Monday

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.

A quick reminder: as I mentioned seven days ago, The Monday Kickoff will become an email-only publication on April 1st, 2024. If you no longer want to receive The Monday Kickoff via email, please unsubscribe before March 28th.

With that out of the way, let's start the week with these links:

Dr Terror deals the Death card: how tarot was turned into an occult obsession, wherein we learn about the fairly innocuous origin of tarot cards and how they evolved (?) into a a tool of fortune-telling and spiritual self-discovery.

It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly, wherein Cal Newport argues that we need to recognize the harms that technology has on us and our minds, and that it might be time to more aggressively curate the tools we allow in our lives.

Wild Pigeon Chase, wherein Carrie Arnold goes looking for wild rock doves in the Hebrides and learns about how wild animals change not just from domestication by humans, but by living close to us.

‘Children are not dolls made for gaining followers’: This is how kids are affected by viral TikTok pranks, wherein we learn (although it should be obvious) that all of those social media practical jokes that parent pull on their kids are harming those kids in multiple ways.

Recapturing early internet whimsy with HTML, wherein we learn about the HTML Energy movement, yet another initiative to get more people to build sites using plain old HTML, but which also calls on people to reexamine our relationship with technology..

What happens when you take too much melatonin?, wherein we learn about the effects (many of them not so good) of ingesting more of the popular sleeping aid than we should.

Going cashless is a bad idea, but it’s not a conspiracy, wherein Brett Scott argues that the push to move away from physical money — often clothed in terms that make it seem like we all want it — doesn't benefit us as much as it benefits Big Tech and Big Finance.

The Bittersweet Science, wherein Mark MacNamara dives into a program called Rock Steady Boxing, a non-contact regime of pugilism designed to help people survive Parkinson’s by thinking in terms of three-minute rounds.

Name Your Industry—or Else!, wherein Sarah M. Brownsberger reflects on the insidious trend of classifying all work and occupations in terms of an industry and how that devalues both work and us.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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.

A quick announcement: The Monday Kickoff will be moving house on April 1, 2024. And, no, that's not a joke! The Monday Kickoff is becoming an email-only letter. Why? Almost all of the engagement with it comes via email, believe it or not. With the move, I'll also be experimenting with a new format.

I'll be moving subscriptions over to the new platform on March 26. If you no longer want to receive The Monday Kickoff, please unsubscribe before then. If you decide to stick with me (and I hope you do!), check your spam folders if the first edition of the new-look Monday Kickoff doesn't land in your inbox on April 1st.

With that out of the way, let's get back to our regularly-scheduled service.

Free Speech and Bad Meats: The Domestic Labour of Reading in Milton’s Areopagitica, wherein Katie Kadue looks at the unspoken debt that the poet, and his famous polemic about free speech, owes to what was considered woman's work in Milton's day.

Behind the Scenes, wherein Kimberley Nelson takes us into the world of the movie extra, a world that's not as exciting or as glamorous as it seems.

Literary Fight Club: On the Great Poets’ Brawl of ‘68, wherein we learn about how a drunken taunt at a party during the 1968 World Poets Conference started a mass brawl involving some of the era's most famous rhyme slingers.

The Dead Internet to Come, wherein Robert Mariani ponders an online world driven not by people but by bots — as surmised by the so-called Dead Internet Theory — a world which may be on its way to becoming a reality.

The Myth of Meritocracy Runs Deep in American History, wherein Jeff Fuhrer examines the idea of everyone in society having an equal chance of succeeding, how that idea became baked into the American psyche, and why that notion was (and is) false.

Mao to Now, wherein Perry Link surveys the changes in the ways in which Westerners — especially scholars and journalists — interacted with China from the 1960s to the present.

Nobody Wants Their Job to Rule Their Lives Anymore, wherein Eloise Hendy looks at the how conceptions of work have changed and the clash of culture between different views of what work is.

Auto Mind, wherein Adrian Daub reflects on the tensions between cars and pedestrians in Germany (and, by extension, elsewhere), and the effect of driving and car ownership on the mass psyche.

Nothing Fails Like Capitalism, wherein Robert Tracinski argues that the recent collapses of over-valued and over-hyped start ups doesn't demonstrate that capitalism isn't working, but rather that those collapses are a demonstration of capitalism's self-correcting mechanisms.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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:

Inside the secret complex making high-tech gadgets for UK spies, wherein Gordon Corera takes us into a British government facility at Hanslope Park, where top-secret devices are developed but we never discover what those devices are ...

Digital memories are disappearing and not even AI or Google can help, wherein we learn about the transience (thanks to outdated file formats) of digital assets, and the problems of remembering where everything that we created and collect is.

A Pint for the Alewives, wherein we learn about how the brewing and selling of beer was once dominated by women, why it was a revolutionary trade for them, and why that changed.

The Vela Incident: Nuclear Bombs vs. Asteroid Collisions, wherein we learn about a large, unexplained flash in a southern ocean back in 1979 for which there still is no agreed-upon origin, but one which has excited much speculation over the decades.

He Steals Them, of Course!, wherein we learn about Thomas James Wise, a once-celebrated bibliophile who turned out to be a notorious forger of Victorian first editions.

Finance fraud is not a deviation from the norm but a reflection of it, wherein Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou argues that financial malfeasance today reflects our age of the blurring between reality and the made up.

‘I repeatedly failed to win any awards’: my doomed career as a North Korean novelist, wherein Kim Ju-sŏng recounts his attempts at navigating the complex, and dangerous, literary world of the Hermit Kingdom and why that was even more difficult for him.

Apocalypse-Proof, wherein we learn about the origins and uses of a Brutalist skyscraper in New York City, and why it (and buildings like it) became a symbol of state power and of conspiracy theories.

Cop Cities in a Militarized World, wherein we learn about the widespread killings of people defending lands and human rights, and the role that the United States has had in the spread of this kind of violence — including on home soil.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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 might seem like this week's edition of the Kickoff is a day late. It is, and yet it isn't. Due to some family matters, I'm in a locale where today is Monday. Nice to have the best of both worlds every so often ...

With that out of the way, let's get this Monday started with these links:

Why you age slower on a plane (and other incredibly strange effects of relativity), wherein we learn about the hows and whys of travel altering the passage of time, and how that can affect us (in almost imperceptible ways) even when travelling here on Earth.

Weird HTML Hacks, wherein we learn about 10 tricks that web designers used over the years to get around the limitations of HTML and of web browsers.

Iron in Spinach, wherein we learn the truth about how much of the mineral is in the leafy green vegetable, and about some of the misconceptions around that.

An ancient technique can improve your attention span, wherein we learn about the concept of cognitive currency, how it evolved to help humans survive, how it's been circumvented by modern distractions, and how we can regain a bit of it.

Why Are We Still Doing What Simon Says?, wherein Joanna Goodrich explores the enduring popularity of a simple electronic game that debuted in 1978.

Rereading My Childhood, wherein Timothy Baker reflects on how our early reading, and our reading any of that again decades later, is an exhilarating, fascination, and often contradictory set of experiences.

The Master Forgers Who Saved Thousands of Lives During World War II, wherein we learn about the Ładoś Group who, working out of the Polish embassy in Switzerland, created fake passports to help Polish Jews escape the Nazis.

Making Magnetic Media, wherein Ernie Smith explores how 3M became a huge (and hugely profitable) player in the floppy disk market, and why the company bailed from that market in the 1990s.

Interstellar astronauts would face years-long communication delays due to time dilation, wherein we learn a bit about the science of long-distance communication, further reinforcing the fact that interstellar travel would be a lonely journey.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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.

Just to let you know that the next edition of the Monday Kickoff will be in your hands on 26 February.

With that out of the way, let's get this Monday started with these links:

The invisible dangers of travelling through time, wherein we explore the physics of journeying into the past and learn about ideas around how temporal paradoxes might be avoided.

What If Money Expired?, wherein we learn about the fiscal ideas of Silvio Gesell, who advocated that we make money worse as a commodity if we wish to make it better as a medium of exchange.

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft, wherein software developer James Somers offers a personal history of the work he does and how it's changing (and may even become irrelevant) thanks to large language models like ChatGPT.

Heartlands: Kanda-Sudacho, wherein Rebecca Saunders takes us on a tour of a village near a bustling part of Tokyo where the traditional truly meets the modern.

The Cassette-Tape Revolution, wherein Jon Michaud takes us through the joys and the power that the compact audio cassette brought to consumers, and why the music industry freaked about those little plastic squares.

The billionaire problem, wherein Geoff Mulgan examines why the extraordinarily rich are significantly to blame for the state of the world.

Here’s the Proof There’s No Government Alien Conspiracy Around Roswell, wherein we get a capsule history of UFO conspiracy theories and a few reasons why whatever crashed at Roswell, New Mexico in the late 1940s probably wasn't alien in origin.

How mathematics built the modern world, wherein we learn how innovations in measurement and calculation led to many of the concepts and technologies that we've come to rely upon since the Industrial Revolution.

The Truth About Lying, wherein we learn about why learning to tell tall tales is a part of a child's development, and how parents can help make telling the truth (rather than immediately shifting to deception) a child's preferred behaviour.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in 14 days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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:

Passive income: Can easy side hustles earn big money?, wherein we learn about some of the promises, and the realities, of set it and forget it-type schemes to generate income without doing much.

Why handwriting is good for your brain, wherein we learn how the direct involvement of the body and senses in mental processes, manifested using pen and paper, has many cognitive benefits.

California Nearly Killed HBO, wherein we learn how the Golden State tried to ban pay TV in its early years, the reasons why, and why that initiative failed.

Loved, yet lonely, wherein Kaitlyn Creasy examines the idea that our basic human needs include the desire to to be loved and to have our basic worth recognised, and how some people only get one of those two.

Math That Lets You Think Locally but Act Globally, wherein we're introduced to graph theory and how it can be applied to finding the shortest routes between cities (and more).

Radioactive Fictions: Marie Corelli and the Omnipotence of Thoughts, wherein Steven Connor examines the Edwardian novel The Life Everlasting and looks at how ideas about radiation and radioactivity influenced the book and its author.

Ford/Food, wherein Patrick Ellis looks at how the idea of fast food got started with Ford automobile factories in the early 20the century, and the legacy of that today.

Striking Isn't Enough: Screenwriters Should Create Their Own Studio, wherein a writer and a law professor argue that workers (and not just ones in the entertainment industry) need options beyond labour stoppages to protect their interest and to shift some power away from conglomerates.

She lived in a New York hotel for more than 40 years. But her life was a mystery, wherein we learn about Hisako Hasegawa who inhabited room 208 at New York's Belvedere Hotel until her death in 2016, a woman that staff and other residents knew but really didn't know.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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.

Wow. It's almost the end of January. Was it really meant to fly by that quickly? If that's the way 2024 is going, I really want someone to pump the brakes every so often over the next 11 months!

Let's get this Monday started with these links:

How the right to repair might change technology, wherein we learn about the environmental impact of devices that are pretty much disposable, and how being able to repair them ourselves can reduce that impact.

Shoot, Don't Kill, wherein we learn about a company in the US that sells (oxymoronic) non-lethal handguns and how that company is trying put their wares into the wider gun-buying consciousness.

Prison Plastic Surgery, wherein we learn about programs to try to reform criminals by reforming their faces, why those programs were unsuccessful, and why the ideas behind those programs are getting a second look.

Four Men, wherein William T. Vollmann recounts his attempts to interview three homeless men in Reno, Nevada, why he decided to do that, and what that revealed about himself.

How big is science’s fake-paper problem?, wherein we discover that so-called paper mills are churning out specious research at such high volumes that scientific publishers' verification systems can't keep up with that volume.

Inside the weird and delightful origins of the jungle gym, which just turned 100, wherein we learn why the ubiquitous climbing structure was created, how it became a staple of playgrounds everywhere, and why its nickname is incorrect.

Can We Even Have Babies in Space? Why We’re Not Ready for Life Off-Planet, wherein we learn about the challenges of not just living outside the confines of the Earth, but also the challenges of perpetuating the human species elsewhere.

Why classical music is boring – by a classical musician, wherein Diane Daly delves into ideas about how to get more people — both listeners and players — involved in the world of classical music.

The Brain Has a ‘Low-Power Mode’ That Blunts Our Senses, wherein we learn how mammalian brains react to not having enough fuel, and how that attempt to conserve energy dials down visual acuity.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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:

Alien language: If we met extraterrestrials, could we talk to them?, wherein we dive into some speculation about how language throughout the cosmos may share certain features, about what characteristics the languages that extraterrestrials use might have, and how we might recognize them.

Winging It with the New Backcountry Barnstormers, wherein we enter the world of American recreational bush pilots who, for the thrill of it and for love of flying, take their small planes to place they're not meant to go and who push those craft to their limits.

The ASUS Eee PC and the netbook revolution, wherein Corbin Davenport walks us through the history of the once-popular small computers and at what caused them to fade away.

'Louie Louie': The story behind the song everyone knows but no one understands, wherein we learn a bit about how the iconic pop song developed, and some weirdness about it that goes beyond the lyrics.

Repo Man, Cult Classic: Facts And Trivia About The Punk Rock Black Comedy, wherein we learn quite a bit about one of my favourite movies from the 1980s.

The People Who Ruined the Internet, wherein we step into the world of so-called SEO experts and learn a bit about why they do what they do, and why what they do isn't any good for any of us.

Louis Armstrong’s Last Word, wherein learn about the perception of the legendary musician both when he was alive and after his death, and about Armstrong's carefully-crafted plan to shape his own legacy.

The World's First App Store, wherein we discover how Japanese computer users in the latter half of the 1980s bought software from automated kiosks.

An Entire Continent Went Missing—But Scientists Have Found It Again, wherein we learn about a prehistoric land mass dubbed Argoland, how it might have disappeared, and the research that went into rediscovering its location.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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:

What are roundabouts?, wherein we get some background information about what those circular intersections are and why they can help improve traffic safety.

What 2,500 years of wildfire evidence and the extreme fire seasons of 1910 and 2020 tell us about the future of fire in the West, wherein we get a look at some research that points to the consistent links between the climate and the prevalence of wildfires.

Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking, wherein we discover why and how the titular act can help us clear the cruft from our brains and, as a result, help us solve problems.

Climate Change Is Turning Up the Heat for Winemakers, wherein we explore the effects that human-led damage to the planet's climate has on viticulture, and what's being proposed to do something about that.

The Localist, wherein Jonathan Levy examines the influence of Adam Smith's economic theories on the so-called Chicago School and the results of that influence (which are still felt today).

The World’s Garbage Can: On the Human Consequences of Mass Export of Waste, wherein we get a capsule history of the export of waste from richer countries to poorer ones, and the impact that has on the environments and the health of those countries.

Don’t Learn Value From Society, wherein Wolf Tivy examines how social failure, to differing degrees and in different forms, isn't confined to any one strata of society.

Ostalgie: Revisiting East Germany, where Matthew Longo looks at nostalgia (for lack of a better word) for East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, and why that nostalgia is especially strong today.

The Year A.I. Ate the Internet, wherein Sue Halpern looks back at the impact that artificial intelligence and large language models had on the world in 2023, and what's in store for us in the coming months and years.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

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.

And welcome to 2024! I hope you all were able to take some time off to relax, enjoy yourselves, and spend time with those close to you.

Let's get this Monday started with these links:

Why Western democracy faces a nightmare made online, wherein we learn (yet again) how easy it is to spread lies and hate online, why politicians and political groups seize it, and how that's a threat to elections and democracy as we know it.

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things, wherein we learn about aphantasia, an inability to visualize the input from our senses, and about some of the misconceptions surrounding this condition.

What Happened to the Polymaths?, wherein Timothy Sandefur explains the origins of the idea of the polymath, and why people have become more specialized in their knowledge and pursuits.

Becoming James Bond, wherein we dip into the life, not always so glamorous, of Ian Fleming and discover a few new facts about the author.

The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry, wherein we learn about the businesses aiming to not just craft virtual memorials but to recreate deceased loved ones digitally, and the potential problems that can arise from doing that.

The weird aliens of early science fiction, wherein we learn about the fantastical extraterrestrial being that late 19th and early 20th century authors conjured up.

The People Who Don’t Read Books, wherein we learn about those who despise and denigrate books and are given good reasons to disregard anyone in the business of selling a vision who proudly proclaims they hate reading.

A Brief History of the Office Cubicle, wherein we learn how an idea for a dynamic workspace devolved into the much-hated cubicle, and how the original idea behind the cubicle might be relevant today.

Wait, what’s a bookmarklet?, wherein we learn how, in the days before add-ons and extensions, people expanded the capabilities of their web browsers using snippets of JavaScript.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt

Enter your email to subscribe to updates.