Kickoff For July 22, 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.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Business and Economics
How Inequality Statistics Can Mislead You, wherein we take a closer look at the elephant graph and learn that, for most people around the world, the view of their rise in income isn’t as rosy as the graph makes it out to be.
AT&T promised 7,000 new jobs to get tax break — it cut 23,000 jobs instead, wherein we get a glimpse at how yet another large corporation, this time a telecommunications giant, that took advantage of government largesse and deliberately dodged delivering on its promises.
Inside Google’s Civil War, wherein we get a look into the internal tensions at the tech giant, tensions that are pitting employees against a management they believe has strayed from the company’s core principles.
Science
Your Skeleton Reveals More About You Than You Think, wherein we’re introduced to the work of pathologists, and how that work not only helps us understand ourselves, but also understand early humans and even long-extinct animals.
A revolution in time, wherein Paul J Kosmin recounts how we came to measure the passage of years in the way that we do, and the political, religious, and historical changes that it wrought.
Switch from hunting to herding recorded in ancient pee, wherein we learn how a group of archaeologists used a novel method to determine when neolithic humans began switching to a herding lifestyle in ancient Turkey.
##Ideas
Notes on Citizenship, wherein Nina Li Coombes ponders the nature of citizenship, and holding dual citizenship, and how the idea of citizenship doesn’t always live up to the expectations that many ascribe to it.
Get Thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade, wherein Dominic Pettman examines 19th century French philosopher Charles Fourier’s ideas about a perfect society, and how some of those ideas could apply to the modern world.
How Not Having an Opinion Has Improved My Quality of Life, wherein we learn that saying something like I don’t have an opinion on that isn’t about shrinking from debate, but about avoiding knee-jerk reactions and taking the time to stop and think more deeply about a topic or idea.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.