Kickoff For September 23, 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.
Have you ever started reading something and it just either didn’t click with you or it didn’t live up to your expectations? That’s what happened a couple or three times this last week. Which, as you can guess, made compiling this Monday’s kickoff a bit more difficult. Luckily, there’s a lot of good reading out there.
Let’s get this Monday started with these links:
Arts and Literature
Reading Lessons, wherein Irina Dumitrescu show us how we read evolves and changes based on the complexity of what we read, and that reading also evolves to adapt to the nuances and styles of authors we latch on to.
One Night Wonder, wherein we join the two young creative minds behind the failed Broadway musical Glory Days, discover how they learned the lesson that on Broadway failure is more common than success, and that their play bombing wasn’t the end of their careers or artistic aspirations.
Why is Irish literature thriving? Because its writers and publishers take risks, wherein we find out that publishers large and small in Ireland are willing to take a chance on older and unproven authors, chances that are paying (literary) dividends.
Science
The maths problem that could bring the world to a halt, wherein we learn about dynamic resource allocation, why it’s so important to the modern world, and how researchers are trying to make solutions to dynamic resource allocation problems faster and more standardized.
Before the Shaking Starts, wherein Trevor Quirk takes us on a personal and geological tour of an earthquake zone in Utah, and discovers both how violent the Earth can be and how unprepared (or just plain oblivious) many people are to the dangers of seismic unrest.
How modern life is transforming the human skeleton, wherein we learn about the discipline of osteobiography, and discover how the bones beneath our flesh are very much alive … and they’re constantly being broken down and rebuilt.
Ideas
Why Does a Language Die?, wherein Don Kulick ponders that question by examining the languages of Papua New Guinea, and concludes that it’s not the right question to ask.
Sweetness and strangeness, wherein we dive into the world of the metaphor, and learn why metaphors are so integral to both human language and human thought.
The New Preschool is Crushing Kids, wherein we enter the classrooms of (very) young Americans and learn that what they’re being taught and exposed to isn’t helping them develop as students or as well-rounded people.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.