Kickoff For February 7, 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:
Arts and Literature
The Strange History of the Worst Sentence in English Literature, wherein we discover the history of It was a dark and stormy night, how what came after that sentence is even worse, and about the author who penned that sentence.
In Argentina, cheap government-issued netbooks sparked a musical renaissance, wherein we learn how young people in the South American country embraced small, underpowered laptops and with them unleashed their creativity.
What We Overlook In The Shining, wherein Cale Brooks looks at why some people are obsessed with Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel, and tries to plumb the depths of the movie.
Space
Where Aliens Could Be Watching Us, wherein Lisa Kaltenegger explores how planetary scientists have identified exoplanets, which is how alien civilizations could discover Earth.
Can This DIY Rocket Program Send An Astronaut To Space?, wherein we learn about the team that makes up Copenhagen Suborbitals, a group of volunteers at the world’s only crowdsourced crewed spaceflight program who are trying to put humans in space without the backing of industry or government.
Technosignatures are a sea change in the search for alien life, wherein Corey S. Powell looks at a new path towards searching for alien intelligence, one that searches for ways in which a civilization modifies its environment in detectable ways.
Business and Economics
Here are responsible shareholder tactics that actually work, wherein Ellen Quigley argues that so-called responsible shareholder tactics generally aren’t very effective but that universal owners can change the way a company operates.
Inside Amazon’s Failures to Protect Your Data: Internal Voyeurs, Bribery Scandals and Backdoor Schemes, wherein we learn how the ecommerce giant, in an effort to delight its customers, played fast and loose with the personal information of those customers putting them at all kinds of risk.
Cereal Killers: How 80-Hour Weeks and a Caste System Pushed Kellogg’s Workers to Strike, wherein we learn how the breakfast food giant has been jerking its employees around, and how those employees are trying to fight back to gain better wages, better conditions, and more dignity.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.