Kickoff For November 13, 2023
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 place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years, wherein we follow Erika Benke deep underground into a Finnish storage site for nuclear waste.
The conspiracy of fools: do you have to be a total jerk to succeed in life?, wherein we learn that you can be self confident and assertive without being an egomaniac and a narcissist, but that most of the world has yet to realize it.
In This Essay I Will: On Distraction, wherein David Schurman Wallace explores distraction, what it means for writers, and that perhaps all of use are distracted because we are still learning how to live.
Waiting on tables, mending puppets: the first jobs that shaped researchers’ careers, wherein we learn how early work experience gave some researchers the tools that helped them succeed in their fields.
The strange, secretive world of North Korean science fiction, wherein we get a glimpse into the odd, and oddly fascinating, speculative fiction that’s published in the Hermit Kingdom.
Lunik: Inside the CIA’s audacious plot to steal a Soviet satellite, wherein we learn about how, in the late 1950s, American intelligence agents and Mexican federal police hijacked a Soviet rocket, all in the name of national defense.
Goodreads Is Terrible for Books. Why Can’t We All Quit It?, wherein Tajja Isen ponders what the social cataloging site is actually good for, and why it’s still so popular despite having a user interface that’s just short of terrible.
Netflix is giving you bad taste, wherein Kathleen Stock ponders how the algorithms that streaming services use display recommendations work, and the effect that those algorithms have on us.
Why does non-alcoholic beer taste different?, wherein we’re taken through the answer to that question, an answer which has a few facets.
And that’s it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.