Kickoff For March 18, 2024
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.