It's all change here at Monday Kickoff HQ. Most of it good, in case you're wondering. Hope all is well with you, too.

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Ford and the Birth of the Model T — A chance to learn a little more about how the Ford Motor Company transformed mass manufacturing and, by extension, work and the role of workers. Which, in turn, helped create modern car culture and all of its dubious wonders.

From the article:

With the Model T, Ford didn’t just create a cheap, practical car. It built an efficiency engine. With high-precision machining, Ford was able to manufacture highly accurate parts that resulted in a better, more reliable car, required less work to assemble, and used less-skilled labor. This made the car inexpensive, which, along with its excellent design, resulted in sky-high demand. High demand and high production volume enabled Ford to make additional process improvements.

Ida B. Wells and People’s Grocery — Long before Rosa Parks, a black newspaper owner in Memphis was fighting racism and white supremacy in the American South in her own way. It's hard to imagine the courage that took.

From the article:

The story of People’s Grocery is a foreboding of future actions of white supremacist terrorism against Black businesses in East St. Louis, Illinois; Elaine, Arkansas; and Charleston, Houston, and Knoxville, as well as the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921.

Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important — While definitions of work and productivity have morphed over time, the attitudes towards doing nothing haven't. And that needs to change.

From the article:

[I]dleness is not just a psychological necessity, requisite for the construction of a complete human being; it constitutes, as well, a kind of political space, a space as necessary for the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press.

Bound for Glory — What happens when you're a book lover and have a lot of space? You fill it with books, of course! One of the largest collections of second-hand and antiquarian books, in fact. Colour me impressed and more than a tad envious.

From the article:

Unlike the more commercially oriented of his peers, he has sold books primarily so that he could acquire more for himself. Of the Harrogate shop he owned prior to his move here he says: ‘Its main purpose was not to sell at all, but rather to buy and increase my buying profile.’