This week, you get a bit of bouncing around between a couple or three topics. OK, most weeks with this letter are like that but you'll see what I mean in a moment.

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

Behind the Myth: The Politics of Japan’s Island Creation Story — A short but interesting dissection about how the story of Japan's birth was co-opted to provide a framework for societal cohesion.

From the article:

The “Kojiki” and “Nihon Shoki” show how early Japan imagined land, authority, family and nature as part of the same sacred order. The islands were not merely territory, but living descendants of the gods, an imagination that still echoes in Japan’s seasonal rituals and reverence for nature.

Myths may not record history scientifically, but they reveal how civilizations understand themselves. And in Japan’s creation myth, the land begins with life: two gods, one male and one female, giving “birth” to the islands together.

Why is Privacy So Hard? — I thought this was going to be a rather dray and technical treatise, but it's an interesting, grounded, and accessible (not to mentioned detailed) musing on the titular question.

From the article:

Let's say you want to purchase a web cam. You can go into your favorite electronics store and compare the web cams based on price, color, and features. However, you can't easily compare how good they are with respect to privacy (or security for that matter). As a result, privacy does not really influence customer purchases, and so companies are not incentivized to improve or prioritize privacy.

The Examined Life in the Age of Optimisation — Rodney King ponders the differences between today's obsession with tracking, charting, and optimising all aspects of our lives and actually reflecting upon and examining our lives. The former being an end in itself, the latter a means to an end.

From the article:

Rest stops being rest and turns into the thing you do so that you can work harder afterwards. A walk in the woods, which used to be permitted to be nothing more useful than a walk in the woods, becomes a step count and a measured dose of what the wellness literature calls ‘nature exposure’. I catch myself at this on the coastal paths near where I live, the small reflex to reach for the phone and certify that the walk took place, to convert an hour of wind and waves into evidence that I was looking after myself.

Rogue Verbs — Mao Jian takes us into the changing landscape of China's literary and mass culture, changes which are warping the use of language and are shifting the focus of cultural works.

From the article:

The significance of these works, then, does not lie in any inherent potency they may possess, let alone in their aesthetic innovations. On the contrary: their substance may be crude, their plots cheap, their values unstable; they may even help to reproduce fantasies of money, deference, violence and hierarchy. Yet precisely because they are crude, they lay bare the most basic nervous reflexes of contemporary society.