A few people have asked me how I choose the articles that I share with you each week. Instead of taking up space here, I've written a short entry in my public notebook to explain that.

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

Welcome to Toronto, World Capital of the Urban Raccoon — Having lived the first 45 years of my life in Toronto, I can attest to the fact that raccoons are some of the wiliest, intelligent, adaptable, toughest, and sometimes scariest creatures (urban or otherwise) in nature.

From the article:

Raccoons are indeed everywhere in Toronto, a by-product of urban sprawl, which has seen their ancestral ranges become absorbed in a blink of ecological time into human habitats. Rather than flee or perish, though, the Procyon lotor has turned out to be uniquely adaptive to city life. Estimates have put Toronto’s raccoon population at an absolute minimum of 100,000 and as many as 640,000—an astonishing ratio of up to one raccoon for every four people who live here.

Marking Time — A fascinating dive into how scientist date ancient artifacts, and what they learn about what happened (and when) in the distant past.

From the article:

Miyake’s pioneering analysis of the cedar continues to ripple through studies of the past, colleagues say. “She trusted her instincts and was so confident in what she had that she was able to convince us all that there was a real effect,” Dee says. “And the rest, as they say, is history.”

The deep history behind the Road to Nowhere inside the Great Smoky Mountains — What happens when plans to build a dam and generate large amounts of cheap electricity fall apart? You wind up with a situation that still affects residents of the area many decades later.

From the article:

However, relocating hundreds of families with patriotic persuasion and a checkbook didn’t solve the TVA’s issue. As they moved, many families were leaving something important behind — a piece of them that was impossible to move. This valley was also home to dozens of ancestral cemeteries, and the TVA’s dam and lake project was set to cut off communities’ access to these sacred spaces.

Flipping the kill switch: I survived 72 hours without US tech — A European reporter tried to do just that with predictable results. Since this is early days, they should revisit this in five years to see what European alternatives have been released, have matured, and have been widely (or not) adopted.

From the article:

I felt productive. But the workflow around me was not. The tools themselves worked perfectly well once I accepted that breaking years of habits would take time. The disruption ultimately came from stunted collaboration: meetings, messages, shared documents and the constant stream of small exchanges that keep a newsroom moving.