Just so you know, The Monday Kickoff is taking the next couple of weeks off. The next edition will land in your inbox on 5 January, 2026. Hope you're all able to take some time off over the festive season. See you next year!

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

The World’s Most Common Surgery — A fascinating walk through the history and development of cataract surgery, a medical procedure while now widely performed is still out of the reach of many people who need it.

From the article:

Regardless of differences or personalization of techniques, such as that granted by LALs, cataract surgery is no longer a question of whether vision can be restored at all, but how well.

The algorithm will see you now — You've probably heard about companies that have developed AI tools to replace human radiologists. The claims those companies make are a bit overblown and, as it turns out, it's quite difficult to completely replace a human in this profession with technology.

From the article:

[W]hile models beat humans on benchmarks, the standardized tests designed to measure AI performance, they struggle to replicate this performance in hospital conditions. Most tools can only diagnose abnormalities that are common in training data, and models often don’t work as well outside of their test conditions.

The strangest letter of the alphabet — Like many people, I'd never heard of the letter in question (or even heard its name). But its history and why it fell out of use makes for a good story for linguistics geeks (and the broadly curious).

From the article:

But the death blow dealt to yogh was the printing press. The earliest printing press in England was a Flemish import, as were the typefaces. But the yogh letter was unique to English, and like the other letters unique to English, it would be expensive to print. And, as we just saw, there were ready alternatives, so yogh disappeared without a trace… from English.

Scam Cities — It's been a while since I've heard about a country carving out a so-called special economic zone. This article underscores the dangers of what can happen if that sort of initiative goes wrong.

From the article:

[T]he difference between criminal enclaves and innovation cities isn’t solely one of intent or ideology but also the political and institutional environments that permit the state of exception to occur — and, therefore, the zones to exist. Just as Shenzhen became a symbol of economic modernity, Yatai is now a cautionary tale of what happens when extrastatecraft becomes criminal infrastructure.