Kickoff For 25 August, 2025
Another month is about to bite the dust. And, for you in the northern hemisphere, winter is another month closer. Don't expect any sympathy from me, though.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
Swahili on the Road — What makes a language dominate others? Here we learn about the political, social, and cultural forced that helped Swahili go from being but one of over 100 regional languages to one that's spoken by over 200 million people.
From the article:
The Swahili taught in classrooms and during TANU-organised literacy drives was the standardised version that had been slowly consolidated over the previous century. Even today, Tanzanians have a reputation for speaking Kiswahili Sanifu (‘proper’ Swahili), in contrast to the dialects spoken in, say, parts of Kenya or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Why we can’t stop multitasking — Allison Robins tries to answer that question and discovers that multitasking is something that we can't avoid (at least, not at work) but it is something we can mitigate.
From the article:
After interruptions, participants tackled smaller tasks for quick wins to rebuild momentum and emotional stability. Unfortunately, many productivity tools treat these resets as distractions, using guilt as motivation. Participants were already beating themselves up over their inability to stay focused, so they didn’t want tools that piled on more shame, preferring steady, judgment-free support.
A Tale of Edo Japan Timekeeping and Navigation — Yes, there was an era before the clock and the watch. The people of old Tokyo, and the rest of Japan, had some interesting ways of keeping time with implements that were works of art in themselves. And using other novel methods, too.
From the article:
Perhaps most bizarrely, ninjas sometimes used a method that relied on the size of a cat’s pupils to indicate the time. When a cat’s pupils were wide open, it was dawn or dusk; at noon, they were narrow like a needle. Thus, cats became silent alarm clocks.
The Emptiness Of Literature Written For The Market — Kenneth Dillon ponders the sacrifices and compromises with which writers of popular fiction grapple and how that's tied to the shrinking market of publishers.
From the article:
At issue here is not which novels deserve to be published but rather how institutions incentivize some, repress others and allow yet more to exist independently only when it costs them nothing. Sinykin and McGurl share a deep concern for how these trends effect creativity, and they land on different sides of the issue.
The Department of Everything — An engrossing account of one person't time as part of the Telephone Reference Division of the New York Public Library, a pre-Google human search engine, and recounts the joys, perils, pleasures, and frustration of that job.
From the article:
In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary.