A couple or three people have asked how I fund The Monday Kickoff. Aside from the occasional micropayment, the money comes out of my own pocket. Buttondown's annual fee isn't crippling and I pay it gladly, if only because I enjoy sharing interesting and sometimes challenging reads with others.

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

How Japan Turned Department Stores Into Dreamworlds — Those kinds of stores have different characters, and different meanings, wherever you go. Beyond being places to shop, they're also something of a capsule commentary on a society, its tastes, and its aspirations.

From the article:

In Japan, department stores and their advertising used design and messaging to address a difficult question: “What did modern life look like?” In asking that question, the stores served as more than just a place to shop; they became social spaces, art institutions, and national sites where consumers could acquire new social identities.

The 300-year-old tool helping stranded astronauts get home — It just goes to show that when modern technology fails (as it's known to do), older and simpler solutions can get the job done.

From the article:

Even the most far-flung missions still involve the same fundamental concepts, he says: looking at stars, looking at objects in comparison to the stars, and using geometric relationships to determine where we are. "Whether we are doing it manually with a stick, or a sextant, or a high-tech camera, it's fascinating to me that a lot of these same techniques are all linked and have those common heritages and mathematical foundations."

The Claims of Close Reading — A rare article that hits two targets: a paen to the titular practice and its effects on critical thinking and analysis, and a lament about the hollowing out of humanities programs, and the thinning out of the number of professors, at American universities.

From the article:

I also learned more about close reading itself. My students showed me how simple and how hard it can be to notice, to point to a detail that’s really on the page and small enough to fit under your finger. I never asked them to respond to a prompt. They had to build arguments from the ground up; there was no right answer, only stronger and weaker ones.

So What if They Have My Data? — Hana Lee Goldin examines how we've gradually, and sometimes unwittingly, given up our myriad personal data to numerous faceless online entities, how that works, and why we should be more than a little concerned about that.

From the article:

The architecture of digital consent treats data sharing as a binary: agree to the terms or don’t use the product. There’s rarely a middle option that allows us to use a service while limiting what data gets collected and where it goes. The result is that the “choice” to share data often functions as a condition of entry into daily life rather than an informed negotiation. We’re not handing over data because we’ve weighed the tradeoff and decided it’s fair. We’re handing it over because the alternative is exclusion from services we rely on.