Kickoff For 6 October, 2025
Thanks to everyone who recently either sent a micropayment or bought one (or more) of my books. Your support is appreciated. Remember, though, doing that is optional. As I keep saying, the best way to support The Monday Kickoff is to keep reading and to share the letter with others.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days — History repeats itself in roughly the same place, but without the mass deaths by starvation and the descent into cannibalism. This story shows just how helpless we are against nature, even with all of the technology and hubris at our disposal.
From the article:
Riders swaddled their feet with curtains torn from the train’s windows. They broke apart wooden chairs and berth ladders and lit campfires with them. As a 1953 article published in Trains & Travel noted, a few of the more dedicated staff on board took care of “latrine patrol” using melted snow and buckets scrounged from the baggage car. Furniture salesman Mark Sullivan was among the passengers who realized that members of the Donner party had frozen to death nearby a century earlier.
Did Craigslist decimate newspapers? Legend meets reality — A more detail and more nuanced analysis of the newspaper business beyond the simple internet/digital disrupts traditional business narrative that we've been fed over the years, which highlights the more pervasive problems newspapers faced before the advent of the internet.
From the article:
The bottom line on Newmark and newspapers echoes a much-cited line from “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” In the 1962 Western, U.S Senator Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) built his legend on a shootout with Liberty Valance, a feared outlaw. But it was actually a gruff rancher (John Wayne) who fired the fatal shot. A local newspaper editor knew the truth, but said nothing. “When the legend becomes fact,” he explained, “print the legend.”
What Makes a Mature Science — Yes, science takes time to develop and evolve — something that many people forget or just don't understand. And that development and evolution comes after more than a few false starts and assumptions.
From the article:
This is the way that all systems work. Things are made up of smaller, simpler things that follow their own logic. For some reason, we tend to find this counterintuitive — where we haven’t been trained to think mechanically, we usually default to thinking impressionistically.
My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet — I think we all realize that the internet has been changing radically over the last few years, and not for the better. But there are still outposts on the web that are untouched by algorithms and which try to adhere to the ethos of the early web.
From the article:
This decay has been happening since the web was created. But the older, simpler, stranger net hasn't vanished yet. Ruins of a bygone internet live on, waiting to be explored. You only need to know where to look.