If you're interested in supporting this letter, I've added a new way to do that: micropayments (and memberships) via Ko-fi. Obviously, you're under no obligation to do that. I appreciate you just taking the time to read this letter each week.

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

The Class War on White-Collar Workers Is Just More Capitalism — Ryan Zickgraf argues that the gutting of white-collar jobs, which may or may not be driven by AI, isn't an attack on workers but instead is an example of how capitalism is designed to work. Any way you look at the situation, it still sucks.

From the article:

The problem with this specific tech-vs-white-collar-professionals “class war” narrative is that it personifies a system that has no central strategy or unified plan beyond extracting value. For the average white-collar worker — the person who isn’t a high-level policy writer but a spreadsheet-jockey or a midlevel content strategist — the threat isn’t coming from a Trumpian decree. It’s coming from the quarterly earnings report.

Nature vs nurture: How much of our personalities are determined at birth? — It's a question that has been asked for many a decade, but we're far from a definitive answer because the argument is (shockingly enough!) more complicated than it seems.

From the article:

The early days of these studies struggled to consistently identify DNA variants related to personality. We now understand one reason for this: human traits are "polygenic", with many different genetic variations each contributing a tiny effect that add up across the whole genome. For complex traits like personality, effects could be spread across thousands of DNA variants.

The Quest For Clean Cargo — A look at one way in which shipping goods by sea may (and probably should) change, and at the life on board such a vessel.

From the article:

[T]here is another way to look at global shipping, a view that exposes different questions: Not how much can we move, but how much really needs moving? How much of everything do we need? What can we get right outside our door? How much of what was replaced could have been repaired instead? How much of what was bought truly brought happiness?

Headspace: can our brains get full? — A dive into the fascinating, frustrating, weird, and wonderful ways in which our brains create memories and how recall them. There still might be some hope for that 8-bit processor in my skull ...

From the article:

The feeling that our brains are “full” arises not because we have run out of storage, but because we have reached the limits of what we can process at once. Attention is finite. Working memory – the small amount of information we can actively hold in mind – is even more limited. When these systems are saturated, new information struggles to gain a foothold. This is the mental equivalent of too many tabs open: nothing has been permanently lost, but everything becomes harder to manage.