Kickoff For April 7, 2025
I'm not going to talk about the events of the last few days. Not that they weren't unexpected, though. Now, however, there's more than a little extra uncertainty in the world. We're in for an even wilder ride than we thought. All we can do is hang on and hope for the best.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
How a Cold War underground university smuggled in Western ideas — Wherein Cheryl Misak recounts the story of a parallel, underground lecture movement established (with British backing) in the Eastern Bloc, one that taught and discussed ideas that went against the grain of the prevailing ideology.
From the article:
These activities were not welcomed by the authorities. During the first years, the secret police would tail Jan Hus visitors from Prague airport, as they had access to flight lists. They stationed themselves outside the seminars, checking identity cards, so that they could expel student attendees from their universities and menace those who had already lost their positions.
Ben Mezrich’s Foolproof Formula for Hollywood Success — Wherein we learn how Mezrich went from struggling writer to someone whose books not only became (critically panned) bestsellers but which are also adapted into successful movies — all created via a simple method that Mezrich devised.
From the article:
In a way, Mezrich’s books aren’t even books. What they really are is IP: intellectual property designed for Hollywood adaptation. This has served him particularly well in the streaming era, which has goosed demand for oven-ready content and incentivized writers to thirstily seek a lucrative second life for their books and articles onscreen, ideally by reporting on heists, capers, scams, feuds, and other narratives with theatrical appeal.
In My Life, I’ve Witnessed Three Elite Salespeople at Work. You Won’t Like Their Secret — Wherein Franklin Schneider recounts his days as a top telemarketer and details how scummy, shady, and downright nefarious the job can be.
From the article:
In ways large and small, we live in a world shaped by telemarketing. When’s the last time you answered a call from an unknown number? How many tweets do you encounter without bots in the replies? Have you seen how many spam emails your parents receive? I chuckle to think how mad people used to get when we called during dinner—when do you have privacy now? Even your sleep app is hawking your data to companies trying to sell you melatonin gummies. Are these intrusions any less intrusive because they’re silent?
In the Wake of the Water — Wherein we're given a close-up view of the effects, none good (at least for humans), of steadily rising waters and increasing rainfall.
From the article:
Extreme rainfall has been trending up for decades. Add the effects of rising seas — eleven inches since 1956 at the Newport Tide Gauge 2 — land subsidence, and increased tidal range, and a troublesome picture emerges. A 2020 report calculated that by 2050 there would be a fifteen percent increase in Rhode Island properties at substantial risk of flooding. (Projections in seven states — Louisiana, Delaware, Florida, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas, and Maryland — were even worse.)
The secret deportations: how Britain betrayed the Chinese men who served the country in the war — Wherein we're introduced to another horrible chapter of British history: the covert deportation of seamen from China after World War Two, one which (among other effects) forcibly and suddenly broke up families
From the article:
Where mysteries remain, it is because the British state determined that we should not know – and that wives and children would live out their lives, in some cases, their whole lives, never knowing. Beyond the official records, there are oral testimonies from older Liverpudlians, since passed away, that are now impossible to verify. Accounts of immigration wagons prowling the streets of Liverpool and seizing men by force. Of raids on Chinatown boarding houses in the dead of night. Of men hiding in cellars and attics, and others who went down to the docks to meet friends and disappeared for ever. Of home visits from covert special branch officers, to seize the deported men’s documents, as if to erase any record of them. As if the children themselves were not a record.
Tools for Thinking About Censorship — Wherein Ada Palmer examines the concept and practice of censorship, at the government and personal levels, how it effects us all, and offers ideas about how to critically think about censorship.
From the article:
Outsourcing censorship to the populace—to the editor, the cinema owner, the awards committee, the teacher, or the author—multiplies the manpower of a censorship system by the number of individuals within its power, making it the single most effective tool of such systems. Since self-censorship and middleman censorship are cultivated by these same deliberate systems of fear, they must be analyzed together, even as we still recognize the great difference between censoring a friend’s book and censoring one’s own.