Kickoff For April 8, 2024
Another week starts. I hope you're all hanging on, hanging in, and taking care of both yourselves and those closest to you. Sometimes, that's all we can do. Or need to do.
A couple or three people have asked if there's an archive of the old Monday Kickoff — the one from before April 1, 2024. There is, and you can find it here.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
How a Script Doctor Found His Own Voice — Wherein we step into the professional life of Scott Frank, a screenwriter with decades worth of credits and one of the first peopl called in to fix screenplays, and learn how he has remained a vital, relevant force in the world of movie making.
From the article:
[T]he form is notoriously confounding. It’s one thing to write a movie; it’s another to get it made, and another altogether for it to be any good. And, as Frank points out, the bad ones are “just as hard to write as the good ones.” A formatted screenplay page equates to about a minute of screen time, so each scene needs the abbreviated clarity of a haiku.
The Fantasy of Energy Independence — Wherein Peter Z. Grossman explores the origins of the drive in the U.S. to achieve energy independence, why that drive has failed for the last five decades, and why attempting to achieve energy independence will fail.
From the article:
[T]he quest for energy independence has meant that America is continually seeking a “solution” to what we think of as the problem of participation in a global energy market. But if participation in this market is a problem at all, the cause is not external, as we have been led to believe ever since the embargo — it’s bad U.S. energy policies themselves.
Think you’re good at multi-tasking? Here’s how your brain compensates – and how this changes with age — Wherein Peter Wilson looks at how we try to do multiple things at once (though less effectively), and how that supposed skill diminishes as we grow older.
From the article:
Older adults are more prone to multi-tasking errors. When walking, for example, adding another task generally means older adults walk much slower and with less fluid movement than younger adults.
Stoicism is back: This is the ‘slave doctrine’ to understand today’s bosses and employees — Wherein we learn some of the reasons why there's been a resurgence of interest in the 2,400 year old philosophy, especially in business, and why many of today's adherents and promoters of stoicism get it wrong.
From the article:
For popularizers with or without a philosophical pedigree ... it would be enough, perhaps, to rummage through the attic of the old doctrine, identify some ideas with a hint of validity and add a discreet veneer of “self-help” rhetoric to them.
Scandinavian heavy metal: Why Earth’s happiest place makes the darkest music — Wherein Tim Brinkhof delves into the reasons people in some northern European countries embrace the extreme musical genre, which could be due to those countries being rich enough to support a scene of this size.
From the article:
Some argue that heavy metal has become popular among Scandinavians because it allows them to process feelings they cannot easily express in public. Nordic societies are notoriously introverted, valuing conformity over diversity, and preferring silence over meaningless small talk.
I thought my great-aunt was just a gentle oddball – then I discovered her secret role in the Austrian resistance — Wherein Julian Borger recounts his some of his family's struggles against the Nazis and how he, and his siblings, had unknowingly been among people who daily supported the weight of unmentionable loss.
From the article:
But Malci had taken a different path: she had stayed in Europe and resisted. The story of the Jews in the Holocaust is usually told as a binary tale, of murder or survival, and those were the alternatives for many of the children in the Guardian ads and their parents. Yet there was a third path: active defiance. It was the road not often taken, and even less frequently remembered. But it was the road that Malci took.
The Ugliest Airplane: An Appreciation — Wherein we learn about the Transavia AirTruk, a very different looking little airplane from the Antipodes, that was used for crop dusting and which its pilots adored.
From the article:
Today at age 50-plus, the AirTruk lives the life a lot of us could envy: a little work, a little play, and a lot of pleasure for those who use it for either purpose.
How online misinformation exploits ‘information voids’ – and what to do about it — Wherein we're taken into the research around misinformation and disinformation on the internet, how they're reinforced, and why it's important to learn some strategies that can help prevent us being misled.
From the article:
It might no longer be enough for search providers to combat misinformation and disinformation by just using automated systems to deprioritize these sources. Indeed, genuine, lasting solutions to a problem that could be existential for democracies needs to be a partnership between search-engine providers and sources of evidence-based knowledge.
The key to fighting pseudoscience isn’t mockery—it’s empathy — Wherein we learn that to change peoples' minds about the lies that are being fed them we should stop bombarding them with data, try to understand their positions, and to find a way to get someone to see the world the same way the we do.
From the article:
Evidence has repeatedly shown that simply shoving data in peoples’ faces doesn’t work to change their minds. Neither does simply telling somebody they’re wrong and leaving it at that (to be honest, that strategy rarely works on me, either).
So, the first step when confronting a pseudoscientific belief is to not bother arguing it.