Kickoff For February 10, 2025
Another set of weird and wonderful (well, I think think they're wonderful) reads this week. I hope you enjoy them.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The City of Wisdom — Wherein Jamie Zvirzdin reflects on her struggles to balance and reconcile her twin passions for science and writing while contending with the spectre and expectations of her religion.
From the article:
My unconventional path to physics reveals an important insight for those who may feel excluded from the field or intimidated by its complexities: at its core, physics is fundamentally a word problem. A story problem. Personal stories, history stories, thought experiments, formal proofs, metaphors, cautionary tales: surround yourself with the various stories embedded in physics, and you’ll find firm footing wherever you tread in this field.
The Bargain Bin Evolves — Wherein we explore the fascinating and sometimes exhilarating crap shoot that's stores which sell stuff that no one wants (and do it in bulk).
From the article:
Manufacturers and retailers have to figure out a way to get rid of that inventory, and sometimes that leads to successful models—models that didn’t necessarily draw attention to themselves. For example, KB Toys was well-known for selling flashy self-branded toys and video game consoles, but they also sold a lot of cheap liquidated inventory as door-busters. They could offer that stuff cheaply—and maybe convince you to buy it while you’re on the hunt for a few more NES games.
Daylighting a Brook in the Bronx — Wherein Emily Raboteau dives into a project to bring a portion of a stream in a New York borough back to the surface and, in doing so, crafts a wonderful paen to urban ecology and the people dedicated to it.
From the article:
What is the memory of water? Is this captive chapter just a blip in the long life of the brook? Or might the brook be angry, like a poltergeist deranged by degradation, indignity, and concealment? I mean, does the brook hold a grudge? Has the brook been dreaming of freedom, attempting repeated escape? What are the brook’s rights? I don’t wish to anthropomorphize, but how do we match our repair work to the level of harm that’s been done, not to mention, to the soul of the brook?
Lessons From Singapore – The Power Of Homeownership — Wherein Eric Feigenbaum looks at how and why the Asian city state has such a high level of home ownership.
From the article:
Singapore offers us another model – one that works better with American values: socialistic and humanistic goals with capitalistic methods. While the Singaporean government created DBS to help provide capital for both home ownership and funding commercial projects, today DBS is the largest bank by assets in Asia – privately owned and operated with the Singaporean government as a significant, but not majority shareholder.
The Myth of the Loneliness Epidemic — Wherein Claude S. Fischer explores what friends and friendship are, and why a lot of the doomsaying about people in the US (and, by extension, elsewhere) who are becoming more and more isolated from others might just be doomsaying and nothing more.
From the article:
It is difficult to step back, think hard, accurately analyze, and draw solid conclusions about something as personal, subjective, and spongy as friendship. It is important to do so, however — in particular for the public health establishment that has turned its attention to loneliness — because false alarms come with a price, particularly in diverting our attention from other, less amorphous matters, such as economic dislocations, violence, and real epidemics.
Read Between the Lines — Wherein we take a look into the world of people who, for love of cash and not literature, repackage out-of-copyright classics and sell them via platforms like Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and teach others how to do that.
From the article:
Publishing at the rate Pye recommends (three titles per day, the maximum amount KDP allows) requires students to process their titles without any consideration for their contents, leading to a marketplace filled with literature stripped of its context and mined for its keywords. This, of course, is not that different from the rest of the internet, where search engine optimization and algorithmic gaming have created a seemingly endless trough of low-quality slop. But something about this felt different. Pye’s methods were entirely legal, but I was worried about the books’ long-tail impact. I imagined them in classrooms, in some young readers’ hands. I saw them reinforcing the terrible habits of online discourse, where vague language and unattributed generalities have become the norm.