Kickoff For January 20, 2025
In the coming weeks, you'll notice links to more than a few older articles in this letter. That's the result of me clearing out my reading backlog. I'll try to mix in newer articles, but that won't always happen.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
How to get hooked on opera — Wherein Alexandra Wilson explores the wonders of a form of music that many people either misunderstand or are intimidated by, and how anyone can not just get an appreciation for opera but comfortably and joyously immerse themselves in it.
From the article:
Opera required a bit more effort to get to grips with than a musical, but its additional layers of musical complexity and sophistication were, for me at least, ultimately more rewarding. Operas deal with all of life’s big issues, from unrequited love to the death of a loved one. They address social issues too: political rivalries, malign power, toxic male violence. Listening to opera can be highly cathartic, a way of making sense of your own emotions and the world’s problems.
Online Shopping Can’t Be Trusted — Wherein we step into the online world of counterfeit goods, learn about the dangers of those goods, why online retail platforms turn a blind eye to them, and why it can be difficult to spot a fake.
From the article:
Digital market companies, from Amazon to Uber, promised to be a neutral gateway between buyers and sellers, often fighting regulation by claiming that they were simply platforms. But, instead, they became private regulators, organizing online markets in their favour when it bolstered their interests, while behaving as absent cops on the beat when it was more convenient to ignore gnawing problems.
Will AI make work burnout worse? — Wherein we learn that, contrary to the proclamations and promises of the cheerleaders, using AI tools in the workplace can increase employee stress and add to their workloads.
From the article:
“There's an overflow of AI tools in the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep tabs on multiple AI tools to execute tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what, and I started getting utterly frustrated”
Origins of Zero: A fascinating story of science and spirituality across civilisations — Wherein we learn about how the digit signifying nothing evolved, how it spread, and how it helps form the basis of a lot of what we take for granted.
From the article:
The evolution of zero culminates in its central role in today’s digital world. In the binary system, which forms the basis of modern computing, digits 0 and 1 represent one bit. This seemingly simple binary language has led to the formation of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, terabytes, and beyond, shaping the digital landscape we experience today.
La Chasse au Pinard — Wherein Julian Barnes looks at how French troops on the Western front regularly went into battle drunk, why that happened, and why their state of inebriation didn't actually matter.
From the article:
[I]t might be a mistake to overdose your own troops at the wrong time, and soon a system was instituted at the front line. Fifteen or twenty minutes before the troops went over the top, they would line up for an officer to dole out this life-giving and death-defying potion. More than one observer was reminded of communicants queuing up at the altar rail before the priest. Refusal was rarely an option: the officer would insist on seeing the soldier drink it down – and watching the immediate result.
Big Data for the Leviathan — Wherein we're taken through the history of numeracy in England, and how numbers and a knowledge of them not only shaped the lives of ordinary people but also shaped the development of the nation.
From the article:
The absorption of some basic numerical knowledge was taken for granted as a part of growing up. Everyone was expected to be able to count higher than ten; twenty was the threshold set by some contemporary legal theorists for mental competency, and with it, the ability to own property.