Kickoff for July 22, 2024
At the beginning of July, I started an experiment to include six rather than nine links in each edition of The Monday Kickoff. It's been four weeks and I'm wondering what you think. Please take a moment to vote in this anonymous poll. Voting ends on 31 July (1 August for those of you on the future side of the date line).
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Unexpected Resurrection of Harlan Ellison — Wherein we learn how J. Michael Straczynski has helped to bring the late author, known as much for his cantankerousness and litigiousness as his writing, back to a level of prominence six years after Ellison's death.
From the article:
Ellison’s own writing was unlike any other science fiction stories in the field. His two most famous stories, “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Ticktock Man” (1966) and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” (1967), are simultaneously arresting and, for their time, extremely creative.
Why Civilizations Collapse — Wherein Samo Burja examines the reasons that societies fray and come apart, what we can learn from this, and why understanding those collapses is important to us today.
From the article:
Civilizational collapse, then, looks like this dynamic at the scale of an entire civilization: a low-grade but constant loss of capabilities and knowledge throughout the most critical parts of our institutions, that eventually degrades our ability to perpetuate society.
The Bad Trip Detective — Wherein Shruti Ravindran looks at the research done by Jules Evans about peoples' experiences with bad trips while on psychedelics and their after effects, and area of research that until recently has been little more than an afterthought.
From the article:
For many of the respondents who took Evans’ survey, the post-trip difficulties lingered for months or longer. One respondent wrote that his trip had “reset his soul” and left him feeling lonely and disconnected from others for 30 years.
What Big Thing Are We Getting Wrong About the Future — Wherein Robert Tracinski argues that trying to extrapolate present problems (and thinking about those problems) into the future isn't the correct approach, and how prognosticators have gotten it wrong in the past.
From the article:
But part of the reason we have retreated from the future is our current bout of techno-pessimism. We didn’t just fail to follow up on grandiose plans for cities on the moon. We didn’t go back there at all. We lost the confidence that great new technological feats were worth achieving and instead we looked inward, searching for catastrophes to blame on ourselves.
Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective — Wherein we're introduced to a criminal who, after a long career and multiple incarcerations, defected to the other side of the law and created the template for detectives to come.
From the article:
Somewhere in this cycle of escape, re-arrest, re-incarceration, Vidocq decided he wanted to go straight. In 1809, then aged thirty-four and on the run in Paris, he made an unusual move: he turned himself in. It was likely at this stage that he offered to act as an informant in exchange for his liberty, a bargain frequently struck in nineteenth-century France.
The great commercial takeover of low-Earth orbit — Wherein we learn about the private firms trying to set up shop just outside of Earth's atmosphere, why they're doing it and what they hope to gain, and how that could shape humanity's future presence in space.
From the article:
A lot of people are betting that there are fortunes to be made in LEO, and because of that, the US taxpayer is not paying for Axiom Station. Though NASA intends to eventually rent space on Hab One, and has already awarded tens of millions of dollars to kick off early development, the commercial station is being built by hundreds of millions of private dollars. The cultivation of commercial research and manufacturing is ongoing, which was NASA’s aim going all the way back to Dan Goldin’s tenure as administrator.