Kickoff For March 10, 2025
Earlier this year, I promised myself that I'd get my head out of the political and technology spaces. To be honest, that hasn't been going well. To help you try to do the same, I give you this week's set of articles.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
How the bullet train transformed Japan — Wherein Paul Carter takes us on a journey, both historic and physical, aboard what's considered to be the world's first high-speed train system, and ponders what it means to Japan.
From the article:
In a way, the Shinkansen, which connects the country's dense metropolises and its far-flung corners, is symbolic of Japan as a whole: a nation that's both reaching towards the future while also clinging to its past.
Going Dumb: My Year With a Flip Phone &mdas Wherein Jason Kehe recounts his time without a smartphone, an experiment that more or less failed, and how it not only affected him but how it also didn't turn out in the way he expected it to (based on the experiences of others).
From the article:
The idea behind the flip phone was to clear my head of tech-induced psychic baggage. Instead, everywhere perceiving the effects of the self-reinforcing slave-state of technologia, I added to the mental weight. I became more aware of the iPhone I didn’t have than I’d ever been of the iPhone I did have, a consuming absence. And it’s not like anyone around me was reevaluating their own dependencies—my small, secret hope—in light of my experiments in self-liberation. They clutched their phones ever more tightly to their chest, as if I might at any moment steal their precious prostheses and make myself whole again.
How Claud Cockburn Invented Guerrilla Journalism — Wherein we learn about the legendary British journalist and his work, reporting that often (though not always) went against the grain of the conformism if his time.
From the article:
By his personal example, he showed that oppositional journalism needn’t be boring or sombre. But he showed, too, that there’s a price: he was chased by debt collectors most of his life. Dissent isn’t free.
How YouTube Ate Podcasting — Wherein John Hermann examines how podcasting went from primarily aural to primarily video, a phenomenon closely tied to the ideas of virality and centralization.
From the article:
While TikTok helps explain how we got here, it can’t tell us everything about where podcasting is going. Podcasting’s shift to video is interesting and broadly significant, but the most important change, as far as the industry is concerned, is probably the corresponding and slightly lagging shift to centrally controlled platforms like YouTube and Spotify.
‘I received a first but it felt tainted and undeserved’: inside the university AI cheating crisis — Wherein we take a peek into the (frankly troubling) use of AI by university students, why they do it, and why using AI in this was is just the latest incarnation of problems that students face in higher education.
From the article:
The reasons why students cheat are complex. Studies have pointed to factors such as a pressure to perform, poor time management, or simply ignorance. It can also be fuelled by the culture at a university – and cheating is certainly hastened when an institution is perceived to not be taking it seriously. But when it comes to tackling cheating, we often end up with the same answer: the staff-student relationship.
The Year of McDonald’s — Wherein Chris Arnade looks at how central the titular fast food restaurant is to the lives of many people in America - not just for food, but for a sense of community and of safety.
From the article:
It’s happened because people are fundamentally wired to make meaning, and because having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are. If you provide people with a landscape of banal franchises, they will form communities and make meaning in a banal franchise.