Kickoff For September 15, 2025
Can you believe it? Someone accused me of using generative AI to pull together The Monday Kickoff! Their smoiing gun?That I use em dashes (—), which are a (weak) sign of content that might be generated by AI. If you've been a subscriber for a while or have read my other work, you know that I've used em dashes long before the advent of ChatGPT, Claude, Llama, Le Chat, or any other AI chatbot. And I'm not going to change that.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
The Origin of the Research University — Clara Collier explores how and why German universities moved from being simply institutes of teaching to also being places where knowledge was uncovered and expanded upon, and how that spread globally.
From the article:
18th century German bureaucrats didn’t invent the idea of making new contributions to human knowledge. Their great contribution was to institutionalize it: They created a system where original scholarship was rewarded by professional advancement.
The Wet History of Media in the Bathroom — A short, eye-opening history of the devices that people could install in their bathrooms, why those devices became popular, and what that all meant in a wider context.
From the article:
These devices grew quickly in popularity due to their low price, plastic construction, and the ways that they reinforced and promoted entertainment as seamlessly meshing with hygienic and fitness cultures. Newspapers, magazines, and department stores featured them as ideal Christmas gifts, and corporations often included them as sweepstakes prizes. They constituted a type of gimmick, which spawned many iterations in the mid-to-late 80s.
On Letting Go of the Idea of "Keeping Up" — Molly Templeton looks at the gamification of reading: the idea that you need to read as much as possible with a sense of looming FOMO if you don't.
From the article:
The secret truth is that there is absolutely no reason to care how many books you read in a year, unless you like stats and numbers and tracking things and in that case, might I suggest a spreadsheet and doing your own tracking, far from the Goodreads crowd.
Don’t Call It A Substack. Newsletters Have Been Here For Years — An examination of the explosive growth of the email newsletter platform, and the problems with both the Substack model and the service itself.
From the article:
But email is email. It has noncommercial roots, and Substack didn’t invent the newsletter. It simply found a way to make it an attractive publishing medium. They want you to call it a Substack, because they know it can steamroll newsletters with the right thrust.