Start your week with nine curated reads, served fresh each Monday

Kickoff For July 26, 2021

Welcome to this week's edition of the Monday Kickoff, a collection of what I've found interesting, informative, and insightful on the web over the last seven days.

Let's get this Monday started with these links:

Work

Is extreme working culture worth the big rewards?, wherein we get another look into the high-pressure world of finance and why many, including younger workers, stick with it despite all of the BS.

Weary of Work, wherein we learn a bit about the attitudes towards, and theories about, the causes of fatigue among workers that developed in the early 20th century and which helped shape modern work culture.

How overwork is literally killing us, wherein we learn that karoshi isn't a phenomenon confined to Japan and that more people are dying from overwork than from malaria.

Arts and Literature

A Writer From the Future: Who Was Sci Fi Iconoclast Izumi Suzuki?, wherein we learn a bit about the Japanese science fiction author who lived, wrote, and died by her own rules.

The bleak Hollywood masterpiece that attacked 'fake news', wherein Mark Allison looks at Billy Wilder's film Ace in the Hole and how it perfectly lampoons and encapsulates the dangerously manipulative power of mass media.

The NFT Funhouse Mirror, wherein Samantha Culp looks at the (digital) world of non fungible tokens and how they seem to be a funhouse mirror reflecting the flaws and asymmetries of the current art market.

Technology

GeoWorks: The Other Windows, wherein we learn a little about a beloved, niche graphical user interface, its fate, and how it's making a comeback of sorts.

When Hackers Were Heroes, wherein Thomas Haigh looks back at Steven Levy's seminal book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and examines how the promise of those days in computing history actually played out.

Behind the painstaking process of creating Chinese computer fonts, wherein we learn a little about the work of Bruce Rosenblum and a team of programmers and designers in the early 1980s to create a usable Chinese operating system and its requisite fonts.

And that's it for this Monday. Come back in seven days for another set of links to start off your week.

Scott Nesbitt