I’ve also been tinkering with this e-ink development board from LilyGo that I bought a few months ago. Right now, it’s sitting in a cheap IKEA photo frame and refreshes every five minutes with the time AND an excerpt from a book with that time. Super fun.

Anyhow, that’s it from my yappy intro - enjoy the rest of the newsletter! Ten great things to read, as always. Feel free to write back - just reply to this email.

1 Mental Health Is Physical Health - Ask Polly

I’m a big fan of Ask Polly (e.g., ‘Will Grief Destroy My New Marriage?’ in #397) and I really liked this column - it isn’t in the usual answer-to-a-question format, but it’s Havrilesky talking about her journey of considering her physical and mental health as separate pieces of a complete whole, and then later realizing they’re actually the same thing - just in different forms. I relate to this - when I think about what to do with my depressive symptoms, I now realize that apart from the therapy and the introspection, another line of “attack” is to simply start exercising more and eating & sleeping better.

That said, I want to indulge in a BIG record scratch here. Because the people who are the most attracted to this column — the intense, sensitive, thoughtful, brainy people out there who sometimes FEEL THE STRONGEST EMOTIONS after reading 3k words about them! — are the exact ones who need to dial into their bodies the most. I see this over and over in your letters. People like us want to THINK OUR WAY FORWARD even when our engines are stalling. We want to kick the tires when we should be changing them. We want to announce what’s wrong instead of giving ourselves what we know will feed and nurture us — not just right now, but next week and next month and next year, too.

2 Engineering Feelings - Sf Alexandria

What an incredible piece - it’s a profile of Donald Jewkes, an engineer-turned filmmaker who chronicles the young and ambitious stories coming out of Silicon Valley. The last piece I shared from SF Alexandria, You can’t lose if you never quit (in issue #385) was similarly uplifting. He just strikes me as the most incredible person to be around - optimistic, has the gift of seeing people’s potentials, and is now recognizing and using the platform he has to give his “gift” to others: a form of nepotism. He’s an incredible person. There are many gems.

Seeing Donald, you just always want to help him out. It’s probably due to two qualities:

1. Donald is the best listener I know. Anything you say gets his full attention.
2. He pushes past his limits, or rather, doesn’t think of himself as having any. I’ve never heard him express even a little self-doubt or self-rejection. When I asked him how he’s such a good listener, he responded simply, “I only pay attention when I’m interested. Isn’t everyone like that? Like, you should see me in a boring meeting. I can’t stand using my time poorly.”

3 What Makes an Experiment Beautiful? - Asimov

Gosh, I read this earlier this week, and it was so good. I shared another piece by the same author, Ulkar Aghayeva, A Brief History of Lab Notebooks in #397, and here I am with another. As a former scientist, I enjoyed reading about this chronicle of “beautiful” experiments. Every scientist has a sense of what beauty is: it’s a somewhat vague and subjective sense of elegance, simplicity, and directness of approach that leaves the final finding obvious.

While every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is, these features are rarely put into words. Nor is the answer static, and like aesthetic values more generally, these features changed throughout scientific history. In the 17th and 18th centuries, aesthetic appreciation of experiments was centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty. The principal job of a natural philosopher was to “reveal” what was already there.

4 Inside Enya’s Irish Kingdom - Buzzfeed

Wow! I’m a big fan of Enya (time to listen to some of my favourites this Sunday afternoon) but didn’t know she lived in a castle?? I knew she was quite reclusive (Enya put up an additional four feet of walls when she bought the castle and its 8-feet tall walls) but didn’t know this.

5 The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun - Syndekit

Interesting: if you haven’t read the books from the Dune universe, the Butlerian Jihad is an event from the past where humans decided they didn’t want any more machines built in the likeness of humans, and destroyed the “Thinking Machines”. That act fundamentally reshaped the future (obviously), the Charles McBryde here goes into the parallels between that and our current moment, with rapidly advancing capabilities in the “thinking machines” we have today.

6 A Knife Forged in Fire - Chicago Mag

I’m a knife person. I like learning about knife-making, about different kinds of knives, using them, keeping them sharp, and such. I’m the person who will fuss unendingly on keeping my carbon steel knife dry. When I saw this piece come up on my list of watching a knife being made…. sold! What a wonderfully evocative piece of writing about a wonderful process. Every time I think about forging, I think about the sword-making scene in Brisingr… and reminisce fondly on my youth (I’m only 30, but still!).

7 Fluid Simulation Pendant - Mitxela

Just two weeks ago, I shared Mixtela’s FLIP Fluid on Flip Dots. This is actually the OG - the project of his that really got me hooked, and a precursor also to the fluid simulation on Flipdots project. I absolutely loved this - of course the writeup on the website is really nice, but do check out the YouTube video.

8 Chipping Away at the Patriarchy, One Barnacle at a Time - Slate

Fun piece from ten years ago about barnacle harvesting off the Galician coast in Spain. The barnacles, are to some extent, there for the taking for anyone willing to swim into the ocean, but it’s a perilous task because of the rocky coast and the big range in tidal activity. This piece introduces the task and business of barnacle harvesting but also the gender inequality in the profession (women are paid less + the auction for their harvest happens after the men’s). A few women, though, Susana and Isabel González and their two sisters, are changing this by getting to be influential in the harvesters organization and instituting new rules for a more equitable workplace.

9 The strange survival of Guinness World Records - The Guardian

Ha, what a fun read into the history and transformation of the Guinness World Records organization for it to stay relevant today. You know, while writing this piece, I realized I’d shared this exact article back in 2023 (issue #309), but why not share it again?

10 The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison - The New York Times

I feel a bit incomplete for not having read anything by Toni Morrison yet. This profile of hers, from 2015, has gotten me to commit to change this quickly. She’s so cool, it feels, and I really liked the way the personal and awestruck was combined in the profile.

1. Cognitive Ergonomics — Blundercheck
   Nice read on how we should be designing AI systems to make them “ergononomic” for us as users. If you missed it, Systems Thinking is Brain Rot for Analysts, also from Blundercheck, is amazing.

2. Trust, Technology and the CTO — Rhea Karuturi on Medium
   I went to a Claude Code meetup by Rhea sometime back, and I then stumbled upon this piece by her on the role of a CTO - enjoyed and also food for thought.

3. We Don’t Sell Saddles Here — Stewart Butterfield on Medium
   This is a really nice essay by the CEO of Slack. It’s actually an internal memo - about what they’re building and how to get people to use it.

4. Choose Good Quests — Founders Fund
   “Today, Silicon Valley faces a crisis of nonsense. With no shortage of problems, and no shortage of both young technologists and well-capitalized former founders capable of solving them, our best and brightest have largely lost themselves to easy money, the attention grind, and early retirement. In tech especially, for all of the industry’s rare potential, such abdication of responsibility does not only constitute a failure of progress, but a moral failure.”

5. It’s Possible to Learn in Our Sleep. Should We? — The New Yorker
   Self-explanatory :P.

6. The Emergent Self Loop — The Technium
   Kevin Kelly on AI.

   It is entirely possible we come to create a third category for this kind of consciousness and intelligence and selves, that are neither “real”, nor a fake in the mirror. Rather they are what Jean Baudrillard called the hyperreal. An imitation, a reflection, so good that it has its own reality.

7. Letters to Mothers: Crones, Hags, Witches, and Killjoys — Guernica
   “Mother’s Day is a joke we are all in on, and yet it continues—straight-faced, deadly serious, and poisoned.”

8. The Two Faces of Lummie Jenkins — The Atavist Magazine
   Phew! What an intense piece. “The people of Wilcox County, Alabama, remember the longtime sheriff as a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask.”

   

9. A Family Adventure Across 3,000 Miles of Texas — Texas Highways
   Really entertaining personal account of a four-person family roadtrip! Lovely travel accounts and pictures too.

10. Will You Still Medal in the Morning — ESPN
    Very funny essay about flings and affairs between Olympians during the Olympics. There’s almost a sense of secretly learning about something you shouldn’t, in this article.

11. The Neural Network Zoo — Asimov Institute
    2016 (can you believe it???) exploration of what different artificial neural networks look like. And of course, the transformer architecture that underpins modern LLMs is there too.

12. What I Learned About Relationships After Being With My Wife for 8 Years — Absurd Pirate
    Lovely introspection on eight years of being married.

13. Tom Hiddleston on Taylor Swift, Heartbreak, and that Tank Top — GQ
    I did not expect to enjoy this Tom Hiddleston profile as much as I did.

    “Perhaps you learned his name only because of his recent three-month romance with Taylor Swift. But by then, Tom Hiddleston was already a beloved Marvel villain, James Bond short-lister, Night Manager leading man, and truly gifted wearer of suits (like the ones he‘s got on here, in this season’s color: brown). Taffy Brodesser-Akner heads to London to absorb the full blast of his English charm offensive—and find out why Tom and Taylor wound up on the rocks so Hiddleswiftly.”

14. Fruit Is Too Sweet — The Atlantic
    So true, especially in the US :(

15. Meet the Texans Who Love (Like Really Love) Their Snails — Texas Monthly
    I feel if the Kable had a type, it would be essays about passionate people in specific niches, and passionately written essays about them. This is one such.

Speaking of ten years, I visited a dear friend a couple of weeks ago in Delhi, and realized that that friendship is also now a decade old! I wrote long ago in the Kable about the strange and novel feeling of things in my life having existed or lasted for a decade. A decade. Things in my life? And a decade. Surreal.

I also made a really nice pasta last weekend, and I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of a jazzed-up tomato sauce of late. I always add soy sauce, but this time I also added miso. Not any ordinary miso, though - miso I made back in 2022 before… well, before a lot of things! Before I moved to Bombay. Before I met Samira. And such. We’ve been through a bunch of times and places, that rajma miso and I.

One of the nice things about writing the Kable well in advance is that I’m not running away to put the bread in the oven, or to hop on to an early work call, or whatever, and I write a more relaxed, roomy intro. Here’s one such. I’m done, though, so I’m gonna drink my tea, and you’re going to enjoy the ten things in this Kable. Aren’t you?

1 Why I Write - The Orwell Foundation

I shared Orwell’s Politics and the English Language in issue #399, and here’s another piece by him that I quite liked. It’s a bit of a big ask of himself, because he tries to generalize why any writer writes, but then when he talks about his own motivation in detail, I liked that part a lot.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.

2 How to Write English Prose - The Lamp

Well, this is provocative. It’s a 2023 essay by David Bentley Hart, so definitely modern compared to the previous 1946 Orwell piece. I like the opening a lot here, because Hart shows us a few pieces of prose that he really likes, and then he gets quite opinionated on what he doesn’t like, which honestly, is subjective but I didn’t quite agree with much of what he said. Overall, it’s a fun thing to read.

3 How Tourism Saved the Elusive Ghost Leopard From Extinction - Atmos

I still remember being in undergrad and reading Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard - what a great book! When I read this essay about the snow leopard, it was pretty surreal - because tourism has become increasingly popular in Ladakh and the larger Indian Himalayas, income has shifted there from animal husbandry, and predator spotting has become an asset to market. And now there are so many pictures and sightings of the elusive snow leopards! If you’ve read Matthiessen’s book, you’ll realize how crazy that sounds. IYKYK.

4 The lucrative bird-singing contests that are pushing species to the brink - Knowable Magazine

This reminds me somewhat of Homeward Bound: On Pigeon Racing which I shared back in #389. It’s about songbird contests in Indonesia, and there are millions (millions!) of songbirds that are apparently smuggled each year to keep as pets and for competitions. It’s quite to read about.

5 The mystery of mountain lions - High Country News

Really nice personal essay by Sarah Gilman about mountain lions, aka cougars, and growing up in cougar habitat and then continuing to interact with them through her life. Cougars are rare; I don’t think as rare as snow leopards, but quite rare. That quality has served them well - both in terms of human interactions and being amazing ambush predators. Really recommend this to immerse yourself in a different landscape for the ~10 minutes it’ll take you to read it.

6 The Ramen Lord - Chicago Magazine

Whoa. I had no idea about Mike Satinover, and his obsession with making great ramen. He started off as a Reddit celebrity with the username Ramen_Lord (hah), and channeled his ramen obsession into becoming one of the most respected posters on the ramen subreddit by sharing all the details. The next obvious step, you’d think, would be for Satinover to share some of his ramen with his many many fans. He started off doing pop-ups in 2017, and now operates Akahoshi Ramen in Chicago. His work is grueling, given his penchant to get things perfect (14 hour days!), and the ramen is wonderful - but it’s taking a lot out of him. What a great read and a peek into one of the most interesting people you’ll read about.

7 Chili Peppers of the World: Cultivars, Species, and Heat - Notes from the Road

Super fun! Absolutely delightful visual exploration of the entire chili family; as an amateur gardener myself, I was enchanted.

8 The Iran War threatened a food crisis. The next Gulf conflict could do the same. - Reuters

I think this piece goes nicely with The cycling of phosphorus is the basis for all life on Earth which I shared in the previous issue. This is another visual exploration just like the previous piece on chili peppers, and it’s an absolute delight and so well done! It’s about the Haber-Bosch process (which produces virtually all the world’s ammonia) and the downstream urea that comes from it. It’s a process heavily dependent currently on fossil fuels (both as an input material and an energy source), and you can thus expect any geopolitical event or war to have a severe effect. That’s what this Reuters piece gets into.

9 Mail Between Heaven and Earth: On Japan’s Post Office For Letters to the Dead - Lit Hub

Whoa. This is profound and moving. Yuji Akagawa is a survivor of the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami from 2011. It took him three days to find his wife, and as he started helping other survivors come to terms with their new upended lives. His experiments were quite varied - for example, he took survivors to hot springs to get some time away from their evacuation centre homes. He was then inspired to create the “drifting post”, a postbox where you could write letters to the people you lost in the earthquake. Akagawa is the proprietor and key administrator, and reads all the letters that come in. They’re all incredibly moving, as you can imagine.

10 The Epic Battle to Break the Mississippi River Canoe Record - Outside

Absolute cinema. I don’t know what more you can say about this one. Two teams (that were originally one team) try to canoe down the entire Mississippi river and beat the previous world record of 18 days. I’m someone who’s traced the entire river from start to finish on Google Maps, and I can hardly believe that you can use a non-motorized vehicle to do all of that in eighteen days. Fifteen days? Wow.

1 Terry Gross and the Art of Opening Up - The New York Times

So good! I haven’t really watched much of Terry Gross’ interviews, but I know she’s possibly the best one alive right now. I enjoyed this profile of hers so much - the way she prepares for and brings herself to her interviews, the way she lets her guests share things that they’ve never shared before. I’ll now have to catch up on the back catalogue of Fresh Air (her show) in double time.

2 Middle-Aged Love: Rereading in Your Forties and Beyond - Uncanny Magazine

I’m a big fan of re-reading books. I was just thinking earlier to myself about how it’s like each Important Book in my life is like a mile-marker, and a checkpoint against which to measure myself. I’m not in my forties (yet, lol), but I was constantly nodding along when I read this piece about rereading by Marissa Lingen.

3 FLIP Fluid on Flip Dots - Mitxela

Good lord, this is so good! I recently started following Mixtela (Tim Alex Jacobs) on YouTube and have loved his videos - his most recent one, though, was definitely my favourite. He makes a large flipdot display and then gets it to do a fluid dynamics simulation based on how you tilt it (to control the gravity). It’s so, so fun. I’m sharing the writeup on the website here, but I’d highly recommend the full YouTube video.

4 64 Reasons To Celebrate Paul McCartney - Ian Leslie

This one is going to take time to read, but it’s a cute and detailed account of the many ways Paul McCartney is an all-round cool person. I learnt a lot of interesting things about him, and I think you will too. In particular, I liked learning about his struggles with depression and how he prioritized his family compared to some of his other musical peers.

5 Spaghetti Underground - New York Review of Books

“The MTA’s new redesign of the New York City subway map is the latest of many attempts to capture the sprawling network on paper.” So fun! Transit maps are necessarily reductive, and there are a lot of subjective decisions that go into choosing the balance between geographical fidelity and ease of use. This history of New York’s subway maps goes into the design decisions and the political debate around the iconic MTA map that is well known well beyond just New York.

6 The Ancient Waterways of Phoenix, Arizona - Longreads

I’ve never been to Phoenix (but always found the name so fascinating) and enjoyed learning about the waterways that cut right through the city - or to put it better, the city that built itself around the ancient waterways. The irrigation canals of the city predate the city by almost 2000 years, and were once the largest irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. The open water canals, though, became a source of political contention in Phoenix, and there’s been a lot of attempts to contain them and also restrict access.

7 Nick Kyrgios, the Reluctant Rising Star of Tennis - The New Yorker

A 2017 profile of Nick Kyrgios - almost ten years later, we’ve seen his career fizzle out and never really achieve the heights we thought he would. What I found really interesting (and didn’t notice back then) is that Kyrgios’ reluctance and reservation towards the tennis world existed back then - I guess I just ignored it. To some extent, it feels as though his career arc has been inevitable.

Many people assume that Kyrgios is in denial about his ambition. “I think deep down, in his own way, he’s becoming more professional,” Paul McNamee, a retired Australian player and a former C.E.O. of the Australian Open, told me. “But to admit that and to fail—he would not cope with that, maybe.” Kyrgios resists that analysis. “Some days, I’m really good,” he said. “I like going out on the practice court and training with my mates. But I don’t know about fully engaging and giving everything to it. It’s just a game. It’s just a sport. It’s such a small part of my life.”

8 Learning to Love Dill, Russia’s Ubiquitous Herb - The New Yorker

“Talia Lavin on rediscovering dill in Russia, where the herb is sprinkled on seemingly everything.”

9 The cycling of phosphorus is the basis for all life on Earth - Aeon

Fun science-y and historical exploration of the history of phosphorus. The way our life is set up biologically, phosphorus can be considered a “rate-limiting” element. It’s the rarest of the most necessary elements for life, and thus its concentration determines the entire quantity of biomass on earth! And of course, given how we’ve been using synthetic phosphates for our agricultural systems, we’ve thrown the phosphorus cycle out of alignment.

10 The Everlasting Forrest Fenn - California Sunday

“Five years ago, a legendary art dealer left his home in Santa Fe, traveled to an undisclosed location somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, and hid a 42‑pound chest filled with priceless treasure. Why?” I don’t have much to say about this piece apart from the short summary above. Is that even real!? Someone leaving a box of treasure in the wilderness with just a cryptic poem to figure it all out, and thousands of people then attempting to find it?! Crazy.

1. The anxiety of the perfect loaf: the illusion of culinary precision (Iza):

Fun piece about the history of baking (bread, in particular) and how modern “digital-first” baking is introducing somewhat needless anxiety in its quest for precision. I feel this to some extent when I bake: I like recipes, and in particular with bread where I weigh things out specifically, but I also enjoy using recipes as guides.

2. The “Garlic Nerds” Building a Better Allium (Offrange):

Super fun! Garlic, for those who don’t know, is primarily grown via asexual reproduction. Most of us, even those who garden, will rarely see garlic flowers and seeds. There’s a group of people now looking to breed new garlic varieties that aren’t just clones of last year’s crop - and it’s so interesting!

3. Competitive Oyster Shucking Is Real, Decadent, And China’s Best Party (Deadspin):

What a wild read from 2019 - competitive oyster “shucking” is a real thing, which I obviously had no idea about, and China is now the world’s biggest stage for it.

4. the classics, mapped (by Peter Guillam):

Not a longform read, by any means, but a fun exploration of the journeys in the best classic novels.

5. How the Words We Teach English Language Learners Changed (Pudding):

Oooh another data exploration piece - this essay looks at word lists that cover over 90% of general English use, and compares the 1953 list to the 2023 list. Obviously, there are a ton of changes.

6. The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages (Washington Post):

“In a city where diplomats and embassies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn Smith was a savant with a secret.”

7. becoming yourself is a social project (Velvetnoise):

As always, great stuff from Maja of Velvet Noise. I like this a lot - because it’s about how to get the people in your life to help you become yourself. It involves a bunch of things - how to let people know what’s going on, how to ask for help, and how to invoke that vulnerability.

8. Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family (Blog):

Not sure how I came across this, but it’s a hard-hitting piece about the concept of “arranged marriage” in conservative Indian families. My takeaway was when author’s dad said that Indians don’t “fall” in love, that’s too accidental and only “powerless” Americans do that. What a way to think about things!

9. Bengaluru re-imagined through its incredible water network (Questionofcities):

“Bengaluru’s water woes are not new but, this letter to the city by a hardcore Bengalurean and water expert, is a tender recount of its water network with an appeal to look beyond lakes’ restoration.”

I’m aware I’m somewhat part of the “problem” by living in newer developed parts of Bengaluru myself, and I’m hopeful that eventually the city can regain its water-centricity of earlier. This reminds of Making Indian Cities Habitable that I shared recently.

10. Living In A Lucid Dream (Noema):

What a thing to read - an exploration of what lucid dreams are like, and why you’d go to some extent to experience more of them.

1 The Boeing 747 Begins Its Final Descent - The Atlantic

The last Boeing 747 was manufactured in 2022, and it’s pretty much absent from passenger aviation today. I am too young, I think, to have any concrete memories of the 747, but the YouTube videos I’ve watched about it have almost always been centred around awe and wonder. What an amazing plane! I honestly can’t believe that the first 747 was made in 1969. This essay is an ode to the 747, and quite a delight to read. Fun to pair with Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s (issue #400).

2 The product of the railways is the timetable - Ben Springbett’s Substack

Fun exploration of how the real outcome of the railways is not the infra or the tracks or the coaches or even the concept of “travel”, but rather the timetable. Railway networks need to optimize for speed, which is not just the speed of the train, but the speed at which you can connect from any two different nodes on the network. Now, of course, the Swiss railways are the world’s best at this, and they have designed their entire rail network around seamless interchanges (so you wait very little for your connection). Once you realize that the timetable is your north star, then even your infrastructure starts to be designed around it. As a bit of a transportation nerd, I loved this.

3 The Unhappy King of Snooker - The New Yorker

I recently read snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan’s autobiography Running, and well, it’s one of the most entertaining autobiographies you can ever read. I appreciated how candid he was, and especially so about his struggles with depression. This is a 2015 profile of his (2 years after his book came out) and it’s a pretty good read - very insightful into the kind of person Ronnie is, the extent of his genius and conversely of his internal demons.

4 For Humpbacks, Bubbles Can Be Tools - Hakai Magazine

“A lungful of air is like a multifunction toolkit for humpback whales.”

This is amazing!

5 Are Crows Really Our Friends? - Audubon

Well, isn’t this a fun sequel to the previous piece? It’s a fun exploration of how we think about our relations with crows, and whether it’s possible or not to have meaningful relationships with them (I think it is).

Gibson doesn’t have relationships with any of these specific birds. He’s spent almost 500 nights considering them as a group, wild and anonymous. “They’re putting on a good show for you!” he shouts. Really, though, these birds aren’t paying attention to us; they’re performing for one another. We’ll continue to tell stories about corvids, but in this moment, their story is their own.

6 Why Am I Left-Handed? - Quanta Magazine

Always a big fan of Natalie Woolchover’s writing - here she writes in Quanta’s new Qualia series about the biological and cultural factors behind left-handedness. About 10% of humans are left-handed - this fact kinda makes sense because southpaws are going to be vulnerable while fighting (the heart’s on the left) but a small fraction of them will develop some surprise element and survive. The other way to think about this is that left-handedness has a lot of stigma associated with it, and our brains’ plasticity has enabled some of us to just become right-handed anyway?

7 Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - The Long Now Foundation

This is a very fun 2017 piece about Feynman written by Danny Hillis. He reminisces on the time when he worked together with Feynman on the Connection Machine, a massively parallel supercomputer developed in the 80s. I’ll just leave you with the first paragraph: One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, “That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.” For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company.

8 The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days) - Lithub

Another amusing and entertaining and hyper-specific profile of someone very cool - Clarke Speicher’s job is to read books and provide recommendations to film producers on the screenplay-a-bility of books. He reads ~6 books a week, which is about 300 a year. 6000 over two decades of doing this job! What a crazy world we live in that this is literally someone’s job.

9 San Gimignano, how it used to be and what to do now - En

Samira sent me this cute account of San Gimignano - a very well-known and beautiful town-on-a-hill in Tuscany. We went there on a rainy day last year, and it was charming! This piece is by Giulia Scarpaleggia, who grew up in San Gimignano and has seen it develop into a popular tourist destination - it’s obviously a great peek into a locals’ view of an evolving city.

I missed last weekend, and honestly I’ve not been having the best time mentally, and thus might not be as punctual going forward for some time. My stats tell me that I’ve been on a ~63 week streak (not weekly, but 63 issues in 63 weeks), and it feels sad that I may not keep to it. I will strive to, of course, but won’t force myself too.

One interesting development for me with the Kable of late has been the desire to have a bigger pool to curate from. I’ve thus read a lot more than I normally would. Instead of reading “just enough” for me to have 10 good things to pick each week, I’ve put myself in a position of having a pool of about 50 things to pick from. This is great and it’s (a) much more relaxing, and (b) much more expansive for me.

That’s all from me. Enjoy the newsletter. Enjoy the weekend! As always, write to me anytime by replying to any of my emails.

1 My Writing Education: A Time Line - The New Yorker

This is a great piece by George Saunders. He talks about starting off as a writer in 1986, at the Syracuse Creative Writing program - his formative experiences with Tobias Wolff and Doug Unger, meeting his wife at the program, starting to write “serious” stuff which causes him to lose his magic, and more. It’s such a great personal history.

Why do we love our writing teachers so much? Why, years later, do we think of them with such gratitude? I think it’s because they come along when we need them most, when we are young and vulnerable and are tentatively approaching this craft that our culture doesn’t have much respect for, but which we are beginning to love. They have so much power. They could mock us, disregard us, use us to prop themselves up. But our teachers, if they are good, instead do something almost holy, which we never forget: they take us seriously. They accept us as new members of the guild. They tolerate the under-wonderful stories we write, the dopy things we say, our shaky-legged aesthetic theories, our posturing, because they have been there themselves.

2 How Many Errorrs Are in This Essay? - The Millions

Nice piece about errors and typos. This is a bit of a historical piece too, except it spans errors in the printed or written English language starting from… the King James Bible. It’s a lot of fun - it combines a survey of errors with a sharp sense of humour that’s part writing, part choice of the errors the author, Ed Simon, chooses to highlight.

3 Curved origami and tangent developables - Chessapig

Wow? I shared I’d shared Is math big or small? in issue #400, and it was so good! Here’s another one from Elliot Kienzle. Here, Elliot describes “developable surfaces” and how to make cool shapes with paper without stretching or folding it. There’s some math here, but overall this is so cool!

4 Making Indian Cities Habitable - The India Forum

I re-read this piece by Ramachandra Guha about Patrick Geddes.. and I realized I had shared it back in issue #229! Anyhow, there’s no harm in sharing it again. It’s such a great piece from 2020 that talks about Geddes’ contributions to Indian urban planning. Lots of the social and environmental problems that India is facing due to urbanization were actually predicted by Geddes, over a century ago between 1914 and 1924. He talked about three things primarily: the relationship between cities and water access, spaces that could be claimed by trees, and resource management, primarily water management via wells.

5 Silicon Valley Circuits - Places Journal

I really liked this. I was in Silicon Valley a couple of months ago, and obviously only saw it at a single point in time. Hua Hsu talks about the last 30 years and the highway development in Silicon Valley - how Route 85 was constructed due to the rapidly changing fabric of the Bay Area and how its establishment accelerated that change. His personal essay is both personal and full of details of surrounding events, which I very much enjoyed. It goes into so many details of the evolution of arguably one of the most important areas of the world! As someone constantly trying to optimize life, the first part of this paragraph was a good wake-up call for me:

For teenagers, suburban commute times were not of great concern. More time in traffic meant more time to gossip or flirt, daydream and hope for that one song to come on the radio. How often do we recognize the uniqueness of our circumstances? I dreamed of a highway that would take me somewhere new, truly new. Deeper into San José didn’t count. I was a typical teenager, jaded and hard to impress. Yet that morning I did recognize that something unusual was happening. As I took a walk on a highway, I realized that my reality was circumscribed by infrastructure. Maybe this new road wouldn’t take me to the destinations I sought, but I recall that it shifted my thinking about the place I was from. Now that Cupertino was worthy of an exit, I began to understand the city as a node along some larger, abstract circuit.

6 The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge - Tyler Vigen’s website

Whoa. What a good and honestly, bizarre, sequel to the previous piece. Tyler Vigen explores the history of a pedestrian bridge that crosses the interstate I-494 near the Minneapolis airport. It doesn’t make any necessary connect for pedestrians, and nobody uses it… so why was it built? It took a crazy amount of research for him to get to the bottom of it - which even included flying to Kansas City to look through dedicated federal archives! I’m not going to share the actual reason the bridge was built here, but honestly, you want to read this piece for the journey and not the destination.

7 Trekking Across Switzerland, Guided by Locals’ Hand-Drawn Maps - The New York Times

“Nostalgic for a time before ubiquitous connectivity, a writer ditched his phone and relied instead on serendipity — and maps made by people he met along the way.”

Look at these maps! So cute.

8 Your data is yours - Patrick Dugan’s website

I’m a big nerd on capturing data from my digital life and doing stuff with it. In today’s age of AI, this is both cooler and more dangerous, especially if you don’t own either your data or the pipes through which it moves. Patrick Dugan writes this piece starting from this point, “Every platform I depended on eventually shifted its priorities away from mine, so I built my own infrastructure for publishing, personal data, and the privacy controls they never offered.”, and talks us through some of the honestly delightful way he uses his own data.

9 Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity - The Republic of Letters

Calvin and Hobbes fans, unite! Matthew Morgan writes in the Republic of Letters about Bill Watterson’s integrity in standing up for his art and sometimes against the all-powerful comic syndicate. What a person.

10 What Roasting Does to a Coffee Bean, Seen From the Inside - Lumafield

As always, very fun CT scan explorations from Lumafield.

It’s been a strange week for me, but I have had a good time reading a bunch of interesting things, some of which you will see in the newsletter below, and also some books - I have been thoroughly enjoying listening to Matthew McConaughey’s autobiography, Greenlights. The entire book is pure chutzpah. I’ve also been on a John McPhee binge. I am just about to finish The Pine Barrens which might replace Oranges as my favourite book of his.

I’ve been meaning to write a longer post, maybe sometime outside of the cable, about the way I have been interacting with AI and coding agents while developing, writing and curating the Kable. But I think I’ll just share a few things here.

I have a full blown personal app with an audience of one to manage the back end operations of the newsletter. I write the newsletter in this app right now because it helps me do quick searches in the archive when I’m looking for things to reference - that’s why you might be seeing that I have referenced a lot more from my archives in the last month or two months than I ever did.

Another interesting thing that I’ve been doing is that as I’ve been writing the newsletter just right now, I have a Codex window open and I quickly just talk to it verbally about things that I want to improve or issues that I have. I have really been enjoying making these small incremental improvements. These improvements barely move the needle - it takes me more time to make these improvements than it saves me time. However, I enjoy it. It’s a bit of a craft. I don’t know how seriously I should be taking myself, but I am enjoying it.

Anyway, more later. Enjoy the newsletter. I think it’s a great ten pieces to read this time. And let me know if you like it.

1 Fireworks Are Not Patriotic. Drone Shows Are - Wired

“This Fourth of July will feature more drone shows than ever. I went on a pilgrimage to drone country—and had a near-religious experience.”

So good!? I loved this. And the images, of course!

2 Restored Images Show the 1945 Trinity Nuclear Test In Vivid Detail - IEEE Spectrum

I read Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb a few years ago and loved it (while also being somewhat horrified). I’ve had a strange interest in everything nuclear since, and I liked this photoessay of pictures from the first ever nuclear weapon test in human history.

3 The Mom Who Runs a Household With a Staff of AI Agents - The Cut

I found this really interesting, and kind of strange too - a mom who has four kids has a team of AI agents that do all sorts of things like make personalized education plans, order the groceries, and deal with legal and financial paperwork. If this too sounds a bit horrifying, I feel it is? A little? Maybe not horrifying, but just strange. I found this to be a super cool perspective:

She has a theory about why she’s been willing to go further than her more technical friends. “The programmers I know are 70 percent threatened by AI and 30 percent ‘This is a cool tool,’” she says, so they keep their agents on a tight leash. Genet, by contrast, doesn’t feel like she has a profession to defend; AI, after all, isn’t trying to raise her kids. “So I’m zero percent threatened and 100 percent empowered. I have no skin in the game to prove I still have value in my job. I understand that’s not the norm.”

4 If America’s So Rich, How’d It Get So Sad? - Derek Thompson’s Substack

“Or: How the 2020s broke our brains”. Interesting piece that tries to find the root cause behind plummeting sentiment in the US. Long story short - there’s no “silver bullet” or single explanation - it’s a lot of things. Lack of community, rising inflation, the housing crisis, and a general continuation of the pandemic’s negatives are what have caused the “tragic twenties” in the United States.

5 Where Are the Economies of Scale in Homebuilding? - Construction Physics

I am back with another piece from Construction Physics (An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project in issue #359, How Does the US Use Water? in issue #356, and Will We Ever Get Fusion Power? in issue #333).

I really liked this because the US in particular has homes that can be somewhat centrally built and are somewhat standardized. So why aren’t there crazy economies of scale as you build more homes, especially containerized or prefabbed homes? It’s actually a really interesting answer, it’s again, not a single point of failure but a menagerie of them primarily centred around logistics costs.

6 Is math big or small? - Chessapig’s website

This is a pretty technically involved piece about mathematics, but I also think it’s really, really fun. Instead of me talking about it, I’m just going to reproduce the summary of the piece here below. It’s actually not an essay, but it is the transcript of a talk.

“When Illustrating a mathematical idea, the first thing you need to decide is the scale. Is this concept something you can hold in your hand, or something to wander around in? I will reflect on the scale of various analogies used by research mathematicians, such as Thurston’s train tracks and pictures of symplectic manifolds. Topologists use the metaphors of “geography” and “botany” to organize problems in their field. I will argue that geography and botany are flexible analogies, which give a natural scale for mathematical illustrations.”

and going further into geography and botany:

The “isoperimetric island” illustrates the analogy behind geography and botany. We envision math as an island, with mathematical objects as plants populating the island. Mathematicians, exploring the island, first act as geographers and map out the coast of the island, understanding the range of possibilities of the mathematical flora. As a geographer, math is big. Next, the botanists sit in place with a magnifying glass, classifying all the critters in that part of the island. As a botanist, math is small.

7 Glamorous Crossing: How Pan Am Airways Dominated International Travel in the 1930s - Longreads

I knew that Pan Am Airways was the airline pre- and post-World War II. I did not know, however, how much or to what extent that was true. This essay is a history into the vision behind the company in the pre- and post- jet engine era, the role that Charles Limberg played in expanding to new routes, and the crossborder lobbying needed!

8 The Image Boards of Hayao Miyazaki - Animation Obsessive

Gorgeous, I repeat gorgeous feature on the evolving image boards of legendary Hayao Miyazaki. His evolution is captured in this essay by a bunch of interesting phrases: By the late ‘80s, a powerfully assured technique was visible in these sketches he tossed off so quickly., Every line and form is wobbly, but the impression is sharp, exact and effortless. and His image boards for The Boy and the Heron show a master’s touch, an absolute clarity of imagination.

9 The Heat Shield at the Edge of Space - Arena Magazine

Joseph P. Krause is the co-founder and CEO of Radical AI, a materials company using AI and self-driving lab tech to discover breakthrough new materials. It’s thus apt for him to chart the history of heatshield tech, possibly the technological bottleneck preventing us from having fully reusable rockets right now. I had an inkling of the issue, but I didn’t realize how hard the problem is and how much mental firepower we’ve thrown at the problem so far. Will AI help us get better? Krause obviously believes it, and I hope it’ll happen.

10 Frank Sinatra Has a Cold - Esquire

Just like Playing Doc’s Games (issue #397), this is another of those classic pieces. This one, in fact, is possibly even more famous and well-known that that 1986 personal essay. This is a 1965 piece by Gay Talese about Frank Sinatra, and it’s unbelievably good. Not only does it capture Sinatra’s presence and his aspect of being a mafia don or Il Padrone, but it also captures his vulnerability, his irritability, his loyalty and his behaviour towards others. Just an amazing piece of writing.

1 From Open Source Software to Open Source Strategy - P3 Institute

I remember reading this on the CalTrain up and down the Bay Area, and it honestly felt pretty fitting to be reading it in that setting. The author, Bill Gurley, was a partner at Benchmark, one of the top venture firms, and here he talks about open source “strategy”, a corporate strategy inspired by the world of open source software. In short, the playbook does a bunch of things: “neutralize a stronger competitor, commoditize an expensive input, align an industry around a shared standard, or head off a regulatory crisis.” There’s six examples demonstrating it in action, and I really enjoyed this.

2 The Making of Indian Statistics - Alter Magazine

Alter Magazine keeps giving! This visually delightful piece by Hiya Jain talks about the history of Indian statistics, starting from 1933 British India. The Indian Statistical Institute under PC Mahalanobis not only applied existing methods to Indian agricultural problems, but developed new techniques entirely, in particular in “sampling theory”: how do you randomly sample a small subset of the target population to get an accurate measurement of the whole? What a fun piece to read and look through! The essay also talks about CR Rao, who I have a connection with - he was half of the Cramer-Rao bound that formed the basis of my PhD thesis.

3 Politics and the English Language - Orwell Foundation

I’ve shared this essay by George Orwell once, long long ago - issue #98! I happened to stumble upon it again a few weeks ago, and it’s a good time to reshare. Orwell talks about how a lot of modern English (the essay was written in 1946) is filled with “nothing” phrases - lots of Latin-origin words strung together to mean nothing and everything at the same time. It’s the kind of essay that I’d like to put on my read-once-a-year routine.

4 how to enter side doors - Velvet Noise

I’m a fan of Maja’s writing (see also the key to love is understanding from issue #356) and I like this one a lot too. It’s about how to enter companies or organizations outside of the “usual” pathways: how to find “illegible” jobs which hover around the edges as unsolved tension. Highly recommend! I particularly liked Maja’s framing of: “Specificity is one of the highest forms of respect.”

5 Burnout is breaking a sacred pact - Useful Fictions

Nice complement to the previous piece - Cate Hall talks about burnout and how burnout is about a breakdown of communication between the “elephant” and the “rider” inside us. The elephant is the instinctive and emotional part of us, and the rider is the rational voice that engages in long-term planning. When you go through extended periods of time of the elephant and rider not having their needs met, then burnout is a natural outcome.

6 Leisure as a Dream Job - Madison Huizinga’s Substack

Ha! What a nice thing to read after a piece about burnout - I enjoyed this essay by Madison Huizinga about what we’d do if leisure was our pursuit, or what we’d do if we didn’t have to worry about paying the bills and saving. What would we do if we could do what we want? I love that the essay starts off with a reference to Dua Lipa - in particular because of her Service95 book club (which is really good!).

7 How Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics - Quanta Magazine

Nice successor of sorts to He was in mystic delirium: was this hermit mathematician a forgotten genius whose ideas could transform AI‚ or a lonely madman? which I shared a few months ago. Grothendick did so much for 20th century mathematics - this is a technical/popular-technical introduction to his actual work, and not just his legend.

8 50 Hours to Draw Some Lines - Doug MacDowell’s website

Superb exposition of how to draw graphs with purely analog methods. So nice! And look at how lovely the final output is.

9 A Playboy Interview With Miles Davis - Playboy

Phew. This is a pretty insightful and hard-hitting interview of Miles Davis published in Playboy back in 1962. He talks a lot about race, his perception in society and he also responds to the interviewer asking how he feels about being perceived as rude to his audience. I liked this a lot.

10 The Same River Twice - David Quammen’s website

Another lovely piece from decades past. This one is from 1986 - you start off thinking its nature writing, but then it ends up being a pretty devastating piece about relationships ending.

I feel a deep sense of happiness, pride and accomplishment for keeping the Kable running this long. It’s an extension of me, pretty much - a place for me to feed, indulge and grow my curiosity about the world. I still remember writing the Kable for the first time - a combination of me sending cool things to read to my friends, me being inspired by people around me starting TinyLetters, and honestly an inspired choice of naming (I’m Kat + I’d just read Cat’s Cradle + who doesn’t love an alliteration?).

In a way, I’ve always wanted to play the long game. After the first few issues, I remember thinking to myself, “whoa, wouldn’t it be cool to one day get to Kat’s Kable #1000?”. Almost halfway there now :)

I’ve gone back to Maria Popova’s 10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings many many times, and I’ve never indulged myself in writing something like it myself. No longer! Here’s my version of notes to myself about the Kable:

1. The Kable is an infinite game: I’m a big fan of James Carse’s book Finite and Infinite Games. An infinite game is a set of sustained interactions where the aim isn’t to win, but to keep playing. It allows for an expansive view of the world. For me, the Kable has never been a means to an end, because there is no end. The joy of the Kable is in the unfolding, and in keeping it alive in a way that nourishes me. It doesn’t only nourish my curiosity, but also my social life! I’ve made friends via the newsletter, I’ve gotten my current job (and hence met Samira) via the Kable, and more. There’s no way any of these would have happened had I had a more narrow view of the Kable, or viewed it as a “project” with a certain end.

2. I do it for myself: Looking back, I’ve had many moments when I’ve felt like I didn’t really want to continue. Honestly, most times when I send the Kable out, I get zero replies and maybe a couple of acknowledgements from friends/family. What I’ve done consistently is ask myself, “would I still curate the Kable if I didn’t have an audience? Is it fun for its own sake?” and thankfully, the answer to that has almost always been yes.

3. I’ve been stubborn with my format: The Kable doesn’t look materially different now than it did back in 2016. I’ve been stubborn! I liked the format, and it has been easy for me to put it together this way. Changes I’ve made have been minor - I remember back in 2018/19 I had three mini-themes in each set of ten articles, but even that wasn’t too different from what it is now. Looking back, I like this: I reflect “stubbornness” as a positive thing, in fact.

4. In retrospect, I could have been a more aggressive marketer: Not only have I been stubborn, I’ve been a strange combination of bashful and arrogant in my positioning. I never wanted to shout out about the Kable from the rooftops, and I also thought, “The Kable is so good, and the readership will come.” Considering the fact that I’ve had pretty much no growth in my readership base in the last five years, this feels like I was just silly - I should have marketed myself more!

5. Reading widely is joyful: The Kable is essentially me following my curiosity. Having a conduit for it is joyful in a way that I can’t quantify or describe. The Kable is, in a way, me giving myself the license or the permission to take this sort of exploration more seriously. I have always enjoyed knowing things and showing that off, and in my undergrad this manifested primarily as my passion for quizzing. I grew out of that, though - both by the nature of the competition and the orientation towards facts - and I’ve found that the Kable is now my way of feeding a critical part of myself.

6. Very cool and unexpected things have happened as a result of the Kable: Yes! I could never have imagined these when I started off. I like to joke that my newsletter-friend Kriti, who I’d never met, was the one who introduced me to my current workplace and hence led to me meeting Samira. And the Kable reached Kriti because of another dear friend, Anjani! People talk about increasing the surface area of your luck, or about concepts like writing things being equivalent to constructing complex search queries to find fascinating people, and yeah, that’s what the Kable has been. It’s been so rewarding to find the Kable come back and surprise me in these ways. And it makes me feel like I need to be a better marketer to make more of this happen.

7. There’s a lot of confidence I get from having kept something going for a decade: I know I’m pretty good at a lot of the cerebral things I do, but mental stamina hasn’t been my strongest suit. I still remember feeling bad about “silly mistakes” I made in my math exams in school. As I sit down writing this, reflecting on curating the Kable for a decade, I feel this surge of self-assurance. I can do something consistently for this long. Wow. I started the Kable before Substack was founded! In fact, I feel prouder of the fact I’ve run the Kable for a decade than I do for completing my PhD. I suppose the percentage of newsletters that run for ten years is lower than the success rate of completing a PhD :)

8. I eventually realized that curation is an active choice: I had always seen myself as a conduit - but I’m actually more. When I was in the final year of my undergrad (just when I started the Kable and took my first Adult decisions), I thought that the best thing for me to do was something “pure” and apolitical. That’s why I chose to do a physics PhD. Fundamental science is apolitical, right? When my research group’s members were invited to military conferences about securing missiles, I realized the joke was on me. I also thought that my job in life was to “reduce” my footprint (carbon and more) because it was all bad. That is why I thought of the Kable as some idealistic thing - I was just the messenger. I realize now that curation is an active choice, and I now aspire to have a larger, and significantly positive, footprint in the things I do and for the people around me.

9. There’s a sense of stagnation from just being a conduit: Telling myself I was a passive curator was problematic from another angle - it was boring! Many people, including my dad and my dear friend Valerie, told me that they read the Kable for my commentary, for my choices, and not necessarily for the long articles I shared. This was another piece of feedback which prompted me to be a more active curator. And when I think about it now, I want to write new pieces synthesizing things I’ve read; I want to bring new ideas and metaphors to my thinking and to my creative output.

10. Maybe the format will have to change: Let’s face it. People don’t really read anymore. And maybe the future will entail your AI agent reading and summarizing the Kable for you. We are entering brave new worlds, uncanny valleys, and all sorts of other technological (or dystopian, you pick) futures. When I reflect on the stubbonness that kept the Kable the same for this long, I don’t feel so strongly about it now. I feel that the Kable will have to evolve a bit more and I feel comfortable steering it actively.