Hello. Welcome to Kat’s Kable #111. It has not been a nice week, and if you have anything nice to say to me about this newsletter, this is a good time. Just reply to this email. Anyway, here goes. As usual, if you like what you’re seeing, send it to a friend or twenty. And if you want to subscribe and haven’t yet, here.
### 1. Ursula K. Le Guin Explains How to Build a New Kind of Utopia
_Every utopia since Utopia has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgment, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.
In the yang-yin symbol each half contains within it a portion of the other, signifying their complete interdependence and continual intermutability. The figure is static, but each half contains the seed of transformation. The symbol represents not a stasis but a process._
2. The Man who Saw Inside Himself
“For years, Larry Smarr has used a supercomputer to monitor his health and peer at his organs. Recently, he used his knowledge to help direct his own surgery.”
When it came time for Ramamoorthy to review the necessary consent forms with Larry, both understood the surgical plan exactly, where the danger points were, and when decisions might have to be made in the moment—not in a generic sense, as with most surgeries, but with great specificity. Larry was functioning, in a concrete sense, as his body’s CEO.
3. The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind
What happens when you spend years building up your research and skills and pour all of yourself into it, and then aren’t granted tenure?
I’ve lost a huge part of my identity, and all of my book learning on identity construction can’t help me now. What hurts the most, in a way, is that my loss has been replicated a thousand times over, and will be replicated a thousand times more, barring some mass rejection of capitalism, and rather than face what that means, we have, as a profession and as people, found ways of dealing with it that largely erase the people we lose, erase their pain and grief, and erase our own.
4. Lucien Asks, Why Sports?
_And here are others, sanded too, but on their legs, going at each other with blows and kicks. We shall surely see this poor fellow spit out his teeth in a minute; his mouth is all full of blood and sand; he has had a blow on the jaw from the other’s fist, you see. Why does not the official there separate them and put an end to it? I guess that he is an official from his purple, but no, he encourages them and commends the one who gave that blow.
Now I want to know what is the good of it all. To me it looks more like madness than anything else. It will not be very easy to convince me that people who behave like this are not wrong in their heads._
5. The Race to Invent the Artificial Leaf
A commercially viable artificial leaf would solve several of the trickiest challenges in clean energy. It would create a way to directly and affordably store solar energy while producing a carbon-neutral fuel that could transform the transportation sector, even offering a way to make long-distance air travel environmentally sustainable. Scientists have made slow but considerable progress on the two crucial steps in the process: developing catalysts that use solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, and creating others that can convert hydrogen and carbon dioxide into an energy-dense fuel. The remaining trick is to combine these tasks in an affordable and scalable way, using cheap and abundant materials.
6. Even smart people are shockingly bad at analyzing sources online. This might be an actual solution.
Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In contrast, fact checkers read laterally, leaving a site after a quick scan and opening up new browser tabs in order to judge the credibility of the original site. Compared to the other groups, fact checkers arrived at more warranted conclusions in a fraction of the time.
7. Look at Me: Why Attention-Seeking is the Defining Need of our Times
Even if offline time is good for you, it can be stressful, which might make people hide behind their screens. “I always say to my students,” MacDonald says, “‘If only in real life we had a backspace button.’ But no. Once you say something, it’s out there. You don’t get that kind of control.” Until recently, in other words, most of us were simply too socially clumsy to avoid being ourselves.
8. Back to the Roots
Loved this piece about a new age of Indians who are leaving their (lucrative) city jobs to go farm.
_Most are in it by choice, not by inheritance. Some are in it for the alternate lifestyle; some are inspired by the environmental and land ethic; some are in it to solve their existential problems of “powerlessness and meaninglessness”. Some are in it because that’s what they always wanted to do, finding personal nirvana on land.
_
9. How Steinbeck Used the Diary as a Tool of Discipline a Hedge Against Self-Doubt and a Pacemaker for the Heartbeat of Creative Work
Truly lovely.
My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were. This success will ruin me as sure as hell. It probably won’t last, and that will be all right. I’ll try to go on with work now. Just a stint every day does it. I keep forgetting.
10. The Internet isn’t Forever
Digital storage is not failsafe, as one would assume.
Our records are the raw material of history; the shelter of our memories for the future. We must develop ironclad security for our digital archives, and put them entirely out of the reach of hostile hands. The good news is that this is still possible.