Hello! I’ve written this just an hour before it’s to be sent out, albeit fueled by an energetic Patti Smith singing in the background. I highly recommend her Instagram, it’s a daily delight. Anyway, this week has been good; this issue practically wrote itself. The first three pieces are on tennis, because I’ve read and seen a lot of nice stuff lately. The rest.. the amount I write just goes down as you keep scrolling. Haha.

By the way, does the order of the pieces matter to you? I usually don’t give a thought to the order of the pieces in each issue, although I do try to put things together if they are under the umbrella of a common theme. I’m curious to know. Hit reply and let me know if you have an opinion, or if you don’t care.

Anyway, here goes.

1. A Look at Novak Djokovic’s Mastery of the Tennis Return

Congratulations to Novak Djokovic for winning the US Open this year! I have always felt sorry for him because he’s been in the shadow of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the last fifteen years of men’s tennis. This is a great infographic detailing why exactly Novak Djokovic is the best in the world at returning service. I don’t think anyone else in the world is even close to as good as him.


The Third Man
This is another article about Djokovic, from 2013. This is after he’s had a tremendously successful 2011, and a somewhat quiet 2013. It’s a pretty accurate description of him, and it’s funny how even now, he is still the “third man”, after Federer and Nadal. But who knows, he may just topple Nadal’s record of 17 Grand Slam titles (he’s now on 14). Notice that I’m a Federer fan – there’s no way he can get to Federer’s 20! ;)

Djokovic is on the verge of capturing the respect that has eluded him for much of his career. He seems to become more statesmanlike with every match—a grass-stained Mark Zuckerberg, outgrowing the gawkiness that characterized his early years. Even Roy Emerson offered a glowing assessment of his comportment. “He has definitely changed,” Emerson told me, in August. “I watched him play Murray at Wimbledon, and he seems to have grown up, and actually conducted himself terrifically in the final. He seems to be moving in the right direction.”

2. The Science of the Tennis Grunt

A study from 2017 said that tennis fans could tell if a player was going to win or lose just from the pitch of the grunts by the tennis player. And they could do it better than bookies could.

Last week, Raine spent an evening watching—and listening to—the Open from his living room, in Brighton, England, which contained a piano, two armchairs, and David Kaczmarczyk, his roommate. On a TV screen, Verdasco, the Spaniard, was down a game to the U.K.’s Andy Murray. The players’ din picked up toward the end of the first set. Raine, a Murray fan, did not like what he was hearing. “Verdasco’s pitch is relatively low,” he noted. Murray sounded worn out. When the Spaniard pulled even, at five games, Raine muttered, “Oh, dear.” On his last serve, Murray cried, “WA-boom!” The ball went out, for a double fault. He lost the set.

On the court, Verdasco was bleating like a goat—a confident goat. Murray’s “ehhh”s grew uncertain.
Since we’re talking about bookies in tennis, here’s something about that:

3. Losers’ Lunch

This is a piece about “spotters” in tennis, a group of people who sit in the audiences of tennis matches and communicate in real time updates from the matches to their bosses so as to enable better and smarter betting. Spotting is illegal, but how? They are only broadcasting information from the match that they are watching. Would it be illegal if you were texting your friend from a match with the current score, or with information about how the players were playing?

What Piirimets is, he admitted, is a member of a rogue, impish species in the tennis ecosystem: a courtsider. But with their hunters getting more and more adept, courtsiders—arguably justifiably so—have become an endangered species. Only the most stubborn of their breed persist. Even though sports betting is becoming legalized in the United States, they will still be persona non grata at this year’s US Open, which they will attempt to attend again.

4. In Search of Doors: Read V.E. Schwab’s 2018 J.R.R. Tolkien Lecture on Fantasy Literature

Phew, enough of the tennis?

I loved this so much. I’ve probably already mentioned multiple times that I love fantasy literature. This is another beautiful tribute to the fantastical in every day life. Books come into existence not from fantasy, but from their writers’ inner lives. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Wave in the Mind , “Dragons are one of the truths about us. We have no other way of expressing that particular truth about us. People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.” I’m going to quote a few things from this particular speech, and if you have the time, I would recommend watching the video that’s linked to at the very end. I’m definitely going to read some of V.E.Schwab’s work in the future.

Required reading. A dangerous label, that. As the Guest of Honor at this conference, and as someone who’s already admitted to you that she hasn’t achieved that designation, I challenged him. Why? Why was Tolkien the threshold, the marker, the metric by which membership in this club should be determined? Which is wonderful, for that author, and for anyone who found their way to reading via Tolkien’s hallowed halls. But there isn’t one door through which we must find a love of reading, or nothing. In fact, such a prescription is dangerous, limiting. What happens, when a budding reader is handed a book and told, if you don’t love this, you don’t love fantasy? Setting aside the fact it’s unfair to put that much weight on one book, it is equally unfair to put that much pressure on one reader.

People often ask me why I write fantasy. I used to only have one answer. Because I grew up wanting the world to be stranger than it was. Now I think, what I meant, what I mean, is that I also wanted it to be more.

If any of you want evangelism on why fantasy is a beautiful genre worthy of much more than it deserves, reply and I can send you what I’ve been collecting in praise of and in defense of fantasy literature.

5. The Limits of Reason: Philip Pullman on why we Believe in Magic

More of this theme!

I find it endlessly fascinating, and I call that world “imaginary” not to disparage or belittle it. Imagination is one of our highest faculties, and wherever it appears, however it “bodies forth / The forms of things unknown” (Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), I want to treat it with respect. At its most intense it becomes a kind of perception, as in William Blake’s notion of “Twofold Vision”, by which he means what we see when we look “not with but through the eye”: the state of mind in which we can “see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”.

I’m relying on poetry to make this point because I think that poetry itself is a kind of enchantment. The effect that certain lines and images can have on us can’t be explained by translating them into simple modern English. The very form is part of the meaning, and the sound the poem makes works like a spell on our senses and not only on our minds. But it’s not just true of poetry. Everything that touches human life is surrounded by a penumbra of associations, memories, echoes and correspondences that extend far into the unknown. In this way of seeing things, the world is full of tenuous filaments of meaning, and the very worst way of trying to see these shadowy existences is to shine a light on them.

6. The Poetry of Victorian Science

Again, I’m going to quote from the piece. The essay is about a book called The Poetry of Science by Robert Hunt. It’s interesting to know how the perception of science has changed over the centuries (and milennia). The excerpt talks about a review of the book written by none other than Charles Dickens.

Despite the lavish terms in which it celebrates science, Dickens’ prose also reveals the tensions that permeated attitudes to scientific knowledge in Victorian Britain. Admiration for its clear-sighted objectivity and analytical precision is mixed with a fear, inherited partly from Romanticism and partly from Christianity, that experimental science is destructive, reductive, and degrading; that it diminishes nature to a quantifiable and soulless mechanism. But this view of science as the “stern utilitarian” oppressor of natural beauty and of the imagination is, Dickens assures his readers, groundless, and the “sound, wise, wholesome object” of disproving it has been successfully attained in the book which he is reviewing: Robert Hunt’s The Poetry of Science.

7. The Unreality of Luck

This is an interesting essay. It brings up its point with a couple of examples, one being of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived both atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Would you call him lucky, for having survied both, or unlucky, for having twice been in the wrong place at the wrong time? I don’t agree entirely with the premise of the essay, but I realize that it brings up something interesting and that carries merit.

8. Why Facebook’s Thinning Profit Margins Are a Secret Asset

I understood this as: Facebook makes a tiny profit margin, which means that only a company as large as it can afford to operate in the space that it does. It is going to be incredibly difficult for any other company to occupy the position that Facebook does; because the low profits with a low number of users won’t let the company even survive.

9. The War over Supercooled Water

This was incredible. Water is an interesting liquid: if pure, it can be cooled down to -40 Celsius without it freezing. However, we don’t know how water behaves in those conditions. Two groups, one in Berkeley, and one in Princeton, attempted to study this via running some computer simulations of the material. They got different results, and this resulted in a huuuuuge fight. And the culprit? A bug in the code!

More links
(I can’t keep typing blurbs)

Phew. That was a lot. See you soon. There may or may not be a flurry of special editions coming up. - Kat