Helloooo! Busy week, but I’m juuuuust in time to get this ready. Hope you enjoy the list. As always, if anything, feel free to write back and I promise to reply. It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks/months so I’m afraid I won’t have the time to put out any new special editions, but these weekend issues are an integral part of my weekly routine and aren’t going anywhere. :)
If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser; it usually works. It does for me.
1. Miscellaneous Files: Olivia Laing
I read Olivia Laing’s Lonely City a few years ago, and it remains to this day one of my favorite books ever. It’s about loneliness experienced by people who live in big cities; an almost accusative, ironic loneliness. This is an interview she gave to Guernica mostly about her obsessive cataloguing of events, research. She shares screenshots (screenshots) of her work to show how she handles the administrative and secretarial aspects of her life. It’s unbelievable.
Guernica : I can clearly tell that you like the secretarial part of the work—this is so beautifully organized. It’s almost as if you’re shaping the narrative through categorizing the folders already.
Olivia Laing : This is already quite far into the folder system! It’s like the Tetris thing again—the early stage of structuring a book really arises out of the accumulation and arranging of information.
2. The Pleasure and Pain of Speed
This was a really interesting piece from Nautilus. I’ve believed that the reason more and more of us have anxiety is because of the pace of our lives; we’re traveling fast, moving suddenly from place to place, consuming so much more information than our brains can handle one at a time. We like speed, evidently; it’s why we’ve literally built our entire society around a need for it. But it’s not all rosy.
As life has sped up, we humans have not, at least in our core functioning: Your reaction to stimuli is no faster than your great-grandfather’s. What is changing is the amount of things the world can bring to us, in our perpetual now. But is our ever-quickening life an uncontrolled juggernaut, driven by a self-reinforcing cycle of commerce and innovation, and forcing us to cope with a new social and psychological condition? Or is it, instead, a reflection of our intrinsic desire for speed, a transformation of the external world into the rapid-fire stream of events that is closest to the way our consciousness perceives reality to begin with?
3. How a bench and a team of grandmothers can tackle depression
While we’re on the topic of anxiety, this is another interesting piece I read last week. Depression is all but a global epidemic in a perhaps limited sense. Apparently more than 300 million people around the world have depression. (I dislike saying “suffer from depression”: it is part of who you are if you have it). In Zimbabwe, conventional mental health aid is tough to come by – thus this novel approach to it. “Benches” of grandmothers are present in towns throughout the country, who act as therapists and points of contact for further treatment if required. The grandmothers part of the scheme feel a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment by helping others as well.
4. How a Cycling Superhighway Is Shaping a Generation
We move across continents to explore other unconvential societal and political structures. In Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, roads of the city are made bicycle-only for seven hours every Sunday. For a city otherwise choked by vehicular pollution, this scheme is a real breath of fresh air. It’s also one of those rare schemes that nearly everyone in the city loves. Many cities around the world have tried to emulate this, and 90% of these “cyclic superhighways” are in Latin America. I think that this is a good idea but it doesn’t (and shouldn’t be thought to) mitigate the problem of vehicular pollution in these cities. Forcing no cars on Sunday just increases people’s commutes on other days of the week.
5. Lessons From a ‘Local Food’ Scam Artist
“Working summers at an authentically quaint roadside produce stand, a teenage salesperson is schooled in the not-so-subtle art of how to con a foodie from the big city.”
I started looking out for, and chatting with, other farmers, most of them retired. They knew that the stand was a fraudulent imitation of the farm stands that used to belong to the Garden State’s mostly vanished family farms. They knew that the cherries came from Washington, the grapes from California, and that they were grown on corporate holdings, not family businesses. They also knew that, until the Jersey produce ripened, they would have to buy what was available. They didn’t ask stupid questions, interrogate me on my immigration status, or steal; they had every reason to hate my job and what it stood for but always treated me with kindness and humor. So I always fetched them the ripest, most perfect fruits and vegetables.
6. 385 Feet of Crazy: The Most Audacious Flying Machine Ever
Paul Allen, someone whose mind has inspired me for over a decade now, passed away a few weeks ago. One of his legacies is this: the 385-foot wingspan Stratolaunch , a plane (nay, a _mega_plane) whose job is to carry rockets and satellites high into the sky to be launched from there. If you think it is mad, wait till you see the pictures. It almost comes off as an exercise in chutzpah.
7. Invasion of the frankenbees: the danger of building a better bee
Just like genetically modified crops, can we have genetically modified bees? Yes, we can. We now have the technical know-how to do so, but do we know if it will be good for agriculture and wildlife overall? This is a complicated question, and one I sidestep by not eating honey at all. The real issue, however, is something else: intense monoculture of crops and factory farming has led to a reliance on pesticides and herbicides, and GMO crops are only a way of equipping plants with their own herbicides. This means that GMO crops and bees, now, are solving a problem that’s been brought upon by existing agriculture.
8. Kolmogorov Complexity and Our Search for Meaning
Kolmogorov Complexity is a very interesting technical concept that I came across in the last few weeks. Basically, the Kolmogorov complexity of something is the length of the shortest program that can compute that something.
Now our understanding of our search for meaning is starting to come together. We abhor randomness and love patterns. We are biologically programmed to find some patterns that explain what they see. But we can never be certain that the pattern we’ve identified is the right one. […] Literature, plays, and the cinema offer us a delightful escape from the usual unintelligible, meaningless chaos that we find in the real world around us. Really good literature goes further, and leaves us with the possibility of many interpretations. We come face to face with the incomputability of the Kolmogorov complexity.
9. Meet the Carousing Harmonica-Playing Texan Who Just Won a Nobel for his Cancer Breakthrough
Jim Allison just won the Nobel Prize in physiology, and his story is amazing. Raucous and inspiring at the same time, his life has been nothing short of uneventful.
That’s it. See you next weekend. - Kat.