Hello! It’s issue #149, and I can’t believe it. Next week is going to be #150 and it seems like time has passed by so quickly. It also feels like I’ve been doing it forever? I have started a blog (again). It’s full of ideas and fun things that I enjoy. Blogging is super fun. Let me know if you think anything of it.

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.

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Other Newsletters I was introduced to email newsletters a few months before I started this one, my own. Whether daily, weekly or monthly, they are a wonderful, deliberate and personal way of sharing writing, experiences, and curiosities. I’m currently sharing a few every week as a way of spreading the cheer.

1. Yuki Kawauchi Is Distance Running’s Elite Oddball

This is so delightful. Yuki Kawauchi works an admin job at a school in Japan, but also just won the Boston Marathon. He converts his commute to and from work into a training sesssion. A combination of tenacity and near-perfect biology has led him to be a tremendously successful marathon runner. He’s also run a half-marathon in a panda suit. So no matter what you say, Yuki Kawauchi must definitely be the fastest human to have run in a panda suit. While being well equipped for distance running, he also benefits from a genetic makeup that boosts his sprinting ability. It is truly the best of both worlds. Thus, he can run quickly, but he can also run far. Being light, he is very good at downhill stages of races, which was the case in the latest Boston Marathon.

At a post-race party at the Red Lantern restaurant in Boston, Desi Linden of the United States, the women’s winner, drank Champagne from a sneaker. Kawauchi danced and played Jenga. And, needing a quiet place, he went into the bathroom and phoned the principal of Kuki High School. The formal news conference for the winners would not be held until the next morning. It would require a change of his flight home.

“Sorry, but I won the Boston Marathon,” Kawauchi told his boss. “Is it possible to have another day off?”

2. Dandelion Seeds fly using Impossible Method never before seen in Nature

Every time I see something wondrous happen in nature being uncovered by science, I feel a rush of blood. Of all the things that we do as a species, this may be one of the more pure. Researchers have discovered that dandelion seeds are kept aloft by means of vortices that form around them. The article is short and contains a video that explains the physics of flying dandelion seeds. Would you rather learn anything else this weekend?

3. What we Lose by reading 100,000 Words every Day and [Skim Reading is the new Normal. The effect on Society is Profound](https:

//www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf)
I am a millenial, so by definition I must be checking my phone often searching for small dopamine hits for my brain. As silly as it sounds, it’s correct. We’re consuming information in (giga) bite-sized chunks, and it’s leading to detrimental effects on our attention spans. Both of these pieces are reviews of work done by Maryanne Wolf. While the authors (and me) don’t agree completely with her beliefs and philosophies, I found it instructive to read about this issue being codified in a proper and recognizable way. Personally, I try to work minimally when I need to, avoiding any tasks in between that require me to shift gears in my brain. As I’m writing this issue, I’m only writing this issue. And so on. More than anything, I miss the years of my youth when I could spend an entire afternoon engrossed in a book. I want to reclaim it.

4. Australia vs India Adelaide 2014: When a Terrific Test followed Cricketing Tragedy

Philip Hughes passed away two weeks before the India Australia test match in Adelaide in 2014. Thus the match was sure to be emotionally supercharged, and many doubted the ability of the Australian team to carry themselves through an entire match. However, it was a memorable match that enabled three of Hughes’ closest New South Welsh mates to get some cricketing catharsis, and was no doubt crucial in the personal development of players on both sides. This piece is very well written, with passion and eloquence both shining through.

“The demons inside me probably got me out. I tried to take him over the top and I hadn’t done so all day.”

It didn’t matter. He’d absorbed the emotional intensity of that day, and created a place for Australian cricketers and all who follow the sport to direct their attention, their energy, their grief. Symbols do matter at times like this, and Warner had created one. He’d made that fraught day possible.

5. The Last Format

The last format mentioned here is the mp3. I, along with my personal music collection, grew a lot in the 2000s, and in no small part due to the proliferation of the mp3 file. I would go to friends’ houses to get their collections, and at some point your music collection’s quality was ascertained by how many gigabytes of music you “owned”. For an mp3 really was ownership. Albeit digital, the music was on your hard drive, or your phone. As we stream music now, what does ownership mean? The author of this piece argues that current streaming paradigms hook onto and take advantage of our erstwhile attachment to mp3s.

The mp3 seemed like the final stage in format history, allowing listeners to enjoy and share music in common, without having to buy a physical object. From a capitalist standpoint, all it did was pave the way for the latest innovation, streaming: the industry found a way to capitalize on the idea of unfettered access and the end of ownership. Maybe fans don’t own the music anymore, but the companies, as they remind us, always did.

[…] My mistake was to ever assume that mp3s might represent an endpoint whose technological affordances meant the links between musical creativity and financial exploitation would be severed once and for all. Profit, it turns out, is platform agnostic.

6. Semicolons: A Love Story

An homage to the semicolon. I love using this piece of punctuation. And I’ll leave these two excerpts to show you how well written this essay is.

It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. Their textbook function — to separate parts of a sentence “that need a more distinct break than a comma can signal, but that are too closely connected to be made into separate sentences” — has come to seem like a dryly beautiful little piece of psychological insight. No other piece of punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle.

[…] And so, far from being pretentious, semicolons can be positively democratic. To use a semicolon properly can be an act of faith. It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another ?

7. How WeChat faded into the silence in India

It’s amazing to learn about how widespread the use of WeChat, as a service, is in China. It’s not an app; it’s a superapp. This is a fascinating take into why WeChat never made it as large as other messaging applications in India. It mostly stemmed from the fact that the team behind it didn’t understand the Indian market and Indian sociology well. What works in China won’t work in India. One example: in WeChat, you can freely message people who are geographically proximate to you. In China, this was a useful feature. In India, however, this led to women being stalked and incessantly bothered by males in the area.

8. When the Billboards Fell

More journalism from India. This is a long piece about advertising billboards in the “garden city” of India, Bengaluru. Why do I say “garden city” in quotations? Because the image that Bengaluru has cultivated over decades as a green haven is quickly being eroded by buildings, and also by billboards. Thankfully now, billboards are going down in most parts of the city and giving way back to trees. I’m grateful, because I’ve enjoyed Bengaluru’s canopies in the past and would be sad if they go away. I’ll leave you with a positive excerpt:

These urban victories secured from the courts signify a surging public awareness on the values of trees in cities. They also serve as a synecdoche for a new environmentalism: one that melds the personal actions of individuals, the community efforts of groups, and the political activism of an empowered citizenry. The gardener planting a tree by slum-home or apartment-block or watering sidewalk trees demonstrates individual commitment. The communities, from apartment residents associations to civil society organisations, which lead street protests, petitions, and activist campaigns, signal the strength of the collective. And the coming together of individuals and groups to trigger political action—upholding the tenets of law, seeking justice from the courts, and demanding accountability and transparency from the government—heralds what an informed and empowered citizenry can achieve.

9. The World’s Most Beautiful Battery

A reservoir high in the Swiss Alps uses electricity when cheaply available to pump water to a height, and when electricity is in demand, lets the water fall to generate power. This is useful in the current situation in Europe, where the power outputs of wind and solar energies are highly variable and dependent on weather and local conditions. Isn’t it truly the most beautiful battery?

10. What Happens When Humans Fall In Love With An Invasive Species

It’s been a long time since I’ve shared anything from Five Thirty Eight , so this is a good way to break that rut. This piece talks about invasive fish in the lakes of North America. The general rule of thumb is that only one percent of all invasive species will cause catastrophic effects on the rest of the incumbent ecosystem. So when do we call an invasive species truly harmful? Should we just try to make use of what we beget by our activities?

Long issue this time. Phew. Thanks for staying until the end. - Kat.