Helloooooo. What a great reading week it’s been. Sometimes I wonder if I should include more than ten links, but then I have a busy week up ahead and I should save what I have for later, maybe. Apart from great longform on the internet, I’ve been reading String Theory by David Foster Wallace, which forms, I must say, the pinnacle of tennis writing. I’m also reading The Circuit by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, a book about the 2017 ATP tennis season. And I’m looking forward to the Djokovic-Nadal match which is going to start soon! So yes, tennis. You get the point. What are you reading?

What else do I have to share? I’m glad it’s getting warmer, because it turns out that all the idealistic plans you can make for early mornings go out the window (or rather, stay in) because you just cannot go outside to the gym or for a run at 2 degrees celsius. I’m also thinking about my reading diet for the upcoming months. I’d wrote earlier that I wanted to tackle large and challenging books this year, so I’m starting Infinite Jest soon. Maybe lying in bed hefting it up will form part of my exercise routine. It’s a large book. This morning, I spent a few hours in some sort of flow, where I read over thirty articles in my list. Few other things make me as satisfied as that. I’m grateful. Anywayyyyyy. Here’s the list!

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.

0. 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. Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman

A conversation I have repeatedly with a number of my friends revolves around thequestion, “can you separate the art and artist? science and scientist?” and so on. Can you? This is a piece that argues a very reasonable argument: important practitioners in their fields skew the entire field to suit their personal desires. A misogynistic Feynman cannot be entirely separated from his scientific brilliance, because the misogyny is towards mostly women physicists. Now, as a physics student, I still want to be able to be inspired by Feynman’s style of physics and thinking, but I can’t put his predatory aspect outside of my purview if considering a holistic view.

In addition to enjoying the license to shape the stories about themselves, men like Feynman and Marcy have also been able to control the broader trajectory of science. […] These men determine who gets access and who doesn’t. It’s impossible to know how many careers were re-routed or ended entirely by such abusive behaviors, and we should recall this basic disparity of power whenever we might feel tempted to bemoan the expulsion of Marcy and his ilk from the sciences.

2. The Rahul Dravid Concession

An essay by Manu Joseph about Indian cricketer Rahul Dravid. This piece is not about the cricketing skill of Dravid as much as it is about the place he occupies among fans in India, and what sorts of reactions he evokes. I was a bit stung by it, but I think that was the point. Joseph says, basically: Dravid is, compared to other Indian cricketers, far more anglicized, western, cultured and knowledgable. These aspects of him make him the most appealing cricketer for the “Nehruvian” Indians. Read it, and see if you agree. I don’t know.

3. Why aren’t kids being taught to read?

I loved this. I knew before reading it that reading is not a natural human skill, unlike language and speech. If left surrounded by talking people, an infant will slowly learn to talk. However, if left surrounded by books, it is by no means necessary that the same infant will somehow “learn” to read. So why don’t schools teach it well? There are two camps in this science of teaching young children how to read: some who are “phonics”, who say that one needs to learn how to convert each phoneme in a word to a sound, and the others who believe that children should be “taught to read whole words”. Since reading, for competent adults, is a circumvention of speaking when converting symbols to language, it seems to me like the phonics approach may be the better one. And so the science says.

4. Making Business More Colorful

Wendy MacNaughton is one of my favorite illustrators, and much of this opinion comes from her delightful illustrations in Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. Recently she’s taken on a new role at the New York Times illustrating a weekly column called Meanwhile. It’s delightful, and seems to be a welcome colorful addition to the business section of the paper. In this interview, she talks about why she took up this column, and how she usually works, etc. Fun brain to pick. One of her recent pieces that I enjoyed: Radon Causes Cancer. These Tourists Drink It Up.

I’m interested in people, places and things we usually overlook. I use life drawing and interviews as my way to explore the stories behind these things: how they connect to our daily lives, our culture, our priorities, our interests — the little things that show us who we are now. You know, just our general shared humanity. No big.

5. John McPhee: Seven Ways of Looking at a Writer

John McPhee is one of my inspirations. He must be my favorite non-fiction writer, ever. He has written over thirty books, and for each one he delves into a new topic, completely immerses himself into it, and slowly learns to become an expert. How cool is that?

Of course, he is not an expert on every topic he writes about, but as we read each of his pieces we feel we are watching him in the process of becoming one. His writing allows us to witness the act of learning. As Sam Anderson explains in last year’s profile of McPhee in The New York Times Magazine_, “Learning, for him, is a way of loving the world, savoring it, before it’s gone.”_
This reminded me of one of my favorite parts of one of my favorite books, Dune. About the protagonist, Muad’Dib, the author writes “we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn”.

6. V-2 and Saturn V: A Tale of Two Rockets

Quite a shocking and horrific read.. The V-2 rocket was developed by the Nazis during World War 2, by a team led by Wernher von Braun. The conditions in which it was developed were, as you would expect, horrendous and with little regard for non-Nazi life. After the war, the same celebrated Nazi hero crossed the Atlantic, and led the team that built the Saturn rocket, which launched the manned mission to the moon…
An interesting factoid: the V-2 rocket was called “V” as short for Vergeltungswaffe , which means vengeance weapon. The original V for Vendetta.

7. USAID, Monsanto and the real reason behind Delhi’s horrific smoke season

Complicated. I’ve always maintained and tried to tell people that the reason for heavy smog in the Indian city of Delhi is not solely the pollution within Delhi. Delhi, like Beijing, sits in a rather unfortunate spot where winds carry smoke and particulate matter to it from faraway places. The burning of crops in moderately-far-away Punjab usually causes the heavy smog. And what crop are they burning? Rice. Why the sudden smog? Because they’ve been planting it, and hence burning it, about a month later due to legislation. This article argues that it’s all a ploy by Monsanto to make the state switch primarily to maize, for which (of course) it will supply GMO seeds.

8. How a Stroke Turned a 63-Year-Old Into a Rap Legend

I’ve read parts of Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia , and this could be a great retrospective addition to his book. Sherman Hershfield was a neurosurgeon, and had this medical issue where he would get small strokes at unexpected times (gee, when do you expect a stroke?). One massive stroke left him a rhyming savant. He would talk in rhymes, and this is his unlikely story of making a mark in, and beginning to belong to, a black-dominated hip-hop and rap culture. As good an example of involuntary brain plasticity as you could ask for.

t was as if the side of Hershfield’s brain that held the rhymes had healed the broken side that had short-circuited. Brain scans on rappers carried out by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders discovered that during freestyle rapping, brain activity increased in the brain areas that engage motivation, language, mood, and action. Hershfield said rapping kept his seizures under control, and even after he collapsed that night in Leimert Park, he used hip-hop to regain his speech and return to the stage.

9. The Time Capsule That’s as Big as Human History

Martin Kunze is an amazing man. For a few years now, he’s building a time capsule in an old salt mine in Austria with text etched into ceramic tablets. In a thousand or more years from now, who knows if our digital file storage will be readable or uncorrupted? Our history with excavation leads us to believe that ceramics and clay tablets may be one of our best bets for long-term storage. And that’s precisely what Kunze is creating. It’s called the MOM project (for Memory of Mankind), and the most amazing part about it is that anyone can submit to it, and it can be anything. Want to write a tribute to your pet cat? Do it. It’ll be in the archive. Reminds me of a piece I shared a few months ago: The Strangely Human Messages We Send To Aliens.

10. Write, Critique, Revise, Repeat: On Le Guin and Asking the Hard Questions of Ourselves

Ursula K. Le Guin died a year and a week ago, and I am still sad that I’ll never meet her. In this piece Mary Anne Mohanraj talks about Le Guin’s willingness to repeatedly accept her mistakes and revise her own work. It is so inspiring. She is so inspiring, still. I wrote something about her a few days after she passed, as a means of remembering her better. And while you’re at it, check out this Brain Pickings piece about my favorite essay of hers ever, which Maria Popova calls the best thing written about gender, ever. I may be inclined to agree.

You made it to the end. Thank you for staying with me. It was a long issue. Write back if anything. Feedback? Suggestions? I’m all ears and will respond. See you later.