Hello hello. I hope you’ve had a good week. If not, it’s okay; next week is just around the corner. And if, like me, you consider Sunday the first day of the week, then it might already be next week now, depending on where you live. I have a slightly abbreviated edition this time, because I am scrambling for time and also I want to go to bed now. As always, write back if you have anything to say; I appreciate it and will write back to you.
1. The Most Controversial Tree in the World
Should we consider genetically modified trees? This piece starts off with the story of the American chestnut. This was a tree much beloved and important to the people of North America, but now due to an invasive fungus, it is all but extinct. How okay would you be if the genes of a American chestnut were to be reinforced with some genes that could combat this fungus? Is it culturally important to bring back an American chestnut, or is it better to not play God with the genes? Thought-provoking.
2. Save Our Food. Free the Seed.
Loved this from the New York Times. Big agriculture is changing the landscape of food in ways that we cannot see, for the most part. Many farmers around the world are beholden to a select few companies for seeds, fertilizer and pesticides. Moreover, seeds themselves have come under the purview of intellectual property. It’s sad, and also very important that seeds remain “open source”. Most sad to me, though, is the fact that hardly any of us actually know about this.
3. queen of darts
I did not know about The Victory Journal which brought out this piece about a darts tournament in Belgium, but now I do and I am glad for it. It’s a superbly fun and detailed account of the various intense rivalries and idiosyncracies present in the world of competitive darts.
Visually-speaking, all that is happening is that two people are taking turns throwing a dart three times. The motion is nearly identical. The thwack is identical, too. But excellence is being acknowledged in this room and that is impossible not to get carried away by. The fans stand on tables and bellow along to the schlager. The creepy metallic ba ba ba ba basof DVBBS and Borgeous’s “Tsunami” clang endlessly, over and over again, driving me happily insane.
4. Why Does Infrastructure Cost So Much?
Or more broadly, why does our economy revolve around the construction of infrastructure? Is that the only model of growth we know?
We have to spend on infrastructure because we don’t have a mechanism to experience broad economic growth without it, and we must have broad economic growth or everything in our Ponzi-bubble economy will collapse. It’s really that simple.
5. Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career
Not that the work I do is all that important or memorable, but I prefer to think of it as “writing” rather than as “content.” And for me, that’s an important distinction. Content and writing are not the same thing, at least the way that we’ve come to define them in contemporary society. Content is inherently transactional; its goal is to drive towards some kind of conversion, some kind of exchange of value. This is why platforms just think of it all as “content”; for the most part, they’re indifferent to whether it’s good or bad writing, or even if it’s writing at all. It doesn’t matter whether it has any kind of inherent worth, whether it’s video or animated GIFs or whatever— so long as it’s driving clicks, time spent, purchases, etc.
6. The Surprising, Overlooked Artistry of Fruit Stickers
7. Inside the “largest launch of a produce item in American history”
There’s a new apple coming to the USA. And it has a crazy backstory.
8. How Loneliness Begets Loneliness
Slightly old piece from 2017, but sadly this is more relevant today than it was then. This excerpt was my biggest takeaway from the piece, about how social media is excellent if used as a means towards connection, rather than the only source of it:
If you use those [digital] connections as a way station—kids tend to do this; they use Facebook so that they can then meet up somewhere—it’s associated with lower levels of loneliness. If it’s used as a destination —and ironically, lonely people tend to do this, they tend to withdraw socially because it’s punishing, and interacting digitally perhaps as a non-authentic self, makes them feel more like they’re accepted. But it doesn’t actually make them feel less lonely.
9. Betting the Farm on the Drought
Scratch any of them and you’ll as likely as not find a climate skeptic. These are, after all, conservative people, by and large, and the issue of climate has become a cultural touchstone, […] But probe a little deeper and what you find is that fundamental sense of pragmatism mixed with self-reliance that has always been a part of the character of rural Americans. A lot of them, like Ethan, are facing a problem that shows no sign of improving on its own. And so they believe it’s up to them to take steps to plan for the future. There are fancy words the academics use to describe those steps: “Mitigation.” “Adaptation.” A lot of rural Americans just call it farming.
10. The Video Game Industry Can’t Go On Like This
This piece is a preview of sorts for a games/video games special that should be coming out in the next couple of weeks. Send me suggestions for pieces if you have any!
It’s unlikely that video games will ever truly go extinct. We’ll probably always have something called “video games,” but what those games will look like is still very much in flux. There’s no guarantee that the way games are currently made will remain viable for another 10 years—games aren’t even made today the same way they were 10 years ago. They will look different. They will change because they can, and because they must. Hopefully, all the ways games change will be on our terms—otherwise disaster will change them for us.
That’s all. See ya next week. -Kat.