Hello there. I’m quite pleased with the issue today, which is rather surprising, since I put it together in under 30 minutes. Anyway, I have bread to make and gardening videos to watch, so I’ll leave you to it. Cya.
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1. Hands-On The Jacob & Co. Twin Turbo Furious
Hilarious. This ia a review of a very high-end watch. I’m talking half a million dollars high-end. But this review is probably worth just as much.
The official price is CHF 525,000 (currently $525,210), but consider its talismanic powers. You look at this watch, and you feel the years fall away; this watch will grow a new crop of hair over your bald spot, re-lengthen your weary telomeres, give you coronary arteries with enough clearance for a 747, and recoat your kneepans with the cartilage of youth. This watch will make boys into men, and men into men other men would follow into battle. […] Like the One Ring Of Power, it is imbued with inscrutable and corrupting magic, and like the One Ring it can probably only be destroyed by hurling it into the flames in which it was forged (which in this case probably means tossing it into the cocktail lounge fireplace at La Reserve, Geneva, after three forty-dollar martinis, but you get the idea).
2. ‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents
This is an essay (an excerpt from a book, actually) where Aleksander Hemon recalls how his Bosnian parents lived after emigrating to Canda. It’s full of lovely vignettes, and centers around their relationship with food. If you are displaced to a foreign country, one thing you definitely can do to remind yourself of home is to cook and eat what you used to, which is precisely what Hemon’s parents did. Since I’m a bread buff, I’ll quote from the part about bread:
Bread, on the other hand, is practically sacred. In Bosnian, there is an idiom applicable to a saintly good person: “As good as bread.” […] its symbolic value has less to do with all the effort than with the fact that it is the poor people’s most basic staple – if you have bread, you have food, and if you have food, you live. Bread, in another words, equals life. My father’s favourite expression for work is “earning a crust of bread” while my mother (and everyone I know) harbours a deep respect for bread.
3. Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”
(paywalled, MIT Technology Review)
This is an old essay which I finally got around to reading today. Sometimes I read my saved articles from most recent to oldest, but today was a day when I did the reverse. Asimov wrote this essay to a group of people in a corporation, but I think we’re all fortunate to be able to read it online. He talks about the various ways creativity manifests, his ideas for how to make successful creative groups, and so on. My favorite part was where he accepts and embraces the fact that creativity may be silly, stupid, and one may have a million bad ideas, but none of those matter as long as you have good ideas too, and recognize them as such.
4. How I learned to teach like a scientist
Could I have conveyed more information per minute by talking at my students? Sure. But that’s not how I wanted to teach. My students already knew how to learn facts. I wanted them to think deeply about the research process and to develop their own inventiveness. I wanted them to tap into their imaginations.
5. If we bring our loneliness to the internet,what do we take away?
I really loved this piece by Richa Kaul Padte. She talks about being bedridden for an extended period of time, and how that was the worst time of her life on account of the loneliness is begot. She then talks about how she made friends on the internet, and how she was able to commune with people even when ill. She quotes from George Monbiot and Olivia Laing (both of whom I admire), and it’s just so well-written. I had to take a deep breath when I finished reading it.
The things I do to leave my body are, in many ways, life-saving: they nourish me, make me laugh, sometimes even teach me more about my body than I knew before. But when I turn away from the screen, switch off the light and close my eyes, I am still in my body. And the further away from my sore muscles I fly in cyberspace, the worse the shock of falling back into myself.
6. Not Relevant for Fantasy Purposes
Over the past few years, I’ve had an up-and-down relationship with numbers and statistics. There was a time when I would fill in a number of spreadsheets every day: when I woke up, when I slept, did I do yoga, did I meditate, etc. I felt like I could be reduced to those numbers. That’s what this piece talks about too, in the context of modern sport. We want to distill athletes to numbers; that’s what makes them easy to analyze, right? But it’s so subjective. In baseball, this piece says, the subjectivity is taken care of (algorithmically) by using a measure called WAR (wins above replacement). It measures (or is supposed to measure) how many more wins a player has contributed to as compared to a “standard” player in the same position. I don’t get it. Some things just can’t be quantified.
7. How I Got My Attention Back
(paywall, Wired)
I have a feeling I might have shared this in the past, and I’m too lazy right now to go check, but whatever. It’s an essay from Craig Mod where he talks about going totally offline for a month when at a writing retreat. Being on the internet makes us forever attentive, but at a far lower level than we are capable of. Slowly, we become deadened to creative thoughts. Craig finally talks about how he’s instituted some rules for himself, which includes no internet till lunch. That’s a rule I’m thinking of embracing, too.
8. How Ian McHarg Taught Generations to ‘Design With Nature’
This is a piece from CityLab about designer Ian McHarg. He wrote a book in 1969 called Design with Nature , which apparently is a classic, but I only heard of it today. Quoting from a paragraph in the introduction of the book:
Our eyes do not divide us from the world, but they unite us to it…Let us abandon the simplicity of separation and give unity its due. Let us abandon the self-mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony of man-nature … Man is that uniquely conscious creature who can perceive and express. He must become the steward of the biosphere. To do this, he must design with nature.
9. I’m not Extreme, Consumerism Is
This is a very short piece that’s not in the form of what I usually share. However, it lets me talk about some things I’ve been mulling over, so I’m bending the rules (oh wait, there are no rules). I spent a few months trying to live “zero-waste”, and it was difficult. I had to change a number of things I did, but it was also very educational. I don’t adhere to it strictly now, because I believe that it’s a systemic issue that can’t be fixed by forcing individuals to make painstaking adjustments. This piece says: is it so extreme that someone carries their own bags, bottles, containers and mugs to the places they do commerce? Didn’t everyone do that a hundred years ago?
10. The latest consideration for would-be parents: Climate change
Sigh.
Bye. -Kat.