Hello buddies. How are you? I’m having a busy and tiring last few days at home (which is great) so here I am writing the Kable and then running away to do one of the million things that I have planned. So I’ll just leave you with this week’s list.
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1. The photosynthesis fix
The premise of this piece from Knowable Magazine is that given the current state of the global diet, we need more food in the decades to come, and one of the ways to do this is to artificially edit some of the genes involved in the greatest productive process on earth: photosynthesis. There’s a “glitch” of sorts in photosynthesis, which is that plants produce a compound called glycolate and then proceed to then clean it up by breaking it down. This circuitous process is responsible for slowing down photosynthesis from what we think is a more optimal process. It’s interesting. What’s most important is that we want to “elevate” photosynthesis to what we think is something better than its present form.
2. The proudest day of Grace’s life was graduating as a doctor. Then she began treating patients
This is a rather lovely illustration by Isabel Hanon and Safdar Ahmed in the Guardian.
3. How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth?
An excerpt from Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food by Lenore Newman. This is something that I feel quite passionately about, and so thought worth sharing.
Imagine a treasure hunt. The earth is covered in interesting plants and animals, and some are unbelievably useful. New foods and new medicines wait somewhere over the horizon, still to be discovered. Other wild plants we know well. They are the ancestors of our current crops, and we turn to these wild relations when we need to breed a new cultivar to resist a disease or pest. I called this wealth of biodiversity a library in the previous chapter, and for a good reason; it has much to teach us even now.
4. Why Everything Is Getting Louder
(paywalled: The Atlantic)
This was a crazy read. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced this problem first-hand to an extent that it disturbs my normal functioning, but the story focuses on a server farm in the Chandler area of Arizona. Beginning in 2015, servers started producing an audible humming that could be heard halfway across the town. What can/should we do about this constant noise pollution?
Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me.
5. Art as the Starting Point
I love this blog post so much. I’m just going to excerpt a whole lot from it.
For a long time art was the most splintered-off part of me. I had been an artist for a long time, but I couldn’t really understand why, and I felt kind of empty about it – about the idea of making art. […] Then, I connected deeply with someone who identified as an artist – who loved and valued art for its own sake as the core of their being. It triggered a wake up call to the fact that art -did- mean something important to me that I was ignoring and that part of me was cold and dying and maybe didn’t have to be any more.
At the same time I was struggling to find meaning in the work I was doing. Practical, slightly bullshit white collar work – the kind that only exists because some men somewhere have way more money than anyone else and want to pay you to work on their rocketship, like a giant distributed mechanical horse race between silver-spooned peers.
6. “Enough” by John C. Bogle
Enough. I was stunned by its simple eloquence, to say nothing of its relevance to some of the vital issues arising in American society today. Many of them revolve around money—yes, money—increasingly, in our “bottom line” society, the Great God of prestige, the Great Measure of the Man (and Woman). So this morning I have the temerity to ask you soon-to-be-minted MBA graduates, most of whom will enter the world of commerce, to consider with me the role of “enough” in business and entrepreneurship in our society, “enough” in the dominant role of the financial system in our economy, and “enough” in the values you will bring to the fields you choose for your careers.
7. What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina
I hate Monsanto. That is all.
In a videotaped interview conducted as part of the award program, Gatica explained why she was so motivated: “For me, these soybeans mean only destruction and death. When they spray the soy, they also spray us. At first I didn’t associate my daughter’s illness with pesticide spray. I felt horrible. It was very hard on me.” Eventually, she said, she realized her family was not alone. “What happened in Ituzaingó is a hidden genocide because they poison you slowly and silently.”
8. The World The Economist Made
Really interesting piece about the role that The Economist played in shaping world opinion in the past 170 years. It’s constantly cheerled and supported the ideas of liberal capitalism.
For Zevin, this is the core of the problem. The bankers and businesspeople who read it are treated to capsule summaries of world affairs and charts, presented with an air of knowing superiority. A senior editor once told a nervous new recruit that to write like The Economist, you just “pretend you are God.” But markets are human institutions, not divine ones. As one writer for the paper put it, The Economist was the place where you could “hear the bourgeoisie talking to itself, and it could talk quite frankly.” What Zevin finds is a frequently unreflective conversation. His Economist is an institution that has too often been unable to confront, or resolve, liberalism’s troubled relationships with democracy, empire, and the expanding power of finance itself.
9. How to survive an election with your sanity intact
Tim Harford gives five tips to survive an election season: think about your goals, find out about the issues, don’t obsess about all the lies, vote tactically, and if you’re having a conversation about politics, try to learn something. Quite good advice.
10. The Lesson to Unlearn
Someone else on the internet this past month called Paul Graham one of the best essayists of our time – and I’m slowly inclining towards that point of view as well. In this essay, he talks about the problematic nature of grades in current-day education. Using computer science parlance, he says that grades have been “overloaded” – that is, instead of just capturing information about one’s knowledge, they are also used to determine your professional capacity, your general intelligence, and so on.
But you can’t blame teachers if their tests are hackable. Their job is to teach, not to create unhackable tests. The real problem is grades, or more precisely, that grades have been overloaded. If grades were merely a way for teachers to tell students what they were doing right and wrong, like a coach giving advice to an athlete, students wouldn’t be tempted to hack tests. But unfortunately after a certain age grades become more than advice. After a certain age, whenever you’re being taught, you’re usually also being judged.