Hello! I am doing good this week but also quite tired today–so there’s no text, just the list of articles. See you next time.
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1. A 600-Mile Quest to Savor the Fading Beauty of Japan’s Traditional Cafes
Craig Mod’s writing is simple, evocative and seems to serve the purpose of cultural translation.
It was obvious that many of the kissa I ate at on the full arc of my walk would soon be closed. Of the remaining kissa, most felt like little retirement homes or community centers, points of congregation for the very few elderly citizens of the depopulated countryside villages and towns. It wasn’t depressing, just a fact of shifting demographics and globalization, and maybe a bit emblematic of a kind of generic condition of contemporary humans; how many small joys of life felt overly optimized, while kissa — their business model, their scale, their menus — were decidedly under-optimized. They were simply destined to be left behind with the previous generation.
2. A matter of interpretation
Another nice piece about making science more inclusive from Symmetry Magazine. Here, they talk about making physics/science more accessible to deaf scientists. Is it even possible? As a graduate student in physics right now, so much of my communication happens orally, and through language that is quite difficult to formalize. This piece specifically talks about what deaf physicist Giordon Stark is doing to make physics more accessible.
And although he can read lips one-on-one and in small group settings, that’s not always how communication works. At conferences, big meetings and workshops, Stark requests interpreters or captioners. But because a scientific talk can be difficult even for a scientist to understand, and because sign-language interpreters generally do not have backgrounds in physics, some portion of the information is always lost in translation.
3. Crip Consciousness
Last year, I read the book Dumb: Living Without a Voice by Georgia Webber, which was stark and lovely (it’s a graphic novel about her temporarily losing her voice and her learning how to cope with it). This is a comic in Believer Magazine about her trip to “Crip Con”, a conference about disability. It’s touching.
4. How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class
(paywalled: The Atlantic)
So I’m not really sure I’m 100% on board with the premise of this piece, but I’m at least 50% on board. The idea is: companies like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group have transformed the way the managerial class is deployed in modern companies. It is nigh on impossible to rise up the ranks from worker to CEO in a number of firms that you could work at now, and companies like McKinsey have played a major role in that. It’s an interesting read regardless of whether you agree with it or not. And of course, it talks about Pete Buttegieg.
5. Mozilla Wants Young People to Consider ‘Ethical Issues’ Before Taking Jobs in Tech
Ooh la la. Mozilla has put out a new guide called ‘With Great Tech Comes Great Responsibility’. I’m really glad that ethical concerns are becoming something that more and more people think about.
6. These 3 supertrees can protect us from climate collapse
Yay trees. By this logic, supertrees should get a superyay. This Vox piece talks about three trees in three biodiverse parts of the world: the Brazil nut tree, the stilt Mangrove, and the African teak. They are keystones of their respective ecosystems, and therefore very important and impactful. The pictures in this piece are especially lovely.
7. Is Eating Meat A Net Harm?
Slate Star Codex is one of my favorite blogs on the internet, and this piece is part of a competition hosted by it called the “Adversarial Collaboration Contest”, which I believe involves two people on opposing sides of an issue trying to scientifically present as much data/arguments as possible and make some sort of conclusion. Here’s the abstract of this piece:
The central question is whether factory farmed animal lives are worth living; the realistic alternative to meat eating is not a better life but for those animals to not exist in the first place.
We begin by investigating which animals are conscious. Then, we compare the happiness literature to the conditions under which animals are factory farmed to figure out if from their perspective non-existence is preferable. And finally, we survey the more easily measurable impacts of meat eating on environment, finance, and health.
8. My Long, Strange Journey Writing About the Minecraft Universe
Alison Lowenstein writes in Narratively about her experience writing tens of books set in the Minecraft universe over a few years. She started off completely clueless, asking her son for input and feedback on her writing. I found her whole journey quite fun and interesting.
At this point, I was an old hand at the Minecraft Universe and no longer saw these books as that much of a challenge. I did, however, see them as an opportunity to connect with my son. Now I had a deeper understanding when he told me what had happened in that day’s game, and I knew what questions to ask him. […] A highlight of the gig was reading chapters aloud to my son in the evenings after dinner, before he signed on to his nightly escapades in the Minecraft world. He would finish his homework and then spend half an hour listening to my book and offering feedback. I think he liked that I took his opinion seriously, and I loved that he wanted to share it.
9. The human hand in fish evolution
By selecting large fish for food and rejecting smaller individuals, we’re piling on evolutionary pressure on these fish species to stay small and avoid capture. In itself, this isn’t bad , but it is changing the phenotypical expressions of fish species quite rapidly. The fish are better for it, but the question that’s more selfish and relevant to us is: are we better for it? Are we endangering our own food supply by encouraging proliferation of fish that are harder to catch?