Well, hello there! I am positively jumping with a weird and rare sort of optimism today, and it’s amazing. Part of it is that it’s a Saturday evening, and I’ve done my tasks for the day, and after writing this introduction, I will settle down with some ice cream. It’s summer solstice tomorrow. I’ve been spending more and more time tending to my plants and garden that it seems like an important day. My plants will complain about dwindling daytime hours henceforth, however I shan’t. I’ll leave you to it. See ya next week!
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1. The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories - Quanta Magazine
This is a piece about Donald Knuth, who at this point is a living legend in the field of computer science. It’s actually an interview, and is very well done. Knuth says that he’s more of a “journalist” than a researcher. My favorite part was where the interviewer, Susan D’Agostino, asks him if he’s still discovering things. Here’s Knuth’s answer.
I write an average of five new programs every week. Poets have to write poems. I have to write computer programs.
The ultimate test of whether I understand something is if I can explain it to a computer. I can say something to you and you’ll nod your head, but I’m not sure that I explained it well. But the computer doesn’t nod its head. It repeats back exactly what I tell it. In most of life, you can bluff, but not with computers.
2. A Way Back - The Bitter Southerner
Another interview with another grand old man of modern science, this time it’s E.O. Wilson, considered by some to be the most influential evolutionary biologist since Darwin. I’ve read some of his books, and they are marvelous. The interviewer in this case, Caleb Johnson, is also from Wilson’s home state of Alabama. They bond over being Southern, and Wilson is as lucid and clear as ever. It’s a treat to read. What was probably most interesting to me was that although Wilson is proud of coming from Alabama, it’s one of the most regressive states in the US, with a significant fraction of residents not believing in evolution… and remember, Wilson is an evolutionary biologist.
3. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? - New York Times (paywalled)
Gabrielle Hamilton writes about the restaurant, Prune, she founded in New York City in 1999. Due to the ever-tightening restaurant business (which she explains) and compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, she’s had to shut it down. She writes about the decision to shut down, the tasks involved, and then speculates on what this means for the future of both Prune as well as restaurants in general.
4. The Wonderful, Transcendent Life of an Odd-Nosed Monkey - Hakai Magazine
This is both a beautiful and saddening story about the proboscis monkey, a weird-looking and deeply interesting primate that lives in Borneo. Proboscis monkeys have captured the interest of researchers for years (no, decades), and it’s not only because of their elongated noses that give them their name. Due to encroachment on their forest habitat due to palm oil plantations, they are endangered. Yet, they seem to thrive in what area is left to them.
Composure aside, the proboscis monkey is most famous for its looks. The female has a sweet face with an upturned nose; bright, wide-open eyes; a pudgy belly. The male is more … striking. A pronounced brow cloaks his eyes and his nose can reach an impressive 17.5 centimeters long—a smidge longer than an iPhone X—a protuberance straight out of a Roald Dahl book. Bulbous. Fleshy. Floppy. His stomach is so Dahlishly pronounced, it’s perhaps the best example ever of the word potbelly. The paunch, the hooded eyes, and the fur piled on his shoulders like loose skin add to the furry–old man look. In a treetop perch, gazing over the river, resting on his haunches, a big male wears an impassive expression but is thoroughly attentive to his surroundings, though he forgets his manners and scratches his tummy and nether regions now and again.
5. A Theory of Zoom Fatigue - The Convivial Society (Substack newsletter)
If you’re reading this newsletter, chances are that you have been attending a number of virtual meetings via videoconference, both for professional and personal use. This is a short essay (actually a newsletter issue) by L. M. Sacasas positing a few reasons for why Zoom (and other video) meetings are so … tiring.
Likewise, in face-to-face conversation we are constantly seeking out the elements of meaning afforded by the body of our interlocutors, we are seeking an optimal grip on the communicative process. While our conscious attention is focused on words and their meaning, our fuller perceptive capabilities are engaged in reading the whole environment. In conversation, then, each person becomes a part of a field of communication that includes, but is not limited to verbal expression.
The problem with video-conferencing is that the body is but isn’t there. This means that our minds are at least partly frustrated as they deploy their non-conscious repertoire of perceptive skills. The situation is more like a face-to-face encounter than most any other medium, but, for that very reason, it frustrates us because it is, nonetheless, significantly different.
6. After My Dad Died, I Started Sending Him Emails. Months Later, Someone Wrote Back - Glamour
Our loved ones take so much history with them when they go. The death itself is never the only loss we’re mourning. The inside jokes we had with them become fragments of a dead language. The objects we shared with them become tchotchkes taking up space on our shelves. We’re loath to use the things we inherit from them, lest those things become ours and not theirs. My father died, and our relationship died with him, no matter how many emails I wrote into the willing void.
At the same time, the email from that coworker let me feel closer to my father than I have in a year and a half. It was so full of grace and life that I could imagine it drawing from my father’s energy, thrumming its remaining vibrations across the earth. Why not? I was in agony; I contacted my father; a form of my father’s memory contacted me back. More implausible things have happened.
7. The skeuomorphism of bleeding vegan burgers - UX Design
This piece is really interesting because it tackles a particular question from a design perspective. The question is: “If we vegans dislike what happens to animals so much, why do we still pursue such visceral reminders of animal suffering in our food even when it is vegan?” The visceral reminder is the “bleeding” of artificial meat from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. And then the piece goes off into an in-depth study of skeuomorphism in various aspects of design.A skeuomorph is a feature that imitates the design of some other object, or artifact.
8. Peter Jackson’s LOTR Was an Improbable Miracle, and We’re Lucky to Have It - Paste Magazine
I did not know a lot of what is written in this article! Peter Jackson was a filmmaker of not too much credibility (and far too much ambition for others’ liking) when he successfully attempted to make movie versions of The Lord of the Rings. It’s an amazing thing that happened. The timing is important too–the movies were made before the commodification of science fiction series’, and before the modern stereotypical superhero movie was made.
As we begin to approach the 20-year anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring_’s 2001 release, we should recognize just how much hindsight bias is present in how we tend to view Jackson’s trilogy today … not to mention how profoundly different these films would likely have turned out if they began production just a few years later. In fact, as you tally up the factors that were working against Jackson and_ LOTR at the time, it becomes clear that the eventual faithfulness and smashing success, both critical and commercial, of this trilogy were nothing short of miraculous. Peter Jackson pulled off something nearly impossible, something that would probably never happen today for a bevy of reasons. We should acknowledge just how lucky we are that he made these films exactly when he did.
9. Stewed Awakening - Eater
This piece, by Navneet Alang, dives deep into western cooking and the way it “discovers” or “rediscovers” exotic ingredients. In my time in the US, it has been astonishing to see just how much of an average pantry is sourced from “exotic” parts of the world. OK, so there’s a lot of exotic ingredients. Alang asks, why is that white people are the ones that make these ingredients popular and mainstream? Shouldn’t it be the people of color who know these ingredients more intimately?
Because the aesthetics of food media are indeed white. That white aesthetic is not, strictly speaking, the abundant natural light, ceramic plates, strategically scattered handfuls of fresh herbs, pastel dining rooms, artisan knives, or even the butcher diagram tattoos that the food media so loves to fetishize. It is more accurate to say that the way we define what is contemporary and fashionable in food is tied to whiteness as a cultural norm — and to its ability to incorporate other cultures without actually becoming them.
Robin Sloan’s comment/blog post Blogging the global pantry on this essay is nice too.
10. Why You Should Read Ursula Le Guin Right Now - Popula
To see life through different eyes is, for me, the only way to ward off the feeling of powerlessness. To know that our society is barbaric and unnecessary, and that it will not last forever, does not necessarily inspire the imagination of a better one. The power to transport you into a new world, one with social and political norms that conflict entirely with ours, cannot be understated. This is Le Guin’s greatest work: the creation of an “ambiguous utopia,” an imperfect and improvable reality, but one that is beautiful and superior to our own.
If you haven’t read anything by Le Guin, consider her!