Hello, reader. I hope you’ve had a pleasant week, and if you haven’t, a new one is about to begin. I don’t have much to say in this issue, but I am rather pleased with this week’s list. I don’t know if this happens to you too, but I constantly go into and out of a tempo, or flow, of reading. Sometimes when the reading goes well, it goes really well; I read quickly and I tend to find good things to read. And sometimes when I get “stuck”, it can get frustrating. If the feeling of being stuck lasts for too long, then it even induces some panic. The only constant is that you’ll keep shifting from one zone to the other, I think.
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1. ‘Time to embrace history of country’: Bruce Pascoe and the first dancing grass harvest in 200 years - The Guardian
This is a nice photoessay about Bruce Pascoe, an Aboriginal Australian, and his farm in the state of Victoria that aims to produce grains and flour from native grasses. This is the first year that they are harvesting “mandadyan nalluk”, or dancing grass. It’s a nuanced and interesting story.
However, what I’d like to highlight is that just before reading this piece, I read this one: Regenerating the World, One Farm at a Time from Matters Journal, which also talks about grasses and regenerative agriculture in Australia. It’s a nice essay, but with a glaring omission. Much of the regenerative and holistic agricultural practices that are being “rediscovered” now are actually not new at all: indigenous folks around the world used these as they stewarded their lands. And this piece from Matters Journal barely mentions that.
2. What the ‘Meat Paradox’ Reveals About Moral Decision Making - BBC
This article is really much more than what its title hints at, which is comforting in an age of misleading headlines designed to provoke outrage and short-term interest. It’s an adapted excerpt from a book by Dr. Julia Shaw where she talks about the cognitive dissonance required by society as a whole to both (a) accept eating factory-farmed meat and (b) condemn animal cruelty. What’s really interesting is the way she points out the ways in which we reconcile the two: many societies tie meat eating to important social customs, or say that humans are apex predators “designed” or “meant” to eat meat, and more.
3. Reinventing Grief in an Era of Enforced Isolation - The New Yorker
Wow, this was a really powerful piece. The author, Lauren Collins, is stuck in Paris as her dad struggled with and died of leukemia. She talks about how she and her family process their grief, and you can see her pain and anger shimmer in the text. Not only at the death of her dad, but at the global circumstances that currently prevent her from traveling to her family. I think it was quite courageous of Collins to write this.
4. Therapy under lockdown: ‘I’m just as terrified as my patients are’ - The Guardian
Excellent essay, again from the Guardian. I’ve had a few sessions with my therapist during my shelter-in-place and work-from-home months, but each time I have wondered, “what’s the point anymore?”.
It’s a profession that has been good to me, and I hope good for my patients. But what if the premise is undone by circumstance? What if it turns out that we are hapless victims of a force arrayed against us, that will mercilessly hijack the machinery of our lives, that is silent and invisible and leaves us with nothing to do but cower in our homes and wash our hands and hope that it will pass us by? Is there a role for therapy in a pandemic?
5. The man feeding a remote Alaska town with a Costco card and a ship - The Hustle
Gustavus is a remote town in Alaska of ~450 people. All groceries and items need to be shipped in either by ship or plane. The town grocer, Toshua Parker, has been buying in bulk from a Costco on the mainland and shipping them to Gustavus… on his own ship. The locals dub his store “Toshco”. This is a nice and feel-good story, and it really is rather unbelievable.
6. Angry Dan gives us a sneak peek at his latest limerick paintings full of humour and life wisdom - Creative Boom
This is not in the line of what I usually share on the newsletter, but there are no rules, right. And even if there are, limericks are okay anywhere.
7. The Lost Art of Crying - Nibras Ib’s website
This is such a poignant and touching essay. It talks about how crying has become something that adults aren’t “allowed” to do. Especially in public. However, crying can be an incredible way to release and process your emotions. We cry for so many things. When we’re afraid. Hurt. Overwhelmed. And in each of these cases, it serves a purpose.
I’d accidentally bumped into a core-conflict. My biggest goal is free self-expression. I want to be able to share my internal world easily and honestly, without blocks. It’s a goal I set at 14, when I first noticed the gap between my thoughts and words. When I came to speak, my throat would close up, swallowing the words back to their birthplace below my neck. The frustration I experienced started my journey in personal-development and years later the inability to cry was the last of the remaining gaps in the bridge I’d built. To reach unhindered self-expression, I’d have to become comfortable with crying.
8. We are complicit in our employer’s deeds - Drew DeVault’s blog
This is a useful and well-written article that was inspired by (or is a follow-up to) Tim Bray’s decision to leave Amazon where he was VP at Amazon Web Services. If you are in a position to, DeVault argues that you are obligated to leave a company if it does not align with your sense of right or wrong. His argument:
This is why I hold my peers accountable for working at companies which are making a negative impact on the world around them. As a general rule, it costs a business your salary × 1.5 to employ you, given the overhead of benefits, HR, training, and so on. When you’re making a cool half-million annual salary from $bigcorp, it’s because they expect to make at least ¾ of a million that they wouldn’t be making without you.
If the best defense we have for working at these companies is theNuremberg defense, that doesn’t reflect well on us. But, maybe you would object, maybe you would have the courage to say “no” when asked to do these things. Maybe you would, but someday, a cool project will come across your inbox - machine learning! Big data! Cloud scale! It’s everything you were promised when you took the job, and have more fun with it for a few months than you have had in a long time. […] Doublethink quickly steps in to protect your ego from the cognitive dissonance, and you take another little step towards becoming the person you once swore never to be.
9. Trivial pursuit? - Himal Magazine
Someone I followed online shared this article about quizzing in urban India written by the one and only Arul Mani. The article is from 2010 and was described (in 2020) as the best thing anyone has written about the quizzing scene in India. I’m inclined to agree.
10. The frictionless genius of Kane Williamson - ESPN Cricinfo
Lovely essay about the ever-graceful New Zealand cricketer Kane Williamson. It’s from 2018, so it precedes his 2019 World Cup heroics.
It’s not at all that Williamson is an unattractive player. Au contraire. But he is so proficient with every shot he does play that his finest innings not only gather a sense of invincibility, they acquire the unfortunate byproduct of inevitability. Of course he played out those two Yasir deliveries. Of course he’s going to rise up and punch through the covers off the back foot. Of course he’s going to lean forward into those drives. Of course he combines moving forward with playing the shot late.
