Kat’s Kable #220

Hello there! This is the fourth-anniversary edition of this newsletter, so woohoo. I’m quite proud of it and am glad that I’ve been able to stay consistent and even with it over the years. It’s evolved a fair bit, as any thing will, but at its core Kat’s Kable has stayed the same: an exploration of interesting and pertinent things via longform journalism. If you’re curious, here are the anniversary issues from July of 2016, ‘17, ‘18 and ‘19. And with no further ado, here’s this week’s list.

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1. Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope - Interview Magazine

I guess I evaluated my level of world-panic a lot when I was thinking about possibly having children, and where I landed is still where I am. I don’t think the future is going to be good. I don’t think there’s an ethical justification for having kids in a world that’s accelerating in these directions. But I am committed to the idea that the world can be better, and I have some amount of faith that being human, being able to love, is still an untouchably and unpredictably generative thing—worthwhile, across unknown contexts, in and of itself.

2. The Lost Art of Growing Blueberries With Fire - Atlas Obscura

Absolutely wonderful! An age-old way of cultivating “wild” blueberries in the northeast of North America is by setting fire to the bushes so as to ensure a good crop soon following.

“I do it for the human culture as well as for the agriculture, to bring together food production work with social gathering, ritualized or repeated activity, memory construct, and a plain old good time with friends,” says Lindholm. “And some of it’s for the adrenaline junkie in me.” But he didn’t set out to become a torchbearer for a historic agricultural practice; in fact, he never intended to become a blueberry farmer in the first place.

3. Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress - Psyche

This is a nice piece from Psyche , which looks like an offshoot/publication of Aeon Magazine. The essay is about how the destigmatization of mental illness has gone a bit too far, where it is often seen as a mental equivalent of a physical illness. True, a lot of mental illness has to do with chemical imbalances and the like, but is that the way to go about treating it?

Mental health treatment needs to re-engage with the language of persons. This means suspending the detached, third-person stance toward patients, and attending to their actual experience and circumstances. And it means encouraging patients themselves to avoid this stance and draw on the normal ways that people make sense of their emotions and actions. […]

Recovering this interpretive conversation means sharply circumscribing if not dropping biogenetic talk. It means seeking understanding, which is what people dealing with emotional suffering, like those we interviewed, yearn for. An understanding as persons, embodied and situated in a life-world. An understanding that is the enemy of fear and requires no othering.

4. Individual vs collective climate action - Kai Brach on Medium

I enjoyed this piece from my friend and fellow newsletter curator about individual vs. collective climate action. I agree with most of his essay and find that he did a good job articulating what many of us may feel.

Needless to say, I’m not a climate scientist or expert. My views are evolving. I’m just another person concerned about our shared future, stuck in and part of a system that feels utterly unjust. I’m still doing a lot to lower my own footprint for the reasons I mentioned in my newsletter, but whenever the climate conversation comes up, I now feel like I should remind others that the most urgent problem to focus on and to discuss with their family and friends is not their inefficient refrigerator or the carbon footprint of their milk.

5. From Dirt - Emergence Magazine

Another beauty from Emergence Magazine. Just wow.

Living in the body I live in, I can’t help but see the direct implications, the devastating implications, of the erasure of certain histories. When you dismiss lives from the record, you put those lives in jeopardy. […] Writing about the environment is a necessary political decision, just as finding a way to beautify the patch of dirt we called home was a necessity in that first house my husband and I shared. It is also why, once the ants announced their interest in the artichoke, I let them enjoy its substance while I settled for appreciating its splendor. I was not dependent on that artichoke for its nutritional value, and if my point is to see to it that things around me thrive, sharing with ants could be part of this goal. I refuse to take part in the segregation of the imagination that assigns greater value to some experiences than it assigns to others. If there is to be a flourishing that I can cultivate, I want its reach to be wide.

6. Technical Excellence and Scale - Electronic Frontier Foundation

This is a piece from the excellent Cory Doctorow that talks about the modern American way of developing innovation, especially in tech. He mains talks about how small companies these days do not grow into large firms themselves, but rather get acquired by large firms that do not innovate as much as they did when small. The large firms have focused more on executing their service at scale, and innovate by acquisition.

Operationalizing, scaling and maintaining services with millions (or billions!) of users is incredibly hard and requires real technical excellence. It’s one thing to “move fast and break things,” but mature products that people rely on need maintenance from people whose motto is “work deliberately and fix things.” Monopolists that have found themselves in antitrust’s crosshairs were accused of a long list of sins, but they are rarely accused of technical incompetence.

7. Humanity is more important than money — it’s time for capitalism to get an upgrade - TED Ideas

Ha! This is a piece by Andrew Yang aaaaall the way back from 2018. Prehistory, almost, where he lays out the tenets and features of “human capitalism”. It’s three core tenets are: (a) Humanity is more important than money, (b) The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar and (c) Markets exist to serve our common goals and values.

I see I’ve gotten into a bit of a mini-theme with the previous two pieces and this one too. I liked this interview that seriously explores the idea of sovereign wealth funds or national endowments. These replace the idea of universal basic income with “universal basic capital”.

9. Curry Before Columbus - Contingent Magazine

This was an interesting piece about hing, or asafoetida, that’s in the broad context of: what spices were common in Indian cuisine before the modern nightshades (tomatoes, potatoes, peppers etc.) were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries. The author, Nishant Batsha, says that before there was curry, there was spice–primarily hing.

The history of curry before Columbus is truly a history of spice. There are, of course, more spices to find in the archives: turmeric, coriander, and cumin come to mind. These are spices that cross region and class, the staples thrown into the pot in meal after meal. But ubiquitous, smelly, resinous hīng gives a chance to take a peek into the flavors of Indian food prior to the Columbian exchange. Perhaps there should be a new way to order something, not Indian spicy, but Indian spiced, with plenty of asafetida. I’ll hold my nose and ask for a generous portion, just like all those food chroniclers over the past millennium.

10. This $35 Keyboard for Children Transformed Me Into a Novelist - OneZero

In this piece, Angela Lashbrook talks about using a dedicated word processing device for writing. It’s similar in spirit to using a Kindle, in the sense that it’s a simple yet sophisticated device that can do just one thing. And because it can only do one thing, it takes away a lot of the distractions that come with writing on a computer.

The AlphaSmart gives me the perfect amount of power over my environment. Because it isn’t connected to the internet, I’m not tempted to check Twitter when a scene gets particularly tough. But I’m not chained to it, either; if I want, I can get up and walk into the other room where I’ve stashed my laptop. Once I’m sitting at the AlphaSmart, though, I might as well get to work. It’s either that or stare into space.

See ya later.-Kat.

Kat's Kable #220