Hello helloooo. I know I know, it’s Thursday, and I missed my weekend slot (yet again). I really have been losing control of my time recently, and forcing myself to send the newsletter on Saturday night (for me) just puts too much pressure on me. So henceforth, the newsletter will remain weekly (on average), but I’ll send it whenever I want! Embrace the uncertainty. Haha. Now I am tired and about to take a nap. So I hope you enjoy this list of articles.
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1. Let’s just get rid of peer review - Alex Danco
This is an idea from Alex Danco where he says that the scientific peer review process needs a major overhaul. I agree, and I think that a vast majority of academics around the world will agree as well. A paper being peer-reviewed sometimes means nothing at all, and the job of reviewing papers is done by academics for free. In fact, younger academics’ career advancement hinges on being a “good” and prompt reviewer. These are all points that Alex brings up and he then follows up with his idea to “fix” (at least partially) peer review.
2. Digital Kiranas - Business Today
This is a nice piece about the present and future of “kiranas”, or convenience stores, in urban India. Obviously, Covid has sped up existing trends. I’ve lived in the US for three years now, and over here stores have been “consolidated” and it’s very rare to find single-franchise or mom-and-pop stores. However, in India, small independent shops still are a mainstay of the overall market. With the advent of the internet and online ordering, this is changing, but kiranas are trying to roll with it and become tech-savvy themselves. Sometimes this means accepting orders via WhatsApp or some other informal setup, or else tying in with digital platforms that help them become more efficient and tech-savvy.
3. De-Escalating Social Media - Nick Punt
If you’ve used social media recently, you know that it tends to escalate controversies, give more space to “hot takes”, and encourages large-scale attacks and sometimes abuse on people who say something “wrong”. It’s infuriating, and honestly, I don’t see it going away because social media companies make money by driving engagement, and they have found that outrage is the best engagement. Here, Nick Punt introduces his idea of Twitter having a “mea culpa” feature, where users can admit that they’ve made a mistake. It’s interesting, and while I don’t know if it’ll work, I am heartened by the fact that at least some people are thinking about this seriously.
4. Drowning in Light - Nautilus
This is such a good essay. Artificial lighting is currently cheaper than it has ever been in history, and the trend is set to continue. However, instead of making us spend less money/energy on it, we just light up things more and more. And we really are drowning in light, as the title suggests.
Like any junkie, we don’t know when we’ve had enough. “One thing that evolutionary anthropologists have learned is that humans are not necessarily natural conservationists,” says biological anthropologist Carol Worthman of Emory University, who has done field work in developing countries with scant night lighting, such as New Guinea and Vietnam. “We don’t have inbuilt mechanisms to step down consumption, even in the best interest of our own physical health.” The disruption of circadian rhythms and the disappearing night sky are just a part of the price. We’ve even tried, and failed, to understand how much we need. “Despite over a century of research,” the Sandia group found, “recommended [lighting] levels for comparable spaces still vary by a factor of up to 20.”
5. Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors - Long Now Foundation
This is a nice piece about how we should, or can, think in order to be good ancestors to our descendants. A lot of indigenous peoples think of the impact on the seventh generation ahead when they make decisions, and that is one of the points in this essay. It’s the one I resonate with the most. There’s something about seven generations.. even in plant breeding, when you’re trying to stabilize a cross between two varieties, you have to do it for seven generations before it’s reliably stable.
Let’s start with the question, ‘how long is long-term?’ Forget the corporate vision of ‘long-term’, which rarely extends beyond a decade. Instead, consider a hundred years as a minimum threshold for long-term thinking. This is the current length of a long human lifespan, taking us beyond the ego boundary of our own mortality, so we begin to imagine futures that we can influence but not participate in ourselves. […] At the very least, when you aim to think ‘long-term’, take a deep breath and think ‘a hundred years and more’.
6. How Malcolm Tricks You Into Believing - Medium (paywalled), author:
Tom New
This is a really interesting piece because it goes through Malcolm Gladwell’s writing style/philosophy. And if you’ve read any of his books, you’ll know that he takes a simple hypothesis that you really, really want to believe because it makes such a great story. And he finds things that fit that narrative. However, I learnt recently that much of his work has actually been criticized often by experts in the field. And all of these things are what this essay goes into. And the author of the essay than coins “Gladwell’s Law”, which is worthwhile to be cognizant of in today’s news landscape:
“If you ignore almost everything, you can explain almost anything (with stories)”.
7. Regeneration - New Zealand Geographic
This is a nice piece about regenerative agriculture. I’ve shared such essays in the past, and I keep doing it because I think that it’s an important topic. Also, this is a New Zealand-based essay, and I hardly ever share any of those! So why not?
8. Eating As Dialogue, Food As Technology - Noema Magazine
This essay by Hannah Landecker brings up and discusses some fantastic points. I’ve been reading about this a lot recently, and the point is something like: eating is one of the weirdest things we do because we eat other organisms (whether plants, animals, or mushrooms) and assimilate them to the extent that we get to maintain our identity throughout. However, how much of that identity is our identity? Thinking deeply about these questions leads to a certain humility about human individuality and self-sufficiency.
This might seem head-spinning, and indeed the molecular biology behind demonstrating this set of relationships between plants, the gut microbiome and the animal host is amazingly sophisticated. No doubt there is much more to find out as this research is continued. But we can translate its implications fairly bluntly: some genetic material that is ingested is not just broken down for parts. It participates in the work of turning on and off genes in gut bacteria, whose products are relevant to the physiology of the body that eats ginger and hosts a microbiome. There is a complex interaction, mediated by molecules that we have come to understand as carrying information among the ingested food, the microbiome and the eating body itself.
9. The saboteurs you can hire to end your relationship - BBC
Scott says that hiring a wakaresaseya helps “you avoid confrontation. It’s a way in the short term of resolving a difficult situation without conflict. And your wife is much more likely to agree to a divorce if she’s in love with someone and wants to move on.” Thus, this is especially useful when one spouse won’t agree to a divorce, which complicates proceedings.
But most of Mochizuki’s clients are not married people who want help separating from their spouses, but rather those who want their spouse’s affairs broken up.
10. How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers - APM Reports
This was an incredible read. Apparently a lot of American kids are being taught to read according to the “three cuing” theory that was proposed by academics in the 1960s. It says that when you see a word, the way to read it is to search for graphic, syntactic and semantic cues. Now, to put it simply, this has resulted in disaster. Kids don’t actually read and decode the letters, but instead try to guess the word or sentence from the context. This is a well-written and well-researched piece that might make up for its kinda harrowing content.