Hello there! I know, I know, it’s been a long time, and some of you have asked me where the Kable has been. To be honest, for this past month, I just didn’t feel like writing it. Well, here we are and hopefully my break is over. I remember a year or two ago, sometimes people would try to tell me how amazing it was that I consistently wrote and curated this newsletter, because it seemed like so much work. And back then, my reply was always that it wasn’t so much work, since it seemed natural and the newsletter seemed to write itself sometimes. Recently, it has seemed like work. And that is why I’ve been less enthusiastic about it.
How are you? I hope that your work is fulfilling and that you carve out some time for yourself. Enjoy the list. And I’ll see you soon.
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1. Sport, politics and ignorance - Jarrod Kimber’s Sport Almanac
I don’t know exactly when I started realising that sports and politics would mix, regardless. But now when I go back to watch “When We Were Kings” I can’t understand how I didn’t get all of this before. Here I was watching Muhummad Ali, a man only trying to reclaim his title because he gave it away refusing to fight in a nonsensical war. They also say the reason the Rumble In the Jungle was in Zaire (Now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was because President Mobutu Sese Seko wanted his country to be known, and he thought staging a huge boxing match was cheaper than going to war.
Muhammad Ali was one of the most political sporting figures of all time, and the Rumble In the Jungle was one of the biggest sporting events in history with two African American fighters returning to Africa for the World Heavyweight title. And the entire thing was there to sports wash and promote a corrupt regime. I watched this 100 times, and I never saw it. Now it’s all I see.
2. When India Kicked Out Coca-Cola, Local Sodas Thrived - Atlas Obscura
I really enjoyed this piece from Atlas Obscura. It starts off quoting Tom Standage’s view that coca-cola is “capitalism in a bottle” and then continues to explain why Coca-Cola left India in the 1970s, leaving open an empty space that could be occupied by local, homegrown sodas. Some of these, like Limca and Thums Up, are still popular. However, a lot of them have been bought by Coca-Cola after they re-entered India in 1993.
3. Artist Barbara Iweins on spending two years photographing all 10,532 objects in her house - It’s Nice That
Honestly, this is something I’d really like to do some time. Either photograph everything, or else settle for the slightly less daunting task of cataloguing all my possessions in a spreadsheet.
4. Always on the side of the egg - Haruki Murakami
This is the speech that Murakami gave when accepting the Jerusalem Prize in Israel in 2009. I found what he said to be quite insightful, as takes the side of the downtrodden, no matter who is right and who is wrong. His line of thinking is, “Between a high, solid wall and the egg that breaks against it, I will always be on the side of the egg”.
I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories – stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.
5. Screen Share: A College Teacher’s Zoom Journal - Wired (soft paywall)
I’ve read two books by Anne Fadiman, and enjoyed both of them thoroughly. Here she writes about her experience teaching her writing class, Writing About Oneself, online via Zoom. It’s a very different class from what one would usually image a college class as, and also one of the least amenable to virtual substitution, I think. She writes about teaching, overcoming tech issues, bloopers, and the joy of connecting and sharing work even though it’s through computer screens.
6. How a homeless refugee became a 9-year-old benevolent chess champion - ESPN
This is a tale about Tani Adewumi, who escaped from Nigeria with his family to emigrate to the United States.
For a lot of children his age, even the ranked ones, chess is fun, chess is engaging. But for Tani, chess represented what he found in America: control. “Tani used chess as a teddy bear when he first started, you know?” Martinez says. “He found it, and he held on tight.” But who would ever believe that a teddy bear could save his family?
Growing up, fear and upheaval were Tani’s constant companions. Chess changed that. With his indefatigable curiosity and his aggressive style of play, he has given his family stable footing. Now he wants more. “I want to become the youngest grandmaster in the world,” he says.
7. Thermoelectric Stoves: Ditch the Solar Panels? - Low Tech Magazine
Yet another well-researched and interesting article from Low Tech Magazine. Thermoelectric stoves are wood stoves that can provide a household not only with thermal energy (for cooking, heating, etc.), but also electricity. Consider it as an alternative to solar panels. What’s interesting is that even though the actual thermoelectric conversion is very inefficient, the heat that is dissipated can be used for heating and cooking.
8. Out There: On Not Finishing - Longreads
This piece is beautiful, and one of the best things I’ve read this year. Devin Kelly writes about our societal preoccupation with finishing things, rather than just doing them. He focuses on an annual “race” called Farmdaze that him and his friends attend. It’s not a race in the conventional sense of the word, in the sense that it’s more intent on participants having fun with each other than on them trying to win or even complete the whole race.
Two weeks after Farmdaze, I sat in my therapist’s office wondering why I hadn’t been able to stop when all my friends had. We talked about how I have a desire to tell a specific story: a story of perseverance, a story I have been telling myself for so long as a way to make sense of my own life, as a way to prove, to myself, that I could love myself, and deserve the love of others. For a long time I have believed that love and joy come after. They come after accomplishment. They come after pursuit. They don’t live in the present. They have to be earned. But there is a kind of grace that comes at a place like Farmdaze, a place that calls itself a race but is really everything that a race isn’t, an event that lets men give up if they want, that doesn’t shame them for it, that lets them become present in the story that is, simply, all of us trying to love all of us, the story that Galway Kinnell calls, simply, “tenderness toward existence.”
Another lovely excerpt:
For so many hours, shuffling around that farm, I didn’t want to be doing, I wanted to be done, so that when I was done, I could say I did a thing. This is the opposite of the spirit of ultramarathoning, of distance running in general, which is in many ways about being “Out There,” caught up in a moment that divorces you from the world, from society, from anything other than self. Accomplishment happens in an instant. Accomplishment is awarded the moment the finishing is done. But being out there takes a long time, and if it is only done for the sake of accomplishment, then it feels like an even longer, more painful time. Our society offers up so much as reward, and yet rewards so little for the so-much of life.
9. “Dylan” by Ellen Willis
What a piece of writing this is. It’s from 1967, written by Ellen Willis. I’ve read quite a few pieces of writing on Bob Dylan, and this is right up there, possibly the best piece of music writing I’ve ever read. It delves in and out of “Dylanology” so well, sometimes making you feel like Willis has been living in a nook of Dylan’s brain itself.
Dylan’s refusal to be known is not simply a celebrity’s ploy, but a passion that has shaped his work. As his songs have become more introspective, the introspections have become more impersonal, the confidences of a no-man without past or future. Bob Dylan as identifiable persona has been disappearing into his songs, which is what he wants. This terrifies his audiences. They could accept a consistent image — roving minstrel, poet of alienation, spokesman for youth — in lieu of the “real” Bob Dylan. But his progressive self-annihilation cannot be contained in a game of let’s pretend, and it conjures up nightmares of madness, mutilation, death.
10. The Map Is Not the Territory - Farnam Street
I enjoyed this overview of maps, and models, from Farnam Street. It’s from 2015, but most of it is still applicable and offers something to learn.
To solve this problem, the mind creates maps of reality in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity of reality is through abstraction. But frequently, we don’t understand our maps or their limits. In fact, we are so reliant on abstraction that we will frequently use an incorrect model simply because we feel any model is preferable to no model.
It then takes up a few case studies, including the Value-At-Risk (VAR) model that is used to quantify risk in the banking community.
The practical problem with a model like VAR is that the banks use it to optimize. In other words, they take on as much exposure as the model deems OK. And when banks veer into managing to a highly detailed, highly confident model rather than to informed common sense, which happens frequently, they tend to build up hidden risks that will un-hide themselves in time.