Hello there! I was quite out of energy from this week, but here we are and here is another issue of Kat’s Kable. It’s a bit more lazily compiled than usual. See you soon!
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1. Global Capital Is the Tail That Wags the U.S. Economic Dog - Carnegie Endowment
I’ve read a lot of things that have widened my view of global economies in the past year. This one is pretty interesting and among those too.
This means that there is little to justify the fetish for unfettered capital movement. In a world already flooded with excess savings, it doesn’t result in more productive investment; it encourages global savings imbalances by allowing wage suppression in trade surplus countries to be exported abroad; it forces up either unemployment or debt in trade deficit economies; and it weakens the negotiating power of workers and exacerbates income inequality everywhere. The only ones who benefit from unfettered capital flows are international bankers and the very wealthy owners of movable capital.
2. The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods - OneZero
I don’t think these prepper billionaires are aspiring to live in the world depicted in the Walking Dead because they’re horrible people. Or at least not just because they’re horrible people. They’re simply succumbing to one of the dominant ethos of the digital age, which is to design one’s personal reality so meticulously that existential threats are simply removed from the equation. The leap from a Fitbit tracking your heart rate to an annual full-body cancer scan or from a doorbell surveillance camera to a network of autonomous robot sentries is really just a matter of money. No matter the level of existential security, the Netflix shows we stream are the same.
3. The Rise of the Feminized City - Lithub
This is an adapted excerpt from the book Feminist City by Leslie Kern. I felt very educated on a number of things by it. It’s very western-city-centric, which means I just had to take a few things at face value without being able to relate to them. But still, a good read.
4. A ‘Forgotten Holocaust’ Is Missing From Indian Food Stories - Atlas Obscura
This article makes a good point: why is the Bengal Famine not more included/involved in overall food narratives of India? It was one of the worst things to have perpetrated on Indians in the 20th century.
More than 75 years after the death of Khamaru’s father and millions of Bengalis like him, the Famine lives on. Kochu shaak, googli, and watery khichuri resonate in family memories, and appear in kitchens today. Within Bengal, because of the compounding role of the British imperial government and the wealthy and Hindu upper castes, the Famine is also called, in whispers, the Bengal Holocaust. It informs how Bengalis born a generation or two later think about food and, quietly, it lingers in Bengal’s kitchens.
5. The chemistry of a curry - Chemistry World
Much as I detest the clumping of a wide variety of dishes from different cuisines as a single “curry”, I did enjoy this deconstruction of what makes a curry a curry. The author of this piece, Nina Notman, lives in the UK and is attempting to make better curries than those which can be made with curry pastes bought at a store. She goes into a lot of the chemical aspects involved in using fresh spices, grinding your own, and so on. The piece is published in Chemistry World after all. Also this is very interesting:
And I was flummoxed by the fact that, unlike for most western recipes, I couldn’t see how the individual components fitted together to build the flavour of the final product. There is a reason for this: Asian and western cuisines don’t follow the same flavour rules.
This disparity was identified in 2011 by researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, US. The team was studying over 55,000 recipes from around the world to seek evidence for the so-called food-pairing hypothesis – the long-standing assumption that ingredients with shared flavour molecules are more likely to taste nice together than ingredients that do not. ‘The conclusion from our paper was that there is statistical evidence that this shared compounds effect plays a role in western cuisine,’ explains one of the lead researchers Sebastian Ahnert, now at the University of Cambridge, UK. In Asian cuisine, however, they found the opposite. The more flavour compounds two ingredients shared, the less likely they were to be used together.
6. The river roads of India - Out of Eden Walk
Paul Salopek walked for 17 months across Northern India and in this gorgeous ArcGIS photoessay, he talks about what he saw and encountered. What a lovely put-together… thing. It’s an essay, a story, a sort-of memoir, I’m not sure it fits any conventional genre. But I loved it. The pictures and maps are spell-binding.
7. The Age of Mass Surveillance Will Not Last Forever - WIRED (soft paywall)
This is an excerpt from Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and Homeland. Actually, it’s an excerpt from the introduction, which is written by Edward Snowden. I suppose this almost qualifies as “required reading”, even though I don’t think any reading is “required”.
And yet despite this grim reading from my seven years in exile, I find more cause for hope than despair, thanks in no small part to those lasers and traffic cones in Hong Kong. My confidence springs not from how they are applied—to dazzle cameras and, with a little water, to contain and extinguish the gas grenades of a state gone wrong—but in what they express: the irrepressible human desire to be free.
The problems that we face today, of dispossession by oligarchs and their monopolies, and of disenfranchisement by authoritarians and their comfortably captive political class, are far from new. The novelty is in the technological means by which these problems have been entrenched—to put it simply, the bad guys have better tools.
8. Inside David Bowie’s Final Years - Rolling Stone
I absolutely love David Bowie, and this 2016 profile of his final years/month just made me love him more.
That night essentially marked the end of David Bowie as a public figure. He never toured again, never gave another in-depth interview. He grew so secretive that he chided one of his closest collaborators, Tony Visconti, for revealing that they watched British comedy during studio breaks. By the time he made his surprise re-emergence in 2013 with his first album in a decade, The Next Day, he had pulled off a feat that no other rock star has quite managed, regaining all of the heady mystique of his breakthrough years, and then some. He was a legend, a living ghost, hiding in plain sight, walking his daughter to school, taking cabs, exercising alongside ordinary humans in workaday gyms in Manhattan and upstate in Woodstock. With his family, he said, he was David Jones, the person he had been before he assumed his stage name. He had, at last, truly fallen to Earth, and he liked what he found there.
9. Myriam Sarachik Never Gave Up on Physics - New York Times (soft paywall)
“The New York-based scientist overcame sexism and personal tragedy to make major contributions to the field, for which she received recognition this year.”
I enjoyed this piece, and like to think that the sciences are more receptive to women now than they were to Sarachik.
10. The True Story of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore - Palladium Magazine
The Western student of international politics knows to nod approvingly when Lee’s name is mentioned. Frustrated by the sludge of partisan politics in his own country, he sees in Lee’s legacy a kind of exotic escape. If asked, he remarks sagely: Singapore is proof of what enlightened authoritarianism can achieve.
I found this history of the founding of Singapore quite instructive.