Hello, reader. I’m slowly getting back to my routine of sending out this newsletter every weekend. It’s started to feel natural again, which is good. I’m also considering leaving MailChimp and moving to, perhaps, Mail Octopus. Kai Brach (who curates and writes the excellent Dense Discovery) recently moved to it. I don’t want to use Substack. Speaking of Substack, I guess I’m not the only one who’s totally bewildered by the number of new newsletters on it. It’s almost like a new social network, or the new podcasting. I enjoyed this twitter thread by Venkatesh Rao about Substack and what it looks like it might grow into in the recent future. Do you have any thoughts? I’m curious to know. In some sense, I feel smug about starting a newsletter before it was this mainstream.
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1. What Frogs Can Teach Us about the State of the World - The Walrus
I’m a simple man–if an essay also includes frog sounds, I like it. This is a really cool piece about how frogs can serve as indicators of the health of their environment/ecosystem. It’s also a showcase of a “citizen science” project that actually works.
As I stand in the dark and listen intently to the frogs’ voices, what is at first chaotic comes into focus, my ears straining to separate the different types of calls. I’m pleasantly surprised by the range of amplification my hands provide as I change their shape around my ears, and I’m starting to understand the distinction that Krause makes between listening and hearing—the difference between engaging with the sense and passively experiencing it. It’s a practice that can make us realize that all is not lost and that the environment can recover if we let it—in his book, Krause points out that there are now choruses of frogs and nightingales thriving at Chernobyl.
2. There’s No Such Thing as Ethical Grocery Shopping - The New Republic (soft paywall)
This is a review-of-sorts of Benjamin Lorr’s new book The Secret Life of Groceries. And it’s just, I don’t know, very sobering. It reflects a lot of what I’ve seen when I’ve been to big supermarkets in the US. And it confirms a lot of what you might fear when you buy groceries: that these are products with dubious ethical origins, that they pay the original farmers very little, and that those workers may not even be making ends meet.
You have no choice. You can shop at a store that pays its workers better, sure, but the real atrocities have taken place long before your desired products have reached the shelf, and the stickers have nothing to do with it. “And here grocery has one last trick,” Lorr writes: “it allows us to hate our shrimp and eat it too. The image of the bad polluting aquaculture farmer or vulnerable exploited migrant gets imprinted in our first-world brain, while the fungibility of commodity goods—that maze of brokers and agents—gives the entire system the plausible deniability it craves.”
3. A Legislative Path to an Interoperable Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation
A piece by Bennett Cyphers and Cory Doctorow about interoperability of the internet. What this means is that any two devices can talk to each other, if they use the TCP/IP, HTTP and TLS protocols. However, we’re diverging from that original interoperability now as large tech companies close off the way their services can be interacted with. So this piece basically goes into the ways in which we can rebuild interoperability in our internet.
4. How America Killed Soy Milk - Eater
A cool piece about how soy milk that you can buy in generic American stores is just soy milk as it “should be”. I view this mostly as a product appearing in a new country and climate where people didn’t know what to do with it. And therefore soy milk in the US became something distanced from what it was. She mentions the joy of drinking freshly squeezed soy milk, and I really want to try that sometime.
5. Cricket coach Mark Coles moved to Pakistan for a job that paid nothing - it changed his life - stuff.co.nz
This is the fascinating story of Mark Coles–54 years old, alcoholic, suicidal, who then took up the job of coaching the Pakistani women’s cricket team. It’s a nice story, and it ends with this:
“I hope that one day those girls say, ‘That crazy old white bloke taught us a few things’. It was never just about winning. That’s not all we set out to do. We set out to enjoy each other’s company – in good times and bad. And we did that.”
6. Bruce Springsteen and the Art of Aging Well - The Atlantic (soft paywall)
Wonderful, wonderful profile of Bruce Springsteen. He’s someone I look up and relate to.
Springsteen is the world champion of aging well—physically, intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. His new album and film, Letter to You, are performances about growing older and death, topics that would have seemed unlikely for rock when it was born as a rebellion for anyone over 30. Letter to You is rich in lessons for those who want to know what successful aging looks like. Far from being sad or lachrymose, it’s both youthful—loud and hard-charging—and serene and wise. It’s a step forward from his Broadway show that debuted three years ago and his memoir, released four years ago. Now he’s not only telling the story of his life, but asking, in the face of death, about life’s meaning, and savoring life in the current moment.
7. When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece - Fantastic Anachronism
This is one of the best book reviews I’ve ever read. It’s got a lot to do with the book in question: Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I haven’t read it, but this review wants me to try it out sometime. James Boswell is described as “Selfish, servile and self-indulgent, lazy and lecherous, vain, proud, obsessed with his aristocratic status, yet with no sense of propriety whatsoever,”, which clearly tells you what we should think of him. What the author of this blog, Alvaro de Menard, wants to expand upon is how such a man could write one of the all-time outstanding works of English literature.
8. Making Indian Cities Habitable - The India Forum
A nice essay by Ramachandra Guha about Patrick Geddes, a Scottish town planner who traveled across the subcontinent about a century ago. Guha is attempting to study Geddes’ work and draw conclusions and make recommendations about city planning that are relevant even today. I find Geddes’ three major influences pretty important: English craft socialism, French historical geography, and “geographical anarchism”. His work and writing was inherently interdisciplinary. It also focused on designing around nature, as well as democratic participation of urbanites.
9. When They Leave - Human Parts
content warning: suicide
Sara Benincasa has written this very moving piece about suicide, and how it’s played a role in her life. I guess I liked this part best:
It is neither a failure of character nor an indicator of a genius mind to contemplate suicide. It is just a thing that happens, and it happens oftener to some of us than to others. There is no romance here. There is pain, and the management of it looks different to all of us, and sometimes the managing of it becomes exhausting. For some people the allure of death is that it can look like the lie some adults tell children: “He’s just sleeping.”
and also this, where she tells you it doesn’t need “fixing”, it needs care.
I was lucky. My parents helped. You can help too. Don’t try to fix it. It doesn’t need fixing. Listen, and help someone access care. You can’t save anyone from themselves. It’s not your job. You can assist, though. And if they leave, you didn’t fail. It isn’t about you, and that is terrible and wonderful to know.
10. The case for why Google should be regulated as a public utility - RankScience blog
Google search is fundamentally the gateway to the internet for the majority of people and an arbiter of truth in our digital age. Google has a dominant market monopoly position, a treasure trove of sensitive information on hundreds of millions of users. It’s incentivized to return value to shareholders and extract more value from search over time, which is at odds with doing right by businesses and citizens. Their business model doesn’t require them to act in the long-term interest of businesses and citizens, and because they have a monopoly on a utility that’s become essential to our day-to-day lives, the only solution is for the government to enforce guidelines on fair behavior within search.