Hello, friend. Here we are on this rainy (for me) Friday with another issue of Kat’s Kable. This week I’ve been thinking about is a particular scene in the 9th book of Wheel of Time, where Rand (the main protagonist and the “Dragon Reborn”) changes dramatically as a person, becoming more vulnerable, open to love, and willing to share his burden of “saving the world”. To that, an Aiel Wise One says, “He has given up trying to be as strong as the stones, and has instead achieved the strength of the wind.”. I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
I also read two poems this week that seem to be the perfect foil to each other: Aurbade by Philip Larkin and The Thing Is by Ellen Bass. I’m really grateful for people who can put in words what others can’t. Anyway, here is this week’s list.
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1. The Big Thaw: How Russia Could Dominate a Warming World - ProPublica
This was, well, quite chilling. No pun intended. As the world warms and the polar ice caps start to melt, there’s bound to be a global migration of population from the tropics to temperate zones. Climate change is also going to cause a drastic change in agricultural productivity of lands across the globe, converting a lot of inaccessible farmland in Russia and other latitudinally-aligned countries to prime grain-growing land. It makes you think, why should some countries work to combat the effects of climate change if it benefits them in the short term?
Russia has been explicit about its intention to come out ahead as the climate changes; in its national action plan on climate released in January, it called on the country to “use the advantages” of warming and listed Arctic shipping and extended growing seasons among things that would shower “additional benefits” on the nation. Russia may be no better positioned, politically speaking, to welcome large numbers of migrants than the U.S. or Canada; in fact, xenophobia is probably even more prevalent there. But how it tackles migration and its own demographic challenges will have tremendous consequences for the U.S. and the rest of the world. Russia has always wanted to populate its vast eastern lands, and the steady thawing there puts that long-sought goal within reach. Achieving it could significantly increase Russia’s prosperity and power in the process, through the opening of tens of millions of acres of land and a flourishing new agricultural economy.
2. Dirty Kitchen - Asian American Writers’ Workshop
“Far from our barrios, mountains, and islands, we cook, so that we may practice swallowing our undesirable truths, acidic and blood-heavy.”
This is a lovely piece piece by Jill Damatac, who was born in the Philippines. Shew rites about her identity and indigeneity, in this case, centered around the food practices in her family.
My mother’s people were blessed by their gods, who breathed fire, bled lava and nourished the land; in return, they required a sacrificial offering with every moon. They gave us sisig, a cure for acute imbalances: a hangover, a bad stomach, a shipful of uninvited conquistadores. And as the collective stomachache of colonization took hold, sisig underwent its own holy transfiguration, going from occasional remedy to a daily part of the Jesus-blessed family meal. With scooped fingers and a thumb, elbow resting on a raised knee, Kapampangans would gather a pat of rice, some meat, and a green hunk of sisig, the chili-hot, acidic corrosion hardening their stomachs, balancing the bitterness blooming, silent, in their blood.
3. The edge of our existence: A particle physicist examines the architecture of society - The Bulletin
I did not intend for this but this is a good complement to the previous article I just shared.
I am a particle physicist. My profession examines matter at the smallest scale in search for answers to some of the biggest questions: where the universe came from and where it is going to be. […] Nature has no political ideology and carries no passport. Science, at its best, also espouses such cosmopolitan ideals. That data is neutral, and science is apolitical, makes for an alluring narrative. By clinging to it, the scientist appears assured, almost noble, rising above the messy and the mundane by sheer force of intellect.
But reality does not conform to such convenient self-delusion. Pretending to be above and beyond politics is by itself a political position; in adopting it, one has aligned with the state and sided with the powerful. We all share the same sky, but only some of us have access to the instruments that probe it, only some of us have our ideas heard, only some of us can enter spaces of higher learning without fear of bodily harm. The many walls and uneven planes in society extend into science, dividing and excluding participants, shaping the directions of research, manipulating results and guiding their application.
4. How and why I stopped buying new laptops - Low Tech Magazine
This is quite interesting. I really like Low Tech Magazine (their website runs on solar so sometimes it’s down because of that, how cool) and here they talk about why buying new laptops for their use case is simply not worth it, economically and environmentally.
All this means that there’s no environmental or financial benefit whatsoever to replacing an old laptop with a new one. On the contrary, the only thing a consumer can do to improve their laptop’s ecological and economic sustainability is to use it for as long as possible. This is facilitated by the fact that laptops are now a mature technology and have more than sufficient computational power. One problem, though. Consumers who try to keep working on their old laptops are likely to end up frustrated. I shortly explain my frustrations below, and I’m pretty confident that they are not exceptional.
5. ‘Hope is an embrace of the unknown’: Rebecca Solnit on living in dark times - The Guardian
I found this soothing and hopeful essay by Rebecca Solnit from 2016. It’s quite good.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.
6. Hiding in Plain Sight - Jonathan Foley’s blog (soft paywalled on Medium)
This is a personal blog post about depression. Foley, who is a world-renowned environmental scientist, talks about living with depression all while being a wildly successful person in his chosen profession. I think he does a really good job of explaining it while also recognizing the fact that, sometimes, it just cannot be described.
Unless you’ve experienced depression yourself, it is impossible to describe it to you. It’s like trying to imagine what the color blue smells like. Or wondering if subatomic particles have feelings. It can’t be done.
Plus, I wouldn’t even know how to fully describe it because, to me, it’s just “normal”. Depression is to me like Tuesday is to you.
7. Ad Tech Could Be the Next Internet Bubble - Wired (soft paywalled)
The premise of this interesting piece (which I pretty much agree with) is that online advertising as we currently know it sucks, and the only people it benefits are online middlemen. Users hate them, and advertisers don’t have a way to track them or control them. A comparison is drawn between adtech and mortgage-backed securities in the US market that led to the 2008 crash.
Similar conditions were in place when mortgage-backed securities flooded the market in the early 2000s. These financial instruments traded at prices far above their true value, because the average trader had no idea they were backed by toxic assets. Once the truth came out, the bubble burst. Hwang thinks online ads are heading in the same direction, since no one really grasps their worthlessness. There are piles of research papers in support of this idea, showing that companies’ returns on investment in digital marketing are generally anemic and often negative.
8. Bland God: Notes on Mark Zuckerberg - The Stinging Fly
Fascinating essay about Zuck from 2018.
Sometimes I fantasise about interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. I would ask him the questions Facebook began asking me from the moment I first signed up. What films have you watched? What make you happy? Add your relationship status. Add a life event.
What we know of Zuckerberg himself is hardly enough to constitute a single identity. We know him purely by his luxurious blandness, his posed photographs and his lengthy, ultimately meaningless statements about ‘community building’. We also know, if we read Kate Losse’s The Boy Kings, that Zuckerberg used to work in a glass office, in the name of radical transparency, but kept a secret private meeting room in the back.
What Zuckerberg represents, then, is a hive of connections, a cybernetic black hole which swallows up human behaviour and regurgitates it as ad revenue. He is a seer, a keeper of memories. He pressures us to share, then ostracises those who refuse. He encourages us to watch each other, the way he watches us. In 2012 Facebook even instituted a ‘snitch list’, asking users to inform on friends who might be operating profiles under fake names.
9. The Kolmogorov option - Scott Aaronson’s blog
OK, but all this leaves a question. Kolmogorov was a leading and admired Soviet scientist all through the era of Stalin’s purges, the Gulag, the KGB, the murders and disappearances and forced confessions, the show trials, the rewritings of history, the allies suddenly denounced as traitors, the tragicomedy of Lysenkoism. Anyone as intelligent, individualistic, and morally sensitive as Kolmogorov would obviously have seen through the lies of his government, and been horrified by its brutality. So then why did he utter nary a word in public against what was happening?
As far as I can tell, the answer is simply: because Kolmogorov knew better than to pick fights he couldn’t win. He judged that he could best serve the cause of truth by building up an enclosed little bubble of truth, and protecting that bubble from interference by the Soviet system, and even making the bubble useful to the system wherever he could—rather than futilely struggling to reform the system, and simply making martyrs of himself and all his students for his trouble.
10. Good Enough
Lovely reflection essay written on the last day of 2020. I can’t point to what exactly makes me like it, but I like it a lot.
The hardest thing about the lockdown has been how it looks so very similar to despression. A restless malaise where you can’t do anything, though in this case, it’s because there’s been literally nothing to do. Everything is closed or off limits due to my personal bar for safety. If I don’t get out of bed or get dressed in outdoor pants, it’s because there is (almost) nowhere to go.
I miss you in my kitchen eating waffles, and being crammed into a booth next to you at the bar and hearing you read in a bookstore and oh, there are so many ways in which I miss you. All of my choices this year have been so selfish; they are because I want to hear your band play in a dive bar and I want to go on coffee dates with strangers and I want to sleep on your living room couch when I come to visit and I want to hug you when you drop me off at the airport to fly home. I want to embarass you when I dance at your wedding and I want to slide my plate across the table to you and say, “OMG taste this, it’s amazing.”
See ya soon.–Kat.