Hi hi. I’m Vishal and here’s another issue of Kat’s Kable. My brain has been in a weird place, and I’ve also been very busy with work, so please excuse the wacky schedule (or lack of it) that the Kable has been on lately. How are you doing? I recently bought a new fountain pen (a new Pilot Metropolitan, which I love) and have been using with a new ink called Diamine Earl Grey. It’s been a joy and is serving as a reminder of how good tools make work fun. Speaking of tools, I also got a new forged chef’s knife recently (nothing fancy by pro standards) which has made kitchen prepwork a breeze. Watching people make and review knives on YouTube has become one of my hobbies. Anyhow, that’s all I have to say here for now, do enjoy this list of longform articles from the internet.
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1. What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? - The Baffler
This is a great essay from David Graeber, back from 2014. I read it for the first time a while ago, and will probably keep going back to it once every few months. He writes and asks about why animals play at all–given that evolution works by survival of the fittest, playing seems wasteful.
Why do animals play? Well, why shouldn’t they? The real question is: Why does the existence of action carried out for the sheer pleasure of acting, the exertion of powers for the sheer pleasure of exerting them, strike us as mysterious? What does it tell us about ourselves that we instinctively assume that it is?
I also liked this comment on physicists:
Physicists are more playful and less hidebound creatures than, say, biologists—partly, no doubt, because they rarely have to contend with religious fundamentalists challenging the laws of physics. They are the poets of the scientific world. If one is already willing to embrace thirteen-dimensional objects or an endless number of alternative universes, or to casually suggest that 95 percent of the universe is made up of dark matter and energy about whose properties we know nothing, it’s perhaps not too much of a leap to also contemplate the possibility that subatomic particles have “free will” or even experiences.
2. Neofeudalism and the Digital Manor - Locus Magazine
I’ve shared Cory Doctorow’s writing earlier, and here’s another recent piece from him about what he called neofeudalism: the way that we rely on the benevolence of large corporations for much of our internet experience and privacy.
After all, the thing that gives tech companies the power to overrule your choices on your computers and devices is that they’re not really yours. Thanks to onerous licensing terms and bizarre retrofits to copyright and patent law, the only entities who can truly be said to “own” anything are aristocratic corporations, who may have to capitulate to the king, but owe no fealty to us, the peasants.
and
Having attained walled manors of their own, these merchant-warlords are determined to ensure that no one does to them what they did to their toppled forbears.
That aristocratic urge is why we see lock-in, kill-switches, overcollection and overretention of data, and the invocation of state power to silence critics. As with feudal aristocrats, the state is happy to lend these warlords their legitimacy, in exchange for the power to militarize the aristocrat’s holdings.
3. Is Substack the Media Future We Want? - New Yorker (soft paywalled) and [Can Substack CEO Chris Best build a new model for journalism?](https:
//www.theverge.com/22159571/substack-ceo-chris-best-interview-newsletter-subscription-model-journalism-decoder-podcast) - Verge
Two good, well-done pieces about Substack, the newsletter platform that almost everyone is on these days. What’s really interesting is that things seem to have gone full circle–people left mainstream, conventional media houses to be independent on Substack, but now Substack itself is becoming like a conventional media house. I’ve never worked in journalism, so I don’t know the nuances of what’s going on, but it seems to me that giving opinionated writers a free reign without editing or fact-checking is suboptimal. The second link, an interview with Substack’s CEO, is pretty insightful because of its in-depth nature.
4. How Algorithms Are Changing What We Read Online - The Walrus
Nice follow-up to the previous articles. This is by Russell Smith, who wrote an art-and-culture column for the Canadian Globe and Mail for many years.
That idea of engagement, however, made my heart race. It wasn’t at all what connecting with readers used to mean to me. If my ideas were being discussed in academic papers, if I was giving bloggers strokes, if I was annoying the powers that be at Heritage Canada or in the upper floors of the CBC, that, to me, was engagement. That was how I measured my influence on the culture. But one thing that Sophi does not weight differently is readers. All readers are effectively the same: a click is a click, whether it comes from your mouse or from Margaret Atwood’s. So Sophi cannot measure engagement in my twentieth-century sense.
5. How rural schooling is going into the dark - Mint
This breaks my heart. Covid has accelerated online and digital learning, and in India (and in every other country) this has just sharpened the divide between urban and rural, as well as well-off and poor. It’s an age-old story at this point.
6. Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? - Debugger (publication on Medium, soft paywalled)
Very nerdy essay about why Apple’s new integrated M1 chip is so fast. The answer is not straightforward or simple, because it involves a number of changes. I’m still not sure I understand completely, but this post did help quite a bit.
7. Gene Wolfe Turned Science Fiction Into High Art - The Ringer
I’ve not yet read any of Gene Wolfe’s work, but this was a really nice bio of him. He had such a story. In his day job before becoming a full-time writer, he developed the industrial process that cooked Pringles chips.
For decades people will say it’s strange that a book this visionary and bizarre was written by someone with Gene’s background. But what does that mean, since The Book of the New Sun is a work virtually without precedent? If Henri Bergson and St. Augustine had collaboratively edited a 1930s issue of Weird Tales, this is the text they might have produced. It’s strange that it was written by anyone. That it was written by the guy who figured out how to cook Pringles is no more startling than any other possibility.
8. The Last Children of Down Syndrome - The Atlantic (soft paywalled)
Yikes. What a story. Prenatal screening of babies gives parents the opportunity to decide whether or not to carry a child to term if there is a high chance of the occurrence of Down Syndrome. “Suddenly, a new power was thrust into the hands of ordinary people—the power to decide what kind of life is worth bringing into the world.”
The medical field has also been grappling with its ability to offer this power. “If no one with Down syndrome had ever existed or ever would exist—is that a terrible thing? I don’t know,” says Laura Hercher, a genetic counselor and the director of student research at Sarah Lawrence College. If you take the health complications linked to Down syndrome, such as increased likelihood of early-onset Alzheimer’s, leukemia, and heart defects, she told me, “I don’t think anyone would argue that those are good things.”
But she went on. “If our world didn’t have people with special needs and these vulnerabilities,” she asked, “would we be missing a part of our humanity?”
9. How to Do What You Love - Paul Graham’s website
I came across this 2006 essay by Paul Graham because it was mentioned on Brain Pickings. It’s really good, and it’s written in this dispassionate and calculative tone that I enjoy and relate to.