Well, hello there! It has been a long time since I sent out Kat’s Kable, and I’m not entirely happy with myself for taking this impromptu break. I wasn’t feeling it. It’s been a while since I’ve sat down with some tea and a list of good longform articles to read. I’m slowly getting back to that place, though, because as I was pondering on life last week, I realized that I missed curating the Kable. For a few months, I was spending a lot of time within myself, so to speak, working through some things, reading fiction and no nonfiction, and closed off to as many external stimuli as possible. I feel ready to dive in again now. So here’s a short issue, and there’ll be a full-length one this weekend. Hope you like it!
And as always, feel free to write back. I love to hear from you, and even though I am no longer very prompt with emails, I will write back (eventually).
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1. How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis (The Atlantic, soft paywalled) I enjoyed this. Alison Gopnik talks about her life falling apart. Regularly prescribed things like therapy, antidepressants, and yoga didn’t work for her, but somehow, theology and David Hume did.
2. On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk (Solarpunks (on Medium)) What a fun and mind-expanding piece to read. I’ve read a bunch of interesting things about solarpunk, but never thought that people actually thought of it as a serious thing. Well, they do, and it’s very exciting.
3. A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize (The Spectator, soft paywalled)
4. These Precious Days, By Ann Patchett (Harper’s Magazine) Ah please please read this precious piece by Ann Patchett about a pandemic, a new friendship, about giving and taking, and also about Tom Hanks and magic mushrooms.
5. To All the Friends Whose Work I Will Never Read (Still Drinking)
6. Life Lessons from a 97-Year-Old Lobsterman (Outside Online) Loved this.
“It’s all in here,” John says, pointing a yellow-gloved hand to his head, which, after 97 years, is still covered by a respectable amount of gray hair. “I been over this bottom so many times, it’s imprinted.”
7. A Look Into The Wild Economy Of Tabletop Board Game Funding (NPR)
8. Farms Can’t Save the Planet (The New Republic, soft paywalled) Good piece about how paying (big) farmers to sequester carbon in their soil isn’t as good a deal as it sounds.
The magical idea that America’s farmland could become a planet-saving carbon repository has enchanted the country: In theory, farmers could get paid to capture carbon in their soil—something that healthy soil does naturally, and if farmers changed some of their practices, like planting cover crops and reducing tillage, could be accomplished at a much higher rate. […] It’s a perfect Band-Aid for those who don’t want serious emissions-curbing legislation and a prime staging area for corporate greenwashing. The problem is that it’s not clear it works. What is clear is that the agricultural carbon sequestration dream serves as a fig leaf for increasingly consolidated agribusiness—and the urgent reforms needed both for curbing emissions and rethinking American agriculture.
9. What Is an Individual? Biology Seeks Clues in Information Theory. (Quanta Magazine) As someone who does research in quantum information theory, I found this very interesting, and cool. It’s quite a sticky problem to identify “units” of life. In other words, when does one organism end and when does the other begin?
Cya! -Kat.