Kat’s Kable #237

Hello there. Here I am, crawling into your inbox with yet another issue of Kat’s Kable. It’s been a weird few weeks for my brain, for sure, and I haven’t had a great time. But I eked out the energy to write this newsletter, and I’m glad I did. I remember telling myself a few years ago that it’s great to have many hobbies when they’re all working in sync, forming a large flywheel that keeps the momentum of my life going steadily. I think I’ve lost both some mojo and some rhythm, but I suppose I’m ready to build it up again. Anyway, that’s all some rambling. I have a list! Of articles! And I hope you like it.

As always, I love hearing from you–thoughts, greetings, bad jokes, good jokes, music recommendations, book recommendations, anything. Say hi. I’m mostly harmless.

If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser. This works if the website has a “soft” paywall. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether.

1. The Absent-Minded Father of Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener - Cantors Paradise (soft paywall on Medium)

I enjoyed this biography of sorts of Norbert Wiener. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the 20th century. Along with that, he was also one of its most eccentric characters. It started with a strict and manipulative father, which clearly scarred Wiener for life. This piece recounts in some detail Wiener’s work, which does sometimes get technical. I enjoyed it.

This is both hilarious and depressing. The parallels between a generic drug gang and the academic job market are drawn out very clearly. The low-level jobs, drug dealers or PhD students, involve most risk and least job security, and usually lower-than-par wages. There are coveted, low-risk, high-paying jobs at the top (gang leader, tenured professor) which are offered as bait to all even though there are very few of such jobs. And so on. I’m doing my PhD now, and I had the misguided notion when I began that if I did well, I’d become a professor at a university. That’s simply not true.

3. Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird Are Goals - GQ

It can be hard to appreciate progress as it’s happening, but the life King and other athletes of her generation couldn’t imagine for themselves is the one Bird and Rapinoe are living now. They’ve already set a bold new standard for athletes by unapologetically asking for (and getting) what they want and deserve at the bargaining table. But they’ll leave an equally powerful mark by merely existing together—by being gay and joyfully in love in public.

4. Harold Budd - 4 Columns

This is one of those cool things where I read this piece about musician Harold Budd just a day before a friend said I should listen to his work. And wow! I listened to some of his collaborations with Brian Eno (who is very cool also) and enjoyed it, especially when lazing in the half-light of a setting sun.

Budd conceived a unique sonic terrain, in part by eschewing what was cool at the time. While other composers pushed the bounds of “difficult” avant-garde music, Budd created gentle, lushly romantic ambient works, embracing the piano and melodious, old-fashioned instruments such as the celeste. He admired abstract painters like Mark Rothko, but also derived inspiration from the far less hip Pre-Raphaelite artists of the mid-1800s, especially the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Budd’s dreamy early breakthrough “Madrigals of the Rose Angel,” which featured a segment titled “Rossetti Noise,” was deliciously out of step with the hard-edged music of the 1970s. “It was wonderful, that image of a rose angel,” Budd told me in 2008. “Whatever a ‘rose angel’ is, I haven’t a clue, and it certainly isn’t a madrigal, but it’s a combination of words that, to me, is still magic. Absolute magic.”

(coincidentally he looks a bit like Bob Dylan in this picture)

5. How Civilization Broke Our Brains - The Atlantic (soft paywalled)

This is a pretty interesting piece about “work” as we have it in these modern times. I think it’s worth taking the time out to read. A few choice excerpts:

This bizarre need to feel busy, or to feel that time is structured, even when one is sprawled on the couch on a weekend afternoon—where does it come from? Is it inscribed in our DNA, or is it as much an invention of industrialized culture as paper clips and microchips? To answer that question, we would have to understand the texture of human life for most of our history, before civilization and workweeks edged their way into the picture. We would need a participant-observer from our era to live among hunter-gatherers and experience their relationship to work, time, and joy.
and

Imagine the 21st-century worker as accessing two modes of thinking: productivity mind and leisure mind. When we are under the sway of the former, we are time- and results-optimizing creatures, set on proving our industriousness to the world and, most of all, to ourselves. In leisure mode, the thrumming subsides, allowing us to watch a movie or finish a glass of wine without considering how our behavior might affect our reputation and performance reviews. For several hours a week, on Sunday evening, a psychological tug-of-war between these perspectives takes place. Guilt about recent lethargy kicks in as productivity mind gears up, and apprehension about workaday pressure builds as leisure mind cedes power.

6. Happiness Won’t Save You - New York Times (soft paywalled)

content warning: suicide, depression
Oh lord, this was one heavy piece. Don’t read it unless you’ve got some emotional space to spare. It’s about Philip Brickman, who was responsible for some seminal studies and surveys in psychology about the role and origin of happiness in people. A fascinating character by all accounts, brilliant academic, charismatic individual, tender and high-maintenance, and plagued by inner demons, took his own life at 38 years of age. The piece itself goes into happiness (this seems to be a sort of theme in this issue of the newsletter) in an investigative way. Is happiness the goal? Or is it commitments (Brickman’s idea)?

7. George Saunders on the Vitality of Fiction in Increasingly Turbulent Times - Inside Hook

Lovely interview.

Yes, but I think what literature helps us resist is our own habituation. The mind likes to settle into “knowing,” to go on autopilot, which is sort of the opposite of actually being alive. To be alive, or to be, you know, optimally alive, would mean being fresh and open to every moment and every person — not permanently decided about anything. I think literature puts us (artificially and briefly) into that state for a few precious minutes and thus reminds us that that state exists and is attainable.

8. The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker - Atlas Obscura

Wow, this was cool. Who would’ve thought that automatic rice cookers would be such a heated topic of commercial contention? Apparently there are many ways to make a rice cooker “automatic”, in the sense that it cuts off heat to a low level when the water reaches its boiling point–you can have a paramagnet with a suitably tuned Curie temperature, use the high latent heat of vaporization, or like this article discusses, use a bimetallic strip that cuts off electricity supply once the water gets hot enough. It’s very cool! I’ve started eating rice more often lately, and I’ve been tempted to get a rice cooker, but I like the vague alchemy and imperfection of cooking it in a closed saucepan on the stove.

9. 7 Reasons Why Video Gaming Will Take Over - Matthew Ball’s website/blog

This is a piece I read a long time ago but never got around to sharing. It puts forth a case for why video gaming will become a dominant mode of entertainment. I think Ball is a venture capitalist, and this list imbibes the confident predictions of a VC.

See ya soon. -Kat.

Kat's Kable #237