Well, hello there, friend. I’m writing this on a Sunday night, not exactly looking forward to the week ahead, but also happy that a few work things are going to be wrapped up in the next couple of days. There’s a paper we need to submit to a journal, and another one we need to revise and resubmit. Neither of those are big tasks in themselves, but remembering them and letting them occupy a corner in your head can really permeate into and dull the rest of your thoughts. I bought a bag of overripe peaches at the farmers market and spent an hour today freezing some of the better ones and making juice from the ones that were too far gone. I learnt that you can peel peaches easily by blanching them for a minute. Amazing, and makes me realize how useful a culinary process blanching is. One thing that’s stuck with me for a while is a part from Thom Eagle’s book First, Catch : he says that blanching (make white) literally is the opposite of how it is used culinarily (to preserve color, especially of greens). Words are strange, and we make and use them in curious and delightful ways.
Well, I got a bit whimsical there. Bit of an experiment, I think. I had a few mellow months inside of my head, but the inner dialogue has woken up again and is getting cheery. I might get chatty. Here’s this week issue. I’ve gotten back into the routine of reading far more than ten pieces a week, so I can exercise a good level of discretion while curating. It takes a lot of pressure off! And also reminds me that I can read so much–I lost that mojo for a while, and to be honest, it was scary.
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1. The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know - Fast Company
This is an interesting piece from 2003 that I came across recently. It’s about how Wal-Mart/Walmart is super ruthless with its suppliers and how a contract with Walmart can change the entire course of a company. Case in point: Huffy bicycles, when it got a contract with Walmart for an entry-level bicycle, basically relinquished its higher-end bicycles to competing companies. Walmart (at the time of writing) was then integral to Huffy’s survival. You get the sense that Walmart’s ruthlessness raised the bar in terms of efficient manufacturing and supply chains. At the same time, though, Walmart expects a year-on-year decrease in prices, which led to Huffy not manufacturing bikes in the US anymore after a few years. So, yes, efficiency, but it’s more complicated than that.
2. How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? - Low Tech Magazine
Ahhhh, I really love Low-Tech Magazine’s deep dives into almost archaic topics. However, in this case, they make a good case for the return of sailing ships. Sailing ships are great for the environment, but also very hard to build considering modern standards of safety and comfort. There’s only a few companies and shipyards now who are investing in new sailing ships, but they’re doing some interesting work.
3. The Romance of Running - Gestalten
Despite the countless feats, marathons, and milestones that serious runners chase all over the world, the sport mostly resonates with people because of its accessibility and mental qualities. It is a form of exercise where you set your pace, setting, and goals. It allows you to momentarily dissolve into your thoughts and to connect with nature or the cityscape.
4. How to Live With Dying - The American Scholar
Weirdly enough, this is a piece that goes well with the previous one. The author, John Kaag, talks about his relationship with running and how he used it to plug the multitude of gaps in his life. In the end, he almost ran himself to death while running on a treadmill despite his body telling him not to. This seems to be a bit of a personal statement for me: these days, I feel tired and know my body desires rest, but I go run anyway. The weather sucks, but something in my head says that I should run to feel good. It’s taken some mental tussles to tell myself: it’s OK to run only when I feel up to it.
In snow and sleet, in wind and heat, I ran. I prioritized my training regimen above all else—my professional life, my relationships, and ultimately myself. “Can you take a day off?” my first wife used to ask. No. “Can I run with you?” she’d ask. No. “Can you slow down?” No. My obsession was masked under the cover of “good health,” but most of my friends saw through the thin veneer. What lies beneath the surface of the lung-gom-pa? Narcissism, masochism, perfectionism? I began to schedule my weeks around my runs. When I finished a run, I immediately began to plan for the next one. When I got up in the middle of the night—one of the byproducts of overtraining is sleeplessness—I’d think about how to fit in extra miles.
5. Is It Better to Plant Trees or Let Forests Regrow Naturally? - Wired (soft paywall)
Nobody condemns trees. But some critics argue that an aggressive drive to achieve planting targets will provide environmental cover for land grabs to blanket hundreds of millions of acres with monoculture plantations of a handful of fast-growing and often nonnative commercial species such as acacia, eucalyptus, and pine. Others ask: Why plant at all, when we can often simply leave the land for nearby forests to seed and recolonize? Nature knows what to grow and does it best.
and
The great thing about natural restoration of forests is that it often requires nothing more than human inaction. Nature is constantly at work restoring forests piecemeal and often unseen on the edges of fields, on abandoned pastures, in scrubby bush, and wherever forests lie degraded or former forest land is abandoned.
But because it requires no policy initiatives, investments, or oversight, data on its extent is badly lacking. Satellites such as Landsat are good at identifying deforestation, which is sudden and visible; but the extent of subsequent recovery is slower, harder to spot, and rarely assessed. Headline grabbing statistics on the loss of the world’s forests generally ignore it.
6. How I Became the Honest Broker - Ted Gioia’s Substack
I recently (partially) read Ted Gioia’s book Music: A Subversive History and loved the way he wrote. It’s been fun to follow his Substack also, even though I’m just on the free tier. Here he talks more personally, about his past career, and the value of being an “honest broker” and how he learnt about that. He then talks about how he sees himself as an “honest broker” of music, and more generally, of culture. From his newsletter, book, and Twitter feed, I think he’s doing a good job of that.
Then I reached the most abject level in this whole process of self-abasement. I started worrying about whether the reader would actually enjoy the music I was recommending.
This was a whole new consideration, one that had never dawned on me before. And I could tell by consulting various cutting edge critics, that this issue hadn’t got on their radar screens either. They didn’t give a rat’s ass for the reader’s musical pleasure. Or, if they did, they made sure to hide it at every pass. I started reading music reviews just looking for the words: enjoyment, pleasure, delight. They had gone missing in action. Why didn’t anyone talk about them? Shouldn’t enjoyment be a make-or-break part of the deal? Yes, a critic expands the readers’ horizons, informs and educates, but also guide them to pleasure. After all, wasn’t that why I listened to music? Wasn’t that what brought me to my vocation in the first place?
7. The new mind control - Aeon
The funny thing about this piece was that I was just talking about what it talks about (subthreshold effects that we can’t detect but affect us) with a friend a day before I read it. I was telling my friend about patterns engineered in the world around us that shape our behavior in certain ways. This essay goes into specifics of how online forums and social media can steer the behavior of society as a whole, especially elections. The essay is written by Robert Epstein, who has done some research on this, and he talks about the details of his experiments and their results. I took them with a grain of salt, but the general idea of social media and the internet shaping people’s thoughts is undeniable in today’s world.
8. Notes on Craft - Granta
Lovely essay by Jonathan Lee about opening lines of novels.
Often the visitor turns around and walks away; the first line is frequently the only line a reader reads. If that opening sentence tries too hard, or holds no special friction, the book slips from its holder’s hands – back onto the table, or the shelf, ready to be replaced with a magazine, or a snack, or a screaming child. Knowing this fact makes an opening sentence extremely difficult to write. It is like the shirt you will wear to the most important first date of your life – except the date could be with anyone, and you have no way of guessing at their taste, and you have to choose between all the imaginable shirts on earth.
9. The Black Void of the Moon - The Awl
This was an interesting and short personal essay, back from 2014. Maria Bustillos talks about growing up, loneliness, and the existential angst of discovering the things that are wrong with the world. She ends on an optimistic note:
We don’t know whether the engine down there will ignite, as we speed through the void: we don’t and we won’t. The matter is out of our hands. It seems there’s no way out. And there’s not.
It depends how one is constituted, but the various balms we have, of music, love, philosophy, religion, friendship, literature and art, of all the kinds of understanding we can hope for or try to have, might serve to bring us all to the other side again. Surely one should be ready to come back into the light. Just in case.
10. Collision - Fifty Two
Aha! Another feature from Fifty Two. It’s about a terrifying air travel accident, so skip it if that’s not your thing. Even though it only happened in 1996, I don’t think I’d heard about this incident until I read this article about it. It’s terrifying to read, and brings back memories of watching Air Crash Investigation on NatGeo when I was a kid.
See you next time!-Kat.