Hello there, reader. This is Vishal and here’s another issue of Kat’s Kable. It’s been a busy and simultaneously low-tempo week for me, and I don’t think that makes sense, but that’s the way it feels. I didn’t have the time or energy this weekend to write the full-fledged newsletter, but I wanted to send it out nonetheless, and here we are with one of those abbreviated versions that take almost the same time to write as usual, but merely seem easier. Gotta go now, so see you later.

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1. Speaking River, Speaking Rain (Vikalp Sangam)–really lovely piece about ways of language especially in Indigenous cultures.

And I am also interested in the power of words in a magical sense, if one may put it that way, partly defining magic as the capacity to enter new realms of perception, to open other worlds, expand our emotional, sensual, and intellectual realms. To think of it – words for us span the height of the sky, depth of the ocean. So many processes, phenomenon which are real, but which can never be experienced in a certain way, language helps the mind extrapolate and bring almost into our corporeal reality.

2. The Father of Modern Metal (Nautilus, soft paywalled)–A bio of Harry Brearley, who while not being the inventor of stainless steel, was its staunchest evangelist.

3. Black Death, COVID, and Why We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (Ex Urbe, Ada Palmer’s blog)–really long blog post about why the Renaissance wasn’t the glorious time that we think it was, and how that should inform opinions going along the lines of, “The Covid-19 pandemic will create a renaissance in the world.”. Ada Palmer is a historian and also an excellent author.

4. The curious tale of the football international nobody ever heard of (because he was born in the wrong month) (The Correspondent)–the story of a footballer Jamie Lawrence, who if born 9 days earlier, could’ve been a footballing superstar. Instead, he competed with boys months older than him when qualifying for age-restricted football teams, and hence has had a bit of a stunted football career.

5. Insulation: first the body, then the home (Low Tech Magazine)–when living in a cold climate, it’s often more beneficial (in terms of energy use) to wear more layers of clothing than to keep your home at a higher temperature.

6. Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet (MIT Tech Review, soft paywalled)

7. How Friendships Change When You Become an Adult (The Atlantic, soft paywalled)

Perhaps friends are more willing to forgive long lapses in communication because they’re feeling life’s velocity acutely too. It’s sad, sure, that we stop relying on our friends as much when we grow up, but it allows for a different kind of relationship, based on a mutual understanding of each other’s human limitations. It’s not ideal, but it’s real, as Rawlins might say. Friendship is a relationship with no strings attached except the ones you choose to tie, one that’s just about being there, as best as you can.

8. The Crow Whisperer (Harpers Magazine)–A bit of a quaint and charming piece by Laura Markham about “communicating” with crows and other birds.

9. Meet the Woman Teaching the Psychology of Survival (Outside Online)–“Wilderness pros are trained to deal with physical injuries, but what about the psychological trauma that can result while on an expedition, from fear and stress, or from watching someone die in a fall, an avalanche, or whitewater? Australian psychologist and mountaineer Kate Baecher created a training program to equip guides and athletes with a tool kit to handle the worst mental distress we encounter when we’re far from help.”

10. Why Can’t We Be Friends (Real Life Magazine)–Really fascinating piece about a salient feature of the internet, i.e. parasocial relationships. A parasocial relationship is “almost” social, or even “perversely” social and comes about most often on the internet in fandoms (whether for people, shows, movies, etc.).

This isn’t the democratic paradise that social media once seemed to promise, an open-ended and unpredictable set of conversations among peers who would grow through free debate. Instead it has turned out to be more like looking through a window at a group of friends having a conversation, who can’t hear you as you laugh along with their jokes. In this sense, the prevalence of parasocial media reveals the disappointing parasocial interaction at heart of the internet more broadly. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook tend to flatten interactions with even our friends to parasociality: We scroll through all these images of the people we know doing stuff while we are idling or waiting or sitting alone, not doing stuff.