Hello, reader. I’m Kat and here’s a slightly tardy issue of Kat’s Kable. However, we don’t care about schedules anymore and so who cares if this is a mid-week issue. I’ve been a bit unfocused today so the issue is freewheeling. Hope you don’t mind the rambling text. Hope you’re having a nice week. Cya!
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1. Inside India’s booming dark data economy - Rest of World
This was sobering. I knew that all kinds of data can be bought in wholesale dumps, but it’s disconcerting to read about it spelled out in gory detail. I personally think that the rapid advent of digital tech and services (around the world) has come at the cost of eroded privacy of all users.
All of this exists in a legal gray area. As of now, there are no laws in India regulating the selling or purchasing of so-called stalkerware. Nor is there much clarity about the privacy laws currently on the books. In India, it is not illegal to physically surveil a target, for instance, but things get fuzzier when it comes to tracking somebody’s location via mobile phone. Courts have been forced to establish statutes, case by case. In 2018, for instance, a family court in Delhi admitted evidence collected from spyware in a case concerning a marital dispute, stating that the right to a fair trial outweighed privacy protections.
2. The Wanderer - The New Yorker
This is a piece from 1999 about Bob Dylan. I really enjoy reading about Dylan, mostly because I like his music and I find him an iconic character. It’s also interesting to read these point-of-view pieces about him, because you get to see how (both in quantity and manner) invested the author is. A lovely passage that involves one of my favorite Dylan songs:
But from the outset Dylan established an intimacy with the audience: the music did the emotional work for him. The current version of “Tangled Up in Blue” begins, like the original one on “Blood on the Tracks,” with chiming major chords, but the onstage Dylan soon slips into a different scale—into the blues. Dismantling and rebuilding his own song, piece by piece, he bends notes down, inverts the melody, spreads out the pitches of the chords, leans on a single note while the chords change around it, stresses the offbeats, lays triple rhythms on double ones. As the rest of the band holds on to straitlaced harmony and a one-two beat, the song tenses up: opposing scales meet in bittersweet clashes, opposing pulses overlap in a danceable bounce. At some point, the classic radio staple becomes a new animal. By the end, Dylan may be speaking right at you, but you’re probably too caught up in the music to notice.
3. Becoming a magician - Autotranslucence
Autotranslucence is one of my favorite blogs to follow and read. I don’t usually resonate with the writing but sometimes I find wonderful things. And this is one of them. The author talks about becoming a “magician”: someone who is so highly competent at what they do that their actions seem magical, similar to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.).
One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. […] The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick I described above is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.
and
Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems. This will start to change your worldview without the controlling ‘you’ explicitly approving or denying every new belief or framework. Magicians or their work often seem to have a subconscious glow that I am drawn to, particularly if they use a type of magic that I recognise is on my critical path and thus something I’m currently seeking.
4. What magic teaches us about misinformation - Tim Harford
Well, this piece is not quite about the same magic as the previous one, but it still pleases me to put them together.
There is truth in both these explanations. But is there a third account of how we think about the claims we see in the news and on social media — an account that, ironically, has received far too little attention? That account centres on attention itself: it suggests that we fail to distinguish truth from lies not because we can’t and not because we won’t, but because — as with Robbins’s waistcoat — we are simply not giving the matter our focus.
5. These scientists spent decades pushing NASA to go back to Venus. Now they’re on a hot streak. - Popular Science
I was drawn to this article because of its title alone. It starts with lamenting how little we’ve studied Venus as compared to Mars. In many senses, Venus is more “Earth-like” than Mars. However, two projects have recently been approved by NASA to send probes to Venus to study its atmosphere as well as satellite-image it. What tickles me is that both of these projects are termed “small” and yet their grants are each worth ~$500 million.
6. If We Can Soar - Pipe Wrench Magazine
Wow, this was great. Firstly, I knew pigeons could fly, but I didn’t know that certain pigeons could be made to do tricks. Secondly, I am pleasantly surprised at the role they played in bringing together and calming a group of men in Los Angeles.
When asked why they became interested in pigeons, many of the South Central men link their interest in the birds to the adrenaline rush of seeing the birds’ acrobatics, a thrill similar to watching a fast car or motorcycle, or to the perceived instinctive gravitation of children to animals. It’s an accessible and seemingly natural connection — boys, fast-moving objects, wildlife. But there’s a deeper story behind what the birds offered them then and still offer today, with men entering their fifth and sixth decade raising Birmingham Rollers. A why shaped by race, place, and gender. A why that traces the plight of Black men in the U.S., landing us squarely in the prevailing systems of inequality that still exist today.
7. Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend - Grantland
More feature writing from years and years ago. This is from 2012, and it’s about another of my loves: tennis. The piece is mostly about Nadal, but it’s got some lovely writing. Take, for instance,
How must it feel to be Rafa Nadal today? The cruelest thing about this glutted golden age of men’s tennis is that it keeps producing astonishing matches, matches that actually expand your idea of what sport can be, and someone has to lose all of them.We’ve seen Roger Federer, probably the most effortlessly brilliant tennis player who ever lived, shattered and weeping on the court after losses that seemed to groan up from the Old Testament.
and
Of course, the terrible thing about tennis, as opposed to mere epic warfare, is that you have to do it again next week. Ultimately, I think what’s clued me in to Nadal’s greatness is that, ever since Djokovic’s rise, he plays this way and still loses. Our sports culture may value winning over everything, but there’s nothing more epic than tragic defeat. […] No one in sports is more imperially second than Nadal right now.
You know someone is writing passionately when they use these this much italicized text.
8. An Unbroken Grace - Notre Dame Magazine
A lovely ode to Barry Lopez, late nature writer. I’m inspired to read his work after reading this. It’s wonderful to see someone write so warmly and gracefully about someone else. This, particularly, struck me. The author, Fred Bahnson, asked Lopez what it would be like for a wolf to look at a human, to which the reply was,
“I would say it’s an encounter between the two sides of a lopsided divorce,” Barry said. “It’s a breach, you know. If you can imagine a divorce in which only one member of the dyad — modern humanity — made the decision to create a breach and then enforced it, you can begin to understand what the growing malaise in human culture is about. It occurs to humanity that it has lost its spouse.”
9. Do Hippos Count as Dragons: An Examination of Identity and Taxonomy - Tor
I sent this article to a friend, who replied with, “this is an existential essay with a cutesy headline. a trap!”. Be warned, reader, it is indeed a bit of an existential trip, but well worth it in my opinion. It’s about labels and classification (something we’ve become experts at on the internet) and why sometimes it’s better to be inclusive in the way we define labels and assign them to people.
I am not saying that asking if a hippo counts as a dragon is the same thing as searching for unconditional love and understanding from the people around us. I’m just saying that this is why it’s attractive to ask these questions of each other, these questions about hippos and dragons. We can be like kids in bumper cars, choosing wilful misunderstanding without really hurting each other, taking strong stances that ultimately mean nothing, pretending to come to cosmically important realizations and then returning to lives where nothing is changed.