Hello, hello. It’s a busy Tuesday morning here and I have to run (literally) and then run to a meeting. There’s not all that much I have to say this week. So anyhow, hope you enjoy this issue and as always, write back if you want to say hi, or anything at all. I love hearing from you.
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1. Wimbledon: Where Women Wait - Longreads/Racquet Magazine
This is a 2019 longform piece by Ben Rothenberg about the unfair treatment meted to women at Wimbledon, one of the four premier tennis tournaments held each year. For instance, only in 2019 did Wimbledon pay the same amount of prize money to men and women. This essay goes into some of the history of gender equality (or rather, the lack of it) in professional tennis, and also highlights some of the major fighters for equality. To be clear, things have gotten a lot better compared to a few decades ago, but still some schisms remain.
2. Let’s Grow Some Things - Defector
I enjoy growing plants and food. This is a nice and feel-goody piece about gardening and growing things even if you may be a total beginner. It emphasizes that for a home gardener or dabbler, most of the joy is in the act of gardening rather than in the output you get. That’s something I’ve learnt in the past few years too–growing the maximum amount of food possible would not make me as happy as my current, more intuitive, approach.
It is easy to reach the bleakest depths; even with the pandemic seemingly in retreat, there is a great deal of cruelty and inhumanity out there to find. What I am suggesting, then, when I encourage you to grow something, is to seek out the opposite of all that. Indulge the things that make your brain feel fuzzy, that release the good chemicals. It’s important to find things like these, and cultivate and revel in them. If you don’t, before you know it, you’ll be out of time.
3. AI’s Google Colored Glasses - Alexander Dante Camuto on Medium
This was very interesting for me to read as I am not really in tune with what’s going on in artificial intelligence (AI) research these days. Camuto starts by discussing the famous AlphaFold algorithm developed by Google to make progress on the hard problem of protein folding. The point being made later is that even though this is a good achievement, the lack of government funding and involvement in AI research is more telling.
The benefits of the inter-relationship of academia and industry have been the subject of debate for decades. When companies have an outsize influence on funding and ascertain what is worthy of research as determined by commercial interests, the thematic diversity of research narrows considerably. This reduction in research diversity has been measured recently for A.I. as an excessive focus on deep-learning (algorithms that use neural networks). Other forms of A.I., such as Bayesian methods, which work for smaller amounts of data and are less commercially viable for tech companies, have fallen to the wayside.
This narrowing has crept up on the field unnoticed because A.I. researchers have conflated academic research and corporate research for years. Corporate research is geared towards developing methods that will be profitable in the near term. In contrast, the aim of academic research is often exploratory, and less concentrated on a single domain. The fact that many academic researchers are under the pay of Big Tech companies means that they are not truly free to pursue exploratory research.
4. Would you please please please please please please please stop talking? - Believer Magazine
This is a 2020 piece by Wyatt Williams where he talks about the abortions women have and how uninvolved the men who caused them are. I found it quite eye-opening, and sobering too.
5. The Obsession with “Getting Ahead” in Your Twenties Is Failing Young People - Catapult
This is actually a pretty optimistic essay in my opinion. It’s something I’ve thought about a lot–I’ve been told, by various people and systems, that there’s certain things to do by a certain time, that it wouldn’t do to fall behind in life, and so on. It’s honestly been quite great to slowly shake off some of that ambition (which wasn’t mine to begin with) and competition. I related with quite a bit of this essay.
Who am I even trying to get ahead of? What am I trying to stay on track for? I wondered, thinking about the constellation of tips on getting ahead at work, ahead on meal prepping, ahead on studying, ahead of the week, ahead of the traffic, ahead of whatever was going to show up on Instagram, that orbited around every area of life.
and
I have worked to rethink my milestones; I have wondered if they can help shape me but not define me, if they can exist within me instead of beyond me and only in relation to someone else. And when I get stopped now in the grocery store and asked what I’m doing these days, what’s next for me, I think of the five year plans I scrapped and milestones I’ve missed and everything that’s supposed to tell me I’m on track for what my life should be. I think of how lucky I am that, for once, nothing I truly want can be measured or logged as behind or ahead. And I wonder if that means I’ve finally “caught up” to me.
6. 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - Kevin Kelly’s website
Gosh, I’m surprised at myself for starting to share lists of advice on the Kable. I shared Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life a few weeks ago, and this here is another list by Kevin Kelly. I’d come across it some time ago, and was struck by the sheer list-iness of it. A list of short and sometimes pithy pieces of advice, much of which is not pretentious.
7. By Ponnuthai’s Side - The White Review
A photo-essay by Jaisingh Nageswaran whose photos were taken during the 2020 lockdown in his hometown of Vadipatti in the state of Tamil Nadu. The pictures are lovely and as the essay notes, “Jaisingh’s photos are full of sounds.”.
8. Wild Beasts - London Review of Books
This is another nice piece about rewilding in Scotland. Rewilding is a good thing, but it can be made even better if it involves the entire community rather than just the rich landowners. In some sense, the socioeconomic context of landlords and peasants remains.
Is this rewilding? Not exactly. But what rewilding means is always a matter of local interpretation. There is no stable meaning because wildness itself is unfixed. It’s a way of seeing that emphasises certain attributes, sometimes at the cost of obscuring the long history of human involvement in the landscape. This isn’t a popular view: it can seem obtuse or obstructive to say that I don’t much like ‘wildness’ when in fact I’m an advocate for the ecological restoration it’s usually taken to mean. But time may have run out for this kind of philosophising: atmospheric CO2 is at 420 ppm; rewilding has slipped under the fence and is out there, flourishing in the world.
9. Beyond Hope - Orion Magazine
Ah. This essay by Derrick Jensen resonated with me quite a bit. He talks about the concept and feeling of hope when it comes to the climate crisis, his main point being that hope “is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”
When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.
I think that it’s not all that black-and-white (in the sense that hope is not necessarily a bad thing), but this is something I think about often. When we, collectively, can do something, then we need not be desperate enough to latch on to hope alone. Also, as an aside, I was browsing through old special editions and the one I’d done before the cats one last week was issue 145, a climate special back in 2018. I read it and was quite surprised to see how bitter and angry I was when writing it. I feel like I’ve mellowed out a bit in that regard. Still upset, but it’s not taking up all the space?
10. “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee” - Essay by Honoré de Balzac
This is one of the wackiest things you might read.
Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. […] sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink-for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.
See ya soon.-Kat.