Ah hello there, reader. This is Vishal and I’m here with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I seem to be in an interesting and pleasant phase in life right now. I finished writing my PhD thesis (yay!) and it feels like a lot of the tension I was carrying has melted from my body. I’m eating well, sleeping enough, and the best part is that I have become comfortably lazy. It’s nice because my personality/self-image is very much defined by the things I do --whether it’s work or a hobby. It feels nice to simply.. be, and to not the least bit guilty about it.
Anyhow, that’s enough rambling. I’ll leave you with this week’s list. I’m noticing a subtle urge to only share things I “get”, or fully agree with. And I think I’m going to counter that by sharing things that I don’t quite get, or am fully behind.
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1. Pard and the Time Machine - Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog
At some point in the last two years I discovered that Ursula Le Guin had a blog. A blog! It is a delight. This particular post of hers isn’t “longform” by any means, but I’m still gonna share it. Pard is Le Guin’s cat.
He’s there right now, although today, the last of April, my thermometer says it’s 77 degrees and rising. He is sound asleep. About one fifth of him is right on top of the Time Machine. The rest of him, paws and so on, spills over to the desk top, partly onto a lovely soft alpaca Moebius scarf a kind reader sent me with a prescient note that said, “If you don’t need this I hope your cat will like it,” and partly on a little wool fetish-bear mat from the Southwest that a friend gave me. I never had a chance at the scarf. I opened the package at my desk. Pard came over and appropriated the scarf without a word. He dragged it a few inches away from me, lay down on it, and began to knead it, looking dreamy and purring softly, till he went to sleep. It was his scarf. The mat arrived later, and was adopted as promptly: he sat on it. The cat sat on the mat. His mat. No argument.
2. Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See - Nautilus (soft paywalled)
This is an excerpt from Peter Wohlleben’s book The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing Our Ancient Bond With Forests and Nature. The excerpt talks about how applying our animal models of pain and thought (nervous systems, brains, etc.) does not work when thinking about plants. Some plants respond to visual stimuli in counterintuitive ways. Some also produce compounds which are known to suppress pain. The logical conclusion then is: plants feel pain and some of them can see. I think the message I got from reading this is that we should not see animals and plants occupying different rungs of a hierarchy, as we currently do. Rather, they are so different that they resist comparison with each other and ought to be regarded on an even footing.
3. Returning the Gift, 2021 - Center for Humans and Nature
Lovely essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her book Braiding Sweetgrass is one of my favorite books of all time.
Knowing the beings with whom we share the world is also the pathway to recognition of the world as gift. The world seems less like a shopping bag of commodities and more like a gift when you know the one who gives you the aspirin for your headache. Her name is Willow; she lives up by the pond. She’s a neighbor to Maple, who offers you the gift of syrup on Sunday morning pancakes. Paying attention is a pathway to gratitude.
and
What should be our response to the generosity of the more-than-human world? In a world that gives us maple syrup, spotted salamanders, and sand hill cranes, shouldn’t we at least pay attention? Paying attention is an ongoing act of reciprocity, the gift that keeps on giving, in which attention generates wonder, which generates more attention—and more joy. Paying attention to the more-than-human world doesn’t lead only to amazement; it leads also to acknowledgment of pain. Open and attentive, we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds, the old growth and the clear-cut, the mountain and the mine. Paying attention to suffering sharpens our ability to respond. To be responsible.
4. The biology of dads - Aeon
This was interesting to read. I think the main point is that biological changes in mothers after birth (especially when it comes to levels of some hormones) are pretty marked. However, what are the analogous changes in dads? This piece is sort of like a recent literature review, and it’s written by someone (James K Rilling) who has also done research in this area. So I’m not sure how confident I am in their conclusions, but it is all quite interesting.
5. The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver - GQ
This is one of the most fascinating things I’ve read all year, for sure. It focuses on Alexey Molchanov, who is by far the greatest freediver in the world at the moment. Freediving is when you try to dive as deep as you can with a single breath of air. I learnt a lot of interesting things. One is that when you start to panic that you’re going to run out of oxygen, you can push through it and then realize you have a second wind (hehe I do like my puns intended) as your body decides to not send as much oxygen to your body’s extremities. It also seems like the hardest part of freediving is cultivating a catatonic mental state where you conserve energy, don’t give in to panic, and stay unperturbed. That’s why a lot of the freedivers interviewed in this piece say that not only is freediving a competitive sport, but also a way for everyone to achieve a level of mental balance and equanimity.
6. Empiricism Alone Won’t Save Us - Boston Review
This is a response to another blog post/article Economics After Neoliberalism (also in the Boston Review). I won’t pretend to fully understand everything’s that’s being talked about, but the two pieces put together seem to contain quite a few things to learn from and perhaps think about.
7. My Instagram - n+1 Magazine
This is a long personal essay. But it’s one that is quite relatable. The author, Dayna Tortorici, talks about how she moved from primarily using Twitter to primarily using Instagram. It was pretty smooth sailing at first, but at some point she starts to follow accounts of people she doesn’t know (e.g., celebrities) and that is the first step to Instagram seemingly taking over her life. I appreciate her honesty in talking about the role the app plays in her life. She talks about other things too–privacy and the lack of it, how Instagram affects the design of “in-real-life” things, advertising, body dysmorphia, among others.
8. Reconnected - Real Life Magazine
Real Life Magazine is great. Here Paris Marx talks about the impending decentralization of the internet that everyone is talking about (crypto, blockchain, web3 and so on). I’m remembering something I read somewhere lately (not in this essay) about web3 or the decentralized web, something along the lines of technological solutions not being enough to change the underlying power structures or human behavior patterns that have made the current internet a centralized place. And the author of this piece too talks about how the current decentralized internet seems to be open to co-optation. I’m really not sure what I think about it, so I’m trying to read more and form an opinion.
9. Richard Rusczyk’s Worldwide Math Camp - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
“Online, a math Olympian has found a way to nurture prodigies from around the world.”
Now fifty, Rusczyk bonds easily with math-obsessed kids because he used to be one of them. Growing up, he was fast with calculations and showed a brilliant, intuitive grasp of geometric relationships. He had a competitive streak, and won many math competitions. But, at the same time, he experienced deflating setbacks that helped dissuade him from the academic pursuit of mathematics. He loved math—it had taught him about resilience, creativity, and the joys of finding one’s tribe. Still, he faced a conundrum: If you’re a math prodigy who doesn’t want to become a mathematician, what do you do with your life?
10. A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change - Quanta Magazine
A few years ago I read this book called Grass, Soil, Hope by Courtney White. The premise of the book is that there are a variety of ways that we can sequester carbon in the soil, and make it stay there for a long time. This article, though, says that the second half of that claim is dubious at best. Getting carbon to stay in the soil for a long time is a sort of holy grail, except the problem is that a lot of climate change models assume it to be true. Scientists are finding out that no matter what form the carbon takes in the soil, microbes find a way to break it down. We therefore have to be more careful about how much we rely on carbon that’s sequestered in the soils of the planet.
Until next time.–Kat.