Well, hello there. This is Vishal with yet another issue of Kat’s Kable. I’ve been going through a bit of a funk. I (kinda, not really) took some time off after my PhD defense, and it feels like a lot of things I was ignoring have caught up with me now. I am so tired physically/mentally/emotionally, but I don’t have too much to do! It’s a weird phase but, you know, it’s just a phase. Anyhow.. I’m happy to have written this issue of the newsletter today, and I hope you like it.
The LSU campus has a lot of lovely live oak trees. I took a picture of one of them:
As always, feel free to reply with whatever you’d like to say, even if it’s just to say hi. I don’t bite.
If you got this from a friend and want to subscribe, here’s the link. Also, if any of the links are paywalled and if you don’t want to pay for a subscription, try opening the link in incognito mode in your browser. This works if the website has a “soft” paywall. If that doesn’t work, you can access the website using a different browser on the same device, or use a different device altogether. Another, slightly involved, method is to try to disable JavaScript and reload the page. This works on some websites for me.
1. ‘Betiyaan’ to badasses: How the hockey team became the team we love - and the women they wanted to be - ESPN India
Nice article about the Indian women’s hockey team that did so well at this year’s Tokyo Olympics. I really enjoy reading Sharda Ugra’s writing, and she does a great job here too.
The Indian women’s hockey team must no longer be shadows of the men and their medals. Do not imagine them in your mind’s eye as small or frail. In Tokyo, they have grown larger than they have ever been, in their minds and in ours. They have climbed out of the corners of the history books, dusted off the cobwebs and said, take a good look. This is us. A team like India and the sport have never seen before.
2. Tadashi Tokieda Collects Math and Physics Surprises - Quanta Magazine
I really enjoyed this story about Tadashi Tokieda, a mathematician at Stanford University. What was most interesting is that he started off as an artist, then became a philologist (someone who studies languages), and then got into mathematics. That alone was very refreshing to me, considering that a vast majority of professional mathematicians take a linear path to get to where they get to. When asked about his “unusual” path, he says
I don’t think I’ve had an unusual life, but it would be regarded as unusual if you take the standard sort of life people are supposed to have in a certain type of society and try to fit me in it. It’s just a matter of projection, if you see what I mean. If you project on the wrong axis, something looks very complicated. Maybe according to one projection, I have an unusual past. But I don’t think so, because I was living my life day by day in my own way. I never tried to do anything weird — it just happened this way.
3. Our Experience of Grief is Unique as a Fingerprint - Lithub
Wow, this spoke to me quite a bit. I’ve been recently dealing with some grief from a few years ago that’s resurfaced. I really liked the opening paragraph of this piece by David Kessler.
Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.
4. The Rani of Thoothukudi’s salt pans - People’s Archive of Rural India
Thoothukudi is a coastal town in Tamil Nadu in the southern part of India. This is a really lovely and touching account of the hard work that goes into evaporating and crystallizing salt from the salt pans constructed adjacent to the sea. It’s excruciating, and the work is low-paying with nothing in terms of a security net.
5. N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
N.K. Jemisin is one of my favorite authors and her Broken Earth trilogy is one of my favorite works of fantasy literature ever. She doesn’t often talk to the media, so this profile was an absolute delight! This is one of the first paragraphs.
Jemisin is black, in her mid-forties, and wears her hair in dreadlocks. In her author photo, she gazes sternly at the camera, as if ready for literary combat. In person, she is much warmer, but she likes the picture. Typically, at the center of her fiction, there is a character with coiled strength. Jemisin, who has a degree in psychology, is interested in power and in systems of subjugation. In her books, the oppressed often possess an enormous capacity for agency—a supernatural ability, even, that their oppressors lack—but they exist in a society that has been engineered to hold them down. Eventually, the world is reordered, often with a cataclysm.
6. The future of electricity is local - Casey Handmer’s blog
I’d shared another article from Casey Handmer’s blog at some point on the newsletter. Here’s another which I quite like. The argument that’s made is that some particular geographies are optimal for some forms of electricity (such as Arizona in the USA for solar energy). Therefore, we should make arrangements to transmit Arizona solar power throughout the US. But the example considered (using Arizona solar to power New York) makes you realize that given rampant increases in solar productivity, at some point it will be cheaper to simply have New York power itself with its own solar (even if that means overbuilding).
7. 5 Things Photographing Spiders Taught Me About Humans - Hormeze’s website
I tend to avoid sharing listicles, but this one is pretty nice (and it has great pictures).
8. Quad Gods: The world-class gamers who play with their mouths - BBC
Absolutely wild. This is the story of the Quad Gods, an e-sports team that consists entirely of quadriplegics. It was great to read about how gaming has given members of this team a new lease on life, and also a way to build confidence and independence.
9. Theses on Techno-Optimism - Librarian Shipwreck
Techno-optimism is something I think about a lot, and also something that keeps getting talked about. Techno-optimism is, essentially, the belief that technology will always make human life better and more comfortable. Therefore, no matter what happens in the realm of politics, it is healthy to believe in the future that superior technology offers. Of course, the immediate counter to that is that technology by itself does not improve human lives; rather, it is the way it interfaces with people and societies that does. In my opinion, the most glaring example is that of combating climate change. It is one thing to trust in technological fixes (many of which exist), but a whole other thing to accurately diagnose the human attitudes and decisions that have gotten us to where we are. This is a nice piece about various aspects of techno-optimism, some of which were new to me.
10. Mycelium - Guernica Magazine
I liked this personal essay by Rachel May, and it comes with nice pictures to boot.
All of a sudden, you shout, mushroom! I think you’re mistaken, that you’re just seeing snow. I stop. I eye the lumps and mounds around us, miles of white now covering the sticks and leaves and roots. And there. There they are–a cluster of twenty or so perched on a stump, topped in snow. You’re right, I say. I swing the pack down over my side and unclip your harness; I find you a mushroom stick so you can study them. We stand there for minutes. For hours. Days. Weeks. Crouched down, brushing the snow from mushroom tops, we talk about them together–their color, their gills, their stems. We stay here forever, webbed by a time both endless and too finite. We’re both hungry and cold. I’m eager to get to the warm car. I never want to leave.
See you soon!-Kat.