Hello hello, this is Vishal in your inbox with another issue of Kat’s Kable. Not a whole lot to say this week, except enjoy this list of things to read and have a nice Sunday and week ahead.
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. Reflections on the Sands of Dune (2021) - Bret Devereaux’s blog
Bret Devereaux (famous to me for his in-depth reviews of the major battles in the Lord of the Rings movies) writes a (spoiler-filled) review of the Dune movie from last year. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie, as it seemed like a movie made for people who’ve read the books. I also enjoyed this review, which picks out a lot of cool and small things that I missed when I watched the movie.
2. Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet - Protocol
This is a nice article about read-later apps, mostly about new ones that are changing things up. I use two old favorites–Pocket and Instapaper. Read-later apps are indispensable for me, not least because I need them to read and organize the articles for Kat’s Kable. I am curious to try out some of the newer ones now. The end of this article:
The internet, as a reading experience, is still mostly terrible. But there’s finally competition to make reading the internet more social, more pleasant and more powerful. Apps are beginning to understand the stuff you read as well as you do, or maybe even better. The race to be “the Spotify of reading” is already on.
3. Source Code - Fifty Two
Fifty Two’s features are all good and worth reading. This is one of the last ones they shared in their first season, and it’s about both the history and rise of the Indian IT industry, and in particular about the IT industry giant Infosys. The interesting thing I learnt from this article is that the liberalization of India’s economy in the early 1990s was not the sole cause for the meteoric rise of the IT industry. Rather, much of the credit also goes to a number of quiet and subtle changes starting from the 80s.
4. Chasing Massaman - Whetstone Magazine
Massaman is a Thai dish which is now globally popular. It’s not exactly “traditional” when it comes to Thai cuisine, or at least that’s my impression of it. However, it has a rich history which is also intermingled with the history and identity of Thai Muslims. In Thailand itself, Massaman is generally considered to be a foreign food and hence is more popular outside the country than inside it. What blew my mind is that the name “massaman” comes from the Thai pronunciation of “Islam”.
5. Inside the Booker Prize: arguments, agonies and carefully encouraged scandals - The Guardian
Well, this was quite entertaining. The Booker Prize is one of the bigger prizes worldwide in English literature, and before reading this, I didn’t have much of an idea of how it worked outside of there being a panel of judges, a longlist and then a shortlist. Turns out there is a whole host of intricacies behind the scenes, which is not that surprising, to be honest.
Before the shortlisting and the final meeting, the judges read the remaining books again. Wood calls it “a stress test”. “It’s a crazy process, but it’s also one way of telling what’s going to last. They are looking for a book that basically rewards rereading. By the winner meeting, they’ve read them at least three times.” This repetition is why “comedy and crime never win”, said 2013 judge Stuart Kelly. “Tell me any joke that’s funny on the third reading. With crime, on the second reading you might be drawn into, say, the social background of the book. But on the third?” There are books, Day told me, “that can collapse on the second reading”. On the third, said Nick Barley, they might “curdle”.
6. What If We Were Optimistic about Climate Change? - That Damn Optimist (a Substack newsletter)
I’ve been looking for pieces like this because, to be honest, I’m tired of being anxious all the time about climate change. Instead of seeing it purely as a disaster or crisis, I’d also like to incorporate hope, action and optimism in my view of our mitigation effort (which, as of now, isn’t enough, but it’s picking up speed). What this newsletter issue does well is distinguish between two types of optimism: blind optimism and conditional optimism. The first is dangerous because it doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the situation, but the second is good because it opens up the possibility of us being able to do certain things conditioned on us having the right tools (which we do, to an extent).
7. The Great Beyond - Real Life Magazine
This essay talks about an interesting aspect of social media that is going to get more and more prevalent as time goes on. It’s about what happens with, or to, the profiles of people who have passed away. For example, on Facebook, an account can be made “memorialized”, which means that nobody can log in to the account again, but the profile becomes a sort of virtual memorial space. It seems pretty nice, all things considered. The essay goes into a number of more details and specifics, and if not anything else, made me think a bit more about this whole thing.
8. The ‘note’ economy - Himal Magazine
This is an essay from 2020 about the “note”, which refers to a block of text you had to learn by rote and regurgitate in an exam.
The quest for the perfect ‘note’ reversed the normal chronology of learning. The note would not be made from acquiring books, reading them, then writing examinations to get a degree. It began at the end as it were, from examinations, then working backwards. ‘Previous Years’ Questions’ was the phrase used – grammar was useless, and therefore abandoned, so urgent was the need. By the time I joined college, the photocopier had emerged as a critical ally to student life. Everything could be ‘xeroxed’. Photocopies of ‘Previous Years’ Questions’ were an inheritance passed on by the students’ unions, new question papers adding themselves to the old set every summer, when exams were held.
9. The Americanization of Mental Illness - The New York Times (soft paywalled)
Very interesting. It’s an old article but I think still quite, uh, relatable?
For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. […] Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.
Wow? I’ve thought of this in vague terms, on and off, but never with this clarity. It does make sense, though, as sometimes it feels like our views of mental illness (and wellness) are being “flattened” across the world to look like they do in an American or Western context.
10. The Incredible Fig - Nautilus
Figs! Such interesting fruits and plants. The genus Ficus contains roughly 800 different species! I also learnt in this article that all epiphytic figs are called banyans. I had no idea.
See you next week. - Kat.