Hi hi. I’m back with another issue of Kat’s Kable and it’s the middle of the week yet again. I’m hoping that since I’m sending this out on Tuesday, I’ll send out the next issue on Sunday and get back on that weekend schedule. I’ve been continuing to vibe during my break, which has been all kinds of interesting (in good and not-so-good ways). I’ve been writing lots and lots of personal realizations and things in my journal and on my laptop, which has been mostly… unburdening. Anyhow, I shan’t write more about that here. Hope you like this week’s list and see you soon!
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. The Deep and Twisted Roots of the American Yam - The Ringer
This is a history of the sweet potato, which is often (erroneously) called a yam. The “true” yam won’t grow in most parts of North America, as it needs a tropical climate. The sweet potato, though, grows wonderfully in the warm and temperate American South. This essay was quite the journey, going through a lot of unpleasant history and culture.
I have come to the realization that I am putting something into a thing that was not meant to hold it. That it does not matter whether the tuber is orange or white. That it does not matter when I first met it, or if it is indeed the thing I first met. That it does not matter, even, what name it is given. The charm, you see, has never been inside the root.
I know this, instinctively. And yet I would not have it any other way. I am trying to make sense of myself in a swirl of robberies, and I don’t know how to do that besides remembering. There are ways to remember when it ought to be impossible. There are ways to pass down when you have nothing left to give. I’ve learned them. They’re my birthmark, like those who came before me. With luck and proper care, we can plant our histories.
2. The Lost Diary of Anthony Bourdain - Rolling Stone
Whoa, whoa. I had no idea! That is, I had no idea that Anthony Bourdain was posting anonymously for a while on Reddit using the username “NooYawkCity”. This is quite something, and this article tracks some of his posts, matching it up with some of Bourdain’s “real” life.
While the world had come to know Bourdain’s unfiltered writing style, his Reddit posts brought an exceptional sort of candor. NooYawkCity’s prose was not going through an editor, directed toward a book or TV audience. This was the truest Anthony Bourdain, writing simply for the sake of it, unburdened by his reputation. He’d previously chronicled his passion for food and travel, and now, he needed an outlet to write about his new love: Brazilian jiujitsu.
3. Witten reflects - CERN Courier
Nice interview with theoretical physicist Edward Witten. He talks about recent advances in physics, especially with respect to the correctness (or incorrectness, more correctly) of the standard model. The other interesting thing that he talks about is the “naturalness” of explanations of physical phenomena that might exist. That is,
Reluctantly, I think we have to take seriously the anthropic alternative, according to which we live in a universe that has a “landscape”of possibilities, which are realised in different regions of space or maybe in different portions of the quantum mechanical wavefunction, and we inevitably live where we can. I have no idea if this interpretation is correct, but it provides a yardstick against which to measure other proposals. Twenty years ago, I used to find the anthropic interpretation of the universe upsetting, in part because of the difficulty it might present in understanding physics. Over the years I have mellowed. I suppose I reluctantly came to accept that the universe was not created for our convenience in understanding it.
4. Attending to the other - Jasmine Wang’s Substack
This was so good! My favorite thing in this week’s list for sure.
The American environmentalist Paul Shepard said ‘the grief and sense of loss, that we often interpret as a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.’ How many illegible others, human and nonhuman, have perished because we did not attend to them properly?
and
The sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls a similar mode of relating resonance. Instead of viewing ourselves as closed off, independent systems bent on controlling the other, we should leave ourselves open to being affected by the world, responsive to its call, and thereby allow ourselves to transform and be transformed by it. This orientation reminds me of how one must approach a poem if one hopes to be moved by it; you can analyze it and justify the artifact rationally, but in the end you must encounter the poem bodily, as a totality.
and lastly, this spoke to me because this is the kind of person I aspire to be and am working towards.
One of my closest friends says his love language is deep attention. When I’m confused about a situation, he listens to what I have to say, directs me with careful questions, and then goes away for a few hours. Eventually, he comes back with a question or framing that slices through my fog. I treasure his speech deeply. The attention that undergirds it stands in sharp contrast to the hastily shared words and online takes generated against a backdrop of common knowledge that attention is both scarce and low quality.
5. What Was the TED Talk? - The Drift Magazine
Hah. This was entertaining. I’ve not put much store in TED talks for a few years now, and this article put some of those points down in clear writing for me to understand better. In particular, it talks about the notion of “inspiresting”, a portmanteau of inspirational and interesting. That is the adjective that describes many of the viral TED talks, but when you take a look at what real-world impact those ideas have actually had in the world, you don’t come up with a whole lot.
6. “Urgency and Agency”: Michael Mann on Conquering Climate Despair - Behavioral Scientist
Really glad to see more of this out there. Climate despair or climate doomism is not a constructive way of thinking about climate change mitigation, aside from perhaps shocking people into realizing the gravity of the situation. However, the other thing is shocks people into is inaction, which is not good, of course.
7. Looks fast, feels faster - why the speed gun is only part of the story - Cricinfo
This was a cool sneak peak into an aspect of cricket that’s both fascinating and misleading to television viewers (I think): the speed gun measuring how fast someone is bowling. Deliveries that clock high on the gun sometimes don’t feel quick, and other “slower” deliveries can feel fast.
8. The Skeletons at the Lake - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
This article was doing the rounds over a year ago. I read it a few months ago and finally have gotten around to sharing it here. It’s about skeletons that were found at Roopkund Lake, sixteen thousand feet above sea level in the Himalayas. This article is a long explanation of the various theories of who those people were. It’s quite riveting.
9. I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality - The Atlantic (soft paywalled)
I’m drawn like a firefly to articles like this but usually they’re all fluff and don’t keep my attention for long. But I like Olga Khazan’s writing and she does a pretty good job here. She talks about how she hasn’t ever really liked her own personality, and how she embarked on a quest to change it by behaving like the kind of person she wanted to become. She “measures” her personality by using the big five traits: extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, openness, and neuroticism. I found that relatable since I’ve taken online tests to measure myself on the same scale as Khazan uses.
10. Our Pseudonymous Selves - Cybernaut
Oooh. Nice! The internet is a cool place to experiment with pseudonymity. That is, operating online with a pseudonym, not entirely anonymously. I enjoyed the comparison with pseudonymity in the pre-internet world, and also the way it manifested in the early times of the internet.
Online pseudonymity might appear niche and nascent, an opt-out reserved for identity-concealing artists and over-cautious internet citizens. But there’s a possibility that this is only the beginning of a more pseudonymous landscape, where average individuals have multiple fully-formed online personas that let them explore different facets of identity and move across the internet more freely.
See you this weekend!-Kat.