Kat’s Kable #269

Hi! I’m back with another issue of Kat’s Kable. I’m sending this out on a Monday morning for me, so I’m almost back to my Sunday posting schedule. But as fate has it, I’m going to be traveling for a couple of weeks now, so there’s no guarantee that I’ll email you again this coming Sunday. I will try to make it happen! I am off to visit a new friend and it’s quite exciting. I think both of us are eager to learn things from each other. Very wholesome. Well, I gotta go now as there are starters and ferments in the kitchen to feed for my travels.

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1. The Power of ‘Placefulness’: The Pines of Kodaikanal - The Kodai Chronicle

I read a few articles published by The Kodai Chronicle after a few people on Twitter shared their fundraising drive. This one, along with Elephants in my backyard, were my favorites. Pine trees are not a species native to Kodaikanal (a hill town in south India), and yet they have proliferated after being introduced by British colonists.

“Centuries after they rooted, Kodai’s pine forests are still considered an invasive species: sweet-scented but problematic, they exemplify the conflict between nostalgia for place and the colonial implications of their presence as this writer ‘pines’ for home.”

2. Why Telegram — despite being rife with Russian disinformation — became the go-to app for Ukrainians - Nieman Lab

Telegram is a strange messaging app, and I’d shared Messenger Founder Pavel Durov The Telegram Billionaire and His Dark Empire a few months ago along those lines. With very little in the name of moderation, Telegram can be used for almost any purpose, whether good or bad. Thus, it is being concurrently used by state-affiliated channels for propaganda but also by people seeking independent information.

3. A mathematician explains what Foundation gets right about predicting the future - The Science of Fiction

This was cool! I really like Foundation , a series of stories by Isaac Asimov and more recently, a TV show on Apple TV. It centers around the ‘science’ of psychohistory, an advanced mathematical science that is used to predict (and steer) the overall behavior of a galactic empire. Here Yaneer Bar-Yam, a complex systems expert, talks about the scientific underpinnings/plausibility of something like psychohistory.

4. This book is dedicated to… - Soup

I liked this deep dive into the acknowledgement sections of books. There’s a bit of history, lots of fun examples, and an overall nice and vague theory of the different types of acknowledgements you might find. I thought it was cool that the internet (and social media in particular) has changed the way acknowledgements are written, because of the collapse of the public and the private. This is especially true for authors as they do a lot of their marketing via their private social media accounts. This also reminds me of Nadirah Foley’s thesis acknowledgement, which is posted to her website. It’s so good and nice!

5. Fiction Detective | On Literary Citation and Search Engine Sleuthing - The Drift Magazine

Feels satisfying to pair this essay with the one above. Rather than the acknowledgements, this essay by Sophie Hagney is about works that are cited or referenced in works of fiction. I haven’t seen it universally, but apparently quite a few works do it. Again, these can vary depending on what the author wants to do (are they simply showing off their erudition?), and often aren’t even “needed” in a work of fiction.

You might accuse me of being a bad reader, a haphazard detective, overly nosy, addicted to the internet. All true. But the oft-discussed interchange between art and life is less interesting to me than the actual act of googling, and how it has become built into the act of reading. The whole landscape of citation and appropriation from life and texts has an additional dimension; every text has an infinite intertextual relationship with the internet, whether or not authors know or like or acknowledge it.

6. How we lost our sensory connection with food – and how to restore it - The Guardian

Another nice essay from Bee Wilson! I really liked the opening paragraph,

This is going to sound weird, but I want you to look closely for a moment at your thumbs. See how they flex forwards as well as back. Notice how responsive and grippy the skin is. The human thumb is not just a device for giving the thumbs-up sign or for picking up dropped keys. It is also one of the most efficient and sensitive tools in existence for determining the ripeness of fruit.
As an aside from this piece in particular, I want to say that I love cooking precisely for its multi-sensoriness. It feels utterly engaging to all of my senses, and it gives me a chance to deepen my experience simply by slowing things down and adding layers to my actions. I’m also reminded of traditional methods of using your eyes and ears to tell what stage of boiling a pot of water is at: ranging from “shrimp eyes” to “raging torrent”.

7. The Forgotten Greens - Shruti Tharayil on Medium

I was fortunate to attend a wild food walk in Chennai by Shruti a couple of weeks ago. That reminded me of this guide she’d written a long time ago (2016!) about a number of edible plants that grow by the wayside in many parts of South India. It’s pretty cool and honestly I’m a bit upset that I am learning about these things only now.

8. Chernobyl’s Strange Black Fungi Have a Superpower - Atlas Obscura

Well, wow. There are fungi near the Chernobyl site that are jet-black. And they’re jet-black because they contain melanin! This blew my mind. The closer that fungi were to the source of radiation, the more melanin they contained. Further research showed that it was in fact the melanin that enabled these fungi to deal with and even thrive in a high-radiation environment.. nature is amazing.

9. There Is No Such Thing As Countries - The Philosopher’s Beard (Thomas Wells’ blog)

This is interesting and it raised a lot of points for me. It starts off with describing the category error of confusing the country as a place with the country as an agent (this is more like the government or the people, rather than the place). I won’t try to summarize more, as I don’t think I’ll do a good job of it, but this entire essay was quite thought-provoking, despite me not agreeing with 100% of it. I think it constructively engages with the statement, “countries are just a social construct” (they are) while considering other aspects of them.

This is a nice personal essay by Amy Schneider, who had a 40-game winning streak in the quiz game show Jeopardy!. The entire premise of the essay is her pondering how to answer the question, “How are you so smart?”. She takes us on a nice meandering journey of different ways of answering that question, and even pondering on the validity of the query in the first place. I thought this was the coolest part:

Sometimes what people are really asking is, “How can I get smarter?” And for that question, my answers are not just wrong, but almost hostile. Saying “I’m just lucky” implies that you can never be as smart as I am, since you weren’t born with it. And saying “I’m not really that smart” implies that you can never get smarter, because you’re chasing an illusion. And the thing is, deep down, I don’t even believe myself when I say those things. They’re true, but they’re hardly the entire truth. The fact is, I know how I got so smart, and I know how you can, too. The real answer to “How did you get so smart?” is simply this: I wanted to. And you can, too!

Cya!-Kat.

Kat's Kable #269