As always, I hope you enjoy this list of ten things to read, and have a good week!
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1. How you attach to people may explain a lot about your inner life - The Guardian
I read this (long-ish) 2020 (pre-pandemic!) article about attachment theory, and I think it was a good introduction to the concept. The idea is that everyone has a certain attachment style, and it informs the way they go about their interpersonal relationships as well as their psyche. Also, apparently your attachment style is primarily dictated with the nature of your relationship with your caretakers when you are tiny. I don’t know if this framework is going to be useful to me on a day-to-day basis, but it was interesting to learn about anyway.
2. Check Your Spillover: The Climate Colossus - London Review of Books
This is a long review of William Nordhaus’ book The Spirit of Green: The Economics of Collisions and Contagions in a Crowded World. I enjoyed it because it engages critically with the ideas in the book, specifically that climate change can be successfully mitigated by sticking to our current free market models and instead just fixing the incorrect pricing of certain goods, in particular carbon. I learnt quite a bit from this, especially a few of the surface-level details of the “cost-benefit” models that Nordhaus’ work has spawned. In those models, a “discount rate” is included to weigh future benefits against present costs. It “is determined not only by the degree to which we prioritise the present, but also by the relative impacts our actions will have on a future that will be different from today. The world will change, so the rate must register the effects of present-day activity not as if they were being experienced now, but in the future.”
3. When My Wife Developed Alzheimer’s, the Story of Our Marriage Kept Us Connected - The Walrus
This was touching and quite beautiful. One thing I’m surprised by is that I’ve started sharing articles and stories like this, veering very much into the “personal essay” category. I remember that when I first started the newsletter, I had a strong disinclination towards this.
4. In Praise of Idleness, by Bertrand Russell - Harper’s Magazine
This is, of course, very old. It’s an article about the virtues of idleness, and it’s by Bertrand Russell, so why not share it with you?
5. The strange reason migrating birds are flocking to cities - BBC
The general consensus among bird scientists is that cities are bad for migrating birds. This is because the birds can veer off course due to the bright lights, or they can crash into skyscrapers. However, some birds are actually able to use city parks to their advantage too. For example, some Swainson’s thrushes make a pit stop in some parks in Montreal to feed and moult. While this is cool and nice and perhaps encouraging, it’s important to note that this is not necessarily ideal. It is more important to keep the migratory highways clear rather than think that green spots in cities can compensate for other urban patterns that are destructive to birds.
6. How a rare earth deposit fuelled Travancore’s dreams of Independence and later powered India’s atomic plans - The Indian Express
Interesting! Travancore, a state that took some convincing to join India in 1947, sat on huge deposits of thorium, in the form of the mineral monazite. Travancore tried to play its cards as well as possible, given that it possessed a lot of natural resources. Further, it was embroiled in global efforts to prevent more countries from having supply of nuclear fuel. Finally, India was able to classify the monazite as a “national asset” that could both be used domestically as well as leverage for obtaining foreign materials and assistance.
7. I’m common as muck and spent £150 in a Michelin star restaurant to see if it was worth it - Birmingham Mail
This is one of the most fun things I’ve read all year. Kirsty Bosley describes going to a local Michelin-starred restaurant (Adams) and eating a meal much out of her means. She’s initially skeptical, but the way she describes her food and her sensory reactions is infectiously happy.
Suddenly, they were not tiny little plates of food for big prices. They were experiences, knowledge and expertise, presented in such a way that I could have flown if I wasn’t anchored to the restaurant floor by a crisp table topped with stacks of cutlery.
It was worth £150, easy. I walked out of there on a real, true high. If it means never having another takeaway again in my life, I’m saving up to go back to chase that feeling.
And I’m licking the plate.
8. Special Profile of Satish Bhaskar - Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter
I don’t remember how I stumbled upon this, but I’m really glad that I did. It’s a profile of Indian conservation ecologist Satish Bhaskar. By all aspects, he was a singular person, extremely dedicated and competent and with a healthy dose of eccentric habits. It was so fun to read, not least because it’s co-written by Rom Whitaker and Janaki Lenin.
9. Searching for Susy Thunder - The Verge
Oooh this was so cool. Susy Thunder was a hacker in the 1970s and 80s. Her story is really cool, and it was fascinating for me to learn how much of her motivation to be a hacker came from her childhood and the way her relationships went (spoiler alert: not very well).
As she sweet-talked security guards, triangulated rock stars’ whereabouts, and pulled phone scams for backstage passes, Susan was following an instinct she’d had since childhood. When she was just a little kid, she’d beaten a polygraph test. It didn’t matter that her stepfather was a Navy man. It didn’t matter that her own mother didn’t believe her. It didn’t even matter that the system was rigged against her, and other survivors of abuse, from the outset. Its bureaucracy was inflexible, inhuman, but that rigidity made it vulnerable, too. There were ways to use the rules to break the rules. The older she got, the more she saw the polygraph as a lesson, revealing, to her, the hidden truth of the world: that everything is a system, and every system can be cracked.
10. Accelerated and Decelerated Landscapes - Places Journal
This is a long essay (which I didn’t complete) by Brett Milligan based on historian and critic J.B. Jackson’s view that that any landscape is a space “deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature”. I found this reframing to be quite useful in itself. If you’re not convinced, Jackson also says that “reorganizing space for human needs” means that we take on “the role of time”. The author of the essay, Brett Milligan, uses this to explore what he considers as “accelerated” and “decelerated” landscapes. While the examples weren’t immediately relatable (geographically and culturally) to me, I still learnt a few things by reading about them.
See ya soon.-Kat.