Hello there. I’m Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable, and finally, I’m sending the newsletter out on a Sunday. I don’t have a whole lot to say this week, so I won’t. It’s partly because I’m watching the men’s French Open final right now :D. It’s been a strange few days for me, but it feels alright now. After a few weeks of not juggling a lot, I’ve gotten back to it and I’ve almost got the four ball juggling routine set and stable. That feels nice. Anyhow, that’s all from me here now, and as always, I hope you enjoy this week’s list.
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 Extravagant Partisanship of the Leek-Green Faction - Natural Latin (a fun but recently inactive plant blog)
This was super fun! There’s a lot of enjoyable pictures too. The post is about “leek green”, a shade of green that is also denoted by the Latin word prasinus. This word is used in the botanical names of insects, birds, eels, amphibians and so on. Not only that, but a faction of the charioteers in the Roman circus were also known as the prasinoi.
2. Why are there no bridges over the Amazon River? - Live Science
Also fascinating. There are no major bridges across the Amazon. In contrast, there are nine bridges spanning the Nile in Cairo alone. Why is this the case? There are a number of reasons, some ecological and some economical. The ecological reason #1 is that the width of the Amazon varies seasonally. In the wet season, the Amazon is roughly five times as wide as it is in the dry season. That alone blew my mind. I hope no bridges are constructed across the river though.. it is better to leave that ecosystem alone.
3. Banglophilia - Kindle Magazine
This essay by Salil Tripathi is about growing up with Gujarati parents who loved Bangla, which explains the title. I’m not going to be able to do a good job of summarizing the essay, but it was very nice. I enjoy it when people are able to write about their lives in this kind of easy and matter-of-fact way while still bringing out their emotional investment in the topic at hand.
4. The Race to Redesign Sugar - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
Whoa whoa. I did not know that companies around the world were working this hard to make different forms of sugar to put in their sweet treats. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame and saccharin have gotten a bad rap. There are people redesigning sugar crystals to have more surface area, there are people chemically converting fructose into a sugar called allulose (which is not metabolized very well by us), and so on. However, this article also points out that eating sweet things without sugar hitting our digestive systems can cause its own issues. As in, our taste receptors tell the body to start digesting sugar, but that sugar never arrives. It is a brave new world out there, and all of this is not super surprising given that we’ve had an abundance of cheap sugar only for the past hundred years or so.
5. Before the change: When austerity, simplicity ruled everyday middle class life - Hindustan Times
Mukul Kesavan writes about his life in India prior to the 1991 liberal reforms.
There are many ways of pointing up the difference: the dotted line between then and now could (for example) be written in diapers. My older child was born in 1992 and spent his infancy in cotton nappies that were squares of cloth folded and fastened with giant safety pins. Only those who have shoved sharp pins—while the world slept—through fabric tightly wrapped round first-born bums can appreciate the revolution in child-rearing heralded by the disposable diaper.
6. How to resurrect a coral reef - Vox
This article reminds me a lot of the article I shared in issue 268: Raising Baby Sharks from the Dead. It talks about how to equip corals to better survive warmer ocean temperatures, primarily by quickening their reproductive cycle. What’s interesting here is that corals can reproduce both sexually and asexually, and it’s the asexual propagation that can be “hacked” to happen at a higher rate.
7. A Long Walk in a Fading Corner of Japan - New York Times (soft paywalled)
I always enjoy Craig Mod’s writing, usually through his newsletters. This time, though, he’s written a feature for the NYT about walking through rural Japan.
For me, walking through working villages and towns is the great joy of the Kii Peninsula. Being able to cap a day of strenuous mountain routes with a bath alongside locals, wacky though they may sometimes be, is never not interesting. The whole of the experience, however, is one of acute bittersweetness. […]
But these changes don’t necessarily induce gloominess or sadness. They’re simply part of the inexorable flow of contemporary life — the aging of a population mixed with the loss of employment opportunities in the countryside. We’ve made certain decisions about certain industries on a global scale, and this, in part, is the result.
Instead, if I feel anything, it’s gratitude toward the energy of the peninsula itself — the abundant vitality of the land and the kindness of the people who are still there, all buoyed by the thousand-plus years of historical import.
8. It doesn’t have to be like this - Vittles (on Substack)
Another nice Vittles post! This is about family farms, “regenerative” farming, and how small farms are something we’d like to believe in but which are really hard to pull off. This is specific to the UK, of course, as that is where both the writers of this issue are from. This was eye-opening to read, but it’s also quite long with the two pieces put together, so you might want to set some time aside for it.
9. I Spent 2 years Launching Tiny Projects - Ben Stokes’ Tiny Projects website
In issue #261, I shared a report from Ben Stokes (not the cricketer) about his Paper Website project. Here is a follow-up of sorts from him again, and it’s an overall summary of the “tiny projects” he’s embarked on in the past two years. It’s really quite inspiring and I see myself doing something like this, maybe on a different platform, in some time.
10. Running and the Science of Mental Toughness - The Wire Science
I run short distances just for fun, so I read this with some interest. It’s basically about how we generally “give up” strenuous exercise much before our bodies are totally incapable of moving. Much of it is mental, and this longread is a deep dive into how exactly our brains work when we’re running and thinking about when to call it a day.
See you next week.-Kat.