Hi hi, this is Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable. As per usual now, it’s been a tiring week. I’m not sure why exactly, but it has been. The good thing is that I’ve been reading quite a bit, which I’m happy about. I’ve also taught myself a new juggling trick. When I first started to learn to juggle, I did it without any tutorials online. But now that I want to learn some tricks, I’m relying on online guides to help me learn. And there’s so many cool people who’ve made juggling tutorials on YouTube (and Instagram)! Very heartening.
Anyhow, that’s all I have for now. I’ve been enjoying the book Wintering , by Katherine May, and I will get back to it now. It reminds me a lot of the fact that I enjoyed the four-season climate in the US, and don’t have it now that I’m back in India. Winter served as a very.. grounding time when it got cold. Here’s a nice excerpt.
More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.
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1. The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness - I really liked this 2016 essay by Helena Fitzgerald (who writes the excellent newsletter [Griefbacon](https:
//griefbacon.substack.com)) about living alone as a woman.
2. Where, and why, is North Africa? - “The centrality of race, colonialism, political projects around transnational identities, and the social sciences, all had effects on how the Middle East as a region came to be.”
3. Optimism - This is an essay about something I think about once in a while. There’s lots of improvements in the world over the past few centuries, and while there is ground for pessimism, there is also a good case to be optimistic about many things.
4. Restricted Code - Ah, this is really quite an entertaining and well-researched dive into the effort to push Sanskrit into the mainstream of computer programming.
5. All writing is centralizing onto Substack - Erik Hoel (on his Substack, of course) argues why this is a good thing.
6. Reading Ourselves to Death - Hmm. Interesting. There’s some people and scholars who think that we are exposed to too many words on a day-to-day level. Reading things puts us in different mental states (like being “transported” by a book) and therefore reading too many words means our brains can get overloaded. Makes sense, at least a little bit, to me.
7. He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal. - If you haven’t read this profile of June Huh, please do! It’s wonderful and he’s such an interesting and obviously phenomenal person.
8. In Ghana, a Bumper Crop of Opinions on Genetically Modified Cowpea - Yup, it’s a contentious topic. It is good for there to be public discussion on whether or not farmers want to take up genetically modified cowpea, and it would also be good for there to be clear communication (which there is not at the moment, sadly).
9. National Sample Survey: How India taught the world the art of collecting data - Very nice! I learnt a bunch of cool things from this article from the BBC.
10. Modern Urban Planning Is Inside Out - I like the work that Strong Towns puts out, and this one is good. Of course, their opinions and statements are primarily about civic infrastructure and planning in the US.
We’ve institutionalized this windshield mentality through planning that doesn’t concern itself with public spaces as places, only as transportation corridors. As a result, we build increasingly incoherent cities. Prominent streets dead-end at nothing of interest: a blank wall, a gas station, an empty field. Buildings don’t even front the street in any sort of consistent or coherent way; they often just seem arbitrarily arranged on their lots. (In reality, they’re usually arranged around the demands of parking more than any other factor.)