Kat’s Kable #284

Hello there, reader. This is Vishal with another issue of Kat’s Kable. It’s been another week of productive and fun reading for me, and that usually translates to me having a bunch of nice things to recommend in the newsletter too. I’m off my break and starting work very soon, so it will be a challenge to keep up my reading habit. However, I turn to reading (fiction, non-fiction, graphic novels, whatever) to ground myself especially when I’m in a new place and setting. So I don’t imagine the rhythm of the Kable changing very much, and in fact, I foresee it becoming more regular and punctual. Well, that’s all from me. I’m off to continue reading a book I started yesterday, War Minus the Shooting , about the 1996 Cricket World Cup and drink my first cup of tea for the day.

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1. Is Selling Shares in Yourself the Way of the Future? - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)

Whoa, this is really weird and also cool and obviously quite interesting. It also reminds me of an article that a friend of mine shared with me back in.. 2019: College Grads Sell Stakes in Themselves to Wall Street. The idea here is that as a young person, you have ambitions and potential but not much money. You can sell a “stake” of yourself, as a form of equity, to interested investors. That way, they get a chunk of whatever money you make, but you get start-up money to turbocharge your youth, so to speak.

2. You Love Wine Science Until it Detracts From the Magic in Your Glass - VinePair

What I love about this write-up is the way in which it takes the value of stories as self-evident. The stories aren’t indicative of some other expertise; they’re not a proxy for, say, the ability to tell a Cornas from a Côte-Rôtie in a blind tasting. Instead, when you go to Chambers Street Wines, what you end up walking out with is a story, or a set of stories, to go with your bottle. And often the stories are even more valuable than the wine.

The amount that we enjoy a bottle of wine is a direct function of the stories we tell about it. Once you’re telling stories about the winemaker, about the soil, about the grapes, about the cool dog that patrols the vines, you’re invested.

3. She Caught Bullets with Her Bare Hands — and Made Magic’s Glass Ceiling Disappear - Narratively

This is a wonderful feature of Adelaide Hermann. Initially just the wife and stage assistant of famed magician Hermann the Great, Adelaide came into her own after Hermann’s death. She changed the rules of the magic industry for women, rejuvenated and cleared the debt of her late husband’s magic show, and made a whole bunch of innovations herself. Really amazing!

4. Life on Brazil’s Open Landfills - Atmos

There are about 400,000 to 600,000 trash pickers working across landfills and dumps in Brazil. That’s a large number, and they are responsible for ~90% of Brazil’s recycling. As you can imagine, the job is hazardous and with minimal dignity or benefits. I found this very sobering to read through.

5. A Huitlacoche Farmer - Forager Chef (Alan Bergo’s blog)

Huitlacoche, also called corn smut, is a gourmet food which arises when a particular fungus grows on and colonizes ripe corn while it’s still on the plant. It looks very weird but also very fascinating (to me, at least). In this post, Bergo talks about a huitlacoche farmer in Wisconsin, Mike Jowzik, who has learnt to grow fine dining-worthy huitlacoche with just a year of tinkering around. And it’s so wonderful to read about and see. I don’t know if the conditions are right for it to grow in India, so I do regret not knowing about it and seeking it out when I lived in the US. But thanks to the internet, I can at least witness it through pictures and writing.

6. Malcolm Gladwell Reaches His Tipping Point - The Atlantic (soft paywalled)

This is a 2019 article that came out just after Gladwell’s book Talking to Strangers was released. It’s a pretty indicting critique of Gladwell’s “formula” for his pop sci/psychology books, and proceeds by describing Gladwell’s method, the defining characteristics of his books, and the manner in which he smooth-talks his readers. I personally am very skeptical of all pop sci books because of the need to fit things into a cogent narrative, and for the fact that books are seen to be successful only if they are convincing. This means that a lot of pop-sci writing tends to take ambiguous research results and portray them as rules or laws that the world obeys in general.

7. Why I Am a Bad Correspondent - Neal Stephenson’s blog

I loved this! Noted author Neal Stephenson gives a detailed answer to why he rarely replies to emails or accepts invitations to attend and speak at conferences and the like.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

8. ‘It’s a little bit of utopia’: the dream of replacing container ships with sailing boats - The Guardian

This is fun and cute and also reminds me of Low-Tech Magazine’s How to design a sailing ship for the 21st century? which I shared on the newsletter many months ago. This article has a lot of useful information about the global shipping industry and also focuses in particular on Grain de Sail, a chocolate + shipping company founded by two brothers in Europe, all centered around a… sailing ship! Very exciting.

I’ve read a lot of the articles about mycorrhizal fungal networks that let plants communicate with each other through the soil. But this one I liked, because after introducing the topic, it became an interview cum excursion with Suzanne Simard, who is a scientist in America who pioneered much of the work on mycorrhizal fungi in the recent past. Lots of nice pictures in this of course :)

10. In Farming, a Constant Drive For Technology - Undark

This article starts with the subtitle “Although real-world data is scant, proponents say robotics and AI will soon revolutionize agriculture.” It’s about “precision agriculture”, which promises to make agriculture more efficient in terms of the amount of resources it uses. This is definitely the need of the hour, and a lot of people are doing interesting things in this regard. The one thing I realize when I read about things like this is that these technological advances further entrench our industrial approach to agriculture. Automating farming tasks, distancing humans from farm labour etc. serve to bolster larger and larger farms managed less and less by human eye. Sometimes I think we would be well served by stepping back and seeing what path we’re on by adopting unending technological innovation.

See you next week!-Kat.

Kat's Kable #284