Hello there, reader! Welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. I’m doing a good job of writing an issue per week for the past few weeks, and I’m happy about that. I don’t think the weekend schedule is working out for me, though. Wednesday seems to be a good alternate middle ground. I am tired! I keep pushing myself to do too many things at home, and this is a familiar feeling from my PhD days. I don’t seem to give myself enough time to do the things I want to do, but I still push myself to do all of them. It’s a recipe for tiredness, that’s what it is. But! I am still reading. And reading never makes me tired. I can’t read when I’m tired, but reading is never the cause for tiredness. That is something I’m always grateful for.
That’s all I have to say. I hope you enjoy this week’s list down below.
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. I read all 54 Animorphs books in five days and it almost killed me - The Spinoff
A colleague at work shared this with me after we talked about our common reading interests.. and wow! I read the Animorphs books as a kid, and I remembered them as wacky, crazy and not-normal books. This article brought a lot of those points home again, as well as made me realize a few more crazy things about Animorphs that I hadn’t registered then.
What gets me through the dark points of unanswerable moral questions and explicit body horror is the fact that Animorphs is also weirdly funny. The out of place PC ‘90s youth banter is really quite endearing, although painfully ‘90s in some of its gender stereotypes. It also reads in places like a middle aged person trying really hard to imitate what ‘kids’ talk like by only watching ‘90s high school movies; it’s fantastic.
2. Prolific - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
Whoa. I didn’t know about Steve Keene, an artist in the US who has over 3,00,000 canvases in circulation. That’s a lot of paintings!
He is often cited as the most prolific painter in the world: he estimates that he has more than three hundred thousand paintings in circulation. His outfit—blue shorts, a white short-sleeved shirt, red sneakers, rubber gloves—was dotted with paint. Certain items in or near the Cage (a watering can, a container of kitty litter) had accumulated so many paint blobs that they’d become nearly unrecognizable. “I love the idea of doing sixty paintings a day, and finishing them, more than the idea of trying to make one that I think is perfect,” he said. “The whole system is based on trying not to beat myself up.”
3. The Scandalous History of the Cubic Formula - Quanta Magazine
Well, wow. During grad school when I took a group theory course, I learnt about the crazy circumstances surrounding Galois’ solution of the quintic (fifth degree) polynomial equation. It turns out that even cubic equations, which were solved before him, had their own controversy. European mathematics was a pretty fun (or scary) place to be then.
4. The Problem of Too Much Money - Be Wrong (a Substack newsletter)
I don’t know much about macroeconomics, and wish that wasn’t true. This is a post about macroeconomics in general at a global scale, and while it goes into a lot of detail, I honestly don’t know if it’s right or not or whether its conclusions are believable. I think the basic premise is that nobody wants to hold on to money, and so they usually give their money to banks, who then distribute it according to the large institution called “finance”.
5. Behind Wilco’s 2001 Masterpiece, a Band Breaking Its Heart - New York Times (soft paywalled)
Wilco’s album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my favourite albums ever (I haven’t listened to it in a while though) and I really enjoyed learning more about the story of its creation.
In the boxed set’s liner notes, though, the former drummer Ken Coomer — who, himself, had been unceremoniously replaced by Kotche early in the recording process — has a succinct way of summing up the human toll of such demolition. “There was deconstruction going on with the songs: Let’s break it all down and build it back up with different pieces and parts,” he said. “And that’s what happened with the band, too.”
6. Deep Time Sickness - Noema Magazine
Interesting.. I found some of this kinda woo-woo but it’s an interesting thing to think about.
“In Mexico, people who are “tocado” — “touched” — reveal that geological time can emerge through fissures in the land to alter the way we relate to our homes, cities and even ourselves.”
Relatedly, I’ve started thinking about the timescales that inform my life, and it’s an interesting line of thought to go down. Of course, there are years and months and weeks and so on, but apart from year and day, the others are just made up. I’ve started making my own misos, which take anywhere between three and twelve months. I think that’s a nice timescale too sometimes.
7. What I Miss About Working at Stripe - Every.to
This is an interesting piece because the author, Brie Wolfson, talks about working at a place where everyone is super passionate about their work, to the extent that they are willing to work weekends, nights, and put much of themselves into the work. Wolfson now works at a less “intense” place than Stripe, and she talks about the nostalgia she feels when she looks at that time. I think that the point being made is that you have to derive some value from your work beyond compensation–it seems to be important to us as humans.
8. The Limits of Language - Slate
Another article about Wittgenstein, except this one is from 2015. I’d shared a few more about his work earlier this year. What’s interesting about this piece is that it talks about the way Wittgenstein’s work about language has informed artificial intelligence research.
So, language is quicksand—except it’s not. Unlike the parlor tricks of the deconstructionists who bloviate about différance and traces, there clearly are rules that shouldn’t be broken and clearly ways of speaking that are blatantly incorrect, even if they change over time and admit to flexible interpretations even on a daily basis. It’s just that explicitly delineating those boundaries is extremely difficult, because language is not built up through organized, hierarchical rules but from the top down through byzantine, overlapping practices. Some things can be pinned down with practical certainty, just not in isolation and without context.
9. What Science Taught Me About Compassion, Gratitude and Awe - The Daily Good
Again, interesting because part of it seems a bit sketchy to me but at the same time the other parts of it are interesting and insightful. This is a transcript of a talk that Dacher Keltner gave in 2016 about the role of awe and compassion in science. I think he recognizes that his audience will be skeptical, and does a good job of addressing some of the more obvious and immediate objections. So it was worth a read. To be honest, I am really not sure how much our biases affect our scientific knowledge of the world at the level of math and physics and chemistry. But anything beyond that, I think, absorbs our biases and our frameworks easily. Maybe I’m saying this only because I have a PhD in physics, ha!
10. How and why I travel the way I do. - Milk Trekker (on Substack)
I’ve shared some pieces from the Milk Trekker newsletter a few times, and I really like Trevor’s work. Here he talks more about the practical details of how he travels across Europe exploring and experiencing different cheesemaking traditions. I enjoyed his account.
It’s always seemed like a bad idea to get my life into the position where I require a lot of money to maintain it. I know it’s not this simple for everyone, but I’ve gotten very good at living with very little. It is the years spent becoming comfortable with a lack of so called financial security or job stability that have allowed to do what I’m doing now. I’m not recommending the life I live to everybody, I don’t have 8 simple steps to the good life to offer you. I have no plan. But I have found a path, that looks like it winds up an intriguing mountain, to a good viewpoint. I’m doing what I feel called to do, and finding my voice and medicine in the process. The book is open, and is writing itself as I walk, with faith in the decency of humankind, and the essential benevolence at the heart of existence.