Good morning, reader! Or good evening, if you are across the Atlantic. This is Vishal, and I come to you with a hastily written (but lovingly curated) issue of the newsletter just before I head into work.
I had an interesting experience yesterday where as part of work, I had to type out the word “series” multiple times and a few minutes in, my mind told me, “how ridiculous is it that series is spelled the way it is, I’m sure you’re wrong, why don’t you look it up” and, reader, I had to look up the spelling of “series” and realized I was doing it right and then had to spend the next fifteen minutes wondering how this was even possible. It was quite the thought process.
I have also been so… out and about? I have not been spending as much time at home as I would like. This life I lead now is so different from what I did during my PhD. Back then, I was always at my garden, always starting new ferments and jars in my kitchen because there was no uncertainty of, “oh, will I be here in a week to take care of these?”. I miss that.
Anyhow.. that’s all for now, more out of necessity than anything as I have to go cook my lunch and then head to work. So do enjoy this list of things to read and as always, just hit reply if you wanna say hi. I love hearing from you!
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. Inside Flipkart, the Indian giant beating Amazon (Rest of World):
An interesting portrait from February this year about how Flipkart and Amazon are going head-to-head in India and while the article says Flipkart is beating Amazon, I honestly don’t know about that.
2. The Great LA Dumpling Drama (Eater):
Ha! This was fun to read about. It’s about a restaurant called Din Tai Fung, which moved from one large mall in Glendale (a city part of the greater LA area) to the other right across the street. While it started with that, the article also talks about malls and public spaces more generally, which I liked.
3. How the World’s Heaviest Man Lost It All (GQ):
This was… fascinating, which is one way to put it. It’s about Paul Mason, a Britisher who used to weigh close to 1000 pounds and has now shed most of it, and how his life has been across those stages.
4. How To Speak Honeybee (Noema Magazine):
I always love reading about honeybees and communication.
5. HUMAN_FALLBACK (n+1 Magazine):
Laura Preston writes about her experience being the human backup (“human fallback”) for an automated chatbot while working for a real estate company. Eerie but also interesting (I’m really overusing this word today).
6. Platonic (Fifty Two):
A meandering and somewhat vague longform piece about men and women being “friends” in India, and how as a concept it’s different from how it is in other parts of the world.
7. Tiny Treasures of the Forest (Fungi Mag, PDF):
Some absolutely beautiful pictures by Allison Pollack of the fruiting bodies of various mushrooms. I found her technique to be so amazing!
To create an image with the entire fruiting body in focus requires a technique called focus stacking. My camera is mounted on an electronic rail that moves it a few microns between each image. To create a single photo of a sub–millimeter sized mushroom, hundreds of individual images, each with a different focal length, are composited using software that combines the in-focus portions of each individual image.
8. Why is finance so complex? (Interfluidity):
This is a kinda conjecture-y blog post but I think it addresses two interesting points: the finance world is becoming more and more complex because the humans involved are becoming more intelligent, and also the opaqueness (or is it opacity) of finance is what lets us collectively invest in building assets and infrastructure and if things were more transparent, we would all be too scared to. Not sure if either of these is right but thought-provoking nonetheless.
9. The Baseball Writer (The New Yorker, soft paywalled):
Ha! This is an article from all the way back in 2001, and it’s by… Bill Bryson! The subject of the article is also… Bill Bryson. His dad. It’s really quite charming and wonderful and about baseball and traveling and writing, so what’s not to love.
10. A Library of Words (Austin Kleon’s Substack):
Finally for this week, a musing from Austin Kleon about the evolution of thesauruses, and how it’s far more creatively useful for them to be arranged by theme (as Roget’s was initially) rather than alphabetically.
The Thesaurus is supposed to work in the opposite direction: you start with an idea, and then you find the words to express it. To put it another way: a dictionary turns words into ideas and and thesaurus turns ideas into words.