Hello there, reader! This is Vishal with another issue of your favourite newsletter, Kat’s Kable. The really noteworthy thing in my life these days is that my bluetooth speaker has been possessed by a ghost. Every once in a while, a couple of times a day, it will make the sound it makes when it turns on, and then immediately turn itself off. I was on my other bluetooth earphones on a work call the other day and for a moment, couldn’t participate in the call. Because of the ghost in the speaker! I had to excuse myself with, “sorry, I have a haunted bluetooth speaker, could you say that again?”
I started reading These Precious Days by Ann Patchett: it’s an essay collection that she launched recently. This morning, just before getting ready for work, I read her essay about cleaning, organizing and clearing out the extra stuff in her apartment, and as I finished it, I laughed a wholesome laugh and thought, “wow, how lucky for me to be reading this”.
I’ve had a couple of weeks uninterrupted at home (before that streak breaks again this weekend) and I have thrown myself into a lot of new ferments. It’s been great. Mango vinegar? Check. Karvanda cheong (a syrup made with small currant-like berries)? Check. Ginger miso? Check. Spicy fermented mango salsa? Check.
That’s all for this week. If you liked this week’s issue, please do write in and tell me :)
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1. The Virtue of Wonder: Martha Nussbaum’s Justice for Animals - Asterisk Magazine
I’ve been sharing so many articles from Asterisk of late! Since I found them recently, I’ve been reading through and enjoying so much of what they’ve been putting out. This is a really nice introduction to Martha Nussbaum, who is introduced as: “If you’ve heard of any contemporary academic philosopher, there is a decent chance that it is Martha Nussbaum”. She’s written another book now called Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility which seems to explore some pretty thorny questions around how we ought to frame our ethics around the animals around us, whether wild, farmed, or as pets. Wonder, then, is taken as a good starting point to empathize better with animals.
The virtue of wonder is both amazement at animals’ unique ways of life and curiosity about why they behave the way they do. When we wonder at an animal, we recognize that their behavior has a purpose, that there is something it is like to be them, and we try to understand. Wonder, she writes, “takes us out of ourselves and toward the other… [It has] nothing to do with our own personal search for well-being. It is connected to our original joy at life itself.”
2. March BLAHG, really long - Rivendell Bikes
Ha! This is a stream-of-consciousness (almost) monthly roundup blog by Rivendell Bikes, an American bicycle works company. I found this blog post utterly endearing, with peeks into their month-to-month operations, commentary on “well-built” bikes and musings on the future of the bicycle industry. Blogs like this really make me fall in love with the internet all over again, as there’s no way I would’ve known I’d enjoy it, but the internet has presented it to me, and here we are now.
3. Why Mathematicians Re-Prove What They Already Know - Quanta Magazine
Proving age-old theorems in newer and novel ways is a great way to discover connections between and within the subfields that comprise the vast and wondrous world of mathematics. The practical benefits to proving things again and again aren’t concrete, but isn’t that part of the fun of it all?
4. Baroque, Purple, and Beautiful: In Praise of the Long, Complicated Sentence - Lithub
This was so fun to read. I think the first part of the essay is a tad bit boring, but then it starts to get into examples, and what wondrous examples they are. The last paragraph of the essay is.. you guessed it, a single sentence. :)
Every semicolon in Desai’s sentence could be replaced by a period, but how much would be lost in that transformation? The semicolons linking all these clauses together into one long sentence encourage a breathless narration in the mind, a character quickly thinking through the implications of their train of thought. By the time the reader gets to the fifth and sixth clause, there is the overwhelming sense of the character (as represented through the narrative vantage of free indirect discourse) at odds with himself, all of those “nevers” in the penultimate clause, and then in the final one the rushed smooshing together of nouns in “child-dog-yard,” a damning contrast of the difference in concerns between suburban Americans and those in Desai’s native India, a concern which at least in this excerpt never needs to be didactically stated.
5. In Colombia, a Story of Coffee, Family and Climate Change - Atmos.earth
This is a really nice profile of Colombian coffee farmer Julián Arroyave, who grows coffee in 7 acres of Colombia’s Eje Cafetero aka the Coffee Axis, one of the best parts of the world to grow coffee in. The farm has been in the family for four generations, but as climate change’s effects kick in, it may not remain the coffee-growing paradise it used to be. It’s a poignant profile, and enjoyable while remaining somber in its tone and outlook.
6. On good conversations - Kindred Spirits (on Substack)
I’d shared Good conversations have lots of doorknobs back in issue #301, and this is a nice related short essay about good conversations too. It also features Ursula K. Le Guin (always a good thing). Here’s a passage I loved especially.
The art of conversation is to weave together the threads of existence, reality, and experience. It takes courage to do this weaving: we leave ourselves open to judgement, taking a gamble on whether we’ll plant the seed of mutual understanding or sudden indifference.
It’s easy enough to describe what a good conversation feels like: weights being lifted off shoulders, solitude cracking wide open, lightbulbs flaring to life in a cobwebby corner of the mind.
7. My Lifetime Reading Plan - Ted Gioia’s Substack
Well well, yet another issue of Ted Gioia’s newsletter. I’m not to blame though, as so many of his posts are worth sharing. This one I found quite interesting and inspiring, as he talks about his well-formulated plan to teach himself a whole bunch of things by curating his reading. He prefaces the whole thing by saying it’s not a strategy he recommends (ha!) but that some people might find it useful (ha). The more I read Gioia’s writing, the more I want to be like him.
8. Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia - The New York Times (soft paywalled)
Vienna, Austria’s capital city, has an enviable portfolio of city-owned housing. It’s interesting to read about how they’ve done it, because having access to housing that costs you only 10-15% of your income changes the way you live. The municipal housing project was begun all the way back in 1919, so it’s taken some long-term foresight to build up the city’s housing market this way.
9. The King in the Endgame - The Ringer
Magnus Carlsen will continue to play chess. He will lose a game here and there. He will stumble into controversies. Mostly, he will win. He will swat away whoever the next world champion will be. He will continue to be at the forefront of humanity and machine’s collaborative investigation into the frontiers of the most ancient of games. He may never reach 2900, but he is going to try. And, unshackled from the obligation of being a world champion, he will follow his curiosity wherever it takes him. Perhaps this, more than anything else, will be Carlsen’s lasting legacy from his decade as world chess champion: He was the one who showed us it doesn’t matter. The most powerful king, after all, is the one with room to breathe.
10. Our Business Is Killing - Slate
I saved this for the end, because this one is a heart wrencher. Andrew Bullis talks about his experience as a veterinarian, and how it’s a tough, tough job. In particular, he focuses on euthanasia, which one of his professors in vet school said was the one thing that every vet needs to do well.
It isn’t until you have a day like this that you realize the stress animal owners put on you or the gravity of the decisions you have to make. The pressure is so high—you’re the only one who can make the final call. In veterinary medicine, doctors operate alone. Yes, there are specialists and techs to assist you, but the system is much less organized than human medicine. It’s just you on an island, and you’re supposed to be the be-all and end-all doctor for anything and everything your community needs.