Hello, reader. I come to you again on a Wednesday (India time) as I fell sick over the weekend and was out of action for a bit. I woke up today feeling surprisingly well, and really want to document this feeling of gratitude for being healthy (or on the road to it at least) because I feel it most days and somehow don’t even give it a second thought! Amazing.
I do have to rush now, because I have breakfast to make and eat, and lunch to pack, and so on, but I’ll see you around again over the weekend. This issue is one of the “abbreviated” kinds, but the articles are just as good as ever :)
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1. ‘You Must Believe You Can Repair It’ (Wired, soft paywalled):
Fun personal essay about an American man who bought an RV and has spent a significant amount of time repairing it and making it roadworthy, while joining and growing a repairer community across the country.
2. Meet Saaduddin, only Indian metal sculptor making Damascus knives (News Meter Hyderabad):
I’m not sure Saaduddin is the only one, but he is definitely one of the coolest :). He has a studio where he repairs motorcycles, makes sculptures, and most relevant (to me at least!), makes knives.
3. [Letter from Greenland] Rotten Ice (Harper’s Magazine): Gretel Ehrlich writes about her visits to Greenland over the years and how the seascape and the icescape have changed almost beyond recognition in that passage of time. I don’t know, it’s quite depressing, but also something I feel we’ve got to read?
4. Going the Distance (and Beyond) to Catch Marathon Cheaters (Wired, soft paywalled):
Well, wow. Given that even I used a shortcut on an informal charity run when I was in college, there’s no surprise that people cheat at marathons considering the high stakes involved in some of them. But then to have someone receive tip-offs and then do detailed investigations on suspected cheats? Especially when it drives one of the suspects to take their own life? Murky.
5. Who Doped the Dogs of the World’s Greatest Dogsledder? (GQ):
More sports malpractice! I’ve shared a couple of essays on the Iditarod sledding dog race in Alaska, and I’m not sure why there are so many longreads about it at the moment.
6. The other side of egoism (A Working Library):
Well, I’m a simple man. I see an essay with detailed references to Ursula K. Le Guin’s work, and I share it with as many people as I can. The author of this essay, Mandy Brown, talks about how altruism, while seemingly good, holds up the power hierarchy of giver and receiver, and how Le Guin explores these ideas extensively in her book The Dispossessed.
In criticizing altruism, the novel isn’t suggesting we jettison care for each other. Rather, it’s positing that altruism is a meagre sort of caring. And, I think, it’s going further to argue that caring for each other is also caring for ourselves. “Altruism, hell, I want to respect myself,” says Shevek. In place of altruism, Shevek calls for mutual aid, for solidarity—for seeing the plight of others as his own. That, for me, is the big difference between altruism—or its close cousin, charity—and mutual aid. The former preserves the hierarchy between giver and receiver. The latter recognizes that everyone has things to give, and everyone has things they need.
7. India’s Quest to Build the World’s Largest Solar Farms (The New Yorker, soft paywalled):
Enough said in the title, I guess. With a nationwide commitment to build up 500GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030, India is quickly striding to build solar farms to meet that target. But with installations of that scale, are the locals’ interests being centred or even addressed?
8. America’s hidden urban laboratory: the South (Devon Zuegel’s blog):
I’m a fan of Zuegel’s writing, and here she writes about America’s “New Urbanist” culture and townships, which are surprisingly coming up in a big way in the South. It’s surprising because the South is thought to be a place of car dominance and suburban life (which is also true).
9. Feeding the World Without Sunlight (Asterisk Magazine):
Insightful interview with Mike Hinge of ALLFED, an NGO that researches and prepares for severe and neglected food shocks.
10. How heat pumps of the 1800s are becoming the technology of the future (Knowable Magazine):
Heat pumps really do seem like pure magic to me, as they have coefficient of performance that goes into the 300-400% range. Basically, they would need to use only one unit of energy to move three or four units of heat around, making them far more efficient than gas boilers. We probably wouldn’t really use them in India, but in the temperate west, they make a lot of sense.