Hello, good reader, and a very good morning and evening to you. Today is a big day. It is Kat’s Kable’s seventh birthday! Wow, I really can’t believe that this newsletter has been around for so long now, and that I’ve been semi-consistent over so many years. I used to joke, “I want to get to the point where I can say my newsletter’s run longer than my entire PhD” and well, here we are now. Thank you, reader, for being part of the journey. I know it’s a pretty one-directional method of communication and I haven’t done much in terms of building a community (apart from a defunct Telegram group that got attacked by the Russians), but honestly, I don’t know if I want to do any more than this.
Every time I sit back and reflect on what I want the newsletter to me, I come back to the primary reason of it forcing me to be consistent with my reading and being good at summarizing things. You could call it self-improvement. There have been supplemental benefits, of course, like some wonderful friends I’ve made via the Kable. And really, the fundamental reason I keep doing the newsletter remains that I get something out of it. I prefer to keep it that way, as it takes everything else out of the equation and makes it a bonus. A bonus that makes life much richer :)
Anyhow, that’s enough indulgence from me. Or rather, indulgence via email. I’ve ordered myself a small cake and as soon as I hit send, I’m going to go eat it. To many more years of Kat’s Kable!
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. Remembering the Egyptian Childhood I Never Had Through Its Culinary Traditions - Lithub
Jasmin Attia, an author, is coming up with a book The Oud Player of Cairo soon and this personal essay is part of the marketing work for it. It’s really nice, because as many immigrant families experience, finding your food in a new country can be hard but also a worthwhile exercise in re-establishing your identity. Attia writes about it touchingly.
My mother is unsatisfied with my first ten grape leaves. She shakes her head. My stuffed grape leaves are too short, too long, too thick, or too loose. They would never last through the cooking process. She shows me how to unroll them and correct my mistakes. I oblige because I now understand the pain of ghorba, and I must assuage it by rolling the grape leaves. I must get it right for I am now the one who is to carry the secrets of this near sacred process, and I am the one who cannot let it fade.
2. The Hunt for the Green Vault Squad - GQ
Well, wow. This is about an audacious and successful heist that was carried out in 2019 in Dresden, Germany where a bunch of jewels (having nostalgic more than financial value) were stolen from the Green Vault. Pretty riveting story of how the investigation went about and how the investigators were hard pressed to furnish proof against the primary suspects, the Remmo family in Germany.
3. How Fast is Necessary? - Pedestrian Observations
I’d shared The French Way of Building Rapid Transit all the way in issue #222, and here I am again with another post from Pedestrian Observations. This essay is about the Swiss rail system (which is obviously amazing) and its guiding principles: as fast as “necessary” rather than as fast as “possible”. This is very sensible, because the network wants to homogenize one-hour journeys and seamless transfers at its major stations, rather than zooming through as fast as possible but still having transiting passengers wait. Really quite cool. Of course, it works in Switzerland because of the size and shape and the layout of the major stations, but there is something here for other countries/regions to learn too.
4. From Ontario to the NBA: How Jamal Murray was raised to be a star - ESPN
Jamal Murray is a part of the Denver Nuggets team that recently won the NBA men’s championship in the US. I didn’t follow this season at all, but I did enjoy this profile of Murray, and in particular about the way his father trained and groomed him to be the player he is now. Murray’s been basketballing since forever, and that’s a large part of the player he is. His dad has also made him focus on mental strength and calmness, adding meditation sessions to his practices, so that was quite cool (although it seems an increasing focus with athletes these days too).
5. The Origami Lab - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
This is an essay all the back from 2007, and it’s about Robert J. Lang, a Californian who got his PhD in semiconductor lasers, worked in the laser field for years, and then gave it up for… origami?! Love it! Also, this essay is written by Susan Orlean who is amazing and really, what more do I have to say to recommend it?
6. There’s No Such Thing as a Free Market - The Baffler
Hmm interesting and provocative as you can imagine the title to be. I’m a fan of Robert Kaiser-Schatzlein’s writing, which is why I even gave this one a shot. The essay is a sort-of-book-review of Jacob Soll’s Free Market: The History of an Idea.
Ultimately, though, this book is not about policy, it’s about an idea. And the more I read it, the more I felt that Soll’s history wasn’t owning up to the fact that the phrase “free market” obscures much more than it clarifies. Free Market, while quite thorough, makes no argument for why we should even use this phrase anymore. To avoid getting stuck in the muck of our oligarchy’s reality-warping argument, a better approach would be to abandon the label altogether and reckon with what we really have: a state government captured by business interests that shape society so that businesses and their owners benefit first. It’s freedom for commerce, and chains for everyone else.
7. What We Do and Don’t Learn from Bog Bodies - Whetstone Magazine
Bog bodies are essentially ancient bodies preserved in peat bogs, and because of that, they can be preserved almost perfectly. Giulia Alvarez-Katz here writes about how we’ve recently been learning more about history by studying bog bodies, and in particular about the diets (lots of porridge!) that these early humans had (the contents of their stomachs are remarkably well preserved).
I’ve got a Google Alert set up for bog body gut content updates, and I hope that by now maybe you’re compelled to have one, too. The less we know about something, the more it seems we’re driven to learn about it. How very human. Kind of like porridge.
8. The Untold Story of the Boldest Supply-Chain Hack Ever - Wired(soft paywalled)
Well, wow. I think a bunch of us must have heard of the SolarWinds hack when it happened and even infected a whole bunch of US government servers (primarily the department of justice). I didn’t think too much of it, and part of that was because the US government itself has been tight-lipped about it. This is an essay with a lot of details about the private investigations into the hack, which was by the way one of the most sophisticated hacks of its kind. I don’t know how much to read into a profile about this on Wired, honestly, because I don’t even know if this is true or if everything of note has been left unsaid. Anyhow, I’m sharing it because it’s entertaining.
9. Why Britain doesn’t build - Works in Progress
“The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.”
Really enjoyed this, and if you haven’t read Lessons From a Renters’ Utopia (issue #307), I’d recommend reading them together as they both talk about particular countries’ approaches to housing in a historical context.
10. Tintin, Hergé and Chang – A Friendship That Changed the World - The Wire
Cute!
Hergé’s friendship with Chang had brought about a deep shift in Hergé’s worldview. Before he had met Chang, Tintin was, in Hergé’s own words, ‘a bit of a joke’, but Tintin would henceforth forever be cast in the role of ‘international social crusader, chronicler of major world events, and champion of the underdog’.
Looking back at their friendship many decades later, Chang said:
“We were like two brothers. I suggested to him that to use real events as the inspiration for his adventures would be a better idea … Thus The Blue Lotus was born. At that time, I visited Hergé once a week. We spoke of history, anecdote, costumes, poetry, art, the countryside and so on. As soon as the drawings were inked in, I drew the Chinese characters in different handwriting.”