Good day, reader. This is Vishal with another issue of your favourite email newsletter, Kat’s Kable. I woke up this morning with my wall clock reading 12:35 and before I could think of replacing the batteries (did you think I woke up that late?), I thought to myself, “let’s just keep it as is for a couple of days and see if it changes the way I behave”. I highly doubt it, but let’s see anyway.
I’m about to go make dinner (Thai red curry) and bake my weekly loaf of bread, so this has been a proper Sunday full of chores and such. However, it is nice when the day is done and you’ve felt like you’ve done something , so the downtime feels doubly good. I started reading this book called No One is Talking About This and absolutely did not get it. So I’ve turned my attentions to Julia Skinner’s Our Fermented Lives. While I proceed with my own fermented life.
Last night I made a plum “cheong”, cheong being a Korean word referring to a method of making sweet syrups from fruits by using sugar to draw out the fruit’s juices. This syrup could also be called an oleo-saccharum, a fancy word for oil-and-sugar, because it’s a way of getting the fruits to release their essential oils into the sugar and hence the syrup. The key to this method being amazing is that it involves no heating, and thus results in a syrup with all the flavour intact. Some call it a fermented syrup, but honestly, with such high sugar levels (equal quantities of fruit and sugar), it’s unlikely that any microbes can live. This is what my plum cheong looks after just a day (all the liquid is from the plums)!
Anyhow… that’s all. I digress. You’re here for the list of ten articles. They are here. Enjoy them.
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1. A Sweet and Potent Harvest - Places Journal
Stingless bees are aplenty in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, and the native Maijuna people have been tapping their honey for a long time now. The honey, though, was mostly used by them and what little remained was sold in the cities. There has been a revival of the practice now, with nonprofits helping to train the Maijuna, providing processing equipment, and also connecting them with urban buyers. The result is a source of income that is stable, safer than foraging in the forest, and more gender-equitable.
2. Daniel Bard Made an Improbable Comeback. Then He Had to Do It Again - The New Yorker (soft paywalled)
Well, wow, I really enjoyed this. It’s about baseball pitcher Daniel Bard, who played an amazing couple of seasons from 2009 to 2013. Which, mind you, came after a “comeback” where he had lost some of his muscle looseness and ball control. After 2013, he lost some of that control again, became a coach, but realized that he had slowly started to gain back that control. And in what is truly a memorable story, he made another comeback, all the way in 2020. He’s obviously not the virtuoso he was in 2010, but he’s still an excellent pitcher.
Success isn’t the same thing as dominance. The point has never been to blow guys away with hundred-m.p.h. fastballs, as much fun as that is. It’s always been to try to win with whatever you’ve got.
By the way, the quote above also reminds me of something written on Cricinfo about Virat Kohli and his most recent century:
This is perhaps because he has figured out how to do well whether he is switched all the way on or just half the way on; how to work within the limitations he is all of a sudden having to deal with.
3. The Man Who Broke Bowling - GQ Sports (soft paywalled)
Ha, one article about sports followed by another. I was almost about to say, consecutive articles about American sports, but this profile is about Australian Jacob Belmonte, affectionately known as Belmo. Bowling, of course, is stereotyped in my head as such an American sport. Belmonte is famous for popularizing the two-handed bowling technique, which means you can impart more spin, or “revs”, on the ball. When he started off, his technique was called a “cancer” to the sport, but now after he’s won 15 majors and catalyzed a generation of two-handed throwers, well, the turn tables.
4. The Paradox: Explaining Yoel Romero - The Fight Site
More sports! This time it’s mixed martial arts, which I honestly have no idea about. I’d earlier shared 10 Days In Havana in issue #303, also from Fight Site. That was more of a travelogue, whereas this one is talking about the tactics and strategy of Yoel Romero, one of the most enigmatic, athletic and successful MMA fighters out there. To be honest, the biggest revelation I had reading this article was that the difference between strategy and tactics is basically the same as the difference between climate and weather. Ha!
5. Bad waitress - Dirt Magazine
Entertaining and interesting story by Becca Schuh on being a writer and a server, with service industry jobs providing her bread and butter while she worked towards making it as a writer.
6. Global Microbiome Study Gives New View of Shared Health Risks - Quanta Magazine
“The most comprehensive survey of how we share our microbiomes suggests a new way of thinking about the risks of developing some diseases that aren’t usually considered contagious.”
This is interesting too: it’s about an “indirect” immune system we have, or rather an indirectly transmitted and/or hereditary propensity towards some diseases. This sharing comes from the microbes that inhabit the spaces that we do, which primarily come from the people we are in closest contact with. I do admit that many of the results so far are not unequivocal, but it is an interesting theory and provides another way of thinking of disease transmission and immunity.
7. El Nino coming? Why the ‘little boy’ spells big trouble for India - Mridula Ramesh’s blog
Not a “long” read in the spirit of what I usually share on the newsletter, but a good primer on how the El Nino impacts the Indian monsoon and more generally India’s overall water availability.
8. My Father’s Death in 7 Gigabytes - Wired (soft paywalled)
“Dad spent decades writing weird, experimental literature. His last wish: Upload it all to the Internet Archive.”
This is quite nice.
The two boxes have become one, taped back up and placed in the attic. No one will worry about that box besides me, and one day my inner bad librarian may feel ready to throw it away. All the digital files are zipped up in one place too—partly because I don’t want his poems to show up every time I search my computer for something. Tomorrow I head to the interment, just my brother and I, and the green urn, too, will be filed away into the ground. I am glad this project is over, but I ended up welcoming the work, guiding these last phases of compression. My father needed a great deal of space, but now he takes up almost none. Almost. Death is a lossy process, but something always remains.
9. How to Sharpen a Scythe - Yale Review
First, I just want to say how much I love the word used for the sharpening process of a scythe: “peening”. I love collecting and sharing articles about attention and wonder, and while this essay starts with scythe sharpening, it becomes a meandering meditation on the way we pay attention to the world around us.
Yet, with scythe in hand, I have begun to notice a change. I like how the tool sharpens my focus, as well as how it conditions my experience of living on this particular patch of earth. A patch that is also changing. [..] Every season brings increased variety, which is another way of saying that every season brings increased possibility, and when I drift off to sleep at night, worn out by the day’s demands for attention, it is to the meadow singing with cricket song.
10. Strategy Letter V - Joel Spolsky’s blog
Micro- and macroeconomics for software companies. Lots of cool insights here, starting with the concept of substitutes and complements and how for-profit companies support open source projects with the goal of commoditizing software, ending up at the conclusion that “smart companies try to commoditize their products’ complements” and how it’s easier for software to commoditize hardware, but harder for the reverse to happen.