Well, hello there, reader! This is Vishal, and I’m back with another midweek issue of Kat’s Kable. Life is just super busy, but I’m really happy to be making time for the newsletter once again. Lots of interesting things in this issue, as there are in every issue :) ha, this “issue” is more of a solution. Anyhow, I gotta run. Enjoy!

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1. On Craft (Cat Hicks’ blog):

A lovely post by Cat Hicks about her grandfather.

He fixed things often and silently. Grandpa just cared about things working. He had an instinct for not just broken things but soon to be broken things. He would point out risky work, bad decision making in the form of shoddy materials or shifting angles. He was offended by the trace measures left in the world that signified short-term planning. So I learned that this too had something to do with craft. He had a visual vocabulary that amazed me. I think about how he could see these details. He saw choices and constraints and tensions and frictions where I just saw chairs. He saw effort where most people just saw end products.

2. Baking Bread in Lyon (The New Yorker):

Enthralling and heartbreaking. Worth every minute of the 30 it’ll take you to read this.

3. No sacred masterpieces (Matt Basta’s Substack):

_It’s easy to treat a particularly clever or elegant piece of code as a masterpiece. It might very well be a beautiful trinket! But we engineers are not in the business of beautiful trinkets, we’re in the business of outcomes. In the same way that a chef shouldn’t be disappointed that a beautiful plate of food is “destroyed” by a hungry customer eating it, we shouldn’t be disappointed that our beautiful git repos are marked as “Archived” and shuffled off the production kube cluster.

The attitudes that we have towards the things that we make are good indicators of maturity. It’s natural for us to want our work to have staying power and longevity. It’s extremely human to want the validation of our beautiful things being seen and used and recognized; it means we’ve done well. On the other hand, our work being discarded gives us an opportunity to understand what (if anything) we could have done better._

4. In India, a Need for New Antidotes to Curb Deadly Snakebites (Undark Magazine):

Fascinating story about the Irula tribes and how they “harvest” venom from the four major deadly snakes of India.

5. The flower of famine (India Today):

This is an article from 2007 which I somehow stumbled upon - it’s about the bamboo flowering season in Manipur. It only happens once in 48 years, but when it does, it wreaks havoc. Rats multiply beyond the carrying capacity of the bamboo flowers, and literally start eating locals out of house and home.

6. Tears in the Rain (Admiral Cloudberg):

Phew, this was so sad. It’s about the 2002 Überlingen air disaster, where two planes rammed into each other mid-air. This account is definitive, and in a perverse way, gripping.

7. Ahead of Time (The Yale Review):

Beautiful personal essay by Kamran Javadizadeh about losing his sister and his relationship with that journey as well as the ensuing grief.

I’m looking back at the Hafez that Bita sent me and reading it again. Grief there seems to produce the ghosts of those you’ve loved. The river by which you weep is slow. You can take your time. Your tears mingle in its stream. I don’t read poems to know the future. I read them to hold the future at bay. Grief may be the knowledge that you can’t do that in the end, that the future won’t be like the past. You feel it now. Like water to the page, it spreads in all directions, it thins the surface, it touches what you cannot touch.

8. The Internet Debacle (Janis Ian’s blog):

A 2002 blog post/article about how the internet affected the music industry and particularly music distribution. Quite instructive.

As artists, we have the ear of the masses. We have the trust of the masses. By speaking out in our concerts and in the press, we can do a great deal to damp this hysteria, and put the blame for the sad state of our industry right back where it belongs - in the laps of record companies, radio programmers, and our own apparent inability to organize ourselves in order to better our own lives - and those of our fans. If we don’t take the reins, no one will.

9. America’s Advanced Manufacturing Problem—and How to Fix It (American Affairs Journal):

Phew, this one is a solid 45 minute read. It’s quite interesting, though, and has a lot of useful historical details.