Hello there, reader, and it’s Vishal back with another issue of your favourite internet newsletter. I’m sitting in a random restaurant on a random road waiting to head to an event for work, and well, if that isn’t the ticket to write up a overdue-from-the-weekend Kat’s Kable issue, I don’t know what is. I do have to run now to the event, and while I wanted to write some more about a fun housewarming party yesterday, a two-layer coconut milk pandan pudding (it was wonderful) and an upcoming week of travel, alas, I don’t have the time.

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. Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road (BBC):

Pretty cool insight into how team chefs cook for Tour de France athletes - things have come a long way from eating whatever each hotel served up (mostly pasta and rice) to hyper-optimized meals cooked for each athletes metabolism.

2. Supershoes are reshaping distance running (Technology Review):

Supershoes, starting with Nike’s Vaporfly, are pretty crazy. I haven’t worn one - but even the description is mind-boggling. They have huge pieces of foam (over 3cm tall!) and carbon fiber plates to maintain rigidity. Because athletes are using these, long-distance running records are dropping like bowling pins.

3. ‘Why wouldn’t you, if you can run faster?’: the unstoppable rise of the carbon-fibre super shoe (The Guardian):

Very similar to the previous one.

_Just a word of advice: if you speak to someone who has completed the marathon, don’t make the mistake of thinking that their super shoes made it easy. “At the end of the day, the shoes do help, but you’ve still got to be able to run at that pace,” says Rose Harvey. “You’ve still got to run the damn thing!”

_

4. Scoop Dreams (NY Mag):

A profile of Shams Charania, a very new-age sports reporter who deals in scoops and is basically on his phone all the time(averaging 18 hours a day).

When we met, Charania had taken a Lyft from his home in the Chicago suburbs because driving would have prevented him from texting and the train wasn’t an appropriate place to take a call from, say, the general manager of an NBA team whose name popped up on Charania’s iPhone shortly after he sat down. At one point, Charania set down a piece of toast to type out a text with his right pinkie to avoid smearing the screen with the strawberry jam on his thumb. “I didn’t even realize I was doing that,” he said when I pointed it out. “I’ll do anything to get the text off. I’ve used my nose before.”

5. This Art Residency Space In Delhi Evolves In Harmony With Nature At This Architectural Gem (Design Pataki):

Lovely lovely!

6. Architectural Cross-Section of Kowloon Walled City (Cohost):

I’ve earlier shared about Kowloon Walled City in issue #318 (Atlas Obscura’s The Strange Saga of Kowloon Walled City). This one takes it further and it’s an absolute marvel - a cross-section of this crazy place/social experiment.

7. Why Is Chile So Long? (Tomas Pueyo’s blog):

A very fun deep dive into Chile’s weird and extreme shape. I found this to be the coolest map of them all.

8. Notes on Tajikistan (Matt Lakeman’s blog):

Another whimsical and in-depth exploration of a country, this time more about its people and history. If you don’t think you’ll enjoy a (pretty) long read about a single obscure country, you might be proven wrong by this one.

9. Echoes of Electromagnetism Found in Number Theory (Quanta Magazine):

Really fun technical read about the connection between two mathematical constructs called periods and L-functions, which connect calculus and number theory.

10. Pursuing fusion power (Knowable Magazine):

“Scientists have been chasing the dream of harnessing the reactions that power the Sun since the dawn of the atomic era. Interest, and investment, in the carbon-free energy source is heating up.”