Hi there, reader. Good morning, and welcome to another tardy issue of your favourite internet newsletter, Kat’s Kable. As usual, ten great things to read, and like the last issue, this one too is filled with blasts from the past as I continue to sieve through my recent haul of the best writing from the early 2000s. Phew - I gotta run to work now.
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1. The Strange Death of a Sherlock Holmes Fanatic (New Yorker):
Very Holmesian story of the death of one of the world’s foremost Sherlock Holmes scholars, Richard Green. This one is back from 2004, and it all revolves around a bunch of missing papers that every Holmes scholar (and family member, apparently) had been searching for and coveting for a long time.
2. The Mad Scramble to Claim the World’s Most Coveted Meteorite (Wired):
2018 piece on a meteorite impact in Carancas, Peru, and how a ragtag team of professional-ish meteorite hunters from the US descended to find remnants - a story of a mad rush that involved shamans, border control, and a whole lot of chasing.
3. What would a world with AGI look like? (Rohit Krishnan’s Substack):
I usually like reading Rohit’s work - here he talks about how the concept of AGI is going to change the way we do things, and I found his vision something.. nice, and embraceable, while also leaning more on the technical side of things.
4. True Grit (Atavist):
“When a storm surge swept dozens of wild horses and cattle from the coast of North Carolina, no one expected there to be survivors. Then hoofprints appeared in the sand.”
5. Accelerate design (Falcon Design):
Ahmed Shah is a North America-based founder of Falcon, a new type of AI-powered design platform. This is a really nice essay from him that articulates his journey into design and what he sees as the next logical place for design tools to get to with the advent of generative AI. I enjoyed reading about his vision.
6. Queens of Infamy: The Rise of Catherine de’ Medici (Longreads):
As part of my internet-trawling for old and amazing longform reading, I found this series by Anne Thériault called Queens of Infamy - very fun! This one is just part one of the story of Catherine de’ Medici, and I plan on reading part two pronto.
7. YouTube: The Learning Machine (Trung Phan’s Substack):
Nice walkthrough of how a bunch of athletes across sports now are learning a lot of their core (and world-class!) skills on YouTube.
8. Seven Days And Nights In The World’s Largest, Rowdiest Retirement Community (Buzzfeed):
Well, phew. Extremely entertaining read about The Villages, a seniors-only retirement community in Florida with over 100,000 residents now - and all owned by a single billionaire.
9. The Last Days of Target (Canadian Business):
So I didn’t know this, but the US-based chain Target planned an expansion into Canada in 2013, and… well, it all went badly. This is a pretty damning read about all the mistakes they made and why some of them happened.
10. What It Takes to Be a Short-Order Cook in Las Vegas (The New Yorker):
There were only two cooks per shift, and I once heard that we made an average of three hundred and fifty meals every morning, which seemed an astonishing number. Yet the other cooks never seemed fazed. They cracked eggs two at a time without breaking the yolks and kept four, five, or six pans going simultaneously. They moved with such unvarying precision that some suffered from repetitive-stress injuries. One of them, a scrawny black man who lived on a houseboat with his son, had developed a kind of tennis elbow from handling frying pans; another, whom I’ll call Jack, had thrown out his hip after years of pivoting from the stove to the serving counter.