Hello there, reader! Welcome back to another issue of your favourite internet newsletter - Kat’s Kable. I’m writing this on a Sunday afternoon feeling quite chuffed after my wife & I hosted a successful ferment-led soda party yesterday! You know that glow you get after a nice time with friends? Yeah. We had six different ferments - five soda/kombuchas (jamun, jackfruit, sweet lime, mango and plum) and a fermented guacamole. Speaking of guacamole - it’s been an amazing avocado summer. I’ll write about it another time. For now, I’ll leave you with ten great things as usual - ranging from dairy farm robots and carbon capture to instituting a Friday night dinner to bring community together.
1. How Dairy Robots Are Changing Work for Cows (and Farmers) - IEEE Spectrum
“Robots are taking over much of the daily manual labor at dairy farms, including milking, feeding, cleaning, and more. It makes dairy farmers’ lives easier, and makes the cows happier, too.” Interesting report about the increasing wave of robots that are taking over operations at developed countries’ dairy farms. What I found interesting is that cows actually are happier and produce more milk because they get milked when they want.
2. That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil - Bloomberg
Hilarious 2015 article by Bloomberg journalist Tracy Alloway who wanted to purchase a barrel of crude. An actual barrel. All she got was a jar, and that too after a whole lot of finagling with a broker and a gas trader. Entertaining!
If gold is the equivalent of a pet rock, then I can confidently say that oil is the equivalent of playing host to a herd of feral cats; it demands constant vigilance and maintenance. If gathered in sufficient quantities, it will probably try to kill you, or at least severely harm your health.
3. Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group - The Paris Review
Another fun article, this one by author Johannes Lichtman, who is invited to speak at Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.
Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question. In 2021, I had turned down an invitation from the government of Saudi Arabia for an all-expenses-paid trip to a writers’ retreat at al-‘Ulā, as I didn’t want to be a part of their arts and culture whitewashing. But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.
4. Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi & Vim - Pikuma
I write every issue of Kat’s Kable on vim (or rather, nvim) on my laptop, and I had a whole phase a few years ago of sprucing up my terminal editor setup with all sorts of plugins and keyboard shortcuts. I’m always eager to learn more about the history of these tools, because while they’re basic in terms of snazziness, they’re also advanced in terms of what they can help you achieve. This fun read into the history of vim (via ed , em and vi) is enjoyable.
5. Grow the Puzzle Around You - Jessica Livingston’s blog
Jessica Livingston is a co-founder of Y-Combinator, the world’s first startup accelerator and one of the most famous names/brands in the ecosystem. This essay by her is a sort of autobiography of her years starting YC, and it’s very fun. It talks about how the core team of YC got together, and how Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris would pick & advise startups and Jessica would do “everything else”. While this does sound pretty gender-coded, Jessica discovered she was the social glue and intelligence at YC, and the best judge of people. While I knew about Jessica, this is the first time I’ve read about her perspective, and I wanna go back and read more of her writing.
In fact, it may even be that the strangest combinations of qualities are the most valuable. I had a weird combination of qualities, but they matched YC because it was such a weird company. And the most successful startups do tend to be weird. They’re usually such outliers that the idea sounds preposterous at first. To everyone except the founders, because the company has grown out of their experiences.
6. This Old Man - The New Yorker (via Internet Archive)
Roger Angell was an American journalist best known for his baseball writing. This 2014 essay by him in The New Yorker is about getting and being old - he was 94 when he wrote it. It’s very endearing, and despite feeling a sense of apprehension at the beginning of the essay, I found it to be extremely life-affirming. Definitely something I’d like to go back to reading in a couple of months.
Friends in great numbers now, taking me to dinner or cooking in for me. (One afternoon, I found a freshly roasted chicken sitting outside my front door; two hours later, another one appeared in the same spot.) Friends inviting me to the opera, or to Fairway on Sunday morning, or to dine with their kids at the East Side Deli, or to a wedding at the Rockbound Chapel, or bringing in ice cream to share at my place while we catch another Yankees game. They saved my life. In the first summer after Carol had gone, a man I’d known slightly and pleasantly for decades listened while I talked about my changed routines and my doctors and dog walkers and the magazine. I paused for a moment, and he said, “Plus you have us.”
7. Friday Night Meatballs: How to Change Your Life With Pasta - Serious Eats
Sarah Grey talks about how her husband and her started to get quite lonely in an American suburb after having their firstborn, and how they mitigated that by instituting a “family meal” at home every Friday night - meatballs and pasta, same menu every time, but everyone’s welcome - whether friends, family, or someone else who saw their Facebook post. This one is also quite life-affirming and definitely a good template to model hosting and community on!
8. So You’re the Boss Now? - Harnidh Kaur’s Substack
I liked Harnidh’s post here about becoming a first-time manager, and how she replayed her old roles and experiences with different types of managers to come up with her own modus operandi. In particular I really liked the intentionality with which she’s coming to this.
And if you do it well- if you choose humility over ego, trust over control, growth over credit- one of your former teammates will step into your shoes, notebook in hand, reverse-engineering what you did. I hope they find something worthwhile to emulate.
9. Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions - Heimildin
“The carbon capture company Climeworks only captures a fraction of the CO2 it promises its machines can capture. The company is failing to carbon offset the emissions resulting from its operations – which have grown rapidly in recent years.”
10. Drawing Rohan - The Dial
Deeply endearing story by Nishant Jain about the illustrations he made constantly around and after the time his kid was born.
Deep observation has been a part of my life since before I became a father. As an artist, I draw urban life in public spaces: a person reading a book in a cafe, someone crossing the street, families in public parks. These are ordinary things but they fascinate me. Do I not drink my coffee the same way? Am I also impatient for the light to turn green? Drawing people is an invitation to look past the ways we are different from one another, and recognize our underlying similarities. It is this idea that I seek to communicate with my minimalist drawings and the spirit with which I wanted to approach my new life as a parent. I wanted to observe Rohan, without distractions, and record the little things he does and that make up his world.
