Hello there, reader. This is Vishal coming to you with another issue of the Kable. It’s a midweek edition because of… well, life, honestly, but as always, there are ten great things to read. I have a super-early morning flight to catch for work, so I’ll be off. See you Sunday again and enjoy this list!

1. Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals (Quanta):

Very cool! It’s always super fascinating to read about the evolutionary pathways and how special (or un-special, depending on how you see it) intelligence is.

2. The Unseen Fury Of Solar Storms (Noema):

What’s the number 1 risk to our electrical and telecommunications systems? It’s a centennial solar storm: this is a great piece about our evolving understanding of solar storms and how we are preparing for ones in the future.

3. The Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the Obits (MIT Reader):

The best creativity is stimulated when you read about disparate ideas put together in one place, and this piece argues there’s no better place for that than obituaries.

4. Progress Unraveled (Scope of Work):

Simply wonderful. A long piece about… twine, and meditations on science and technology. We know rope is strong because it’s lots of fibers wound together, but was it unscientific to trust rope before we quantitatively understood friction? Superb.

5. Earth’s Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes We’re Only Starting to Understand (New York Times):

“Earth’s crust teems with subterranean life that we are only now beginning to understand.”

6. Here Come the Lionfish (Emergence Magazine):

“Coming face to face with lionfish in the warming waters of the Aegean Sea, James Bridle traces the unfolding of geology, evolution, and empire that not only occasions this meeting, but binds us in relationship with this “invasive” species.”

7. The Geological Sublime (Harpers):

This article made me want to go back and read John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World , and honestly I can’t think of better praise. If you haven’t read it, please do!

8. Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks (Maggie Appleton’s website):

I really love Maggie Appleton’s writing, and this one is no different.

“Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it”

9. Solitude and Leadership (The American Scholar):

I really enjoyed this commencement address by William Deresiewicz. It’s from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2009, and his point is that leadership comes from spending time with yourself and developing a sense and talent of concentration. I found it pretty interesting how he connects the two, and it makes sense.

Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. […] To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

10. How Social Media Shortens Your Life (Gurwinder Singh’s blog):

This essay did the rounds some time back, and it’s worth a read on the way it analyses social media’s effect on our subjective experience of time.