Hello there, reader, and welcome back to another (mid-week) issue of Kat’s Kable. I’m frantically typing this out on a Thursday morning about to rush for breakfast, work and you know.. everything else that requires franticness (I’m tickled that franticness is an actual word). So! Happy reading, and see you on Sunday.

1. Becoming Earth (Emergence Magazine):

“Wandering among the ancient decomposing cedar trees of the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon, Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer wonders what they might teach us about the nature of our own afterlife.”

2. Lonesome spines: buyer sought for over 150,000 books and the one-time Yorkshire Dales youth hostel in which they’re housed (The World Of Interiors):

“Richard Axe is celebrated in the bookselling trade for owning one of the largest collections of antiquarian and second-hand volumes ever assembled. Since 2005, his stock has been arrayed in a huge former youth hostel in the Yorkshire Dales, but now his career is approaching its coda”

3. EelMail (Frank Chimero’s newsletter):

Really fun and whimsical 1000 word exploration into the world of… eels!

4. An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project (Construction Physics):

Brian Potter’s recent longreads on Substack have been really good! I enjoyed this one - which talks about the sheer improbability of so many of the things achieved during the Manhattan Project.

5. Notes on Managing ADHD (Fernando Borretti’s website):

Not a longread per se, this is more of a guide. It’s structured really nicely, though - divided into strategies and tactics to manage ADHD.

6. What brain surgery taught me about the fragile gift of consciousness (Big Think):

Really touching personal essay by Eric Markowitz. He talks about his miraculous return to life after a brain surgery that gave him unfavourable odds, but also how he felt surprisingly most alive just before the surgery.

7. The McPhee method (Joseph Somers’ blog):

Excellent! I’m a big fan of McPhee’s writing and his writing style. This essay mentions McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are , and I immediately inhaled it over the course of two days.

8. How to spot a genius (The Economist):

An interesting fact: the average Nobel laureate is born in the 95th percentile of global income. How do societies, educational institutions and governments better find and retain the geniuses in their midst?

9. Why Romania Excels in International Olympiads (Palladium Mag):

Ha! Good complement to the previous piece. Romania, by almost all metrics of measurement, does pretty poorly in education. However, the country outperforms significantly in student olympiads. How? Why? The answer primarily lies in the structure of their post-Soviet educational system that acts as a zero-sum game: try to focus maximally on the few best gifted at the cost of attention given to all others.

10. How Ahmedabad’s New Irani Restaurant Helped me Rediscover the Joy in Friendship (Spicy Dabeli):

I recently came across Kathan’s Substack, and I really enjoyed this first piece I read - I plan to read more! P.S. I enjoyed the use of the word “scrumdiddlyumptious” - especially because I’m in the middle of a run BFG re-read with Samira.