Hello there, reader and welcome to another issue of Kat’s Kable. This one’s coming to you in the middle of the week because I was traveling over the weekend enjoying some time off. I’m actually dictating parts of this issue to my laptop instead of typing it out just as an experiment and I will tell you a fun fact: my dictation app thinks of Kat’s Kable as CatsGamer. That sounds pretty fun, huh.
Speaking of fun, I am still pretty bamboozled at the fact that my audience is shrinking. I peaked a couple of years ago and I have steadily shrunk in size and I don’t know what to do about it. Partly I know I do this for the love of the game and I don’t really care about the quantity, but I also want to know that I have a growing base of readers.
So, yeah, I’ve been brainstorming ways to revamp the newsletter, make it more “modern” (it’s super basic right now, I know). If you have any ideas, let me know. And of course, you can always write back to me by replying to this email, and even better, you can forward the Kable to someone you know who might like it.
That’s all! I’m off for breakfast. Enjoy the ten pieces for the week and see you again this weekend.
1. Daydreamers and Sleepwalkers: Crossing the Borderlands of the Unconscious - MIT Press Reader
A fun adaptation from the recent book The Unconscious: A Cultural History from Hippocrates to Philip K. Dick by Antonio Melechi.
“Scientists, novelists, and philosophers have spent centuries studying the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. Each descent only deepens the mystery.”
2. Where’s Earl Sweatshirt? - The New Yorker
This is a very fun but long read in an area that I actually don’t really know anything about! It’s about an American rapper called Earl Sweatshirt who became super popular in 2010 and then disappeared. This is a 2011 story of him during his disappearance, after which he came back to popular life and recording culture in 2012.
3. Why We Shouldn’t Treat Rap As Poetry - The Awl
This is another fun 2011 piece that’s prompting me to read deeper about the subject of rap music as literature - there was a big movement back then called “rap as poetry” and this essay is about why one shouldn’t. The argument hinges on two primary pillars: that rap lyrics aren’t poetry because they’re so coupled to the act of performance, and that authorship is so blurred where oftentimes the performer has written little or none of the lyrics themselves. Fascinating read.
4. My two-part desk setup - Fatih Arsalan’s blog
I’ve shared a few pieces by Arsalan before - this one isn’t a longform piece per se, but it’s one I really enjoyed - he talks about his desk setup and how he separates out the “digital” and “analog” parts of his desk. I have a single wide desk right now, but I’d love to have a much wider one at some point to do something like he does.
5. Blindsight - Atavist Magazine
I think me reading this essay recently was pretty coincidental, because I also just read Peter Watts’ book Blindsight a month ago. This one is really bizarre - it’s about Hollywood producer Simon Lewis who was beginning a stellar career, then suffered a horrendous car crash, and eventually regained much of his cognition, but with one major change: blindsight, which means that the visual pathways through the prefrontal cortex don’t work well, so you route part of your vision through an older and more involuntary pathway through the brainstem.
6. The Education of the Broligarchy - Colossus Magazine
This is a recent piece that I found pretty interesting. It starts off with the premise that there is a canon of books that tech bros, so to speak, in Silicon Valley Read. And then it goes on to then talk and theorize about their current and future paths to power in politics. I know opinions are very divided on this. I found this piece to be pretty optimistic in the sense that it’s good that these silicon valley elites are taking part in politics instead of distancing themselves as they somewhat used to do.
7. High on the Stones - The New York Review of Books
Another piece from my 2011 binge - well, wow. Keith Richards’ autobiography Life came out in 2011 and this is a review of the book. It’s not just a review of the book, it’s a review of his life, almost, and I loved reading it. It’s full of extremes, it’s full of partying, it’s full of music, it’s full of celebrity and I think it’s just such an entertaining read.
8. A Rough Guide to Disney World - New York Times
John Jeremiah Sullivan, who’s writing is pretty awesome, writes about going to Disney World with his family and his friend’s family. And it’s a crazy fun read, just like the previous one.
Once again a day of equatorial heat that all but exerted a physical weight. The shoulder skin of the tank-top-wearing men around us roiled ultravioletly, in a precancerous way. It took a lot of psychic reserve to steel your soul for these long days of amusement. […] I somehow ended up carrying Lil’ Dog. That was a lot of steps for his tiny legs across the desert of heat-mirage. There is something unnatural or I should say unearthly about Lil’ Dog’s weight, or his density. It was like carrying a meteorite. To carry both girls would have been easier.
9. How Does China’s Spacecraft Compare to NASA’s Artemis? - IEEE Spectrum
Interesting piece (it’s actually part 2 of a 3 part series) about the rivalry between China and the US in the new “space race”. I do wonder where India fits into this comparison - I don’t think there’s much of a comparison today, but hopefully there is a meaningful one in five years’ time.
10. Here Be Monsters - Michael Finkel
Ha, last 2011 piece for this week. A boat that took off from the Pacific island of Atafu carrying three boys went missing. The boys were missing. For 51 days. And then they were found! Absolutely crazy story that should read as a precautionary tale but reads as a fun adventure, almost.
