Hello there, reader, and welcome back to another issue of Kat’s Kable - your favourite internet newsletter. As always, I present to you ten great things to read. You may have noticed quite a few pieces from 2011 in the last month or so - that’s because I stumbled upon a secret (ahem!) source with a big compilation of 2011 longform essays! I’m not even close to reading them all, so you can expect some more :)
The key insight for me is to read about things like the internet from back then - it feels like a time capsule, almost. Warnings about the internet becoming a walled garden with no interoperability between platforms.. well, that has gotten more intense with wider reach of social media and now, AI & LLM-powered search. It’s definitely fun and intellectually stimulating to read about, though.
Anyhow, that’s all from me in this preamble - I have to get started with work soon, so I’m gonna run. Enjoy the Kable! Share it if you feel like. And of course, feel free to reply to me anytime.
1. The wonder of modern drywall - Works in Progress
Fun! I hadn’t encountered drywall until I moved to the US for grad school, and honestly, it felt like a weird material coming from the Indian context (where brick walls are standard). I enjoyed reading this historical analysis of the need for a material like drywall, how it’s a modern equivalent of older wattle-n-daub building technologies, and I particularly liked the last paragraph:
Yes, this is all boring. No sane person should ever get excited about a blank wall, let alone read a thousand plus words on the subject. But your wall at home is a recurring reminder that most true architectural and design advancements are almost entirely invisible.
2. The Man with a Plan to Save Maine’s Moose Population - Down East
“Lee Kantar, the only dedicated state moose biologist in the country, is charged with everything from managing the hunt to countering the deadly onslaught of winter ticks.”
America’s, and in particular Maine’s, moose population is in danger. What from? Winter ticks. A combination of moose overpopulation and higher winter temperatures mean ticks overwinter effectively and spread easier from moose to moose. A moose management plan, spearheaded by Lee Kantar, surprisingly centres the annual moose hunt - a way for moose populations to be managed across the state to levels where ticks don’t spread so easily from one animal to the other.
3. How the Internet Gets Inside Us - The New Yorker
A 2011 piece by Adam Gopnik summarizing opinions about the internet. His thesis is that people can be divided into three groups: the Never-Betters (we’re on the brink of a new utopia), the Better-Nevers (technology is ruining us and the world), and the Ever-Wasers (this is just another shift in the shifts that always happen). Honestly it feels like a time capsule to be reading opinions from.. 15 years ago!
Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self.
4. A rationalist’s guide to manifestation. - Isabel Unraveled on Substack
This piece did the rounds in January, and I finally got around to reading it. It sounds a bit woo-woo, but honestly, it’s pretty nice. The basic premise is this: “When you define what you want, you reach out for it, and the world starts to offer it to you.”
Further, Isabel talks about some other nuances - for example, when you want (or “manifest”) something and it comes to you, say yes and accept it without second thoughts.
5. The Art of the Body Shot - Grantland
Phew. Chris Jones’ meditation on the body shot in boxing - “a fast, technically perfect punch tossed into the dead center” of someone’s soul, and “for punch connoisseurs, it was a thing of beauty”. I’m not a big fighting sport fan, but I did enjoy reading this piece.
But they’re beautiful precisely because of their rarity — because they’re so fundamentally sound, because they require discipline and technique and art. Body-shot knockouts are boxing’s equivalent of a great wraparound, open-field tackle in football, or those nights when Michael Jordan went after Grant Hill’s ankles, because Jordan knew that’s where Hill’s worst weakness hid. They display an intelligence, a determination, a self-control that, for me, is far more impressive than fireworks.
6. William Gibson, The Art of Fiction No. 211 - The Paris Review
I absolutely loved this interview of William Gibson by David Wallace-Wells. It goes into so much - Gibson’s upbringing and influencing science fiction authors, the way he coined new terms like cyberspace and cyberpunk, and his views on the way technology is changing our lives. I recommend giving the whole thing a read.
7. How Carrots Became The New Junk Food - Fast Company
Another fun 2011 piece, this time about baby carrots. Baby carrots! The carrots we all thought were cute small carrots and then later realized were actually normal carrots cut and lathed into the baby carrot shape? Those ones.
“Jeff Dunn believes he can double the $1 billion baby-carrot business – and promote healthy eating – by marketing the vegetable like Doritos. His secret weapon? He knows every snack-marketing trick in the book.”
8. The Beer Archaeologist - Smithsonian Magazine
“By analyzing ancient pottery, Patrick McGovern is resurrecting the libations that fueled civilization”
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9. Michael Jordan: A history of flight - ESPN
I’m not sure how, but I recently came across this 2020 profile of Michael Jordan. It doesn’t go into his basketball prowess (to the extent that that’s possible), but rather into his history and his youth. I did not realize Jordan came from an almost ancient, mystical part of North Carolina and how much that shaped him as a person. Somehow reading this excellent profile, what I walked away with was a sense of amazement and wonder at the American-ness of it - it felt like there was so much captured in terms of vibes, locations, priorities and it was all part of one big unit.
10. New York Is Planning a Train Line to Connect Its Transit Deserts. We Walked All 14 Miles of It. - The New York Times
To wrap up, this lovely essay by Alex Wolfe - I’m a big fan of his writing (check out his Substack Pedestrian) and this one is no different. NYC has a new train line called the interborough express coming up, and considering how it considers neighbourhoods that are considered “worlds apart”, Wolfe’s chronicle of walking the planned route brings out a lot of stories. And of course, pictures too.
