Just realised it’s been 25 issues already. It has been absolutely amazing curating Kat’s Kable, and I hope that you have enjoyed reading as much as I enjoy compiling. Also, thank you for being the perfect audience!
- How to Hide $400 Million - The story of a woman’s exploration of her husband’s offshore distribution of money. While filing a divorce, she ended up suing her husband and herself. Pretty intense story.
- Lady Gaga: Portrait of a Lady
Being a lady today means being a fighter. It means being a survivor. It means letting yourself be vulnerable and acknowledging your shame or that you’re sad or you’re angry. It takes great strength to do that.
Fame is the best drug that’s ever existed. But once you realize who you are and what you care about, that need for more, more, more just goes away. […] I turned 30 this year, and I’m a fully formed woman. I have a clear perspective on what I want. That, for me, is success. I want to be somebody who is fighting for what’s true—not for more attention, more fame, more accolades. - The Factory of Fakes - I loved this. A company called Factum has made a 60 square metre replica of the enigmatic Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb. And it’s brilliant. To them, the answer to erosion, destruction by ISIS, exposure to weather etc. is to just digitally scan these monuments in incredibly high resolution. And then what? Print them out when you need them, of course.
- If Animals Have Rights, Should Robots? - Slightly meandering piece, but it brings up some interesting points. Something I feel rather strongly about.
- BuzzFeed’s pro tennis investigation displays ethical dilemmas of data journalism - Buzzfeed earlier ran a great investigative piece about match-fixing in tennis. They didn’t release any names, but quoted extensively from statistics that they mined from public servers. They didn’t say how to find these on the piece, but they did on an accompanying page explaining the tech behind their investigation. It wasn’t long until people put two and two together and released lists of the players being mentioned. Buzzfeed avoided libel suits by anonymising players, but made it easy enough for a professional investigation to happen. Is that good, or bad?
- How an Indian Innovator Reverse-Engineered the Making of Sanitary Pads - This is an excellent read. From The Design Issue of the NYT, it’s an inspiring portrait.
Muruganantham told me that he was approached by corporate manufacturers who wanted to partner with him to help get their higher-priced products into the rural market. He declined, he said, because he considered his model as central to making pads affordable and accessible. The women earning a livelihood by making and selling pads at local centers, he found, were also effective in promoting feminine hygiene within their communities. Using that model, he said, “we are going to make India into a 100 percent napkin-using country” — as opposed to the rags he remembered from his youth — “we are going to make Rwanda into a 100 percent napkin-using country, Zimbabwe into a 100 percent napkin-using country.” That goal sounds expansionist, but Muruganantham’s philosophy is not focused on growth. He told me he wanted to encourage “copycats” so that his pad-making technology could spread.
- Inside the 21st-Century Craze for Redesigning Everything - From the same Design Issue that the previous piece was in, this is pretty entertaining. Redesigns, redesigns. Win over the customer’s heart.
All redesigns have something in common: They end. This does not happen at the moment the redesigned symbol, object or interface is implemented. It happens when that redesign is replaced. Maybe that’s the lofty logic of progress, or just the workaday logic of capitalism. - The Woman the Mercury Astronauts Couldn’t Do Without - This is from the science magazine Nautilus, and it’s a very nice profile. You should read it to know about segregation and the problems women faced in the US. More than anything, though, this excerpt struck me as testament to how good a magazine Nautilus is.
A number transposed in calculating the launch azimuth, a significant digit too few in measuring the fully loaded weight of the capsule, a mistake in accounting for the rocket’s speed and acceleration or the rotation of the Earth could cascade through the chain of dependencies, causing serious, perhaps catastrophic, consequences.
I don’t know if I’m looking at this too closely, but the writer hasn’t gone ahead and said that a small mistake could cause drastic consequences (which is usually never true) but has assumed nothing, avoided direct sensationalism (one significant digit off and your spacecraft might just go to Pluto) while also respecting the reader’s intelligence. - Separated at Birth - This was very nice! The author tries to find his nursery-mates, the people who were born in the same hospital and same ward as him in the space of a few hours from his time of birth. The tagline of the article is An inquiry over time into the luckiest generation, and he does a good job.
Does it mean everything or nothing to be part of the same generational cohort? My brief encounters with Italiaander, Ellen, Wiedre, and Andersen suggested that the moment of our birth had indeed shaped us in some crucial way: there was, at the very least, a kind of idealism to us all, although it had been diverted into very different channels. - Lab-Grown Diamonds Come Into Their Own - Lab-grown diamonds now account for roughly 1% of the global market. They should, according to projections, account for up to 15% in the next few years. And slowly even experts are finding it harder and harder to distinguish between ‘synthetics’ and the real ones.
One of these below is a lab-grown one, and the other is mined.