Hello. I’ve been a little caught up with other things this week, and sadly haven’t had enough time for Kat’s Kable. I thought of maybe not sending it out this weekend, but that would break a chain that’s now been intact for nearly six months (six months!). Here goes, apologies in advance.
- Patti Smith on Singing at Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize Ceremony - If you’ve been reading Kat’s Kable for a bit, you must already know how big a fan of Bob Dylan I am. This is Patti Smith being her endearing and enchanting self. If you like this, you might want to check out her two books (memoirs, actually), Just Kids and M Train. Both of these are beautiful.
- A Bigger Problem Than ISIS? - The Mosul Dam is failing, and it may just collapse soon. Repair and restoration works are obstructed by the war in the region, and if the dam does collapse, it will release a mega-huge wave that may cost over a million lives. Scary. According to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assessment, “Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world.”
- Why Time Management is Ruining Our Lives - Our modern obsession with productivity is causing us to become slightly demented.
And yet the truth is that more often than not, techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have. - This former journalist helps caregivers get to know who their patients once were, before dementia took hold - Jay Newton-Small is doing something very nice. When dementia patients are admitted to care facilities, they are required to fill in long 20-page forms which are boring and sometimes not very enlightening. What Newton-Small’s firm does it write small biographies for dementia patients before they enter care, and this has completely transformed the way they are cared for.
- Do Emoji Have Their Own Syntax? - Very entertaining. A nerdy take on how to interpret emoji sentences. The question being asked is, does the order of emoji really matter?
- India is training ‘quacks’ to do real medicine. This is why - This is a piece from over a year ago, but it’s a very nice account of how training some rural medical practitioners for a few months gives them the required skills to deal with most of the ailments they encounter. Is this right, however? In a country like India, where some areas have only one doctor per 70,000 people, we may not have a choice but to put our faith in ‘quacks’. We may as well train them, then.
- Inside the Kremlin’s Hall Of Mirrors - Fake news stories. Doctored photographs. Staged TV clips. Armies of paid trolls. Has Putin’s Russia developed a new kind of information warfare – fought in the ‘psychosphere’ rather than on the battlefield? Or is it all just a giant bluff.
I had always imagined the phrase “information war” to refer to some sort of geopolitical debate, with Russian propagandists on one side and western propagandists on the other, both trying to convince everyone in the middle that their side was right. But the encyclopedia suggested something more expansive: information war was less about methods of persuasion and more about “influencing social relations” and “control over the sources of strategic reserves”. Invisible weapons acting like radiation to override biological responses and seize strategic reserves? The text seemed more like garbled science fiction than a guide for students and civil servants. - One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die - A man called BJ Miller, a triple amputee (he only retains natural function of one arm) is in charge of Zen Hospice, where he has his own quirky methods of giving care to people who are dying. This is a really lovely read.
He was still hopelessly busy, still chastened by the volume of good work he saw in front of him but couldn’t do. But it felt right. Miller hadn’t unburdened himself, exactly, but rearranged and rebalanced the weight. He was committing to the parts of himself that felt most meaningful and trying to shake free of all the other, unhelpful expectations. “It’s the same thing I would counsel a patient,” Miller told me. - By Heart: Authors Share and Discuss Their Favourite Passages -I found this Atlantic compilation where many authors talk about their all-time favourite passages in literature. It’s very good!
Here’s just one, from Borges’ Aleph (chosen by Michael Chabon)
I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me…