Hello there, reader, and welcome to another issue of your favourite newsletter - Kat’s Kable. I’m just wrapping up my 10-day long vacation in the US, and it’s been all kinds of amazing! After my almost 5 year stint earlier, I’m reminded of the things I missed - the beauty and abundance of this country, the diversity, the focus on technology, and I’m also reminded of the things I don’t particularly like - the car dependence, the deprioritization of community, and the focus on materiality. It’s been wonderful, though, and I’ll be sad to leave.
As always, though, ten great things to read. I’ll leave you to it.
1 Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why - Om Malik
Interesting premise and I found myself nodding quite a lot while reading this piece. Good food for thought:
Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.
What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.
2 The Information - The New Yorker
Interesting complementary essay to the previous one - this is in fact from 2011, and Alan Gopnik writes about the new information age that we were entering then. It honestly feels like we’re entering a new information age every five years?
3 The Secret to Success Is ‘Monotasking’ - The Atlantic
David Epstein is well known for his books, in particular Range which was published in 2019 and talks about the strengths of generalists in an era of increasing professional specialization. This particular piece is an excerpt from his upcoming book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, which talks about constraints like deadlines and how those actually improve our productivity and ability to work on challenging projects.
4 Mentabolism - Blundercheck
I really loved this essay. Timber Stinson-Schroff coins a new term called “mentabolism” - how we transform information into sustained performance. The idea is that we need a way to think about performance in the knowledge economy, and how to think about overall output across a career and not just raw intellectual ability. His theory is that you need to be an endurance athlete - you don’t need to blow it out of the park, but you need to have staying power and allow low-level stressors to build up your capacity over time. Quite cool and honestly a way of thinking that I’ll be using for my own career.
5 What Causes Lightning? The Answer Keeps Getting More Interesting. - Quanta Magazine
Whoa - I didn’t know how complicated lightning is, and how incomplete our knowledge of it is, too. I used to think it was simple - there’s enough charge in the air to cause a high electric field and breakdown of the atmosphere, and boom, lightning. But it’s not so simple! The high electric field can be caused by all sorts of esoteric causes - cosmic ray showers, gamma ray bursts arising from sharp ice clouds? Wow?
6 Island of Secrets - The Atavist
I’ve been on a kick of reading the backissues of Atavist (lots recently!). I last shared The Extra Mile (issue #385) and Watch It Burn (issue #383). This 2011 piece is about John Lane, an American geologist, who mounted ambitious cave expeditions in Borneo and then got pulled into the massive sidequest of proving the existence of an animal called the tree kangaroo.
7 China’s technology long game - High Capacity (Kyle Chan’s Substack)
“What reading through China’s Five-Year Plans reveals about its evolving tech strategy–and its plans for the industries of the future.”
Pretty interesting read about China’s overall technology plans - I would pair this with The Aluminum Tech Stack (issue #390).
8 Silicon Valley Is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass - The New York Times
Interesting letter to the editor in the NYT (which you might have trouble accessing, sorry!) about the “permanent underclass” - the increasing inequality that AI will bring and accelerate, but also the strange sense of solidarity between white-collar and blue-collar workers (who are both anxious about the rising inequality and escaping the underclass). Honestly a bit surreal.
9 Never Die - Victory Journal
So good! Victory Journal is a sports publication and I’ve shared 3100 in issue #355, which is about the world’s longest foot race around a single city block in NYC. This piece is about one person - Spencer Seabrooke, who is a slackliner. Slacklining is terrifying to me - it’s about crossing a chasm while on a slack piece of thread connecting the start and finish points. It’s a great piece - about him, the difficulty of his task, and how others rally around him.
10 On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson’s website
Such a touching and thoughtful piece on the process of becoming a dad and the way it adds richness to life.