Good morning, there! Welcome to another Sunday morning Kat’s Kable, aka another on-time departure brought to you by Kat Airlines. It’s been a fun and busy week, as usual - I’ve gotten back into running and like the quick 20-30 minute interludes they give me from everything. We also baked some incredible cookies - there was leftover modak filling (coconut and jaggery cooked down, basically), and we made modak filling-chocolate chip-miso cookies. Fun! Another culinary highlight - I’d made “paneer” rose syrup some time ago with the intention of making homemade paneer-soda and reliving some core childhood memories. The first batch was okay, but the second batch was hitting the spot! Another item for my Sunday agenda: make a bigger batch of rose flower syrup.
I’ve also been tinkering with this e-ink development board from LilyGo that I bought a few months ago. Right now, it’s sitting in a cheap IKEA photo frame and refreshes every five minutes with the time AND an excerpt from a book with that time. Super fun.
Anyhow, that’s it from my yappy intro - enjoy the rest of the newsletter! Ten great things to read, as always. Feel free to write back - just reply to this email.
1 Mental Health Is Physical Health - Ask Polly
I’m a big fan of Ask Polly (e.g., ‘Will Grief Destroy My New Marriage?’ in #397) and I really liked this column - it isn’t in the usual answer-to-a-question format, but it’s Havrilesky talking about her journey of considering her physical and mental health as separate pieces of a complete whole, and then later realizing they’re actually the same thing - just in different forms. I relate to this - when I think about what to do with my depressive symptoms, I now realize that apart from the therapy and the introspection, another line of “attack” is to simply start exercising more and eating & sleeping better.
That said, I want to indulge in a BIG record scratch here. Because the people who are the most attracted to this column — the intense, sensitive, thoughtful, brainy people out there who sometimes FEEL THE STRONGEST EMOTIONS after reading 3k words about them! — are the exact ones who need to dial into their bodies the most. I see this over and over in your letters. People like us want to THINK OUR WAY FORWARD even when our engines are stalling. We want to kick the tires when we should be changing them. We want to announce what’s wrong instead of giving ourselves what we know will feed and nurture us — not just right now, but next week and next month and next year, too.
2 Engineering Feelings - Sf Alexandria
What an incredible piece - it’s a profile of Donald Jewkes, an engineer-turned filmmaker who chronicles the young and ambitious stories coming out of Silicon Valley. The last piece I shared from SF Alexandria, You can’t lose if you never quit (in issue #385) was similarly uplifting. He just strikes me as the most incredible person to be around - optimistic, has the gift of seeing people’s potentials, and is now recognizing and using the platform he has to give his “gift” to others: a form of nepotism. He’s an incredible person. There are many gems.
Seeing Donald, you just always want to help him out. It’s probably due to two qualities:
- Donald is the best listener I know. Anything you say gets his full attention.
- He pushes past his limits, or rather, doesn’t think of himself as having any. I’ve never heard him express even a little self-doubt or self-rejection. When I asked him how he’s such a good listener, he responded simply, “I only pay attention when I’m interested. Isn’t everyone like that? Like, you should see me in a boring meeting. I can’t stand using my time poorly.”
3 What Makes an Experiment Beautiful? - Asimov
Gosh, I read this earlier this week, and it was so good. I shared another piece by the same author, Ulkar Aghayeva, A Brief History of Lab Notebooks in #397, and here I am with another. As a former scientist, I enjoyed reading about this chronicle of “beautiful” experiments. Every scientist has a sense of what beauty is: it’s a somewhat vague and subjective sense of elegance, simplicity, and directness of approach that leaves the final finding obvious.
While every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is, these features are rarely put into words. Nor is the answer static, and like aesthetic values more generally, these features changed throughout scientific history. In the 17th and 18th centuries, aesthetic appreciation of experiments was centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty. The principal job of a natural philosopher was to “reveal” what was already there.
4 Inside Enya’s Irish Kingdom - Buzzfeed
Wow! I’m a big fan of Enya (time to listen to some of my favourites this Sunday afternoon) but didn’t know she lived in a castle?? I knew she was quite reclusive (Enya put up an additional four feet of walls when she bought the castle and its 8-feet tall walls) but didn’t know this.
5 The Butlerian Jihad Has Begun - Syndekit
Interesting: if you haven’t read the books from the Dune universe, the Butlerian Jihad is an event from the past where humans decided they didn’t want any more machines built in the likeness of humans, and destroyed the “Thinking Machines”. That act fundamentally reshaped the future (obviously), the Charles McBryde here goes into the parallels between that and our current moment, with rapidly advancing capabilities in the “thinking machines” we have today.
6 A Knife Forged in Fire - Chicago Mag
I’m a knife person. I like learning about knife-making, about different kinds of knives, using them, keeping them sharp, and such. I’m the person who will fuss unendingly on keeping my carbon steel knife dry. When I saw this piece come up on my list of watching a knife being made…. sold! What a wonderfully evocative piece of writing about a wonderful process. Every time I think about forging, I think about the sword-making scene in Brisingr… and reminisce fondly on my youth (I’m only 30, but still!).
7 Fluid Simulation Pendant - Mitxela
Just two weeks ago, I shared Mixtela’s FLIP Fluid on Flip Dots. This is actually the OG - the project of his that really got me hooked, and a precursor also to the fluid simulation on Flipdots project. I absolutely loved this - of course the writeup on the website is really nice, but do check out the YouTube video.
8 Chipping Away at the Patriarchy, One Barnacle at a Time - Slate
Fun piece from ten years ago about barnacle harvesting off the Galician coast in Spain. The barnacles, are to some extent, there for the taking for anyone willing to swim into the ocean, but it’s a perilous task because of the rocky coast and the big range in tidal activity. This piece introduces the task and business of barnacle harvesting but also the gender inequality in the profession (women are paid less + the auction for their harvest happens after the men’s). A few women, though, Susana and Isabel González and their two sisters, are changing this by getting to be influential in the harvesters organization and instituting new rules for a more equitable workplace.
9 The strange survival of Guinness World Records - The Guardian
Ha, what a fun read into the history and transformation of the Guinness World Records organization for it to stay relevant today. You know, while writing this piece, I realized I’d shared this exact article back in 2023 (issue #309), but why not share it again?
10 The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison - The New York Times
I feel a bit incomplete for not having read anything by Toni Morrison yet. This profile of hers, from 2015, has gotten me to commit to change this quickly. She’s so cool, it feels, and I really liked the way the personal and awestruck was combined in the profile.