Hello, and welcome back! I reneged on the special issue this week because I was lazy and I am also on vacation. I’ll try sending it out this Wednesday. Anyway, here’s this week’s issue with a different but hopefully more aesthetic format.
1.
Roger Federer is Having Way too Much Fun to Quit Now
“I’m having a great time,” he says, pouring himself a Pellegrino. “A fantastic time, really.” He doesn’t mean just at Melbourne. He dominated at the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, California, in March, then won another big title in Miami in April. He beat Nadal in all three tournaments, twice without losing a set.
The run seems to be helping him ignore expectations – and retirement chatter – as he picks and chooses the tournaments he plays while his younger rivals push through the ATP tour schedule.
2.
Robot Hearts : Medicine’s New Frontier
What were once called “crazy ideas” are now at the forefront of modern medicine. Look at this ready-to-be-implanted artificial heart.
3.
What Animals Taught Me About Being Human
Helen MacDonald wrote a really nice book called H is for Hawk which is about her endeavour to become a goshawk trainer in order to cope with her depression, her father’s death, and her slow unraveling as a human. In this essay, she talks about how her activities with animals through her life have helped her as a human being. Read the book if you are interested! I recommend.
Our separate lives, for that moment, coincided, and all my anxiety vanished in that one fugitive moment, when a bird in the sky on its way somewhere else pulled me back into the world by sending a glance across the divide.
4.
An Enemy of the Kremlin Dies in London
This is a rather incredible read which details the death of Alexander Perepilichny, a Russian man on the hitlist of a serial killer. A complex interplay of dynamics led to his estrangement from his business partners. But how did he die!? There are so many secret poisons and weapons developed by these intelligence agencies (is it even right to be calling them that anymore), it’s nearly funny.
5.
Why do so Few People Major in Computer Science?
This is a nice and interesting read. The number of computer science majors in the US was mostly flat from 2004 to 2014. Wages are high, so by that logic more and more people should be opting for CS. Or is it that CS jobs don’t even require a CS major? Nice breakdown of the arguments here. At least the author correctly recognises that all the jobs in the US aren’t being taken over by immigrants.
6.
English is Not Normal
English is clearly an esoteric language with constructs that you will not find in many other languages. Where else can you end a sentence with a preposition, huh. I liked this essay because it chronicles the history of English as a language and (a little bit) as a cultural phenomenon. Essentially, the language is as easy as possible and therefore an amalgamation of many things from many languages and regions.
7.
What Makes the Spelling Bee so Hard
Nice companion to the previous piece. There can be no spelling bee in most other languages because etymology is a simple and exact science. There is very little borrowing and things are what they seem like. The English spelling bee is hard because some constructs and borrowings are arbitrary and even whimsical. Anyway, here’s a nice chart.
8.
The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity
This is hilarious. People believed that the vibrations from a moving railcar could damage and even shatter nerves. This story involves drama - people wielding knives and trying to jump off trains. It got to the point where there was a separate compartment for the railway lunatics to be confined in.
9.
The Magic of Moana’s Ocean
A very nice deconstruction of how animators tackled the challenge of creating the ocean in the Disney movie Moana. It’s part technical, part romantic.
“You know it’s hard for me to go to the beach nowadays,” she said. “When I’m there, I’m looking at how foam dissipates, at how the water recedes back into the ocean, the cadence and the rhythm of the little breaks. I’m looking at how the beach itself is modeled to create the reef breaks, how the light affects the water, the clarity of the water itself, the colors. There’s just a million things going through my head.”
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” she added. “I think it’s gorgeous.”
10.
Why do Colleges Give out Honorary Degrees?
For money and publicity, of course!
“The mode in which honorary degrees are conferred in this country is a sham and a shame. It is so easy to get a degree — so many men of slight acquisitions have obtained a degree – that it is now the way to apply for these honors. If the secret sessions of college corporations were made public, there would be an astonishing revelation of intimations and open requests and endorsements. Members of the faculties of colleges are constantly applied to lend their influence to secure a doctorate for this person or that.”
That’s it for this week. Always love hearing from you, just reply to this email. Have a great week ahead. :)
- Kat