Jumping out of planes, 3 miles above the ground (MM No. 39)

This thing called rain can make the days seem short and the nights seem long. (Chang Ch’ao)

Hey friends,

It’s been quite the five(!!) months, and I’ve reached physical heights (skydiving!) and mental lows (not feeling so great), but I’m getting back into a stable routine recently. How has 2024 treated you so far?

Lots of accumulated books and links to share, and some interesting paths of knowledge I’ll describe as “things I learned while looking up other things.”

• Article about barcodes → Will we run out of barcodes? → Types of barcodes → Check digits → Luhn algorithm → That’s how you can tell if a credit card number is valid!
• Article on precision medicine → Clinical trial design → Basket and umbrella trials → Ecological fallacy → Formal fallacies → Informal fallacies → Amphiboly → Garden path sentences
• Reviews of The End of Drum-Time → pietist Lutheran sect → Scandinavian versus Nordic → Finnish versus Scandinavian → Uralic languages → phonology, vowel harmonization, … (somehow we always end up deep in linguistics Wikipedia land)

Cheers,

Maya // 谢玛亚

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Links

• A striking and simple technique to extract and highlight motion in videos
• Neil Freeman’s Fake is the New Real offers a bunch of clever, sometimes beautiful [maps, lists, Twitter bots], many derived from census data. One of my favorites is “circled states,” where the line segments making up a country’s border are pushed out to create a circle. Tattoo inspiration?
• Advice I want to follow: “Be a specialist in your work and a generalist in your leisure.” I have the tendency to turn the things I enjoy into overwhelming or extreme versions of themselves, so this way of reframing the goal of recreation to continuously broaden my experiences is interesting.
• A glimpse into the world of screenwriting, told through the story of one of its masters, Scott Frank.
• Emoji kitchen!! (Google it)
• “Like Hvaldimir, many captive cetaceans are in-between creatures: born to whales but raised by humans, not quite domesticated but no longer wild, suspended somewhere in the middle of instinct and compliance.”
• An archive of Word Play, a publication dedicated to clever linguistic manipulations of all kinds. An article from Issue 2, 1994, for example, comprises a compilation of two-consonant sentences, including “Wow,” we roar, “we are aware we wore wire a wry way. We’re a wee raw. We rue!”
• On the history, present, and contradictory definitions of the elite (élites!)— including social critic Paul Fussell’s markers of the upper class: having many guests, tardiness, and rumbled bow ties.
• Magical, ethereal, and intricate paper cut compositions of gentle, giant animals and small people by Kanako Abe
• Recommended by Austin Kleon, an essay on the inherent tension between creating and sharing your creations by Tim Kreider: “But there’s a crucial difference between the need to be paid attention to and the desire to connect—it’s the difference between trying to one-up someone else’s story and telling one of your own to commiserate, to empathize; between saying Look at me, everybody and You’re not the only one.”
• An growing collection of “untranslatable” words about life and well-being. I love how the precision of a language so deeply reflects both its connection to the physical world and the spirituality of its speakers. Some examples that resonated:
  • Tūrangawaewae (noun, Māori): literally, a place to stand; a place where we feel rooted, empowered, and connected.
  • Aqilokoq (noun, Inuktitut): gently falling snow
  • 居場所 or Ibasho (noun, Japanese): ‘Whereabouts’; a place where one belongs, fits in, can be oneself
  • Hanyauku (noun, Rukwangali): to walk on toes across hot sand
  • ἐντελέχεια or entelékheia (noun, Greek): the complete realization and final form of potentiality; the conditions under which a potential phenomenon becomes actualized
• An exploration of “all of the variables of CMYK printing” via hand-embroidery
• Novo Nordisk episode of Acquired — apologies to everyone I couldn’t stop talking about this to. My notes linked here for reference :)

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Books

• The Death of Vivek Oji — Akwaeke Emezi
  • 🇳🇬 Nigeria book.
  • Echos to the last book I listened to, A Passage North, were strong— a storyline driven by characters processing and reflecting after an unexpected death; a deep sense of culture, tradition and family in tension with sexuality and individual identity— although the structure and lens of this one were distinct. The cast of narrators (literary and literal) had more vivid personalities, with plot driven by interaction rather than introspection. Emezi also effectively built suspense around the cause of Vivek’s death, culminating in a burst of both expected and shocking revelations, in contrast to the gradual ebb of tension in A Passage North. Definitely listened to this one faster, but found value and enjoyment in both!
• Greek Lessons — Han Kang, transl. by Deborah Smith & Emily Yae Won
  • 🇰🇷 South Korea book.
  • A woman who cannot speak and a man who is going blind connect over Greek lessons. Kang’s detached, nameless treatment of characters only made their pain more stark. This was a short and intriguing listen, especially if you are interested in language or philosophy.
• Devil Makes Three — Ben Fountain
  • 🇭🇹 Haiti book. Learned a lot about Haitian culture and language (especially because I listened to this book, so actually heard what Creole sounds like!), as well as its complicated political history, full of not-so-well-intentioned interventions by the US of A.
  • The intertwining stories of (1) an American SCUBA instructor living in Haiti, who is in love with (2) the intellectual, Brown-educated sister of his Haitian business partner, and (3) the American CIA agent and love interest of said business partner as they navigate, manipulate, and are manipulated by political unrest in the country.
  • Loved the narration about SCUBA diving!
• Data Baby — Susannah Breslin
  • [My Life in a Psychological Experiment]
  • This felt self-indulgent and honestly just annoying?
• All the Birds in the Sky — Charlie Jane Anders
  • I think this book was recommended as a San Francisco-based sci-fi novel, which isn’t my usual jam, but I was pleasantly surprised and pleased by it! Set in a near-future world embued with both magic and magic-like technology, the book follows the lives and relationship of a young girl and boy representing those respective powers. Anders hits my ideal balance of satire and hyperbole with sympathetic characters, yielding an engaging story that made me both smile and think.
• The Last Animal — Ramona Ausubel
  • Set in Berkeley, Siberia, Iceland and Italy, but not in any one enough to represent it fully.
  • “Fortunately, Unfortunately” game
  • I expected this to be an underwhelming de-extinction thriller, but it ended up offering a quietly emotional portrait of motherhood, daughterhood (is that a word?), sisterhood; the relatable juxtaposition of neediness and independence as we grow up; and the impossible questions of how to live our tiny, egocentric, insignificant lives as part of a community of humans, animals, and all life on earth. Wow, didn’t mean to get so dramatic there.
  • Sorta unsatisfying ending, but maybe that was the point?
• The End of Drum-Time — Hannah Pylväinen
  • 🇸🇪 Sweden book? What I’m learning: basically anything about 19th century Scandinavia! We’re following the love story of a Sámi reindeer herders and the daughter of a Lutheran minister (a “settler,” I believe?). The Sámi are a group of people who inhabit the northern reaches of modern-day Sweden, Finland, Norway, and parts of Russia, with a culture of reindeer herding to provide meat, fur, and transportation. Reindeer in this society are the key resource— asking someone how large their herd is compared to asking them how much money they have. We learn that ~20 reindeer is the minimal number to sustain a livelihood.
    • Of the more Southern parts of Nordic country (home of the “Scandinavians”), we learn about the strong intertwining of church and state, which is complicated as the governing body for a region (usually a monarch or representative of another ruling power) can change across borders while the church remains constant. I remember learning about the development of modern “nation-states” in Western Europe, in Russia, in Africa and North and South America through colonialism, but never had thought about the process in Scandinavia before. Interesting but perhaps not surprising that similar themes of sorta arbitrary borders and power dynamics occurred here as well.
    • (Okay, more from Wikipedia than the book itself, but it counts!). So I guess the Sámi people and the Germanic-speaking Scandinavians (medieval Norse) settled the current Norway/Sweden/Finland area around the same time (~3500 years ago!), they had little contact until the 18th century (the Sámi generally lived in the north, Scandinavians in the south which eventually became the kingdoms of Sweden and Norway). At that point, though, a familiar story played out as the Swedish and Norwegian governments began pushing further north, asserting control, viewing the Sámi as “uncivilized” and “primitive,” forcing assimilation with Scandinavization (what a word!) policies, and banning Sámi languages and culture in many contexts. Policies encouraging settlement of Sámi land caused forced displacement and fragmentation of local groups; and scorched earth policies of the German army during WWII destroyed basically all traces of Sámi culture.
    • Then, of course, there’s climate change— the Arctic regions where the Sámi live are highly sensitive to warming temperatures, while also being rich in natural resources— both metals/oils/natural gas and wind/water— leading to conflict over how to manage and utilize the economically & culturally valuable land.
  • Loved this characterization of “all good Sámi stories” as having “the element of a sudden misbehavior in nature, something inexplicable, something the world knew that humans did not.”
  • “… you have to hate yourself to be loved…”
  • So tragic.
• The Storm We Made — Vanessa Chan
  • 🇲🇾 Malaysia book, spanning from 1930s British-occupied Malaya to Japanese-occupied WWII years.
  • Another tragic history, the civilian casualties of war.
• Holiday Country — Inci Atrek
  • 🇹🇷 Turkey book. Contemporary, the vibes of small coastal towns versus urban Istanbul
  • Introspective, the sadness of the end of summers and loss of childhood, thar liminal tension of second-generation immigrants who don’t fully belong to their ancestral or current cultures
  • What is a daughter but a second chance?
• The Bird Tattoos — Dunya Mikhail
  • 🇮🇶 Iraq book.
  • Heartbreaking. A story of love of all kinds, and of tremendous human cruelty. Also, emphasizes the oft-overlooked cost of extremism on local populations (in this case, the Yazidis).
• Palo Alto — Malcom Harris
  • Immigration policy + restrictions, agricultural industry, eugenic Stanford origins, Herbert Hoover
  • The military industrial complex… peacetime arms race, Cold War, William Shockley and Peter Thiel
• The Sister — Sung-Yoon Lee
  • [The Extraordinary Story of Kim Yo Jong, The Most Powerful Woman in North Korea]
  • 🇰🇵 North Korea book, obviously.
  • Interesting (?) and tragic history, but the flippant tone of the book (maybe just the audiobook?) didn’t quite give the subject the gravity and intensity it deserves.
• Ways to Hide in Water — Sarah St. Vincent
  • 🇺🇿 Uzbekistan book (for now— one main character is from there, at least).
  • This was… not quite what I expected, something I’m not sure how to describe, and it’ll stay with me for a long time. Set in a Pennsylvania state park, the novel is both tied to its specific place & time and also spans continents & decades. The main character is cold and distant at first, her trauma slowly appearing itself until a heartbreaking revelation (one of many) near the end— we’re left with so many questions, no resolutions, but that’s the point, I guess. There are no answers to claiming someone is good or bad, or knowing whether you acted right or wrong.
• The Thirty Names of Night — Zeyn Joukhadar
  • (Another) 🇸🇾 Syria book, focused on immigrant communities in NYC.
  • An idea that resonated— wanting to live but not exist as “bodied”
  • “Sometimes to feel secure is it’s own medicine.”
  • “… or maybe instinct is only a name, created to discount a wisdom to which one has no access.”
  • So rhythmic to listen to, almost like a longggg spoken word recitation. Pleasing, but kind of hard to follow the actual narrative.