Hey friends,
In this 40th edition of Maya’s Musings:
- Some quotes relevant to recent musings on exploratory science, mental flexibility, and accepting what you don’t know
- Links relating to everything from geopolitics around the world, my not-so-secret love of graphic design, and giraffes
- A lot of solid book recommendations!
The summer months have been kinda volatile for me personally, but holding hope (and belief in self-efficacy) for calmer times to come. Some practices I’m implementing toward this end…
- Changing my alarm to a morning playlist for a more gentle and inspiring wake-up (this has been an iterative process to fine-tune the “energizing” vs “too annoying at 5:45 AM” ratio)
- Returning to a daily art / creativity practice
- Remembering to read real, paper books!
- Setting a singular daily priority in addition to more extensive / ambitious to-do lists
I also framed some of my favorite artwork that I’ve bought or been gifted (photos from 100 for the Ocean, prints from Sam Larson & Maggie Enterrios) which I contemplate and appreciate often! And, another orca friend as joined the tattoo pod on my ankle.
How have the past weeks treated you? What daily practices, habits, animals, or activities have you treasured recently?
Looking forward to connecting!
Cheers,
Maya 😶🌫️
On exploration and expectation
We shall not cease from exploration // And the end of all our exploring // Will be to arrive where we started // And know the place for the first time
— T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets
Home is everywhere and everything is cyclical. It’s always our eyes and explorations that are changing.
— Emilia Barbu in response to the above, in Dense Discovery no. XX
The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers.
— Physicist and author Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe, with another framing of this idea
Links
- 🫀🦒 What we can learn about human health from the cardiovascular systems of giraffes — the power of comparative medicine!
- 👨⚖️🌲What the recent SCOTUS decision overturning the Chevron doctrine means for policymaking on environmental issues— in summary, it “reduce[s] government’s ability to respond to new scientific findings and technological developments.”
- 🇮🇳💧India is embarking on an effort (“unique in its unrivaled grandiosity”) to connect several of its major rivers to balance the dual tragedies of flooding & drought… but the science supporting the project is based on the flawed assumption that the river basins are independent, and lots of the hydrological data is kept as a state-secret. Worth it?
- 📐🖋️ A deep dive into developing the text used for proofing fonts — going beyond the “quick brown fox” into the land of schnapps, a systems approach to modeling the aesthetics of English, and my alter ego’s life work
- Related: excited to check out Colorfiction, a (free) collection of hand-drawn fonts
- 🎨This text-to-color chooser is fun to play around with… though not sure what I expected besides the obvious when I prompted it with “black lab” (this red-tinted black, if you’re curious: #2B1B17)
- See also: Deblank, a (more sophisticated) AI-powered font and color recommender
- Introducing a new series, Real or Fake?™
- 😶🌫️🔦Up first, Lumenate: an app that claims to induce an “altered state of consciousness” akin to taking psychedelics with… flashing lights
- Recommended subreddits
- r/SecurityClearance: for discussion of what has or might prevent people from accessing classified government information “for things they have done in their lives that are either incredibly benign or incredibly disqualifying.” At the least, read this article highlighting exactly why it’s unhinged and the best.
- I was interviewed during a friend’s security clearance evaluation a few years back, and it was a very weird experience. Never expected a random, suspicious email from of “government official” asking to meet at a local Starbucks to answer some questions about an acquaintance to be legit, but it was.
- r/whatisthisthing: a personal favorite for “the identification of mysterious objects.” So many strange and hyperspecific items in this world.
- r/SecurityClearance: for discussion of what has or might prevent people from accessing classified government information “for things they have done in their lives that are either incredibly benign or incredibly disqualifying.” At the least, read this article highlighting exactly why it’s unhinged and the best.
Books
- Killers of the Flower-Moon — David Grann
- [The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI]
- This seems like a top candidate for my official 🇺🇸 USA book— spans basically from colonization + founding of the country to modern times, covers evil, noble, and weak guys, the suffering of the rest, conspiracy theories that are sort of true, the depressing immorality of our legal system & government, how large forces of industry manifest in individual lives… has a movie with Leonardo… couldn’t ask for much else!
- Invisible Women — Caroline Criado Perez
- [Data Bias in a World Designed for Men]
- The gender data gap → major categories of effect in unpaid care work, the workplace, violence against women
- Evolutionary theory: ancient humans found, especially “warrior”-like, assumed to be male despite physiological evidence, only refuted by DNA analysis; the whole concept that humans evolved violent tendencies due to hunting ignores what the women were doing while the men were out hunting— and, that >95% of murders are attributed to men
- Generic masculine: in language, “he” assumed to refer to “he or she” (but we don’t actually take it that way!) Especially influential in gender-inflected language, where, e.g., default for many professions is male; better is gender natural like English where you can clarify “female doctor” or “male doctor” without having to “modify” a “default”
- “What is male is universal, what is female is niche.”
- Urban planning: marginalization of non-motorized travel (Sweden snow-plowing story), having “suburbs + downtown” layout, availability of restrooms
- Workplace: “optimal temperature,” equipment + uniforms, exposure limits for many chemicals that very likely have sex-specific effects
- Implementation of AI trained on data with gender gap just amplifies affect, adds another hidden layer
- The Foghorn Echoes — Danny Ramadan
- (Another) 🇸🇾 Syria book.
- I’d been looking forward to this one for awhile, but wasn’t that captivated by either of the main characters until the final scenes. I guess they had to go through the tragic, unsympathetic moments for the sentimentality to hit as hard as it did, but I wish I enjoyed more of this book.
- The Golden State — Lydia Kiesling
- By the author of Mobility (an Azerbaijan book), though this one’s evidently a California book.
- This was a wild, stressful, and emotional ride through motherhood and California and ended all to abruptly but also just in the right place and time, and— relatable, tragic, and so ordinarily insane.
- Some People Need Killing — Patricia Evangelista
- [A Memoir of Murder in My Country]
- 🇵🇭 Philippines book, from Obama’s reading list at some point?
- Yet another(!!) insane world existing in my own with no awareness, even more shocking because of its temporal closeness— this time, extrajudicial killings of drug addicts, blatantly promoted by the government.
- Really interesting analysis of the intricacies of language and it’s subtle massaging of the truth—(“linguistic care”) — active/passive voice, transitive/intransitive verbs, the co-option of “salvaged” and “disappeared” to mean “murdered”
- By only deceiving the extrajudicial killings as deaths and homicides, not murders → the police “reduced a pattern of executions to common crime”
- “Some people need killing.” → verb is need, not killing
- This is a bit hard to review on an “enjoyment” scale, because… it was not enjoyable; or on an “interesting” scale, because once I learned about the situation, I didn’t feel compelled to dig deeper (as was the case for, say, Cobalt Red). Aside from the unique linguistic comments, the book was uncomfortable, unpleasant, and disturbing. Although it was a revelation to hear what the Phillipines has been going through in recent years, the information only reinforced my existing belief that (some fraction between 0 and 1 of?) humanity sucks (versus the “Nordic people aren’t perfect!” insight from The End of Drum-Time). The technical writing/rhetoric was rigorous and, as they say, “state-of-the-art,” but that is a necessary, not sufficient criterion for my book “goodness” rating (in contrast to The Sister, which also told a tragic tale but in a somewhat condescending tone)… There’s no doubt that this was a 10/10, five-star, will-actually-remember-in-one-week read [listen]. I think it’s because Evangelista is telling stories that otherwise would be lost to history, and that no one else can or will. The truth (truths?) that are deliberately erased from history (or, in the words of the book, “disappeared”), are valuable as a result of their rarity, and the steep costs of making them known. So… in summary, I’m grateful that these stories were told— that Evangelista told them, at the expense of being able to exist in her homeland— and that I chose to listen. And now, I’m ready to read about a somewhat kinder side of the world.
- Anyway! Sorry for the essay. This just makes me think about what the various dimensions of “That was a good book” are for me. What are the PCs of book ratings? Could I plot everything I read in some n-dimensional space and cluster? So much math.
- Bride of the Sea — Eman Quotah
- 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia book. (And an Ohio book, if I want to get started on the states!)
- “Don’t forget, we fathers are fourth in respect after mothers. Your mother, then your mother, then your mother, then your father.”
- Title reference: Jeddah is “the Bride of the Red Sea”
- “…Inshallah expresses the most certainty a person can have— because God is good, and with God’s will, you will be with the people you love.”
- Burma Sahib — Paul Theroux
- 🇲🇲 Myanmar book. Gotta say, I didn’t even know this country was part of the British Raj or was so geographically close to India.
- Longgg (19 hours!) novel following Eric Blair, an Eton graduate off to become a policeman for the British Raj in Burma, and his transformation into anticolonial writer George Orwell.
- Blair’s intense introvertism and self-consciousness— his constant, almost intrusive awareness of his family and education and appearance— is surprisingly relatable.
- Also: the whole thing where he realizes he has issues with the concept of British colonial rule, and therefore overcompensates by being even harsher to the “natives” to avoid being discovered
- The origin of the “panopticon” as a constant source of surveillance!
- “I have reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right, and the oppressors are always wrong. A mistake in theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself. I have felt that I have got to escape not only from imperialism, but from every form of man’s dominion over man.” (Maybe an excerpt from Orwell’s Burmese Days? Must add it to my list.)
- The Words That Remain — Stênio Gardel, tr. Bruno Dantas Lobato
- 🇧🇷 Brazil book.
- Short novel with themes of love, family, and language. Not particularly memorable.
- The Best Minds — Jonathan Rosen
- [A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions]
- Read by the author!
- The eerie soung of a basketball bouncing on pavement echoing through a neighborhood
- “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
- Madness making achievement all that more impressive…
- One of the challenges of schizophrenia is that people with it don’t accept their illness a
- The incongruence between how articulate one can be discussing their own mental illness and the reality of their psychosis— rationality applies in all cases (“confusing intelligence with sanity”)
- Law school → threat of constant humiliation
Ellen SacksElyn Saks — The Center Cannot Hold (another Yale Law School attendee with schizophrenia)- “The paradox of binaries is that they don’t mean there is no spectrum, just as a spectrum doesn’t mean there are no essential differences. A murky border is still a border. The problem was knowing who had the authority to establish it.”
- Well! I started out extremely bored with this book, but was completely engaged by the 1/3 mark. Rosen writes about schizophrenia as it affects the suffering individual, their friends and family, and societal as a whole with admirable empathy’s and curiosity. I’ve thought a lot about the difficult decisions surrounding involuntary treatment for mental illness given my personal history with the pandemic subject, and Rosen articulates so many of the tensions between respecting someone’s independence / autonomy and preventing harm to themselves and others. I particularly resonated (sometimes uncomfortably) with the discussion of the specific challenges that arise when someone with a serious mental illness is outwardly “high-functioning,” and able to intellectualize their own pathology while internally drowning in their own mind — and the subsequent crisis when the facade breaks down. While I don’t have familiarity with schizophrenia, my own demons are similarly characterized by anosognosia— the belief that one is not ill — and my ongoing pursuits of higher education with a mental disability mirrored many of the experiences that Rosen explains his friend had at Yale Law School. I have lots more to think about with this book!
- The Best Strangers in the World — Ari Shapiro
- [Stories from a Life Spent Listening]
- Read by the author!
- Interesting, but I think I prefer Shapiro’s short-form storytelling for its authenticity and “conversation-ality” compared to this. It was a little too “Jewish coming-of-age,” too close to The Best Minds, for me to truly appreciate, and I’ve read more compelling books and memoirs from journalists (On All Fronts by CNN’s Clarissa Ward, Some People Need Killing by Patricia Evangelista, both Samantha Power’s memoir and her analysis of genocide, Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill, to name a few).