Heyo, Multituders.
This month’s issue is a cop-out, in addition to being a day late. This was supposed to be a reflective piece about my time in Bangalore, coinciding with my two-year anniversary in the city. I’ve spent two weeks trying to say profound things, only to be left with six incoherent drafts filled with rambling musings that belong in my journal, not cluttering your inbox.
Beaten into submission by writer’s block and the easy distractions of the internet, I’m resorting to the newsletter-er’s fallback - sharing links to articles, podcasts, and movies by people who were more motivated than I’ve been. For those of you who’ve kindly opened my mail to boost my open-rates, you’re welcome! There’s genuinely interesting stuff to read, watch, and listen this time.
I hope you’ll find something you enjoy, and I promise to be back at the end of October.
To start with, I realised only after sending the last issue on the psychology of a con that I hadn’t linked my sources. The two Cautionary Tales episodes are well worth a listen; both tales had ironic twists that I couldn’t cover but deserve to be heard. They were The Rogue Dressed as a Captain (about Wilhelm Voigt, the “Captain” of Kopenick), and The Art Forger, the Nazi, and The “Pope” (about Hans van Meegeren’s imitations of Vermeer). The links I’ve shared are from Spotify, but you can find the episodes on any podcast app.
I also referred to Episode 150 of No Stupid Questions (again, Spotify link but available everywhere) as well as Maria Konnikova’s work. Konnikova’s literally written a book on the subject, called The Confidence Game, and the highlights of her ideas are covered in the video below.
My failed attempts to write about my life in Bangalore centred around the idea of “emerging adulthood,” which Robin Marantz Henig wrote about in the New York Times. Emerging adulthood is shorthand for the weird grey area people find themselves in during their 20s, when they aren’t children anymore but don’t always feel like “real adults.”
It was first proposed by a psychologist called Jeffrey Arnett in the 1990s. Arnett was interviewing 18- to 29-year-olds about what they wanted from life when he noticed that many felt caught in a grey area. They were achieving some, but not all of the conventional markers of adulthood - completing education, moving out of their parents’ home, starting work, getting married, and having kids - and were taking longer than their parents to do so.
It’s a state I deeply resonate with. For some years, I’ve lived a life characterised by instability, exploration, self-reflection, in-betweenness, and a belief in the wild possibilities of the world; all of these are the classic traits of emerging adulthood that Arnett identified. I’ve moved cities, switched jobs, got in and out of relationships, and had my naive ideas of life turned upside down by experience in the last five years alone.
I’ve struggled to put coherent thoughts together about this, but reading RMH’s article (link here again) felt like seeing the inside of my head spelt out in beautifully simple prose. Do give it a read.
Years ago, I picked up a second-hand copy of Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain at Blossoms in Bangalore, only to later discover he’d signed and drawn a funky knife in that copy. I wasn’t particularly blown away by the book, but I treasured it nonetheless for his signature (even if it was made out to a random guy called David).
Just yesterday, though, the book took on new meaning for me after I watched Roadrunner, a documentary about Bourdain’s life. The film picks up where Kitchen Confidential left off, when he started hosting shows after being propelled into fame by the book.
His seemingly charmed life was complicated, partly because of his own personality. He’d overcome a drug addiction early in life but never seemed to overcome the need to lose himself in something, be it a career, a person, or the pursuit of adventure. The movie paints a portrait of someone torn between the comfort of domesticity and the thrill of the unknown. Unable to commit to either completely left him angry and hurt; the lack of an outlet for those feelings ultimately consumed him.
What isn’t in doubt is his desire to see the world, or his appreciation of its beauty and acknowledgement of its suffering. When interviewing a civil war victim in Laos, another country scarred by American interference, he spoke to a man who’d lost limbs to a bomb blast. The man asked Bourdain whether he was afraid of seeing the reality of his country’s actions, to which Bourdain said, “The least I can do is see the world with open eyes.”
That line’s been running through my mind since I heard it, and it encapsulated the spirit of the film pretty well. There’s joy and pain in equal measure. You don’t need me to tell you it doesn’t have a happy ending, but it’s still a story worth knowing. It’s streaming on Netflix and its trailer’s below; I hope you enjoy it.
We end with nerdiness courtesy of Hank Green (possibly my favourite person on the internet) and the Radiolab podcast.
Earlier this summer, ocean surface temperatures were hitting highs across the Atlantic, fuelling alarmist predictions of a climate apocalypse. But these record temperatures were a little different than other catastrophic climate events. They weren’t caused by harmful things humans are doing, but by solutions we’re putting in place to fight climate change.
In a recent Radiolab episode titled Smog Cloud Silver Lining, Hank Green talked about how the use of better fuel for shipping was unintendedly raising ocean temperatures. The fuel used so far, in addition to emitting carbon dioxide, also released sulphur dioxide (SO2) into the atmosphere, causing harmful acid rain.
To mitigate this, the shipping industry’s been forced to use cleaner fuel, sans the sulphur dioxide. Turns out, though, that while the SO2 triggered acid rain, it also seeded clouds over the ocean which reflected sunlight and kept temperatures lower than they’d otherwise be.
The episode discusses what this accidental experiment has taught us, and what it could mean for the controversial but increasingly likely prospect of solar geo-engineering. May you be as fascinated by it as I was.
That’s it for this month. I hope you’ve found something to keep you company on this long weekend. Feel free to pass on these recommendations to others with the button below.
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Till next time,
Shantanu