Handwriting & Noodling
Are we losing the ability to write by hand? Also, catching catfish, by hand.
Featured Articles
Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?
The Guardian • 21 Jan 2025 • ~3450 words
We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience – and a connection to history.
Our desire for the mark of the human hand hasn’t diminished. Today we satisfy it in a novel way, however. We embrace a vicarious form of craftsmanship comprised of images of well-made things rather than the things themselves. We look at perfectly prepared meals on Instagram, or the efforts of strangers on home remodelling TV shows and do-it-yourself videos on YouTube, which range in quality from highly produced plumbing tutorials to boring, badly lit snippets of people mowing their lawns (which still somehow garner tens of millions of views). This is in keeping with the growth of other vicarious pursuits.
The Outlaw Tradition of Noodling for Catfish
Texas Highways • 20 Jan 2025 • ~3050 words
Hand-fishing, also called noodling, for catfish reaches its peak every summer at a Lake Tawakoni Tournament.
This is a sport that tends to generate arguments, accusations, and even violence. At this tournament, no one’s accused anyone else of cheating, but almost everyone has discreetly pointed at someone else here, accusing them of something in the past—bringing in fish from other lakes, fishing before tournament start times, putting weights in the fish to make them heavier, using illegal devices such as homemade gaffs, or just drumming up false accusations to cast doubt on someone’s character. You can feel the tension in the air, the same way you feel death drifting through the pews of a funeral. Noodling tournaments may be the closest thing we still have to anxious poker games at Wild West saloons.
Recommended Articles
The Hyperloop: A 200-Year History of Hype and Failure
The MIT Press Reader • 21 Jan 2025 • ~4450 words
Elon Musk's Hyperloop Alpha is another overhyped venture, recycling 200-year-old dreams and exaggerated claims of innovation.
These years have come and gone, and we are no closer to even a convincing full-scale prototype demonstration, to say nothing about a single completed and truly reliable, safe, and profitable commercial link between two cities. No hyperloop line, on pylons or in tunnels, was in operation by early 2022, and the forecasts of earliest completion dates have shifted to the late 2020s. None of the system’s often repeated advantages in comparison with high-speed rail — the absence of wheels (moving on air cushion or magnetically levitated), much faster operating speeds, significantly reduced energy use, lower construction costs — has been tested on even a single commercial project, and all such claims, until proven otherwise, remain in the category of wishful thinking.
The truth about fiction
Aeon • 20 Jan 2025 • ~3450 words
What distinguishes fiction from nonfiction? The answer to this perennial question relies on how we understand reality itself.
What grounds the nonfiction/fiction distinction is not that the former is based on truth or facticity per se, but that the former contributes to how we see the world insofar as it organises the kinds of truths that we care enough about to read and write about. The Montgomery County Commission didn’t initiate a systematic audit of all nonfiction books that might include false or misleading information. Rather, they targeted a book whose claim to truth practically interfered with their understandings of themselves and the country.
Norman Foster’s Empire of Image Control
The New Yorker • 20 Jan 2025 • ~14900 words • Archive Link
The British architect has built an unprecedented factory of fine design. Inside the world of the man who creates exquisite monuments for ultra-wealthy clients.
Foster is an unmatched leader of architects. He can look less confident, even a bit exposed, in the role he now often assumes: that of a techno-optimistic guide to issues of sustainability and development. An oddity of Foster’s public persona, as a speechmaker and an occasional writer, is that he seems to seek recognition less for what he has done—which is to have caused half of the world’s most powerful people to pay for buildings that aren’t depressing—and more for what he has largely not done. He talks of modular housing, or of making cities more walkable.
Nobody could help me with my psychosis. Then I was sent to jail for holding up a shop with a toy gun
The Guardian • 18 Jan 2025 • ~4300 words
I didn’t remember committing my crime but I knew I had fallen through the cracks of the system. Could prison really be my salvation?
The one big question is: how did it come to this? Surely, if I had a mental health team, a long-term diagnosis, a history of psychosis and hospitalisations, and a good support network of friends and family around me, how could it have possibly come to this? Well, I’ll tell you. And I’m afraid it’s not very good news. From my experience, there are two truths universally acknowledged by long-term users of psychiatric services: the crisis team will never not recommend a warm bath and a hot beverage, and unruly behaviour will be punished with a personality disorder diagnosis.
For Decades, He Has Regretted Sending a Man Away for Life. Can He Fix It?
New York Times • 17 Jan 2025 • ~3350 words • Archive Link
Weakened by cancer and nagged by his conscience, a former Georgia prosecutor wants the courts to reverse the sentence he demanded for a man who didn’t physically harm anyone in his crimes.
Mr. Burke testified that during a break in the sentencing, the judge had privately tried to convince him to withdraw his motion for life without parole because it wasn’t fair. “But I stood stubborn,” Mr. Burke testified, still frustrated that he hadn’t listened. To Mr. Askew, the moment felt unreal. Here he was, condemned for life, compelling his former prosecutor to say he had violated Mr. Askew’s right to due process by purposefully enacting a disproportionate sentence.
