03.13 | huzzah i am hitting up your highways

When all’s said and done, all roads lead to the same end. So it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it.
– Charles de Lint

✉️ letter #58

This Wednesday morning at around 7am, I boarded a student driving vehicle headed for Bushwick in order to take my drivers test and get an official New York state drivers license.

Luckily, despite a few too wide turns, allegedly not enough looking around (I swear I did check every mirror and behind me at least twice though!) and "too much time" spent trying to parallel park, I managed to pass.

So Jack Kerouac adventures across the United States, here I come!

The last time I had to go through this test, I was 17 and it seemed like a thing I needed to do before I went to attend college. I then went on to spend my freshman year in Europe, the rest of my college days in New York City, and the rest of my career flitting around major cities in Asia, all with amazing public transport. I literally never touched a steering wheel again for twenty years.

Kind of scarily, as long as I remembered to renew my license - the one I got when I was 17 - online in time, I could keep it valid. While I never did try to pretend like I knew how to drive, it worries me that somebody like me, who absolutely didn't know a brake pedal from a gas pedal, could potentially just plop myself into a drivers seat and goooooo.

I forgot to renew my license during COVID, rendering that worry moot. When I got to New York, I applied for a permit and wrote out a goal to turn it into a license sometime soon. That sometime soon turned into now, two years later. So yay! Go me! See me on your freeways in the near future!

Anyway, between that and still having family over and still trying to make other social and potential work obligations happen this last week, I'm struggling to find the time to write a lot here. So I'll keep it short.

The main picture is of my sister Jane - she is a GOOD driver that was given an absolute behemoth of a rental car for us to use when we were in DC recently. I did not practice on it though.

I did, however, practice on various other rental cars over the last couple of days, and even drove several of the hours from D.C. over to New York. I did not get a picture taken though.

So I'm using her picture instead.

🎼 the soundtrack | never will I marry - nancy wilson, cannonball adderley

Wide my world, narrow my bed
Never never never will I marry
Born to wander 'til I'm dead

🌱 the green light | an eco-focused newsreel

Researchers have developed cyborg jellyfish that could revolutionize ocean monitoring. By implanting electrodes in live jellyfish, Caltech researchers have improved their swimming efficiency and given them ocean sensors that can be deployed to measure changes caused by a warming climate. [Nature]

• The jobs board for Biden's American Climate Corps is finally coming online, and is expected to open next month. [Grist]
• A new study shows that planting trees might not be the panacea it's been made out to be, thanks to how dark forest absorb more heat from the sun and release compounds that help keep methane in our atmosphere. [Inside Climate News]

🪢assorted | food for thought from around the internet

TikTok is once again in the crosshairs of the United States government, which has always been an inane idea but feel even more so the more it gets brought up in Congress. I'm basically with Kaiser Kuo on how dumb and counterproductive this all is:

Proponents of the TikTok bill say that they’re worried about Chinese influence operations — that TikTok will be a powerful conduit for propaganda. Leaving aside, for now, my right as an American to see even the most rank propaganda if I really want to, one has to ask: Is this alleged Chinese influence actually working? If it were, would you not expect to see opinions of China in the U.S. improving? They clearly are not: They’ve worsened dramatically across the years, and never more precipitously than in the years when we’ve worried most about the supposed threat. 

So let’s be honest at least about why we’re doing this: It’s an emotional reaction to do something in the face of this supposed threat from China. But it’s a move that will weaken, not strengthen us. The parallels to another misguided, emotionally driven policy are uncanny: our foolish decision, during the Trump presidency, to place major curbs on immigration from China and to target individuals with ties to China over fears of industrial espionage. Just when it became clear that we needed more scientific and technological talent in the U.S. to compete with China, we decided to limit the inflow from one of its richest sources and to make the U.S. a markedly less hospitable environment for Chinese talent.  “For years China has struggled to stop the ‘brain drain’ from its overseas-educated citizens staying abroad,” wrote Jeremy Daum of the Yale China Law Center in a recent piece. “It would be painfully ironic for our own outsized security concerns to be what finally stops that flow of talent from which we benefited for so long.” We sacrificed that great American strength — our openness — on the altar of national security, and we’re about to do it again. 

By the way, I've started helping him out at Sinica doing some business things. In case you didn't know the podcast is back up and running, it is! And he's writing weekly essays on his thoughts on China that'll be going behind a substack paywall tomorrow. If you've loved his work and want to see it continue, consider becoming a subscriber!

✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun

Jane introduced me to this Youtube channel in which an Englishman who's been in an expat in Korea exposes his fellow countrymen to the wonders of Korean food. She said it was relaxing because it routinely featured people who were excited to discover something new and open to expressing how absolutely delicious those new things were.

This was the video she showed me, which involved giving British high school boys a taste of luxury Korean barbecue beef. It's not the toughest thing to swallow to begin with, but I agreed with Jane - watching people enjoy amazing things for the first time is very relaxing and sweet. And don't we all need a little more of that energy in our lives?

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