A European Summer
The Practical Polymath #81
Hi friends,
I’m back!
In the past seven weeks, I’ve been hopping around Brussels, Paris, London, Lille, Annecy and Genoa. I got to walk my niece to school, play arcade games with my brother, run 10k with my best buddy, introduce my son to his Italian family, baptize my goddaughter, convince my parents to get a fitness coach, eat seriously hot Thai food with my college flatmate, visit our Brooklynite-turned-Londoner friends, catch up with all of my best men and take my wife out for drinks in my teenage hangout. It was glorious.
As much as we’re drawn to novelty and adventure, there’s nothing like the deeply nourishing effect of walking the well-trodden, friendly and familiar places, perhaps this time with new eyes.
Until next time,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
On Tourism: Agnes Callard’s latest essay is a provocative take on the value of traveling as a way to engage with a foreign culture. She depicts it instead as a performative act aimed at accumulating social status brownie points. Even though we’re obsessed with the pursuit of the genuine and authentic experience, we’re instead nothing more than passive spectators. She calls out how we delude ourselves into thinking each of us is doing traveling right: “tourism is what we call traveling when other people are doing it”. Worst, traveling abroad means abandoning our personal taste. We ask ourselves “what does one do when in X country/ place?”. She goes as far as saying traveling is a buffer we put between ourselves and the unbearable thought that we’re going to die.
On Moral Decline: This recent paper suggests that people across different countries are convinced that morality is declining, something they attribute to the moral decline of people as they age and of successive generations. However, when asked about the moral decline of their contemporaries, the same people do not report any change suggesting the feeling is an illusion. What’s fascinating is that the erosion of morality has been making humans anxious for thousands of years. The Roman Historian Titus Livius was already moaning about it in 29BC in his History of Early Rome. So what’s going on here? First, we’re more likely to seek and attend to negative information about others. Second, when recalling events from the past, the negative ones are more likely to be forgotten. Taken together, these two phenomena can produce the illusion that the past looked something like an 18th century Salon and that the present is Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange come true.
Book of the Week: I’m very late to the game here but I recently discovered Norah Ephron. I stumbled upon her epic saga of moving into a prized rent-controlled building on the Upper West side and living through Manhattan’s meteoric rise in rents in the 90s and 2000s (sounds familiar?). I got hooked on the way she writes about New York, her self-deprecating humor and masterful story-telling. Her collection of essays “I remember nothing” has plenty of that. In the interview below, she talks about her career as a writer, journalist and film director.
Lateral Thought
“Reading fiction helps you become an unsystematic thinker, something that is equally valuable but more elided by some engineers. It is easy to maintain an intellectual rigidity. It takes more care to maintain a loose poeticism of thought.”
Simon Sarris
Good to see you back!