Hi friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome back to the Practical Polymath, a newsletter about finding wisdom in the mundane.
Until next time,
Florian
📚 Book Covers
You should absolutely judge a book by its cover. Especially when it’s the exact same book. Which of the different covers of East of Eden below would you go for? I instantly fell in love with the first one, with its enigmatic window, the elongated typeface and the pastel green. Every time I picked up the book, it was that photograph that my eyes encountered first, not the text. And it is that one single photograph which now carries 600 pages of story right back to the surface of my mind. Picking a cover is no trivial task.
🚧 Tunnel Technology
My colleagues at Works in Progress just released the latest edition of the online magazine. I particularly enjoyed learning about the evolution of tunnel-digging technology. The old-school way to dig up a subway tunnel is what’s referred to as “cut and cover”: you dig up a hole in the pavement, build a tunnel, and cover it up. The first subway lines in London and New York were built that way. But a gaping hole cutting across neighborhoods for years in a row is unsurprisingly not very popular. As technology improved, it was progressively replaced by tunnel boring machines which look like giant worms made of steel.
🎥 Movies of Yore
This week’s classic film pick is “Twelve Angry Men”, one of my all-time favorites. In the movie, twelve jurors must decide the fate of an 18-year-old boy accused of murdering his father. While eleven jurors push for a quick guilty verdict, one juror challenges them to consider the possibility of innocence. The film exposes how biases cloud judgment, yet it also champions the power of inquiry and reason to bridge conflicting viewpoints.There is a lesson to be learned from observing how Juror #8 approaches fierce disagreement.
Lateral Thought
“Perhaps the best conversationalist in the world is the man who helps others to talk.”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)