Hello Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to 16 new joiners! This is the latest edition of the Practical Polymath, a fortnightly newsletter about everyday curiosity.
I hope you enjoy this edition!
Florian
Over Booked
I have no problem getting rid of old stuff. Parting with books however, always feels like a bit of a break-up.
Perhaps, like me, you've wondered, what should you do with the ever growing stack that is slowly taking over the limited shelf space of your two-bedroom apartment?
One option is to do nothing. Keep all the books. Have yourself an “anti-library”, a term coined by Nassim Taleb to describe the books you haven’t yet read. In Taleb’s words "the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books”. To me, the larger the rows of unread books, the more acutely aware I become of my shiny object syndrome.
At some point you just have to admit defeat. Despite the intriguing red teapot on the cover and the rave reviews, The Design of Everyday Things is never going to get read. It simply has to go.
Ok, so now you got rid of your unread books. What do you do with the ones you actually finished?
You might be tempted to keep books you enjoyed. A good book deserves to be kept. My wife strongly disagrees, especially since I’m starting to invade her closet space. I had to come up with a stricter selection criteria.
There are two kinds of books that are granted permanent residence:
The ones that I return to often. Consolations by David Whyte for example. I’m never getting rid of it because I know I can count on it to consistently deliver the hit of poetic wisdom I need.
The ones that have presence. The books that fundamentally change your worldview acquire some sort of magnetism. They don’t just sit on your shelf. A glance at their cover and you can feel the voice of the author, picture the scenes they carved out of words, peer straight into the new world they revealed and is no longer a mystery.
And if you really can’t decide what to do with a book, there’s always the option of turning it into something new.
Weekly Wisdom
🤲 Effective Altruism: My first encounter with effective altruism was back in 2015. I had just started a new job working in philanthropy and I picked up “Doing Good Better” by William MacAskill. The book called for a hyper-rational, almost scientific approach to doing good in the world. What was then a marginal group of enlightened academics grew to become an established movement with its lot of controversies. If you want to learn more, I strongly recommend reading this excellent piece about MacAskill in the New Yorker. He’s a fascinating individual with an almost fanatical dedication to figuring out one of the most interesting question: how can we do the most good?
📚 Currently Reading: I have a thing for Scandinavian naive literature. Following his father’s death, Doppler decides to leave wife and kids behind to go live in the woods. He befriends an elk that he names Bongo with whom he shares his reflection about consumer capitalism.
Lateral Thought
“Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.”
Benjamin Labatut
Ya, I keep thinking of the books I've saved. At one point it became too much so I gave a number of them to charity. Neither libraries or schools would take them. My latest reading obsession is Haruki Murakami, yet I'm now rereading Don Quixote. Books are good food.