Subway Ads as a Lens

The Practical Polymath #32

Hi Friends,

If you’re new here, welcome! Every Friday I share a short piece about an idea that’s on my mind and a few links that I think are worth your time. 

Until next week, 

Florian 

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Subway Ads as a Lens 

One of my favorite activity when I’m sitting in the subway is reading the ads. They are a window into our collective soul. 

Take this one I came across the other day on my way to Manhattan: 

“Why commit to furniture when you can barely commit to brunch?”

Funny, right? But why does it make us giggle inside? Probably because it resonates. And if it does well maybe it means that we recognize that commitment is not a defining feature of our times. 

Here’s another one I picked up on that same trip: 

“Is volume just a button on your phone?” 

Once again, this mildly funny joke works on us because it takes aim at something we don’t want to admit to ourselves: our phones are central to our lives. This joke wouldn’t have meant much in the 1980s and will probably not mean much in twenty years. 

If today’s ads offer insight into our collective psyche, surely yesterday’s ones must shed some light on how we used to think. 

Recently, I visited the New York Transit Museum. The main attraction of the exhibition is the perfectly preserved collection of subway trains from the early twentieth century to today. But the real thrill for me was checking out the vintage ads left in the trains. 

This one was my favorite. 

When you think of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, you’re probably picturing a moment of collective pride. But by the end of the 1970s, less than half of Americans thought it was worth it. 

In one single sentence, the ad above captures the political tension around space exploration better than an entire chapter in a History book ever can. 

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Weekly Wisdom 

📚 Book of the Week: This week I’m reading the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. This book is a masterclass in how you can turn the driest topic into a page-turner. Housel’s main thesis is that we fail to predict how the market behaves because we’ve tried to understand it through the lens of finance. He suggests that the psychology of human behavior is a much better predictor of how people make money decisions. 

📱Infinite Scroll: Jia Tolentino is the writer who best captures the quirks of our relationship with technology. In this New Yorker piece she reviews “Surface Tension”, a series of photographs of digital pictures viewed on a screen. If your first reaction is “what’s the point of taking pictures of pictures?”, I can’t blame you. But suspend your disbelief and dig into Tolentino’s piece. It’s the best thing I’ve read about what it means that we have the power to be connected to everything all at once through the simple flick of the thumb.

⛵ The Boat of Stillness: Salman Ansari is one of my favorite online writers. His writing is a profoundly soothing blend of wisdom and masterful storytelling. Make yourself a cup of tea, breathe in and enjoy his latest fable. 

Lateral Thought

“All anybody wants to know is little sketchy bits of information, strictly censored, and that’s enough. It’s more than enough. Did you ever sit down and actually make a list of what you know about, like, Togo? ‘Is in Africa.’ That would be the grand total of your knowledge. But when people say the word ‘Togo’ you let it pass, the same way you let hundreds of people pass you on the street and in the halls every day. And every one of them is as big as Togo, inside.”

Nell Zink