Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome, 16 new subscribers! This is the latest edition of the Practical Polymath, a newsletter advocating for a better word. A better word is possible.
I have a three-year-old son. He was born in the US and even though my wife and I are both French (sort of in my case), we’ve defaulted to speaking to him in English for no good reason whatsoever. I cannot tell you how many times we’ve been told this was a mistake and we should have stuck to French at home. Well, three weeks ago we changed our minds and decided to fully switch to French and I’m happy to report that he’s starting to respond to me in French (albeit with a thick Brooklyn accent). So parents, I don’t know who still needs to hear this but winging it continues to be the best parenting philosophy.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
Weekly Wisdom
🛣️ Reclaiming the Roads: Roads were built for cars, right? Wrong. This piece goes over the fascinating history of roads in the US and the UK which goes back way before the invention of motorcars. Roads were once a shared space between cyclists, horses and pedestrians and became progressively dominated by cars. Good news though, a combination of smart urban re-design and new technologies like e-bikes may help reclaim this precious piece of public infrastructure.
📚 Book of the Week: I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (hat tip to Adriana, a reader of this newsletter, for the recommendation). The book is a critique of productivity culture by someone who spent a decade writing productivity tips. It reveals how a culture made out of “inbox zero” and “frictionless” experiences have profoundly changed how we measure the value of time. Think about services that allow you to send digital postcards, for example. No trip to the post office required. But as Burkeman puts it “it isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort”. You may now be able to send twenty cards instead of one but by removing the inconvenience of writing by hand and walking to the post office, you’ve drained the act of its meaning.
🌍 Climate Trend: The chart below is a reason to be optimistic. It shows the countries that have achieved economic growth while reducing CO2 emissions. Historically, economic growth has been closely correlated with emissions because economic activity required using energy which in turn meant burning fossil fuels. This correlation no longer holds. One reason for this is that low-carbon energy (wind, solar, hydro and nuclear) are increasingly replacing fossil fuels as our energy source. This means we can produce more energy without the CO2 emissions that used to come with it. More in this article.
Lateral Thought
“Do you think it would have any meaning at all if you displayed one of your Shakespearean plays to a bacterium? Of course not. Meaning varies with spatial scale.”
David Eagleman
I've also read 4000 Weeks recently, a couple of times actually. I remember liking it, feeling disappointed for awhile when I felt it was just an extended riff which might not have deserved a whole book, but then coming to appreciate it more the second time around with some notes in hand to consider. I remember the point you reference above very well and, in retrospect, it's one of the gems hidden in the book so I appreciate that you've called it out in this post. We need to be thoughtful about productivity and the idea of maximizing everything into the hours we have available.