Twenty Twenty Two

The Practical Polymath #71

Hi Friends, 

Greetings from Brussels! 

For the last edition of 2022, I picked my favorite pieces, essays, books and quotes from this past year.

See you on the other side!

Florian    

“A society that talks incessantly about ‘productivity’ but that hardly uses the word ‘resilience’ is going to become productive and not resilient.” 

Donella Meadows

Favorite pieces 

• Runaway Reader

• Words Unchosen

• Mister Sandman

• Sugar Daddy

“When you realize how much progress humans can make during a lifetime in everything from economic growth to medical breakthroughs to stock market gains to social equality, you would think optimism would gain more attention than pessimism. And yet.”  

Morgan Housel

Favorite essays

• The tail end - Tim Urban

• How to write - Paul Graham  

• Notes on “taste” - Brie Wolfson

• Living like weasels - Annie Dillard

• Long distance thinking - Simon Sarris

• The art of maintenance - Stewart Brand

• Routine maintenance - Meghan O’Gieblyn

“But although it is true that a unique event can sometimes change our lives completely, or leave its mark on us, it is not too much to say that, by and large, the overall character of our lives is given by those events which keep on recurring over and over again.”

Christopher Alexander

Favorite books

• Doppler - Erlend Loe

• When we cease to understand the world - Benjamin Labatut

• Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals - Oliver Burkeman

“In the history of the world, most of the people who have ever lived either did not know how to write or, if they did, left no writing behind, which is among the reasons why the historical record is so maddeningly unfair. To write something down is to make a fossil record of a mind.”

Jill Lepore