What Bugs Me

The Practical Polymath #33

Hi Friends,

Greetings from Brooklyn!

This is the 33rd edition of the Practical Polymath. If you’re new here, welcome! Every Friday I share a short piece, three links and a quote.

Until next week,

Florian

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What Bugs Me

Last weekend, we drove to the Hamptons to enjoy the last days of summer. Once again, I was reminded of an inescapable fact of life. Every time I hope to find refuge from the bustle of the city, bugs ruin the party.  

You think you’re going to enjoy that perfect outside spot? Here comes the squadron of wasps turning your lunch into the battle of Stalingrad. How about dinner al fresco? You’ll be scratching your legs for days from the bites of blood-addicted mosquitoes. 

And then you have the kings of all kill-joys. Ticks. 

In New York State, they hangout everywhere there's a forest or a patch of grass. These bad boys carry Lyme disease alongside a few other hair-rising pathogens including one that gives you an instant allergy to red meat. Eeek. I don’t really want my two-year-old running into that. 

Unlike bees or mosquitoes, ticks come unannounced. Like silent assassins, they perch themselves on top of grass blades waiting for an opportunity to latch onto your leg. Maybe I can just stay off the grass and sit by the pool? Too easy. They track you down by smelling the carbon dioxide you breathe out. They’re the closest thing to zombies nature ever created.

I packed a pair of tick tweezers, insect repellent and watched half a dozen YouTube videos of ticks biting humans which I can unfortunately never unsee. “Any precautions we should take while in the garden?” I asked our Airbnb host. “We usually keep off the grass and stay by the pool”, she answered. So reassuring. It felt like the entire town was waging a silent war against an invisible enemy. Did anyone know how to win it?

In his fantastic book about zoonotic diseases, “Spillover”, David Quammen asks a renowned disease ecologist for the recipe to protect ourselves from Lyme-infested ticks. His answer is equal parts unexpected and sensible: promote ecological diversity. 

What keeps Lyme disease in check is the owls, the foxes, the weasels and other predators who love to snack on the original culprit: the white-footed mouse. A shortage of the former leads to an over-supply of the latter. The mice then infect the ticks who feed on them. Preserve the ecological diversity of an area and things naturally take care of themselves. Disrupt it and you find yourself trying to put out a raging fire with a spray bottle.  

The efforts that we put in spraying lawns with chemicals in the hopes that ticks will leave us alone are a great metaphor for humanity’s approach to tackling problems.

Donella Meadows captures this brilliantly: 

Hunger, poverty, environmental degradation, economic instability, unemployment, chronic disease, drug addiction, and war, for example, persist in spite of the analytical ability and technical brilliance that have been directed toward eradicating them. No one deliberately creates those problems, no one wants them to persist, but they persist nonetheless. That is because they are intrinsically systems problems—undesirable behaviors characteristic of the system structures that produce them. They will yield only as we reclaim our intuition, stop casting blame, see the system as the source of its own problems, and find the courage and wisdom to restructure it.

And so what bugs me even more than the looming threat of a tick sinking their teeth into my scalp, is our persistent tendency to chase a boogeyman instead of dealing with the system that produces it.

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Weekly Wisdom

🐛 Why Bugs Ruin Everything: This piece by Tim Urban inspired me to lash out on ticks. Few writers have the ability to tap into what everybody is thinking but nobody dares saying out loud. Tim Urban is one of those people.

✨ The Anatomy of a Good Story: Georges Saunders gifts us with a masterclass in storytelling. Don’t miss the bit where he talks about the importance of the writer’s discontent with her choice of words. Only by relentlessly questioning that choice can we really get to the story we want to tell.  

📻 Global Jukebox: A friend of mine told me about this website and I am obsessed with it. It makes music discovery so much more interesting than the bland playlists on Spotify. I spent the evening listening to Malawian music from the 1970s. Pure joy.

Lateral Thought

“Being cultivated is a matter not of having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others. The interior of the book is less important than its exterior, or, if you prefer, the interior of the book is its exterior, since what counts in a book is the books alongside it.”

Pierre Bayard