This week, I’ve been blowing my mind with Vaclav Smil and Ai Weiwei (pictured above).
From viruses to innovation, there’s little that polymath Smil hasn’t written about in 40-plus books. If you don’t know him, start with Size, his latest, where he reveals what happened when US dinner plates got bigger, and how Jonathan Swift made the giants and Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels the “wrong” size. Plus, did you know that incomes in China are as unequally distributed as those in the US?
Artist-activist Ai did. His exhibition, …