People of Interest · Curiosities
What's This Then?
Five genuinely baffling things the world is doing, each of which has, by a happy coincidence, been explained by a recently published book.
[author TBC]
[publisher TBC] 2025
Supertall Life
A supertall skyscraper is, by the precise definition of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, any building exceeding 300 metres. The world currently has approximately two dozen of them, clustered in a handful of cities — New York, Dubai, Shanghai, Hong Kong — and the number is growing. They are spectacular from the outside. From the inside, it turns out, they are something else entirely.
The problems begin with physics. Buildings of this height sway perceptibly in the wind. Engineers manage this with tuned mass dampers — pendulums or water tanks weighing hundreds of tonnes, mounted near the top, which oscillate in opposition to the building's movement. Residents in the upper floors have reported being unable to sleep during storms, as water sloshes in their toilet bowls and furniture migrates gently across rooms.
Then there is the social dimension. Supertall towers are almost exclusively luxury residential, which means their residents are among the wealthiest people on earth occupying some of the emptiest real estate in any given city. Many apartments are investment vehicles rather than homes; whole floors sit dark for years while their owners are elsewhere. New York's "Billionaires' Row" along 57th Street has been estimated to have occupancy rates of under 40%.
The book in question takes the full measure of this extraordinary built environment — the engineering ingenuity, the social isolation, the peculiar psychology of choosing to live above the clouds — and concludes that we are only at the beginning of working out what it does to people.
Cocktail
[author TBC]
[publisher TBC] 2025
Brompton Cocktail
The Brompton Cocktail is one of those ideas so productively strange that you wonder why it took so long to think of it. Developed at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London — the chest hospital — in the early twentieth century, it was a liquid mixture of morphine (or heroin, in earlier formulations), cocaine, alcohol, and occasionally a phenothiazine sedative. It was prescribed to patients with terminal cancer and other end-stage conditions, and the reasoning was straightforward: if someone is dying and in severe pain, you give them what works.
The cocaine was not incidental. It was included specifically to counteract the sedating and nauseating effects of the opiates, allowing patients to remain alert and relatively comfortable. The result was a preparation that, by the accounts of those who administered and received it, was remarkably effective at managing the final stages of life with something approaching dignity.
The cocktail fell out of favour in the 1970s and 1980s, as pain management became more systematised and pharmaceutical companies offered cleaner individual alternatives. The book tracking its history asks whether, in our pursuit of clinical tidiness, we discarded something that worked precisely because it was untidy — a pragmatic compound solution to an irreducibly complicated problem.
It is also a fascinating window into an era of medicine when doctors were trusted to make empirical judgements about what helped, rather than waiting for a randomised controlled trial to tell them.
Water
[author TBC]
[publisher TBC] 2025
Paris Water
Paris runs on two water systems. The first, familiar to any visitor who has drunk from a Parisian tap without incident, is the potable network supplying drinking water to homes, restaurants, and the roughly 1,200 Wallace Fountains — the ornate green cast-iron public drinking fountains installed across the city in the 1870s by the philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace. The second is a separate, entirely parallel network carrying non-potable water drawn from the Seine and underground sources.
This second network — eau non potable, marked on taps and hydrants in green — supplies the water used to flush the sewers, clean the streets, and irrigate the city's parks and public gardens. Paris has maintained this dual system since the 19th century, when Baron Haussmann's transformation of the city required a reliable supply of water for street-cleaning on a heroic scale. The total length of the non-potable network runs to hundreds of kilometres beneath the city.
There is a third layer below that: the Paris sewers themselves, a 2,400-kilometre network that has its own museum and used to offer tourist boat tours before insurers got involved. The book in question descends into all of it — the engineering history, the politics of public water, and the underground Paris that most visitors walk above without ever suspecting is there.
Rake
[author TBC]
[publisher TBC] 2025
Bogota Rake
The Bogotá rake is a lockpicking tool: a serrated blade with multiple peaks along its edge, designed to be raked rapidly back and forth inside a pin tumbler lock while applying rotational tension, with the aim of bouncing the lock's pins to the shear line more or less simultaneously. It is not precise. It is effective. In the lockpicking community — which is considerably larger and more organised than most people realise — the Bogotá is a journeyman's tool, the kind of thing you use when speed matters more than elegance.
The name's origins are uncertain. The tool does not appear to have any particular connection with the Colombian capital, a fact that lockpickers acknowledge with the same breezy indifference with which chess players discuss the Sicilian Defence and the King's Indian Attack. The nomenclature of mechanical skills has always had a loose relationship with geography.
The book prompted by this implement takes the lockpick as its entry point into a broader inquiry: the history of security, the philosophy of the lock, and the peculiar tension between the locksmith's art and the lockpicker's art, which have been engaged in a productive arms race for roughly as long as human beings have wanted to keep things away from other human beings. It is a story that turns out to touch on privacy, property, trust, and the foundational social contract of the closed door.
Tree
[author TBC]
[publisher TBC] 2025
Ginkgo Tree
The ginkgo is a biological anomaly. It is the sole surviving member of an entire division of plants — the Ginkgophyta — that flourished during the Jurassic period and has been otherwise extinct for approximately 200 million years. It has no close living relatives. Botanists sometimes call it a "living fossil," which underestimates the situation: it is less a fossil than a refugee from a world that no longer exists, which has somehow managed to persist into the present.
The secret of its survival appears to be a combination of extraordinary resilience — ginkgo trees are virtually immune to pests, diseases, and pollution — and the intervention of humans, who began cultivating it in Chinese temple gardens some time around the 10th century CE. Without that cultivation, it might have followed its relatives into extinction. Instead, it is now one of the most commonly planted street trees in the world.
Six ginkgos survived the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, despite being within two kilometres of the hypocentre. They are still there. The book in question, which approaches the tree through its botany, its history, its medicinal properties (ginkgo extract has been used in Chinese medicine for millennia, and is still the world's best-selling herbal supplement), and its improbable career as a street-tree-for-all-seasons, makes the case that the ginkgo is perhaps the most successful long-term survivor in the natural world. Two hundred and seventy million years and counting.