I attended a wedding once where I was seated next to a civil engineer. Being me, I wanted to know all about how things in his world worked. He was nearing retirement and had Opinions. It was a good conversation, but what I remember most was his advice: “If you want to understand a place, first find out where your water comes from, and then where it goes.”
Water and sewage, two of the most essential components of a functional modern society.
I thought of that dinner when I ran across this essay by Charles C. Mann. In it, he kicks off a series called “How the System Works” that touches on many of the ways in which humanity has built “the hidden mechanisms that support modern life.”
I find conversations like this fascinating because for so many of us, the process of supplying clean water, electricity, food systems and more might as well be magic.
We Live Like Royalty and Don’t Know It — The New Atlantis
This is not a statement about Kids These Days so much as about Most People These Days. Too many of us know next to nothing about the systems that undergird our lives. Which is what put me in mind of Thomas Jefferson and his ink.
Jefferson was one of the richest men in the new United States…. But despite his wealth and status his home was so cold in winter that the ink in his pen sometimes froze, making it difficult for him to write to complain about the chill.
And if this is magic, consider this series an introductory spell book:)
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