How To
2019
- science, miscellanea
- problem solving
- humor, form, trivia
- nyt:advice-how-to-and-miscellaneous=2019-09-22
- science
- miscellanea
- humor / form / trivia
- science / essays
- science / physics / general
The story
For any task you might want to do, there's a right way, a wrong way, and a way so monumentally complex, excessive, and inadvisable that no one would ever try it. How To is a guide to the third kind of approach. It's full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Bestselling author and cartoonist Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analyzing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you're a baby boomer or a 90's kid by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and powering your house by destroying the fabric of space-time. And if you want to get rid of the book once you're done with it, he walks you through your options for proper disposal, including dissolving it in the ocean, converting it to a vapor, using tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth's mantle, or launching it into the Sun. By exploring the most complicated ways to do simple tasks, Munroe doesn't just make things difficult for himself and his readers. As he did so brilliantly in What If?, Munroe invites us to explore the most absurd reaches of the possible. Full of clever infographics and fun illustrations, How To is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science and technology underlying the things we do every day.
What it’s like
Crisp, playful pages of stick-figure diagrams, annotated charts and deadpan infographics, with a clean, uncluttered layout that rewards dipping in at random. The voice is dry and conversational, as if a patient scientist is walking you through a ridiculous procedure with a straight face, and the sensory world is one of kitchens, rivers, cliffs and empty fields rendered through measurement and imagination rather than atmosphere. It's a cheerful, brainy vibe: mildly absurd, warmly curious, never cruel. Good for a lazy Sunday afternoon with a mug of tea, a bathroom-break flip-through, or a long flight when you want something you can open anywhere and laugh at within a page. The pacing is brisk and self-contained, each short entry a small scientific joke with a satisfying payoff, so the book never asks for sustained attention. Its people are largely absent, replaced by the reader's own curiosity and the author's tongue-in-cheek narrator. Intensity is very low: a few mock-dangerous scenarios such as launching things into the sun or destabilising space-time are played for comedy, with no gore, no sexual content and no real fear. Ideal for readers who love science trivia, absurdist humour, and gently nerdy problem-solving that stays lighthearted.
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