Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 20

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

Q1906

WonderTrade

Medieval tally sticks recorded quantities with notches, then split the wood lengthwise so two matching halves could authenticate the same transaction.

Notch size encoded value, while the irregular split made each pair difficult to counterfeit: wood grain served as a physical checksum. English government used tallies for centuries as receipts and financial instruments. Their afterlife was unexpectedly dramatic; burning obsolete Exchequer sticks in 1834 helped ignite the fire that destroyed much of the old Palace of Westminster. An accounting medium ended by consuming the institution that had outgrown it.

Tally stickRead card

Q1907

DriveTrade

Bills of exchange allowed merchants to order payment in another place or currency, supporting long-distance trade through written obligation rather than transporting coin for every settlement.

Long journeys made metal vulnerable to theft, weight and the problem of changing one city's money into another's. A bill replaced part of that physical risk with names, dates, signatures, reputation and enforceable promises. It could also be endorsed onward, letting an obligation circulate through a commercial network. Finance became lighter, but not abstract: trust was still the cargo, only now it travelled in sentences.

Bill of exchangeRead card

Q1908

DriveBusiness

Double-entry bookkeeping records each transaction as corresponding debits and credits, creating a balanced structure that can expose omissions and clarify how value moved.

The method developed in merchant practice before Luca Pacioli described it systematically in print in 1494; he codified it, he did not invent it. By making one account's increase correspond to another account's decrease or claim, the ledger turns relationships into structure. Balance does not guarantee honesty, but imbalance demands explanation. The page becomes more than memory: it becomes a small machine for asking where the money went.

Double-entry bookkeepingRead card

Q1909

WonderTrade

Jingdezhen became China's great porcelain centre by combining local ceramic materials, specialised labour and high-temperature kilns to supply imperial courts and overseas markets.

Across centuries, quarrying, refining, throwing, moulding, painting, glazing, firing and sorting became an urban production system of extraordinary specialisation. Clay and unfinished wares moved between workshops; imperial commissions demanded precision, while export orders multiplied forms and scales of output. Translucence was therefore a civic achievement as much as a material one: geology, furnace control, labour organisation and quality control coordinated across an entire city.

Jingdezhen porcelainRead card

Q1914

WonderMusic

Each shaken bamboo angklung usually supplies only one pitch or chord, so a complete melody emerges when many players enter at precisely the right moments.

An angklung holds tuned bamboo tubes in a light frame; shaking it makes the tubes strike and resonate. Because a player is responsible for only a fragment of the scale, rehearsal turns musical timing into social awareness: watch, listen, enter, release. Indonesian ensembles expanded the instrument from traditional tuning systems into diatonic repertoire during the twentieth century without erasing its communal logic. The music arrives only when individual restraint becomes collective fluency.

AngklungRead card

Q1916

DriveMusic

A pansori singer moves between song, stylised speech and gesture while a single drummer answers with rhythm and calls, sustaining an epic narrative that may last for hours.

The stage can be almost bare: a singer with a fan, and a drummer beside a barrel-shaped buk. From that economy comes abundance—narration, dialogue, laughter, sorrow, sudden characters and whole landscapes summoned by phrasing. Some complete works demand many hours and years of vocal training, including the cultivation of a rough, expressive tone. Pansori shows that spectacle does not require more objects; it requires a performer capable of making attention change scale.

PansoriRead card

Q1917

StillnessMusic

In qawwali, lead singing, answering voices, handclaps, percussion and repeated poetic lines gather momentum until devotion becomes a shared physical experience.

Qawwali is rooted in South Asian Sufi gatherings, including performances at shrines and devotional assemblies. A lead singer may unfold a line of Urdu, Persian or Punjabi poetry; the chorus returns it, claps mark the pulse, and harmonium and drums tighten the frame. Repetition does not leave the words where it found them: emphasis, improvisation and audience response alter their emotional weight. The ensemble turns listening from private reception into collective participation.

QawwaliRead card

Q1919

DriveMusic

Japanese American ensembles formed from the late 1960s helped develop North American taiko, building drums from available materials and making group performance a language of community.

Taiko names a broad family of Japanese drums, but the large choreographed ensemble known as kumi-daiko is largely a postwar form. In California, Japanese American groups from the late 1960s adapted that energy to temples, festivals and community life, sometimes turning wine barrels into affordable drum bodies. The practice was neither a sealed inheritance nor a clean invention. Migration made tradition audible as a verb: remember, improvise, build, gather.

TaikoRead card

Q1922

DriveBiography

Violeta Parra travelled through Chile recording songs from local performers, then carried that fieldwork into broadcasts, albums, original compositions and visual art.

Parra sought out singers and instrumentalists whose repertoire rarely entered official culture, preserving voices while learning how each song worked from within. She did not stop at documentation: her own writing renewed the tradition, and her arpilleras, paintings and ceramics let the same intelligence cross into colour and thread. The archive and the artwork were not opposing tasks. She showed that careful listening can be an original act when it returns inherited material to public life with new force.

Violeta ParraRead card

Q1923

DriveBiography

After South Africa cancelled her passport in 1960, Miriam Makeba spent three decades in exile, using performance and United Nations testimony to confront apartheid abroad.

Makeba's records carried South African languages, rhythms and everyday stories to listeners who often knew the country only through headlines. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral, the state refused her entry; in 1963 she addressed the United Nations about apartheid, and her music was banned at home. Exile gave her reach, but at the price of ordinary belonging. Her career refuses the comforting idea that an international platform cancels the wound of being denied one's own door.

Miriam MakebaRead card

Q1924

StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş inherited the Abdal and bozlak tradition from his father Muharrem Ertaş, then renewed it through an extensive body of his own songs and performances.

Ertaş grew up inside a working musical lineage, accompanying his father and learning not only melodies but the social world that gave them weight. His singing let the bozlak's high, unguarded cry hold separation, poverty, love, pride and the road; his bağlama answered without ornament for ornament's sake. He became nationally known without sanding away the Abdal tradition that formed him. The achievement was not escape from inheritance, but a voice distinct enough to keep inheritance alive.

Neşet ErtaşRead card

Q1925

WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac commanded an exceptionally broad range, moving between cavernous lows, brilliant high notes and vocal colours that resisted a single category.

Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Peru, Sumac entered international popular culture through recordings that placed orchestral spectacle around her astonishing instrument. Publicity often wrapped her in fantasies of an exotic Inca princess, a story easier to market than a modern artist directing her own sound. The mythology should not be mistaken for the achievement. Her voice could move from subterranean resonance to airborne precision and make the distance feel architectural.

Yma SumacRead card

Q1926

StillnessBiography

Queen Liliʻuokalani composed more than ceremonial music: songs such as Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani turned intimate melody into memory during political dispossession and confinement.

Liliʻuokalani was Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch and a prolific composer whose songs joined poetic language to a keen sense of place. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she was confined in ʻIolani Palace; music written around that period carried loyalty, loss and attention to those outside the room. Aloha ʻOe became globally familiar, but familiarity can blur the political life behind the melody. Her songbook is also an archive of a sovereign mind refusing to be reduced to defeat.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card

Q1927

DriveLanguage

Solomana Kanté created the right-to-left N'Ko alphabet in 1949, giving Manden languages dedicated letters and tone marks rather than forcing their sounds into another script.

Manden languages use tone to distinguish meaning, so a writing system that ignores pitch leaves important work to context. Kanté built N'Ko with letters, numerals and diacritics suited to that linguistic reality, then translated and wrote works that helped create a reading public across national borders. The script now moves through print, keyboards and phones as well as handwriting. Its achievement is not simply representation; it is the confidence produced when a language sees its own structure taken seriously.

N'Ko scriptRead card

Q1928

WonderLanguage

Developed in Liberia in the early 1830s, chiefly by Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ, the Vai syllabary organises signs around spoken syllables instead of importing a European alphabet unchanged.

Each Vai sign represents a syllable rather than a single consonant or vowel, giving the page a logic shaped by the language it records. The script spread through teaching, correspondence and record-keeping in Vai communities across Liberia and Sierra Leone, and its forms were repeatedly standardised as use expanded. Digital encoding added another medium without making the script newly legitimate. Vai literacy had already demonstrated that writing can be invented, taught and sustained outside colonial models.

Vai syllabaryRead card

Q1929

DriveLanguage

Modern Neo-Tifinagh adapts historic Amazigh letterforms into standardised alphabets used for teaching, public signage and digital communication across North Africa.

Tifinagh is not one frozen alphabet but a family of related forms with deep roots in North Africa, including the writing maintained among Tuareg communities. Modern institutions and language activists developed Neo-Tifinagh orthographies to serve contemporary Amazigh varieties in schools, books and civic space. Standardisation made fonts and keyboards possible, while also requiring choices among regional practices. Revival is rarely a return to an untouched past; it is the careful design of a future in which inherited signs can do new work.

TifinaghRead card

Q1933

DriveLanguage

Beginning with Hawaiian-medium preschools in 1984 and public immersion schooling in 1987, community-led education rebuilt a path for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi from early childhood to university.

By the late twentieth century, generations of English-dominant schooling had pushed Hawaiian out of many homes and classrooms. Families and educators answered by building Pūnana Leo preschools, then fighting for public immersion pathways that could continue through secondary and higher education. Children were not asked merely to study the language; they learned mathematics, science and daily life through it. Revitalisation became durable when Hawaiian was allowed to carry a whole future, not just describe a treasured past.

Hawaiian languageRead card

Q1934

StillnessLanguage

Ainu is critically endangered, yet community classes, instructor training, family programmes and museum-based teaching are creating new settings in which it can be spoken and heard.

Assimilation policies and discrimination interrupted the everyday transmission of Ainu across generations in Japan. Revitalisation now takes several forms at once: beginner and advanced courses, new teaching materials, training for instructors, parent-child learning and public programmes led by Ainu knowledge holders. A museum can preserve recordings and objects, but a language needs situations in which one person addresses another. The decisive unit of survival is not the word in a catalogue; it is the relationship that gives someone reason to say it.

Ainu languageRead card

Q1935

DriveLanguage

Since 1989, Kaurna people and collaborating linguists have reclaimed the Adelaide Plains language from community knowledge and nineteenth-century records for teaching and public use.

German missionaries wrote down substantial Kaurna vocabulary and grammar in the 1840s, even as colonisation was breaking the conditions for transmission on the Adelaide Plains. More than a century later, Kaurna leaders used those records as tools—not authorities—to reconstruct pronunciation, create new terms and place the language in welcomes, songs, education and signage. Reclamation does not pretend the rupture never happened. It makes an ethical reversal: paper gathered under colonial power now serves living Kaurna decisions.

Kaurna languageRead card

Q1937

WonderFood

Xochimilco's chinampas are raised fields built from lake sediment and organic matter, threaded by canals and often edged with ahuejote willows that help hold the banks.

Calling chinampas floating gardens hides the labour that makes them stable. Farmers dredge nutrient-rich canal mud onto constructed plots, manage water at the field edge and use rows of slender willows as living reinforcement; the canals also create habitat and temper local conditions. This is agriculture as a negotiated boundary between land and lake, not the conquest of one by the other. Its survival inside Mexico City depends as much on defending water and farming communities as on admiring an ingenious form.

ChinampaRead card

Q1938

WonderFood

Pacific voyagers carried selected breadfruit plants between islands for thousands of years, establishing long-lived food trees and hundreds of locally named cultivars.

A canoe carrying breadfruit carried more than calories. Many prized cultivars had to travel as living shoots or rooted plants, demanding moisture, protection and the confidence that someone would tend them after landfall. Once established, the trees could feed communities for generations within layered agroforestry systems. Their distribution maps a form of navigation measured not only by where people reached, but by the edible futures they deliberately planted there.

BreadfruitRead card

Q1942

DriveFood

Cassava contains cyanogenic compounds in varying amounts, so established methods such as peeling, grating, soaking, fermenting, pressing and drying are vital parts of making it safe.

Cassava thrives in difficult conditions and stores useful energy underground, but its roots cannot be treated as a universally ready food. Cyanogenic compounds differ by variety and environment; no single preparation step fits every product. Across Africa, South America and beyond, communities developed multi-stage processes that rupture cells, dissolve or expel compounds and allow volatile cyanide to escape. The staple's reach rests on agricultural resilience and on culinary knowledge precise enough to turn hazard into nourishment.

CassavaRead card

Q1944

StillnessFood

In southwestern Morocco, argan oil production moves through harvesting, drying, pulping, cracking, grinding and mixing—skills traditionally transmitted among rural women.

The hardest-looking moment is cracking the nut between stones, but argan knowledge lives in the entire chain: when to gather fruit, how long to dry it, which kernels to roast for culinary oil and how to judge paste and water by touch. The oil enters cooking, body care, remedies, hospitality and wedding exchange. Its value is inseparable from the argan woodlands and from the people who maintain the practice. A marketable product sits at the end; ecological and social judgement begin much earlier.

Argan oilRead card

Q1945

DriveFood

Indigenous makers pounded dried bison meat and mixed it with rendered fat, sometimes adding berries, to produce energy-dense pemmican that kept well on long journeys.

Removing water from lean meat slowed spoilage; enclosing the powder in warm fat added energy and protection, creating provisions suited to winter, travel and uncertain supply. Plains peoples developed this food long before commercial fur companies depended on it. Métis producers later organised large bison hunts and supplied brigades moving through the interior, making pemmican part of a colonial economy with immense appetite. Its efficiency should be admired alongside the harder history of extraction that grew around it.

PemmicanRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.