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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 , 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, , at London’s Design Museum until 30 July, uses China as a lens through which to look at the whole world.

In Still Life, Stone Age tools found in flea markets now resemble a layer of forgotten history; nearby, videos of older Beijing show it before ring roads destroyed it.

Most astonishing is a Lego recreation of one of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies paintings, with a dark area added by Ai. Its meaning turns out to be moving beyond words.

Liz Else
Senior culture editor
London