Radiolab - Asking for Another Friend

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

Part 2: Last year, we ran a pair of episodes that explored the greatest mysteries in our listeners’ lives - the big ones, little ones, and the ones in between. This year, we’re back on the hunt, tracking down answers to the big little questions swirling around our own heads. Today, we take a look at a strange human emotion, and investigate the mysteries lurking behind the trees, sounds, and furry friends in our lives.  This episode was reported by Tracie Hunte, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Arianne Wack, Carter Hodge, Sarah Qari and Annie McEwen, and was produced by Matt Kielty, Tracie Hunte, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Arianne Wack, Sarah Qari, Annie McEwen, and Simon Adler.  Special thanks to Yiyun Huang, lab manager at Yale's Canine Cognition Center. Check out Code Switch's "Dog Show!" Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate. 

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N.Y. C. See?

Yeah. Hey, I'm Jedi Boomrod. I'm Robert Krollmich. She's Radio Lab. And today we'll start with a prelude. Hello, hello, England. Are you there? From our producer, Annie McEwen.

Hello. Oh, hi. Yay. Is that Annie? It is. Is this Rupert? Well done. Yes.

Well done. This is Rupert Pennant Ray. Right. Hello. He's 71, and he's at a very busy, very successful career. Yes. Perhaps the two most prominent things I've done. I was on the staff of the economist for many years, an editor. I then went from there to the Bank of England where I was deputy governor.

So you can imagine Rupert is a very knowledgeable guy. Absolutely. Especially when it comes to things like interest rates or exchange rates or commodity prices. And ha-ha-ha. He knows all about that stuff. But this whole time has been the same. this like super successful guy. He's been living with his one big,

big cavernous... ...gap in my life. Yeah. Until very recently, Rupert knew absolutely nothing about science. And when I say nothing, I mean, like,

he had no clue about how the natural world around him worked in any way. Literally. For instance... A periodic table. I'd never heard of the periodic table. Until last year.

And when one day his wife told him he was a mammal... Well, that was a shocker. He had no idea. I said, no, no, of course I'm not a mammal. What? I thought she was using it as a term of abuse. He'd use words like fibro optic cable.

Many, many times. And say things like, Oh, that's radioactive. When describing something he felt was bad or dangerous. Without a clue of what I meant by that phrase. I guess, like, what was it like to be a very important person in a very important circles, but have this gap? Well, I'll tell you what. I became good at bluffing.

I was on the board of a number of mining companies, and I was on the board of a number of mining companies, And I hope none of my colleagues from those companies are listening. Part of being on the board meant he had to read all these geologists reports. Yeah. And then we would have board discussions about all this. And I would sit there stroking my chin in a way I hoped would look like a wise chap. But I didn't really have a clue what people were talking about. What was your schooling like that you didn't have?

Well, this is where it all began, of course. I come from Zimbabwe. I went to school there. It was a boarding school, the kind of school where you wear uniforms, you play cricket, and for some reason, if you're extra clever, instead of studying any science at all, you study Greek. Of course, the irony today is that I remember virtually no Greek at all. So it's not as though it did me a huge amount of favors.

So he'd always thought, as soon as I have time, he would write this wrong. That's what I'm doing now. I'm studying science for the first time at the age of 71. And he's really going for it. He's got a tutor who I see for three hours a week. Studying physics, biology and his favorite. Chemistry. I have been really absorbed by chemistry. I guess you are married to a scientist. Is that correct? I am. Okay. So what is, is that influencing your studies at all? Yeah. We had an agreement that at some point I would put this right, coupled with another agreement that she would be a very helpful tutor to me, which indeed she's proving to be. But I think there's a danger now that she's going to rather wish that she'd never encourage me to do this because I now never stop saying,

wow, have you noticed this? What are the wows? Oh, I mean, all sorts of things. It was partly the periodic table. When I first discovered this, I couldn't believe how elegant it was, how compressed and how beautifully defined it all was. But I'm very, very devoted to it and you have a copy of it close by most of the day. Oh, really? Oh, yes. Oh, my gosh. You were very committed. This is amazing.

Then there are other things. Okay. Whole principle of electricity and how it lights up bulbs and how it then moves on and goes all around the house and comes out at the other end. And things like speed and velocity and acceleration and cells and you're talking about plants and you're talking about animals. Something as simple as the glass of water I've got on the table by me now. I now look at it with a huge amount of respect. And I think, my God, if only I could have a look with microscope eyes and see those little molecules of hydrogen and the single atoms of oxygen

and how they were all joined together, it would be such a delight. I can see why your wife's like rolling her eyes a little bit. No, this is getting tedious, I think. Rupert, go to bed. It sounds very much to me like you've fallen in love. Yeah, it does. It feels like that. It's all fresh and wonderful and exciting,

and, you know, you can't really believe it. It's like one day having a miracle laser surgery on your eyes, and they turned from being colorblind to being fully functional and seeing the richness of the world around you. And thinking, my God, and there I was in that one-dimensional color. and now I've got all of this to revel in. I picture you in a musical sort of like swinging your briefcases about as you, like, you know, jump home from work and dance around lamp posts and stuff.

Well, that would be nice. I wouldn't recommend my dancing, but anyway, I do like the image. Thanks, Annie. Sure. Speaking of reveling and reveling in. Revelling in the wonder, getting back to bass. You know, like asking the questions you never get a chance to ask. That's what we're going to do.

That's what we're going to do. This is one in a series of shows we've been doing. All of us are curious about this, that, and the other. And some of the thises and the thatses and the others won't go away. They won't go into the show either. No, they won't go into the show. Because the show increasingly is these big investigative things. Right.

Feels like, okay, let's make a space for the this, that, and the others. So we did. We decided to just devote a few shows to small questions. to small questions asked by our people that wouldn't go away, so what the heck will just answer them. Yeah, and maybe in the process you get back to that Rupertarian state of renewal, of wonder. Yeah. All right, so you ready, Bobby Kay?

I am. We're going to start things off with... Hello, hello. Hello. Yay! An interrogatory duet from producers Molly Webster. This is Molly. Hi, Molly.

And Ariane. Ariane Wack. Ariane. Hi, I'm. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. So we're going to jump right into the conversation that we had with this researcher. All right. Well, my name is Oriana Aragon, and I'm an assistant professor here at Clemson University. Okay. She studies human behavior and emotion. So maybe you can just tell me, like, what made you first run into this question?

Well, it was summer 2011. Oriana was a grad student at Yale at the time, and one night she was just sitting around. watching late night television. It's Conan. Conan O'Brien. And we've talked about this before. Leslie Bibb. Very beautiful, talented woman.

Thank you. The very talented and lovely actress was on. And she was talking about having encountered this cute puppy. Yeah, I mean, there was this woman. I was just at the hair salon. She had this little dog. It was kind of an ugly dog.

It was like a Maltese. It looked real janky. But she took. took like this little curly hair and she must have straightened with a flat iron and then she put one ponytail holder and then another ponytail holder so it kind of looked like a water ox yeah and then oriana says leslie did something that just sort of struck her she started like gritting her teeth scrunching her face squeezing her hands i just walked up to her and i was like this dog is making me so mad i'm gonna punch it it's so cute

You know, she's like, it's so cute, you just want to smash it. She's so cute. Okay, so wait a minute. When you say, I want to punch you, you make me so mad, it means that you... Like, I love it! And Oriana was just sitting there watching the show, and she was like, huh. Wow, that's a strange reaction. Like, Leslie saw this cute, sweet thing, and she just wanted to kick it in the head.

Which might seem odd, but as Oriana kept thinking about this moment, she was like, oh, yeah. We do this. We do this sort of thing all the time. I do this. I totally do this. Side note, Ariane is a new mom. Every single day, when I see my baby, when I see his, like, little body, my joints tense up and my hands, my fingers start to curl and my teeth start to clenching. I just need to eat his face.

And I need to figure out what's going on here. This sort of like, ah, feeling with cuteness. What is it that we're doing and why do we do that? So anyhow, back in 2011, Oriana set out to answer those questions. And the conventional thinking at the time was that, you know, if this, if there is an aggressive expression, like gritting teeth or clenched fists or wanting to squeeze something. And it must be representing some sort of aggression. Underneath that, there's a little bit of violence. You want to hurt that thing.

Yes. Which sort of makes sense to me because I think my first thought is, we were all cannibals at some point. And there's something in there coming through, and it's not good in polite society. And that urge is just the urge sneaking out in some way. That's interesting. No, I think it's, so work has continued for the last six years on this. And I've found a lot, I've understood a lot now about what these expressions communicate and what they represent. So when Oriana first started researching this, one of the things she had to figure out was when we see something cute.

Do we actually want to squeeze or is this just an expression, a figure speech I want to squeeze you? And so she started doing these experiments where she would bring people into the lab and she would show them these pictures. Like a little baby duckling. Oh, duckling. You know, a little baby fluffy puppy. And then give them bubble wrap. It was funny because it was in this like really quiet hall. And throughout the entire semester, you could hear pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.

And for the really cute picks, like baby ducklings. You'd hear this like, they would just be ringing out sheets of bubble wrap. I identify with that because I was like bubble wrap would not cut it from me. So Oriana was like, okay, it looks like there's real aggression here. Yeah. But, and maybe this isn't that much of a shocker. At the same time, she found there was actually nothing negative going on inside these people. They were actually full of joy and happiness while they were tearing bowel wrap apart.

So it's not about an actual latent aggression. We're just, you know, we're just sort of expressing it this way, but we don't mean it that we're aggressive at all. But that's so strange to have this sort of weird schism where you're happy on the inside but aggressive on the outside. Well, it's actually not as weird as you would think. No, mm-mm, no. Oriana pointed out that in some ways it's so common we don't even notice it. It happens all the time. You see athletes.

Are sports fans. What looks like absolute fury. Oh my God. Punching the air, screaming. Oh, my God. Or weeping. When something great happens. And that's another thing.

Think about, you know. Oh, are you serious? Tears of joy. You see brides and you see. You're the $2 million winner? I apparently am the two. Um, lottery winners. Or.

Oh my God. You see people weeping at the awe of nature. Double complete rainbow. Think about all the times when what happens on the outside, the display, doesn't match what's going on on the inside. But I still feel like I'm at why? Why would you want to punch the cute puppy or a weep at the rainbow? So Oriana started to look at all this stuff. And having tested everything that I can think of, everything that's in the literature, there is a throughline to what these expressions represent and communicate.

So according to Oriana, when you see tears, like all kinds of tears, whether they're for winning the medal, whether they're for looking at the beautiful sunset. It's the same as tears at a funeral or tears of grief. It communicates wanting to stop, wanting to be still, wanting to pause. And Oriana said that when it comes to these like Sort of aggressive er expressions Because you know you see a cute puppy or you scored a goal Or you actually want to fight somebody That's about wanting to go

Wanting to move Wanting to approach Wanting to get close to It's about Moving forward or momentum That's funny because I Like when I see my baby At 4 o'clock in the morning

When he gets up and wants to nurse I'm exhausted But it's not until like I see him and like his face lights up. Like, he's so excited to see me. And it's, oh, I want to like smush him and bite him, right? Like, that's the thing that gets me going. I feel like in those moments.

Right. Because it's, that's definitely it. It's elicitor of those care behaviors. It's like so just nice to know that in situations where, like, we may not know what's going on. We may not be able to, like, read our own emotions or know how to respond to the world, our most basic bodily instincts, they, like, boil down to this really simple set of choices. Yeah.

Or, like, urges. Mm-hmm. You know what I think is, I find myself thinking in a way that I appreciate is, you know, I'm not even going to get all these right, but do you know, like, remember when, like, humans used to think of themselves as composed of, like, fire, water, wind. The humors. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And somehow in this conversation, I feel like, oh, we were right all along. It might not have been fire, but it could have just been go. Yeah. You know, and maybe it wasn't water, but it was stop. Yeah. That's what I'm telling you. We need a self-help book out of this. Okay, I'll get right on that.

Split. Thank you, Molly Webster. Thank you, Aryan Wack. Molly's here, by the way. I was like, you're welcome, Robert. I'm now disclaimer, Molly, which is just to say that, Leslie Bibb has actually been on Conan a number of times talking about how she wants to punch dogs and punch babies. And in one, she wants to slash Angelica Houston's face, all motivated by the same cute aggression reason.

Slash her face? That was how she introduced herself to Angelica Houston. Oh, my God. So that's just to say that at the top of the piece. What happened after that? Just I'm curious. I think Angelica Houston abruptly turned around and walked away. As one might.

That's just to say at the top of this piece, while Oriana was inspired in 2011 by a Leslie appearance, we used a scene from 2018. Okay. There was like a black outfit in one and a red outfit in another. Got it. Got it. All right. Well, thanks, Molly. Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, sure. Okay. Have fun. All right, Tracy. Hi. Should we ask you how you got the idea to do this? Right. Is that the right question?

to start us offer, but are you... It is a question, and it will do for right now. Okay. So, Tracy, facing the challenge of a completely blank page where any question at all might be legitimate. Correct. How did you land upon this way? So one of my friends...

Am I here? Her name is Kat Child. I'm a reporter with Code Switch, a team at NPR that covers race and culture. And so I saw her tweeting one day, because this is how I keep up with all my friends. I just look at what they're tweeting. And she was feeding how she was feeling very vulnerable right now because she's working on a story that was going to involve Samson. Yes. And so I want to know a little bit about how did you meet Samson?

So I got Samson in 2015. And in 2015, this weird thing happened where all of a sudden I became obsessed with just wanting a dog. All of a sudden, all I could do was browse these dog adoption websites in the D.C. area. So there was like a lot of like, you know, going to shelters and going to rescue groups. And finally, this rescue group that I think she'd been in contact with emailed her and said, why don't you come meet Samson? And I clicked on his profile. And he was this really, really adorable beagle mix.

They had this like cute video on YouTube where he's jumping around and he looks so happy. And he's romping in a field playing with other dogs. And the profile didn't really say much about him just so that he was a little shy. He was a stray in South Carolina. And so I arranged to, you know, go meet him at this adoption event. And when my partner and I go to the event, we find Samson and he is just as cute in person, except we notice that he's super, super scared where he's like shaking and he can't even stand on his own. and the people at the adoption event had to have him in his lap. So I don't know.

Maybe that should have been a red flag for anyone who knows dogs. But for me, I was like, oh, like, he's so, you know, he's going to come out of his shell. I'm going to be the one to bring him out of his shell. And so, Samson was living with a foster family. And they wanted to do a home visit. So the foster came over with Samson to my apartment, my little basement apartment in D.C. And we go on this walk. A little exploratory walk.

around the neighborhood. And while they're walking, we pass by a man who is black and he's wearing a sweatshirt. And the foster turns to me and goes, oh, he doesn't like men in hoodies. Huh. So Kat is thinking, and I'm thinking it when she saw me this, are you saying that he's scared of guys in hoodies or are you saying that he's afraid of black men? Right. But Samson was also afraid of me. And I still really badly wanted a dog. And Samson seemed, you know, just like, like he needed me. And I don't know, maybe this is like the patronizing human adopt a dog thing. I don't know. I don't know. And so I just, we decided, my partner and I decided to adopt him. And we loved him so much. And we love him. We love him, present tense, so much. So, Ken, her

partner take Sampson in and almost immediately. Kat would have a friend over who is black. He would just like bark at them. Bark at her friends who were brown for a long time. He especially did not like one of my Korean-American friends. When they would go outside. He just was afraid of anybody who was African-American or, you know, like Latinx. He would growl at them.

It just was like very obvious, but then it became this. Yeah, let's slow down. So to clarify just one thing, you yourself were not. white? I am Asian American. Yes, I'm Chinese American. Does you think that Samson maybe, because you said he was a little afraid of you at first, do you think that he maybe was afraid of you because you weren't white? I don't know. He, so he did like my partner more and my partner is white. Oh no. And Kat did put Samson in training, but that didn't seem to work. So she was just left looking at this adorable little dog that she'd just taken in thinking, is he racist?

And I should say quick. This is like a question that a lot of people have. I'm really sorry. You know, you know what's going on. Huh? You have a racist dog. You know, this is not the first time I've heard. Like this morning, my mom called me.

This idea that dogs can be racist. Because she thinks her dog is racist. It comes up in TV shows all the time. He seems to get really aggressive towards people with darker color skin. I'm so sorry. There's articles about it in Huffington Post and psychology today. And I actually, we'll see. Can I be a hokey news?

Went around to some dog parks. and asked some fellow dog owners. Have you ever heard of this idea that a dog can, like, be racist? And there were a bunch of people who were like, I have. Oh, yeah, totally. Once, a long time ago. Yeah.

I don't know what you're talking about. You know, I heard stories about, I'll walk by somebody there like, he doesn't like white girls. Dogs that maybe didn't like white women. You'd be bottomed and just. Black women. Black men. I guess all of this is just a long way of saying that this is definitely, you know,

a thing. So my question is, is it actually a thing? Okay, now I'm rolling. So this is going to be kind of a fun conversation about race, but also dogs. So to try and answer this question, Kat and I sat down with this woman. Sure, sure. I'm Alexandra Horowitz. I study at the Dog Cognition Lab in Barnard.

Does research on dogs, thinks about dogs, writes about dogs. All things dogs. Okay. So to jump in. Kat told Alexandra about how she had taken Samson in. He barked at... He seems to be kind of racist. But like, you know, is that even possible?

I don't know. Can a dog be racist? She was like, well, obviously, dogs aren't racist the way humans are racist. I mean, racism is rooted in our history. The history of our country and how we've dealt with different groups of people. But dogs do not know about that. What a dog knows about comes from its own life, that dog's own life. Yeah. But as we were talking through what dogs can do, we ended up having this conversation about the most basic elements of being a racist.

Hmm. A racist, a racist, anything? Yeah, so think about it. You know, step one is just putting people in these different groups in your head. I was trying to think about this, too, though. Like, can dogs remember types of? of people or just... Well, I do think that dogs are sensitive to new things and differences. And one thing that Alexander told us that she's seen in her work is that...

Dogs do seem to play differently with different breeds, for instance. They play better with ones that kind of look like them. Wait, so dogs have a buy... Like, they are prejudiced for their own kind? Maybe? Dogs have clicks at the dog park? Yeah, they do. And partly might be because they have the same kind of equipment, the same length tail, the same kind of ear shape, the same body size so they understand each other's cues a little better. It might just be easier. But that's what I'm saying is dogs notice differences in the world. And when it comes to noticing differences between people, there's some at least anecdotal

evidence that dogs can see, can tell men and women apart. But they can't see differences in skin color, right? Because aren't dogs colorblind? They absolutely can see color differences. Oh, they can. Yes. What does the world look like to a dog? The best approximation is that there's probably seeing something like the color spectrum when it's dusk, and it feels like yellows and so forth.

And oranges have disappeared or have been muted. Okay, so the dog can see color. Yeah, so it seems like it's possible that maybe dogs can tell the difference between skin tones. But then the next question is, can a dog then make associations, you know, like light-skinned people are like this and dark-skinned people are like this? and then carry that forward in all those other interactions whenever it meets another person like that person. Yeah, group bias, I guess.

Right, yeah. And can it do that with dark skin people? That's an interesting question. You know, and then say, and then do this. How would you ever test a thing like that? Well, so Kat actually did a story for Code Switch. Okay, it is rainy. And as part of that, she found this woman named Lori.

Hi. Lori Santos. She is another dog cognition expert, except this time she's at Yale. I gave her a call and I'm like, hi, I think my dog is racist. And she kind of said the same thing as Alexandra. I think the word racist has a lot in it, you know, the history of race in America and all these things.

But in her work, she has been trying to answer this very basic question. Can a dog show preferences for certain racial groups? So Lori designed a study. A dog version of a very famous human study known as an IAT, Which is the implicit association test. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of this test. I don't know what it is. Okay, so the implicit association test, it's put out by Harvard, right?

Right. So basically that test, you can take it online. It kind of feels like a computer game where you get these words and you have to sort whether they are positive or negative. And then you're also getting faces, like just faces of people and you have to sort whether they are black or white. Basically, they're trying to test to see if you associate certain groups of people with certain kind of negative or positive images or thoughts.

Correct. Yes, yes. How on earth would you give this to a dog? Well, I think our dog is here right now, so we can... Lori found with implicit bias research. Similar kinds of studies have been done with human babies. Human babies? Yes, to see if they have racial preferences. And since they're babies, you know, and they can't use computers with words,

researchers use photos. Photos of different human faces. So... Welcome, Peter. Hello. To do this for dogs. Aww. Lori had this pit bull mix named Vader come in. And what she does is she brings the dog into this little room.

And they have the dog sit kind of near the center of the room where there is a research assistant. And she has this box and it kind of reminds me of like a little puppet theater where it's open on one side and you can slide in different images. at the front that the dog will see. So the research assistant gets this box ready. Okay. Slides in a picture and then... Vader, look. Pulls off this cover to show Vader a picture of a black person,

just a straight-faced, you know, kind of headshot. And then they show the same picture to Vader. Over and over. And over. And over again. The same straight-faced black person. But then, the researcher shows Vader this picture of a smiling, happy-looking German Shepherd. And then black person, smiling German Shepherd.

It's all very randomized. So sometimes it's black person, black person, then smiling dog and, you know, you get the idea. And what is it that they're looking for here? Well, so that day with Vader, they only showed black faces and happy dogs. And, you know, when Vader comes in again, they'll likely show him other kinds of combinations, white faces with angry dogs, black faces with angry dogs, and, you know, so on. And what they're looking for, and this is the same thing they're looking for when they do this test on babies, is to see whether the dog is attentive and focused or bored and unfocused. Basically, how is a dog reacting to these two different pictures being put together? The way Lori put it was, you know, if a dog shows like a pro-white bias,

then they should find the categories of white faces with happy dogs easier to process and therefore more boring. So they might look away more or they might not be able to stay focused. Bortem implies that that dog might have a preference for white people. But then if they see a black face and a happy dog and they stay really focused on it and they're not bored, that could possibly mean that maybe they're surprised that these two things go together. And maybe that's evidence of a little bit of prejudice. So what has Lori learned?

Well, Dad, here it is, the big news. And it's too soon to tell. It's still too early to tell. Yeah. I mean, we're really at such early stages. It's really hard to say. I guess one thing we have learned is that, you know, so many people are interested in the results of this study. You know, people really want to know the answer to the question of how dogs see these categories. And that's been really compelling just to realize how fascinated people are with this question. How often do you get the Is My Dog Racist question? I hear it regularly, sure. Again, Alexander Horowitz.

You know, because we see dogs as mirrors of ourselves. We see our dogs as mirrors of ourselves. And in many ways, they are. Because regardless of what a dog can see or not see, or whether they associate, negative feelings with different faces. The one thing that dogs are very, very good at, and this is something that both Lori and Alexandra made a point of, is paying attention to us.

And more specifically, how we behave. For instance, remember this idea that dog can tell men and women apart? Well, she was like, it probably has nothing to do with what men and women look like. But instead, it's how we behave. Men and women deal with dogs a little bit different. on the whole. I should have bought some treats. Why didn't I bring treats?

Why didn't I bring treats? Women are more effusive. Oh, you're so pretty. You're so pretty. Women are more likely to talk to dogs in a higher pitched voice. Women might be more likely to crouch down to a dog instead of kind of coming right up to a dog.

So these are obviously generalizations. But I think a dog is very sensitive to those behavioral differences. differences. And Alexandra says the person who dogs are the most sensitive to whose responses they're paying the closest amount of attention to is you. You the guardian, you the owner. We have created a species to be sensitive when we feel tense. I wonder if, you know, I suspected this thing. It became this like sort of funny but not really funny thing that I always wondered. and somehow confirmed it or made it happen just by, you know, just the anxiety of, oh, my gosh, is my dog actually, is he racist, quote unquote? Well, so if, for instance, and I don't want to put behaviors in your, I don't want to say you're doing something you're not, but if you tense up when you see your dog starting to have a reaction to somebody and your dog's on the leash or there at some level in your control, then the dog will feed off of that.

Kat, do you think that that's something you do? Do you think that you have almost this pre-reaction to Samson's reaction that might tell Samson to react? Yes and no. I don't know. This could be a situation where this has become such a running joke among our friends, you know, that our friends who, you know, many of our friends are people of color, they come over and they're already like, oh, this fucking, like this stupid dog, this dog, he's going to bark at me. He might bite me. I don't want to touch him really. Or maybe I do.

And so maybe a host of things reinforced to Samson. Or maybe he is racist. But there is a potential that I have created this world in which my dog now sees the construct of race through me. Just because I have taught them to him through my subtle nonverbal cues of a lot of stuff. If only we could talk to dogs and just understand. If you had five minutes to talk to, well, no, I'm going to make it harder. If you had two and a half minutes to talk to Samson, what would you get out of the way? What questions would you ask?

Okay, this would be so hard to do. But I would want to know about his history, but that would obviously take up wait too much time because I feel like being a Southern boy, he would have like a really hard time talking fast. Right. So I think I would just spend those two and a half minutes being like, you are such a cute dog. Everybody in general, regardless of race. I don't even know if you can tell the difference between people. They would love you. And he loves attention so much.

And, you know, like when he does get settled into a situation, he can be such a, like, cute, you know, like diva where he always wants pets and scratches. But I would say to him, Samson, if you were this nice to every single person you met on the street and you just didn't let fear dominate you, people would love you so much. Oh, I know. I wish I could give them that pep talk every day. I wish someone would give me that pep talk, too. Samson, come on. Let's go and a walk. Come here. Come here.

Yes, good boy. Okay. Okay. Okay, sit. Good job. Thank you. Producer Tracy Hunt. Thanks also to Kat Chow from NPR's Code Switch.

You can find a link to her original story at RadioLab.org. Thanks also to Samson. And tolerant dogs everywhere. Natural waste, canine companions and the lure of inattentively pooping in public. What a title. Sticking with dogs for just another beat. Raffle here. Raffle Krolls-Edie.

I write for Harper's Magazine. Has had a long-standing question, one that was answered. by a German scientist Matthias Gross in that scientific paper he just mentioned. So this began for the author of the paper much the same way that it began for me. It was an idle curiosity. He was raising three kids.

He would take them to the park, their children and families around. But there was also the sort of crisis level of dog poop. He sees people letting their dogs poop. and then just walk away. And he starts to wonder, how can you just leave the poop? How can you do something so specifically antisocial

as leaving feces on the sidewalk? What's with these people? What's going on in people's heads? And so on the way to work in the morning, he would follow people at a certain distance without talking to them and take notes. You have the study there in front of you? I have the study here in front of me.

And I quote, neighbors watch poop falling out of the dog what it means to poop in public a huge pile of excrement on the ground and on the way back. Dog owners look away from their pooping dog. In the afternoon, he does the same thing through the medium of poop.

The earlier science had, my God, the fact that there's previous studies was kind of great. But in the previous study, on this, which he cites. The typical distinction is between people who pick up the poop and people who just leave the poop, which they categorize as responsible and irresponsible dog ownership. But after he's observed these people for a while, he starts to recognize that there was

something more complicated, intriguing, and subtle going on. So one of the behaviors he observes is people bagging the poop, going to that trouble, and then just leaving it. You mean scooping the poop up, putting it into an envelope, a plastic envelope of some kind, and then they don't throw it away? Yes, people will bag and abandon, sometimes right next to garbage cans that are not overflowing. And then the more intriguing version he observes is people bag it and then display it. in some prominent place, sometimes hung on a fence, sometimes hanging in bushes or shit trees, which is the actual vernacular term.

Oh my God. Yeah. Actually, my favorite mysterious example that the paper points to is people hanging the bags of poop on construction fencing with flashing lights on it so that at night it creates a kind of disco for the poop. That's how he describes it. And what the author reads into this is that it's a kind of middle ground between responsible and irresponsible actions.

Maybe you bag the poop to begin with because someone's watching you. You want to be seen as a good citizen. But then later it switches to a form of rebellion against the unnatural constraints of civilization. And so leaving the poop returns humans to nature in a way. Humans can no longer run around pooping freely in the wilderness. So the dog becomes a kind of proxy through which this aggressive, mischievous, atavistic desire can be played out. Wow.

So I want to drop my pants and just poop on the street, but my dog does it for me. Something like that, yes. But does that mean that when you see a man or a woman with a dog who poops on the street, you should be thinking that she's just pooped? Well, at the very least, if you decide to get into it and tell somebody, pick up your poop, the you is ambiguous. It's weird. I'm honestly speechless by that, Robert.

I did not see that coming. Well, Raffel just walked in and left it there for us. And then it was picked up by our producer, Simon Adler, who bagged it and put it on display, as sometimes happens. By which we mean, of course, that Simon produced that interlude. And I guess it's time to take a break. Yes, we should go take a break. We'll back with a few more questions. questions and answers.

Coming up right after this. This is Chelsea Gibson, calling from Dayton, Ohio. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Jed? Robert. Radio Lab. So we're going to continue in our little cavalcade of questions and answers.

And the next one up comes from producer Pat Walters. Hello, Emily, are you there? I'm here. All right. So a few months ago, I called this tree scientist. I'm Emily Burns, and I'm the science director with Save the Redwoods League. Okay. I have so many questions about trees for you.

All right, awesome. But I really just had one question. So I read this little tiny article in the spring, I think, which had a fact in it that really shocked me. And the fact was that redwood trees have 12 times as much. much DNA as humans. Like, is that true? Well, it looks like it is turning out to be about eight times bigger than the human genome. Okay, eight times.

So 12 is close, a little overestimated. Maybe this is not a reliable source. But the idea that, like, these trees would have so much more DNA than us, just kind of, like, twisted my brain up in seven different ways. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Because you usually think of genes as having something to do with complexity. Exactly. So if you're Mozart,

Oh, you're a tall tree. Like, who's going to have the most genes? Right. Like, a redwood tree is basically just a big pine tree. So, like, what is all that extra DNA even doing? Well, I'm not a geneticist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a forest conservation.

But one thing Emily was able to tell me is that I was missing the forest for the trees, so to speak. And why is that? Well, so Emily told me that Coast Redwood, while it does have a very large genome, there are tons of things that have way more DNA. than us. It's kind of mind-bully. You just got to know who to ask. We just do like a rundown of...

All right, yep, I can do that. Cool. So an onion has five times as much. An onion. Yeah, boring little onion. There's some salamanders with 40 times as much. 40 times. Wow.

I've got a list here. Things like lungfishes. Lungfish. Yep. A cockroach. A newt, bread wheat. Really? A lobster.

A lobster just lies at the bottom of a cold sea and mults. It gets even worse because at the top of the list, arguably the organism with the Most DNA in the world with 50 times more DNA than a human is a tiny, not so remarkable-looking little Japanese flower. That's deeply strange. I know. It's puzzling. This, by the way, is biologist Ryan Gregory.

Professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. And my area of study is why certain salamanders have 40 times more DNA than you and I do. And Ryan told me like, no one knows exactly why that's the case. Well, that's why I still have a job is because this is something we're trying to figure out. But according to Ryan, here's what we do know. So in your genome, and I say yours, and I mean that in mine too, I'm not trying to single you out. Take the human genome. Your genome is about one and a half to two percent genes.

Only about one to two percent of your DNA is involved in making the stuff that makes up you. That's the stuff we call genes. Now, there's another couple percent that we now think are there to turn those genes. genes on and off, which is important. But the vast majority of your DNA is kind of accumulated detritus. Could be a gene that sort of mutates and degrades and no longer works. It might be random, redundant copies of other DNA. For example, it might be AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, A T, A T, A T, a million times. Some of it is bits of virus that became essentially stuck in the genome. And so now they're passed on from parent to offspring. Oh. But the key thing is that all these

little random bits of DNA, they're just sort of hanging around. They're not really doing anything, which Ryan says is how you can end up with a huge genome, even though you're just a tree or a frog or a worm or even a single cell. That's right. But if they're not doing anything to help me, why? Well, they would be doing things to help themselves. Help themselves. So it's a little bit like, if you think about the bacteria in your gut, most of them are probably just there because you're a nice warm bag of nutrients that is a great place to live if you're a bacterium. That would be kind of the same sort of thing that might be happening in the genome, which is... But they're not like alive, right?

Like they're... Well, or are they? I don't... Well, I don't know. I think it depends a lot on your definition of alive. So, I mean, our virus is alive. That's a philosophical question that is pretty difficult. But the shift that you have to kind of make in thinking about the genome.

is less that it's basically the recipe for making you or the blueprint for a human or any of those kinds of things. And think of it almost more like a little ecosystem, a jungle with all kinds of different entities doing their own thing. But the one thing that they all do is use us to make copies of themselves. So in this vast ecosystem, in some part of your DNA, you'll get some ancient virus that just keeps copying itself.

A little further down the line. Another one. Doing the same thing. And then in some other part of your DNA, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT, AT. You've got this weird chunk just copying itself again and again and again and again. Almost everywhere you look, you have these dumb bits of DNA just copying themselves over and over again,

filling up your cells with useless DNA. It's like a hitchhiker that gets into your car and you turn around suddenly, instead of Fred, there's now Fred and Fred and Fred. Yeah. And then you turn around again, there's Fred and Fred and Fred and Fred. Right. I mean Fred and Fred and Fred and Fred. And that's pretty much how you end up with these super huge genomes.

And sometimes that can be a problem. Ah, okay. So, Ryan told me about this particular salamander. Certain group of salamanders called belittle glosses. called belittal glasini. It's part of a very large family of salamanders that live all over the western half of North America. They live in the U.S. At some point, a long, long time ago, something happened in the environment that made the salamanders get littler, which is fine, except for this one problem. They have big genomes,

and the more DNA there is, the bigger the cell is. So more DNA, bigger cell. Because all the DNA has to go in the nucleus of every single cell. So as the salamendums, to start getting smaller and smaller and smaller, their bodies are getting smaller, and their heads are getting smaller. But because they have these huge genomes, they tend to have big neurons, and now you're trying to cram a whole bunch of big neurons into a tiny little skull, well, you're not going to fit as many. And so relative to other salamanders that haven't been miniaturized, their vision starts to degrade slightly, their ability to look around in the world and distinguish like what's an insect and what's a leaf gets worse?

They can't do the kind of visual predation that you normally see in their closer relatives. And instead they've shifted to being lie in weight predators. Basically, having a huge genome made these salamanders get dumb. And I couldn't help but think about, you know, like all the extra stuff you accumulate. It's so full of stuff. It's almost hard to get in and close. the door behind you. Like my partner and I have the storage closet that's just packed with crap.

A watering can, a broom, and a car battery. A pile of button-down shirts. One's a little bit too small, one's just kind of boring. How well, dude is very uncomfortable getting rid of things. Yep. A lot of it, I don't even know why we haven't in there. There's like a three and a half foot tall roll of brown paper. Several unfinished art projects.

We're in a break period right now. On top of that is a flower pot. Four air conditioners. Oh, there's another backpack. I remember when I was in my 20s and everything I owned fit in a couple of suitcases. I was light, agile, free. But now, Tupperware bucket full of paint. Charcoal? Unused fabric.

I have so much of this stuff. But at least you don't have a closet in which shoes replicate themselves over and over again. But honestly, sometimes it feels that way. And, you know, I don't want to complain. I feel very lucky to have all of these possessions. but sometimes the pile up starts to feel like a burden. It does. It just feels like a burden.

Like I feel like I'm going down the salamander road, just getting bigger and dumber and slower, bigger and dumber and slower. But there are definitely surprises. But then I talked to science writer Carl Zimmer, and he made me feel a little bit better about all the extra junk in my closet or in myself. Literally none of us would be here,

if not for that, One gene. Because he says there's one little bit of DNA that climbed out of the junk closet and made all of us possible. Well, what is it? Well, you've actually heard about it before. I think it's really special about mammals is that female mammals, or at least placental mammals, carry young around inside the body. David Quamman told us about it in a piece we did a while ago called Infective Heredity, and it's basically this gene that makes a protein. which helps make some cells.

These very special layers of cells in the placenta, cells that let it grab onto the mother's uterus and pull nutrients in to feed the embryo. So it carries nutrients in, it protects the fetus from the mother's immune system. Now, when we talked to David about it... And how did we get that good idea? Well, we got that good idea from a virus.

We were sort of amazed that this gene had come from a virus. But what I learned from Carl is that this little gene sat in the junk closet of our DNA for millions of years, doing nothing, making little copies of itself, not helping me at all, until suddenly... Millions of years later, there's a mutation. And that little useless strip of DNA got repurposed, co-opted, it took on a new job for us. That's amazing. And now we've evolved a dependence on it so that we have to have it.

Or couldn't be us. Without it. A big box with it. So I got a picture frame. Some notebooks. Guitar case. Fishing poles. You never know.

You never know. That's like the motto of this room. It's like, you never know. Whatever the hell this is. What is this? It's a piece of the drafting table that... Where is the drafting table? Do we bring it back to Pennsylvania?

No, it must be in that extra room. Who knows? There's a drafting table somewhere. I know this feeling. I know this feeling completely. What's that? Like rummaging around for that? I just don't like to let things go because I think that they will always bounce back at some point.

They'll have their placental revival at some point. There's old pants, the bike without the wheels. Yes, I have tight pants that are waiting for me to get skinnier, sitting in the corner of the top. This is about real optimism that the weight you carry is actually. actually one day going to come back and make you light and airy and beautiful. That is a perfect segue to our next question, Robert. That's right. Which is itself imbued with the spirit of optimism and hope and reconciliation.

In a very dark, crowded and ugly place. Yes. Whoa. Indeed. Comes from producer Carter Hodge. Hi, Carter. Hi. Hello, Carter.

Hi. Hi, guys. How are you? Where are you calling us from? I'm in the studio at WUNC in Chapel Hill. This is a real privilege to put. Broadway. Musical.

Yes. In a territory which usually eschews it. Oh, what are you? I'm talking about your fervent hatred of American songbook. Whoa. I'm not a fundamentalist about it. I thought we were talking about a subway noise. Is that true?

No, no, just a subway noise. There's nothing to do with Broadway at all. It is a subway noise. It has a little to do with Broadway. Okay, so Carter, what is, maybe you should just begin by framing the question. The deep mystery is... Yeah. The deep mystery is around the sound.

The deep mystery is around this sound that I've been hearing in the subway since I was a younger person, probably since I was in middle school. It's a sound that you hear when you're standing on the platform and the train is just about to leave the station and you hear these three pure high tone. That's the noise.

That's the one? Yeah, that's the noise. Oh, my God. That is the New York sound. Yeah, it's a very New Yorkie sound. And if you're a fan of musicals, you can only hear that sound as one thing. It's totally unmistakable as the opening notes to, like, the most famous song in West Side Story somewhere. I'm pretty sure that it's truck.

me the first few times that I heard it. Da, da, da, dot. There's a place for us. I mean, just as soon as I heard it. In the course of reporting this story, I talked to a bunch of different New Yorkers. My name is Julie Tallinn. I'm a writer and director.

Who are all curious about this sound. Is it supposed to be West Side story? Is that intentional? I used to look around the subway car and wonder, could be. I hate you all of you guys. Who know? Did you notice that that sounded just like somewhere from West Side Story?

I almost wanted to, you know, stand up and make an announcement. That's Jamie Bernstein. Her dad is Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the music for West Side Story. I've talked to my brother and sister about it a lot. All kinds of, you know, friends would just randomly email me, Have you noticed that the subway plays the opening notes of somewhere? Like people were really noticing it around New York City. Okay, so the question is there's a sound in the subway.

Right. And how would you finish the sentence? There's a sound in the subway. Where does it originate from? And is there anything interesting and beautiful about why it exists? That's my question. And do you have any guess what makes that sound? Is it the train that is singing this to me

Or is it the steel rails under the train That's what I thought it was That is singing it to me I thought maybe it was You listened to singing rails actually I thought it was the train coming Rounding the corner As it's coming in

To the platform It's scraping its side Against the incoming thing And that's creating a squeal That just so happens to always hit that pitch Uh No that's not it

This is a man Portland down one train that has stopped did you solve the mystery? Well, you're just going to have to listen and find out. Okay. So Sara Khari, the producer had been helping me, made a call to the MTA.

I don't think this crosswalk works. And they told us that we were supposed to hop on a train, a train, and go way uptown to this warehouse, this big train warehouse. And we were just told to find a guy named Sheldon. Hello.

Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Sheldon. Hi, Sheldon. Nice to meet you, I'm Carter.

Sheldon is this engineer who works for the MTA. He's been there like 13 years. And... This is really exciting for you. He took us into this massive train repair room. Whoa. Oh my goodness.

And there were all of these subway cars up on Lid. We call these problems. Wow. And they just kind of look like these like empty shells of train cars. We're walking into the electronic component shop. And then Sheldon pulled us into this room off to the side through these sort of heavy doors. This is an electric component shop.

Anything related to electric control is done by here. So are you bringing us here because part of what we're interested in has to do with an electric component? Cool. And he took us over to a corner. corner. And he pointed down at this rectangular piece of metal, the size of a suitcase.

This is called face module. Face module, why it called face? It's changed DC to three face. Wait, uh, what is this thing? This is a part of the train? Honestly, it was a little hard to know because he just launched right into like engineering language. The model power salts back to the DCC.

But yes, it's part of the train. It's this little box that sits next to the motor. And from here on out, I would like for it to be referred to as the singing box. But as for why it sings... The sound comes from hard to explain to you why it has the sound. Sheldon kind of punted. And so we had to reach out to someone for some help. Oh yeah, I could tell you that.

Sarah and I called up. I'm Jeff Hackner. Jeff Hackner. I'm an adjunct professor of electrical computer engineering at Cooper Union, where I've taught for 25 years. I came across somebody, I think someone who works at the MTA, and they referred to you as a legend in transit circles. I'm not sure who said that and how much they had to drink when they said that. But I've been involved for many years. And Jeff broke down the singing box for us like this.

He started by telling us how the box even got into the trains to begin with. So what happened is in about the year 2000. Around the time, America was obsessed with... Computer bugs. So-called hanging chat. Stolen elections. Trans authority decided they needed to radically redesign the cars. The MTA was like, we need a massive upgrade.

And so they brought in. all of these new train cars. Yes, R-142s. We called them the new tech trains, new technology train. It was going to be a whole new era. These trains were going to be more energy efficient. But...

One big problem. The newer trains, those require alternating current. The system is a direct current system. The third rail is direct current. In other words, there was a power mismatch. The new trains ran on AC power,

The subway system could only provide DC power. Wait, they brought in trains that ran on the wrong kind of power? Yes. One was AC and one was DC? Yeah. What exactly is the difference between AC and DC again? Well, it's all based on the flow of invisible electricity. As Jeff explained it, when you have DC power, the flow is long, smooth.

It's steady, like a straight line. With AC... It's like pulsing kind of. It is, right. It's known as a sine wave, a sinusoidal wave. It's the same shape that governs the tides, the phase of the moon, the angle of the sun. So one is smooth and one is undulating. Exactly.

And AC and DC don't play well together? Definitely not. And they knew this when they introduced the new cars? Yeah, they knew. The tracks have been providing DC power for like 96 years. So they weren't going to remake the tracks because then you'd have to shut down the whole subway for years. But they needed to use AC for these new cars because it was so much more energy efficient. And so it was a disconnect.

Ooh, like the sharks and the jets. Anyway, the MTA had to figure out a way to take this kind of electricity and turn it into this. And that's... You are interesting. The sound is... That's where the singing box comes in. All face module. It's changed DC to AC face.

That box that Sheldon should. showed us, that's what translates the electricity from one kind to the other. And basically, what these boxes do is that when the train is cruising along, drawing in DC power from the third rail, power goes into that little box in the engine, and inside that box are these little transistors. You can think of these as switches, like light switches. Those switches go on and off, on and off, really fast. and in the process take that DC current.

And I guess you could say like chop it up. And where does the sound come in? Okay, so this is the part that I don't fully in my soul understand. But as Jeff explained it to us, the flow of current in and out of these devices creates mechanical stresses within them. When you feed electricity into the box, the transistors on the inside of the box

and the inductors and the various things, they get sort of jostled. And when they do... They act like little loudspeakers. They're not designed as loudspeakers, but any of these devices, when you flow alternating current through them, will have some tone emitted.

And it's the current interacting with these, like, physical parts? Yeah, that's what's making the sound. Okay. Then a bunch of very complicated stuff happens. But all you really need to know is that when you run current through the box, the stuff on the inside of the box gets stressed. It vibrates, I guess.

And that creates a hum. A high-pitched whining sound that changes in pitch depending on speed. And that's kind of the key to the melody. The transistors chop up the electricity at different rates, depending on how fast the train is going. And the train has three gears. Well, you can think of them like gears. Gear one is when it starts out.

Transistors are doing their thing, and this is the sound that comes out. And then the train shifts to a higher gear as it accelerates, and then this is the sound that comes out. And then as the train settles into a groove, the transistor is slow, and then this is the sound that comes out. Which gives you that melody. And now we get to the real question, which is, is that a fluke?

Or could that melody be intentional? So, so we asked Shell. from the MTA. Do you think that those notes are like just coincidence? Like that's just the sound that it makes or like could they have been selected? No, it's not. It's not on purpose to give you, to let you hear that sound. It's not to let us hear a West Side Story in the subway.

No, no. But then we talked to Jeff Hackner. And he told us that when you're designing a system like the singing box with the three gears, each gear does have its own settings, its own frequency of electricity. And if you're the engineer, you're setting that for each of the three gears. And you're picking a frequency that is not going to overheat the equipment, and at the same time is fast enough that it's going to average out to this nice smooth sine wave. I think it's interesting that you use the word pick.

Well, this is part of your conspiracy theory that somebody, designed these three notes. Yes. I mean, but I guess what I want to know is that whether or not it's possible to have that kind of control and choose the frequencies. Yes. I mean,

an engineer could say, yeah, I could pick a frequency between 1,500 and 3,000. I'm going to pick the A in the sixth octave because I think that's funny. What? So that is totally possible? Sure, because you have a little bit of wiggle

room within the design. Interesting. So he's saying it's possible that the engineer who designed the singing box set the gears at just the right frequencies to make just the right sounds. Is that what he's saying? Yes. Did you find the person who made the design choices? Well, you know, we made a lot of calls, but yeah, we totally did.

Hey, Carter, can you hear us? Yes, hi. Yes. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes. Yeah, of course. So Sara and I managed to track down this guy.

My name is Mathieu Vanas. That's a very French name. We found him in Montreal. My friends call me Matt, and my enemies call me Matt. So just go for Matt. And he works for this Canadian manufacturer. Bombardier Transportation, which is the original equipment manufacturer for the so-called R-142.

These days, he's the head of vehicle architecture for all the different kinds of subway trains that Bombardier makes. Oh, so he is the guy. One of the guys, yeah, back in about 2000. At the time, I was a young and cocky design engineer for proportion and breaking. Matt told us he was part of the team that designed the R142 and all the stuff that goes inside it. There was a huge lab where we had all the proportion equipment set up, including the motors. He says they tested every single aspect of the design, including the singing box.

And when we asked him about the sound... This is the very distinct sound that everybody talks about. He knew about it. Yeah. And not only that, he's a musician. Actually, I was a musician way before I was an engineer. What? Funny enough, in a couple of hours, I'm going to have to leave you,

if you're not bored to debt by this story, to practice with a band. We're giving a concert in a couple of days in Montreal. What's your band? And what do you play? Yeah, actually, we play very quirky, bizarre, funny French song that you would not understand, but they're quite funny.

This is his band playing ACDC in French. ACDC, very appropriate, and some of their other stuff is very musical theatery, which made us think, what if this West Side Story stuff was intentional? Here you had this musician-turned-engineer slipping in a little Easter egg, a little gift

to all the New Yorkers who ride the subway every single day. In fact, Matthew told us that after the subways were unveiled and people began to notice the sound, he even wrote a white paper where he came clean. And here's a spoiler alert.

The punch of this white paper was, the choice of notes is a pure coincidence. I know. Oh, this is really spoiling it. Are you sure? I'm totally sure. No.

So they did choose the notes, but not for any musical reason? Right. In fact, just to sort of twist the knife a little bit. He told us... The first time I watched West Side Story was probably a couple of days ago. Found it way too cheesy for me. Wow. Yeah.

What about, is it possible, some of the other engineers in the room? Do you think no one in that room recognized those intervals? I can assure you that on my deathbed, I will continue saying that no one at the time really cared or really knew. Darn. But even though my fantasy wasn't real, I think what is real is the way it is received, you know, and so it's there, whether by incident or on purpose. but the way it's received is by all these people who are either unconsciously or consciously hearing this like more pleasant melody in the horrible, you know, screeching of the subway. That's true. There's this, like, lovely reminiscent melody that so many of us are familiar with.

And it's this romantic anthem to reconciling difference. Wait, remind me, what is the story that they sing in that song somewhere? When at the end of the play, when Tony and Maria have across the great barriers of culture and difference, a love so supreme. Stay with me. Maria, I love you so much. Don't leave me. Whatever you want, I'll do. Just when Tony and Maria are finally together in Maria's bedroom.

That's Jamie Bernstein again? And yet... It's everything around us. All this terrible stuff has just happened. They had the rumble and they're dealing with all this ghastly tragedy. Then I'll take you away. when nothing can get to us. And trying to rise above it.

And so they sing this song. There's a place for us. And they imagine this place that doesn't yet exist for them. They imagine this song that does, in fact, raise them all above the horror and the tragedy and the violence. Right? It's the characters are all about reconciling difference. and finding this like geographical space for like acceptance and finding love. And I don't know, it's a very romantic anthem for these like horrible subways in such a lovely city.

And just to lean into that metaphor, the subway platform is this like democratizing space. Everybody is there. That is the place for all of us. You know, and then, you know, just not to belabor the point, but to belabor the point, there's also this third level. You know, the generation of the noise itself, it's sort of poetic that the noise itself is created by something that is reconciling an old system of wave into a new motor to be efficient. And something in that translation process is creating these sounds. It's like a little west side story of electricity. Now, a true story, though, true story.

A couple of years after we were using the same technology for the Long Island Railroad. The M7 from Long Island, the traction package is made by Mitsubishi Electronics. And the guys from Melko, Mitsubishi Electronic Corporation, I'd figured out that this thing could sing. And the demonstration they always do with their inverter is that they make it sing the odd to the joy. You know, nah, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Wow. That's pretty cool.

All right. Well, thank you so much to Carter Hodge and to Sarah Kari for helping Carter produce and report that story. And to Matt Kilty for putting the whole thing together. Yes, indeed. And to the folks at NPR's Code Switch, who let us work with Kat Chow for her story about Samson and Andre Berman and Annie Brown.

Oh. Yes. You say it to them before I say it to them. Okay, because I have the advantage of, I will remember the email address. which you will never do. That's true. I should say,

I mean, you could do the email address. No, no, no. Why should do the whole thing? Let's see where this go. All right. Let me do the first part. Yeah. Listen, everybody listening to this show has probably at some point thought,

I have a question too. Something has entered my head and I can't get it out because I don't know the answer and I want to know the answer. And I'm a wee bit embarrassed to ask. But that embarrassment is no longer a problem. Just write us here at Radio Lab slash at. At. At. Yes.

WNYC. WNYC. WNYC.org. I know that part. RadioLab at WNYC. That's right. I said it trippingly off my tongue, didn't I? Yes, you did. You got there eventually.

So that's it. So if you have the idea, RadioLab at WNYC. Send us a question. We will answer it. We'll try to. Get you a slash thing like the Radio Lab WNNNC does. There's no slashes and email addresses. Sometimes when you want to cash some particular questions,

you go, radio, Lab at WNYC.org slash stupid questions or something like that. And then we put them all in a little pile. Don't do that with email addresses. Oh. That's a website. It's a website. Yes, I knew that.

Somewhere there's a place for me. This is not the Internet. That's for sure. Anyhow, if you have a question, send it to us, RadioLab at WNYC.org. And maybe in our next go-around, who knows when that will be. But we will try and answer. Yes. Till then.

I'm Chad Abum Rock. I'm Robert Crull. which, thanks for listening. To play the message, press 2. Start of message. This is Ryan Gregory from the University of Guelph. Hi, my name is Mathieu. I'm calling from Lisbon, Portugal.

Katow, here to read the credits with Danston. Okay. Radio Lab was created by Jad Ebermrad, and it's produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylene Keith is our director of sound design. Susie Lechtenberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca, wrestler, Rachel Cusick, David Jebelts, Bessel Abt, or Abti, Tracy Hunt, Matt Keelty, Robert Crulwich, Julia Longoria, Annie McEwan, Latif Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Kelly Prime,

Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster. With help from Shima Olai-A-I-I-I, Audrey Quinn and Neil Denisha. Our fact-checker is Michelle Harris. I wish you a very good night. Thank you. Bye. Oh, Samson. Speak?

Speak? Samson. Okay. Never mind. The one time he doesn't speak. Okay. Thanks, guys. End of message.