Radiolab - The Memory Palace

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

Nate DiMeo was preoccupied with the past, and how we relate to it, from a very young age. For the last decade or so he's been scratching this itch with The Memory Palace, a podcast he created. He does things very differently than we do, but his show has captured the hearts of Radiolab staffers, past and present, time and time again.  So we decided to get Nate into the studio to share a few of his episodes with us and talk to us about how and why he does what he does. He brought us stories about the Morse Code, the draft lottery, and then he hit us with a brand new episode about a bull on trial, that bounces off a story we did pretty recently. More history on scrub bulls. Follow @thememorypalace on Twitter. This episode was produced with help from Bethel Habte.  Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.    Other staff favorites: Zulu Charlie Romeo Notes on an Imagined Plaque Snakes! Outliers  

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

Yeah. That means among all the male Holstein's in the country, more than 99% of them can be traced back to one of two bulls. Wow. That's amazing. Born in the 1960s. Hey, I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. Radio Lab.

The females haven't fared much better. There's so much similarity among them, the effect of the effect of the effect of population size is less than 50. So despite there being 9 million of them, there's really only 50 cows out there. That's true of bananas too, right? It's like all bananas belong to one banana. A little while ago, we got into

the studio with Soren Wheeler, who is our, what is he, he's executive? He's managing editor. Managing editor. And we were well, as you heard, we were in a kind of conversation about cow genetics. For reasons that we'll become clear later. I thought I was going to see if I could see something about the milk production where was the milk? Because there's actually

the real reason that we were in the studio. with Soren, was to talk to... Is Nate here? I am here. Yeah, I do... This guy. Nate DeMaio. No, I'm here. He does a podcast called The Memory Palace.

He's been doing it for about a decade now. And I'm here at Marketplace, where I used to work for many years. It's a little bit like coming back to high school. I feel like I'm roaming down the halls, being like, hey, man, hey, there used to be a water fountain there. Every episode, he tells a history story, but it's done so personally and so carefully. And so differently than we do it. And we just thought, well, we want you to hear what he does.

And from time to time, it's something we do. We want to present the people that inspire us. So what we plan to do here is just give you a taste. So we're going to play a few Nate DeMayo pieces. We're going to talk about him right after. And in the end, he's going to debut a new one that he made kind of with us in mind. That's where they will be cows again. But before we get to that, for me personally, the one that really

sort of just like made me have to sit down and just like just think for a while is when Robert sent me the Morris Code thing you did oh sure I was like God damn that was good there's not there's not a wasted decision in that entire piece and like as an editor I I pretty much can say that about oh nothing else oh maybe nothing ever ever and so it's just it's just kind of perfect so you want to play it yeah play it yeah play it yeah it's like Robert might not remember it that well it's uh which one is it's called distance is it oh here it is I I think it's episode 44. So I'm going to hit play.

Hopefully we'll hear something. This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMaio. Samuel Finley-Brice Morse spent the first 35 years of his life learning to paint at Andover, at Yale, in London at the Royal Academy. He studied the works of the masters to learn how Michelangelo built bodies that seemed to pulse and shudder out of mere oil and shadow and crosshatch. To learn how Raphael summoned the spark of inner life with a single stroke. of pure white and the dusky ochre of a noble woman's eye, to learn how to create illusions of space and distance,

to learn how to conjure the ineffable through the mere aggregation of lines and dots and stretch canvas. He learned how to paint. And in 1825, Morse was living in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife Lucretia and two young sons, and a third child was on the way, due any day. One night, a courier delivered a message. The city of New York wanted to pay

Morse $1,000 to paint a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette. The hero of the revolution was coming to Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the start of the war, and he would sit for Morse if the painter could leave right away. So he packed his easel and his brushes and his paints and clothes that were good enough to wear

when meeting a man like Lafayette. And he kissed his pregnant wife, and he left that night. On another night, a week later, Morse was in his rented studio in Washington, preparing for the arrival the next morning of his distinguished subject. He heard a knock on the door, and there was a courier, breathless and dirty from a hard ride on hard road,

handing him a note that was five words long. Your dear wife is convalescent. He left that night. He rode for six days straight, on horseback and in the backs of juttering wagons, wrapped in blankets against the cold wind of October nights. And when he made it to New Haven and ran through fallen leaves up to the house on Whitney Avenue,

he learned that his wife was dead. In fact, she had died before the courier had knocked on his door in Washington. In fact, she had already been buried some morning while he was on the road, while he was racing home to be by her side, and sit with her while she got better. Samuel Finley-Bries-Morse spent the next 45 years of his life, trying to make sure no one would have to feel the way he felt that night, ever again.

Samuel Finley-Brease-Morse spent the next 45 years inventing the telegraph to turn real space and real distance into illusion in developing Morse code, dots and lines, that could transmit the stuff of real lives, of dying wives. That is such a great last line. Lost lives and dying wives. You're asshole.

Well, thank you, fellas. Well, just think about the lushness of the writing. Like, you're not just galloping down a road. Like, you're in a blanket, and it's nighttime, and you're out of breath, and you can see so clearly, there are very few sentences conjuring up so, such a lot of paint. You know the one that got me in that was the running through the fallen leaf? when he's gotten back almost to his house and the running through the fall and leaves to get to the door.

That one just a movie took place in my mind in about, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm kind of glad that you guys chose to play this one. I sort of forget about it sometimes, but it sort of does seem to be a favorite of some folks. I think in some ways just because I think that it's fun that it's so short, but at the end of it, folks wind up moved. And, I mean, some of that I think I just chalk up to the fact that you play the dying wives card and you can, you can, I think that gets you a long way.

But it's what I'm sort of trying to do to have you walking away feeling like, oh, I see where this guy is coming from. I felt this way before. Nate, have you always gravitated to history? Why? Yeah, how did this happen? Yeah, how did you get going with this? I really, I think that I'm not much of a history. buff. You know, I really, I like fiction a lot more. I like movies a lot more. But I have been

fascinated with the past and how it works since I was very, very young. Like, it's been a preoccupation of mine. Like I, you know, I've just very distinctly remember going on vacation to Colorado when I was four or five and hearing a Kenny Rogers song that was on the radio during one particular drive. And then being like seven or eight and being really, really struck, you know, back home in Providence, you know, two or three years later, how how just powerful it was to just hear, you know, Lucille or whatever on the radio, you know, or coward of the county or whatever it might have been, and really be brought back to that moment that something could feel so real, you know, right there in a different context. And, you know,

Similarly, I spent, you know, a lot of my youth sitting around my grandparents' kitchen table listening to family stories. And, you know, both sides of my family are big storytellers. And so, you know, I would hear the family lore sort of over and over again. And I would hear the debate about, you know, the best way to tell the story. No, no, no, no. Interesting. That's right. And so what you need to say first is that, you know, so dad was eight and we'll let's get this

straight. He wasn't 10. It's important that he was eight. And that's the day that he decided to steal the car and drive it around the block. And one of the stories that was told over and over again referred back to a time that my mom's dad was this kind of, particularly during the Depression, was this kind of jack of altruids. You know, he fixed car batteries and did a number of things to kind of feed the family. And one of the things that he did was drive a cat.

which I, from what I understand it was essentially just sort of depression Uber. It was some borrowed car that he would give people a ride in. And he was driving up the hill up the east side of Providence on the way to Brown University, up, I believe, Waterman Street, which is the steepest street. And he's like struggling with his clutch. And he's trying to just keep this car going up this hill. And while he was doing that, the passenger in the back seat

put his feet on the floorboards and went through the bottom of the car. And then it was suddenly had to run along with the car like Fred Flintstone until they could get to safety. Wait, he fell, he slipped through the bottom completely out of the car?

Right through to the ground. Oh my God. And so this is a story that was worth telling at Christmas or whatnot. But I very distinctly remember being in high school in my first car, in my Volkswagen Rabbit,

driving stick on that same hill with like friends in the car, being so sort of elated to be, you know, a teenager behind the wheel and, you know, driving over to go to the record store and just feeling like young and alive and then realizing like, oh, shoot, I don't know if I can get up this hill.

Because I don't know if I can handle the clutch this thing and I'm already smelling the burning clutch and it was just like oh yeah this is that hill you know here I am in my own youth having a moment on the same hill so you have like the you have whispers

from the past exactly right it's sort of like you've been there so long and your family's been there that every step you take is a step already taken in some way yeah in a way yeah is there any way we can get ourselves kind of into another one yeah which one so why don't just like I don't even I think numbers might actually have

the words numbers next to the file the other ones are also like i could go 94 numbers yes two numbers yeah just it's 936 does that go just go ahead all right here we go this is the memory palace i'm nate demayo maybe you remember i don't because of the cbs news special report which follows mayberry rfd will not be presented tonight but will return next week at it regularly scheduled time over most of these stations the draft lottery the news can't be on. Maybe you were just going to watch Mayberry RFD and were surprised. Maybe you had scheduled your whole week or more. Canceled plans. Got off work. To be there in front of the set on December 1st, 1969. Or you listened on the radio in the living room with your folks like it was 1940,

your father pacing like his father might have done in 1940. Your mom there with her brave face on, ash on her cigarette growing long. Or you were listening on the little transistor radio propped up on the shelf above the sink and your dishwashing job, with all the guys in the kitchen, each of you hanging on every number, the one older dude north of 30, keeping his mouth shut for once. Maybe you got in the car to listen, because the reception was better, he said. But really you just wanted to be out of the house away from your roommates or your girl, or everyone, just wanted to be driving.

Maybe you remember. I don't. The news broke in and there was a reporter, Roger Mudd from CBS. He's young and handsome in the video on YouTube. I didn't realize he'd ever been young and handsome. Tonight, for the first time in 27 years, the United States has again started a draft lottery. And the famous first pick tonight is September 14th,

the first birthday that now is designated 001, which means for 19-year-olds born on September 14th, that beginning in January, local draft boards will induct those men born on September 14th, barring the firmness, the next birthday in order April 24th, and so on down the line this evening. And so on down the line. It was the first draft lottery since the fall of 1940,

a little over a year before the U.S. entered World War II, but Washington knew where the whole thing was heading by then. 20 million men, ages 21 to 36, had to register, had to have their birthday attached to a number, one through 366. There was an extra number for a leap day babies. So those numbers could be written on slips of paper. So those 366 slips of paper could be put into 366 capsules

and put into a bowl. There was a big ceremony. The Secretary of War was blindfolded with a swatch of fabric cut from a chair used during the signing of the Declaration of Independence. He drew a capsule from the bowl that had been stirred with a paddle made from a beam from the ceiling of Liberty Hall and handed it to the president. And thousands of people united only by their citizenship

and by the various outcomes of cascading games of chance, of timing and biological processes and happenstance, that had meant each was. born male on that particular day in the calendar during this narrow window of years would be sent off to war. There was less ceremony in 1969. There was no blindfold, no relics to wrap that night in the spirit of the founding, just carpet and curtain in the beages and browns of Vietnam Arab bureaucracy.

No president or cabinet member to do the honors. Nixon left the number pulling to selective service officials and their secretaries. September 14th. 14.0.01. And at least one young man from the president's youth advisory council. Paul M. Murray, Rhode Island. There was supposed to be others, but others refused. Said they didn't want to be used as props by the Nixon administration.

But the numbers were pulled anyway, drawn from blue capsules drawn from a clear bowl, in full view of the camera so no one could call foul, on the process at least. And slips of paper were read out and stuck on bulletin boards. A printed date, posted beside numbers listed in order. 001 to 366. And you just waited. Waited to hear your birthday called. That date you know better than any other.

Waited to hear it called out and posted beside what would be your draft number that would determine when you had to report for induction. You even waited through commercials. Norelco Santa with some new ways to say Merry Christmas. Give the Norelco triple header with a cord or in a rechargeable model. Give the inexpensive flip top 20 or the new battery cordless. And say Merry Christmas to the ladies with a Lady Norelco, shaver or beauty salon. Norelco, even our name says Merry Christmas.

February 29. On another night later, there would be another lottery. drawing letters this time. It would determine the precise order in which men who shared the same birthday would have to report to be inducted, those with the initials JSM before J.J.S. or JRS or whatever. Later there would be a study, a statistical analysis that suggested the drawing of dates wasn't truly random, that the bull wasn't stirred well enough, that December birthdays weren't picked often enough, early enough, but the numbers called on that Friday night in the winter of 69 would stand. And so 850,000 men

would wait. Hearts and throats, knee bouncing, fingers drumming on steering wheels, whatever that thing they would do when they were nervous was, when they were waiting for something, some game of chance to set the course of their life, that might upend every plan they'd laid, dash whatever hopes they'd harbored for their life, might end their life, that would go on to separate their generation into draftees and deferments and Dodgers. I was doing it already that night. As they watched and heard their friend's birthdays get called and we're glad it wasn't theirs.

As they'd stand around in the kitchen comforting a co-worker that the war would be over before his 37 meant he ever had to go to Vietnam. Hoping that was true. Or they knew already that the guy who pulled 224 was never going to have to make good on his promise to run to Canada.

They had to look their brother in the eye when he had 16. You had 172. They were sitting on the warm hood of a car in a field and a cold night with their best friend. His birthday they always remembered because it was Valentine's Day, which meant he was number four.

And they got him good and drunk. And so on down the line. October 5th, February 19th, December 14th, July 21st, June 5th, March 2nd. October 31st, May 24th, April 1st, March 17th, November 2nd. August 24th, May 11th, October 30th, December 11th, May 13th, December 10th, July 13th, December 9th, August 16th, August 2nd, November 11th, November 27th, August 8th, September 3rd, July 7th. So one of those times where, I mean, I wasn't around for Samuel Morse's decision. But this was when I was just sitting, I was parked right in the middle of as I was pretty much everybody my age. And I remember how it felt like being like the edge of a whirlpool.

You're standing there and just hearing these numbers. And I don't think there was anything, any other time in my life where the social compact that I had made to be a citizen of this country in argument with a war, in my case, sort of no argument with the draft. I thought the draft was sensible. But the strange, strange serendipity, like that you can do nothing but get sucked in or spit out. Were you watching TV when? No, I couldn't. I was listening to the radio. I was one of those people.

I couldn't listen to anyone else. And I came up fairly early. Oh, you were by yourself when you were listening? Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. So I knew I was going to. And I had, yeah, I was called and everything.

What was your number? 54, I think. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, I was alone at that time. Yeah, at that moment, I think. More alone than maybe I was prepared for. But putting that aside, it's just sort of amazing that you could not be old enough to know that

and somehow deliver a version of it that feels so gorgeously true. Yeah. There's a kind of interesting form of translation here. Like, you could translate yourself into a moment just based on details like Roger Mudd's voice and his appearance. Yeah, how did you, did you come across a clip and think, hmm, and it captured you? Or was this sitting around the kitchen table, your family telling stories? Yeah, I mean, it was a little bit of that. I remember talking to my dad about it once.

I remember talking, you know, being a teenager during the start of the Gulf War and wondering if, you know, I had. happened to, you know, our generation happened to, you know, have caught that, you know, fastball to the chin. And, you know, wondering where that would lead and whether, you know, it was going to be the kind of defining thing for my generation that Vietnam had been for my dads. And so I do remember talking to him about it and remember his specific story. And he had actually mentioned feeling like it hadn't been publicized that it was going to be on TV. And so he woke up at the crack of dawn to get the, you know, get the newspaper, you know, and ran down to the newsstand or the coffee shop or whatever. And then flipped through and was, you know, thrilled to find out he was, you know, 2.11 or something like that.

But then, you know, had a similar thing, which actually I didn't, he didn't tell me about until after this story, which is he had sort of a similar situation where he met up with his buddies and they all, like, you know, met like, I'm not sure if this is true. whether you told me this or that this is just my imagination running wild. But I think that they went to the place where they played basketball and, like, hung out on the court and waited for everyone to assemble and then kind of said, oh, you're 73, oh, you're 85, oh, you're 30, 30, you know, two, you're lucky so-and-so. Oh, I'm nine, and I'm probably going to have to be there in March. And this story in a lot of ways is just wrestling with this thread that kind of shoots through the whole project of the Memory Palace of thinking about the ways that,

you know, history, you know, constrains or frees us. So my interest in telling the story is not only like, oh, here's a thing that is really fascinating that is worth putting into the memory palace is the thing worth remembering. But this story is sort of explicitly about, and this is one of the only stories where I bring myself into it, that like you might remember, I don't, that there's going to be a separation among listeners about what this story means. But it is about that separation. This is ultimately a story about, you know, the, you know, the,

about life's lottery in a way. Because that phrase you repeat twice, you might remember, I don't. In some sense, you're saying, you were chosen, one group of people were chosen by fate and another weren't. Yeah.

And somehow it's, it's that, your number, your number, so it's like, you could have numbers from one to three 66, and Nate's almost saying,

my number is a million, you know, like, yeah, exactly. That's really interesting. I thought the accomplishment of it was, though, to collapse that distance. You may remember it, but I don't.

But then you deliver it in such a way that you just can get the same sort of sense of terror and random, deep randomness. And then also the collateral damage, like the looking into a friend's eye. Oh, yeah, that stuff is that's very... That hood of the car. Well, I think that some, I mean, some of it is kind of those sorts of details evoke very specific things to me, but that I know existed in 1969. Like, I can picture the inner workings of a kitchen, you know, at a restaurant and who the employees are and, you know, the way they trash talk or the way they jive or whatever it might be. But, you know, in often cases, like, you know, I don't know. But, you know, it's the past.

You know, the past, there is this un, you know, I really, the past isn't. Have you ever run across the, so we have an on our staff, Latif. Sure. You know, you know them well. And one of his phrase. is, and he was a history of science, man. And he always, he throws around the phrase of the past as a foreign country.

I don't think it's, I mean, I, that is true. Fornated, ain't. No, I think that. You're describing it and walking around it like it's your hometown. No, to me, it might as well be Middle Earth. Like, I think that there's an inherent kind of magical unreality to the past. Like, when it, you know, I'm fascinated by the idea

that, um, that there are a million books about Abraham Lincoln, and I'm barely exaggerating. but all you've got is the sort of kaleidoscopic understanding of this person that sort of once walked the earth. So I can know that Abraham Lincoln was a real guy. I mean, I understand that. And of course, there are material, like, he's incredibly consequential historical figure. And there are, you know, people walking around today who are walking around because of the actions that he took. But that said, he lives in this sort of world of, like, dreams and imagination.

there's this magic to the past. There's this, there's this, you know, the past, like, you know, there's this sort of like literal haunting, you know, that these are just kind of specters. And I find that alone really fascinating. We're going to take a brief break, but when we come back, Nate's got one more piece to play us. Do you guys want to hear a new one?

I have a new one. Yes, hear a new one. This is something that had been bouncing around in his head for a while, until it bounced off of something that we did recently. Yeah, so stick around. We'll be right back. My name is Patrick Benkich,

and I'm calling from the beautiful kingdom of Eswatini. 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. sloon.org.

Seabongagaloo. Chad? Robert. Radio Lab. So we are talking to Nate DeMayo from the Memory Palace. And he has one more piece to play, which we will hear now.

Yeah, I was realizing, you know, as often happens with these stories, have this giant list of stuff that I will write down, you know, like, oh, there's this Italian immigrant woman once married a Zulu man who was on display in a dime store museum. Oh, maybe there's a thing that I can do with that at some point. And I was realizing recently that on this list of stories was something. that I had been wanting to do for a while. Like I had stumbled upon the, um, the research of a guy at a Duke named Gabriel Rosenberg, um, that was just like, oh, man, there's clearly a story in there.

And it took me a while as it always does to kind of find the meaning. And I won't spoil any of this. But it has, um, I was excited to play it for you guys in particular because I had just spent a fair amount of time listening to a long series that you guys did recently. And I think that they kind of. kind of bump up against each other in a nice way. Cool. Should we play it?

Yeah, maybe. Go get the case of that. The defendant was led into the courtroom on a rope. He was met with laughter, even from the jury. He was charged with vagrancy and larceny, highway robbery, and disturbing the peace. And the judge informed the jurors that though the death penalty was typically reserved for murder and treason, the various crimes of which the defendant was accused were so serious, their harm was so dreadful. If he was guilty, he would be executed. The defendant didn't follow any of this.

He didn't speak the language. He had no understanding of the fate that awaited. Also, he was a bull. He was a male cow, so that's why. And I could have teased it out some more and played with your expectations a bit longer, but at some point that would get kind of hacky, not to mention confusing, when I told you, as I will now, that the judge informed the jury that after being executed, the defendant would be eaten, and at that point it would be kind of disrespectful both to you, the listener, and to the bull. Because his life was indeed at stake,

there in a makeshift courtroom in a ballpark in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania, in September of 1924, at one of likely hundreds of trials conducted during the 1920s and 30s in so-called Courts of Bovine Justice. Officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture wanted to encourage dairy farmers and cattle ranchers to purchase purebred, pedigreed bulls, with the goal of eventually eradicating all so-called scrub bulls,

basically the mutts of the bovine world. The belief was that purebred bulls produced airs that produced more milk or had bigger, more delicious bodies. And so they came up with the idea of holding literal show trials in farming and ranching communities around the country, in which a single scrub bull would be charged with grievous crimes, namely that being a less than maximally profit, food product or a breeding machine was tantamount to theft,

and that over the course of the proceedings, the jury and the gathered audience would become convinced that their own scrub bowls had to go. It was a show, an evening's entertainment, all fun and games unless you were the bull, and unless you peered behind the curtain. The Department of Agriculture was far from the only scientific

or governmental body promoting what it saw as the benefits of selective breeding. eugenesis were also out to improve the human race by guiding evolution, in part by ridding the human population over time of people with undesirable genetic traits, or at least traits they believe to be genetic, disabilities, mental illness, criminality, alcoholism, even poverty. American scientists were at the forefront of this movement, as were American state legislatures. 29 of which passed laws allowing the forced sterilization of people they deemed unfit to breed, a fate that befell at least 64,000 Americans.

And when eugenic principles were embraced by the Third Reich, well, anyway, the Ag Department thought that the latest in scientific thinking should be shared in the heartland. So a staff writer named Dallas Stockwell Birch of the USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry typed up a pamphlet titled, outlined for conducting scrub sire trials. It was written with a wit and imaginative flair, the one would assume Mr. Birch rarely got to deploy as a staff writer for the USDA's Bureau of Animal Industry,

23 pages that contain the entirety of scrub bull jurisprudence, such as it was, and lay out and easy to follow steps, how you too could hold your own scrub bull trial, such as the one convened in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania in 1924, during the first weekend of fall. held at 7 p.m. So farmers and breeders and boy scouts and merchants in all of Franklin County, it seemed,

could come out to see it. Hundreds seated in bleachers under electric lights on a purpose-built platform a glow in the center of a field. There was music, as per the pamphlet. It was good to have a band on hand, both to entertain the attendees and assuming all went according to plan, to play a funeral dirge after the verdict. There was a judge, a real one, the booklop. what said this was better, and real clerks and a real bailiff, people who knew their way around

a courtroom, who knew how to hit their marks when they led the defendant, through the gap and the bleachers to the place where he would stand in front of the bench and the jury box, as the judge laid out the charges against him. There was a script the judge would follow, though he could improvise as he saw fit. Jokes and banter and local color were all strongly encouraged. But when it got down to the bull, he should stick to the script and lay it on thick. That the defendant is one of a gang of robbers which operates in Franklin County. During the whole of its worthless career has been an ungrateful consumer of valuable preventer, that the defendant is an unworthy father of progeny, and so on. Some things were optional. A hearse with black

punting, a funeral oration, a clergyman. to deliver it. But there should be lawyers, real ones, and so there were in Waynesboro, and witnesses, local breeders, farmers there to lend their expertise, and back up the prosecution's claims that the defendant, the bull, right there, rope looped around its neck, its soft ears forward, its tail flicking, electric lights reflected in its wide round eyes. That bull had cost his owner countless thousands and lost wages. was in fact a rank imposter, a danger to the herd, and by virtue of his nature a menace not only to the prosperity of his owner,

but also the community at large. The defense attorneys would argue this wasn't the bull's fault, that it was merely an accident of birth that had led him to sire offspring that would likely produce less milk on average than those sired by a purebred bull, to yield fewer pounds of dressed weight, according to the testimony of the butcher, to an audience to whom dressed weight was familiar terminology. There were objections and sidebars, gavils were gaveled, oyeres were oyered, there were examinations and cross-examinations, opening arguments and closing arguments, all the things required for a trial under the American judicial system, except a jury of peers. Because who there could truly judge that one scrub bull, there to stand in for all scrub bulls, born to unpedigreed parents, who there could truly judge.

truly determined that bull's worth. Even the prosecution would concede he was merely being a bull, doing bull things. But he was afforded no jury of peers to judge whether he did them well. Who might understand what bullness is to a bull. What is the field and the feed? The buzzing fly. The breeze. The flicking tail.

What is a life well lived? In that notion might seem absurd, sure. But more absurd than a bull on trial in a ballpark and a September evening in Pennsylvania, because eugenics was all their age? I am less sure. This trial ended in a conviction, as they all did. It's one of the steps laid out in the pamphlet.

It ended in a barbecue, which wasn't always the case. Sometimes it was a weeny roast. One bull in Minnesota was dragged along to trial after trial, Once in Indiana, the executed bull was placed in a black coffin and buried. One time, in July of 1930, one bull was convicted in a trial in front of 800 people in Nielsville, Wisconsin. But before he could be killed, he somehow slipped away and ran off into the trees. And I propose we let this one scrub bull stand in for all scrub bulls, though so a few of them exist now, well into the 2000s.

They have indeed been bred and engineered and eaten out of the population. But let's let this one go. To run off into the trees and let him keep on running. To find a pasture, some tall grass, and a life worth living. Whatever that might mean. It's nice. Yeah. So I guess when you said that you were listening to something we did,

it was the Intelligence series with, like Lulu Miller's piece about what that has all that you Yeah, it's interestingly reminiscent of where she ends on the idea of variation and it somehow justifies itself. Yeah. Yeah. But also, you know, I think that, you know, if you think about, you know, Lulu's piece, you know, I think that the cruelty of eugenics, besides, you know, the obvious, that it hinges upon, you know, this sense of, you know, science or scientists or. or the wealthy or the elite or whatever, you know, know what's best for the populace. They know what's best for, you know, specific people and that there is this unknowability that gets denied, you know, as in Lulu's piece, when you hear, when you hear the activists and

historian, you know, talking about, you know, her experience, you know, with childbirth and the unknowability, what that experience is going to be like, the fears that she had that she brought to that, over and over and over again. You know, in the case of eugenics, you have both, like, well-meaning parents, assuming that they, you know, have a comprehension of the subjectivity of their child. And this is this is the way that, you know, partially out of necessity, both economic and just practicality, you know, this is the way that we, you know, as a species, deal with other species. That there are these unknowable subjectivities. There's unknowable other creatures. Yet we constantly decide, you know, what's best for each, you know, each of them on an individual basis.

Even ones that you know really well, like your dog. You know, I puzzle about my dog's happiness all the time, having very little understanding what his, what her happiness is. You know, I don't know what bullness is to a bull. I don't need you to draw a certain conclusion. I'm not, you know, in this particular story, not making a particular political statement about, you know, about eating them or not eating them or breeding them in certain ways or not. But I think that there's real power in merely floating the idea,

merely, you know, like setting, you know, I almost sometimes think of them as balloons. Like if you take, you know, in this story we just heard, if you take the idea of Nazism to, merely, you know, announce the specter of Nazism and then have it be a thing that hangs over this story and that floats, you know, floats above it. It doesn't take much. It just takes, it just takes an invocation. It just takes, you know, like a half a sentence. It really does kind of allow you to make, you know, a story of depth, hopefully, you know, out of a few

kind of dots and lines. Huge thanks to Nate DeMayo for joining us, letting us play some of his stuff, and to Radiotopia crew, of which Nate is a part. If you want to hear more MemoryPalys, go to The MemoryPalus. Or, of course, look for The Memory Palls on iTunes or Google Play or all the things. Because all in all, there's more than 130 or there's a lot. There's a lot of them. Yeah. And also, if you go to RadioLab.org, we'll list a couple that we really like that we didn't get to play in this podcast.

Just, yeah, you can listen to those there, or you can go to his. So either way, I, well, either way, go. Yeah. All right, and we should go, too. Yes. I'm Chad I boom-Rod. I'm Robert Rollwich. Thanks for listening.

This is Ben calling from a vessel transiting north in the Puget Sound Waters of Washington State. Radio Lab was created by Chad Abnerad and is produced by Soren Wheeler. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Susie Lechamberg is our executive producer. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, David Gebel, Bethel Hapty, Tracy Hunt, Nora Keller, Matt Kilty, Robert Krollwich, Annie McEwan, Latif Nasser, Sarah Kari, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, and Molly Webster, with help from Shima Oliai, W. Harry Fortuna, Melissa O'Donnell, Sarah Sandbach, and Neil Denisha.

Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. Okay, bye.