Science Friday - Roman Mars, Disinformation, Ancient Female Big Game Hunters. Nov 20, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Exploring The Invisible Architecture Of Cities With Roman Mars On a walk through your city or town, there are all sorts of sights and sounds to take in—big buildings, parks and patches of green space, roaring vehicles, and people strolling around. But according to Roman Mars, host of the 99% Invisible podcast, you need to look at the smaller, often unseen details to decode what’s really going on in the city.  In the new book The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, co-authors Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt show that you can learn a lot about the place you live in by taking a closer look at tucked-away architecture and pavement markings. There’s meaning behind the etchings on the covers of maintenance holes and water lines, and the cryptic spray painted symbols on the street that signify network and telecommunication cables. These signs and structures can tell stories about a city’s past and present. Ira chats with Mars about the overlooked details built into our cities and how our urban environments are adapting to the pandemic. Big Tech Can’t Stop The Lies As the dust continues to settle from the 2020 presidential election, unfounded rumors persist about stolen ballots, dead people voting, and other kinds of alleged fraud—all without evidence. But as slow results trickle in, President-Elect Joe Biden has won by large but plausible margins, and investigations into the process have held up the results as inarguable.   Anticipating a wave of misinformation, Twitter and Facebook both took unprecedented steps in the weeks leading up to the election to put election claims in context, marking questionable posts as misinformation. And yet large numbers of Americans continue to disagree about reality. How did this happen? And why have we seen so much of other kinds of misinformation this year—like anti-mask beliefs, or other COVID-19 hoaxes? Or take the QAnon conspiracy theories, all of which are completely baseless, yet somehow still spreading? Ira talks to New York Times reporter Davey Alba, and misinformation researcher Joan Donovan, about the patterns of media manipulation and how misinformation succeeds in our digital world. Ancient Big Game Hunters May Have Included Women In ancient hunter-gatherer societies, it’s been predominantly thought that men were the hunters and the women were the gatherers. This narrative has persisted for centuries. But researchers say the story might be more complicated. In Peru, a team of anthropologists uncovered a burial site containing 9,000-year-old remains of a possible female big game hunter. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances. Producer Alexa Lim talks with one of the authors on that study, anthropologist Randy Haas from UC Davis, about what this can tell us about the social structure of hunter-gatherers.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. When we think of ancient hunter-gatherer societies, which some of us do from time to time, there's this idea that the men were the hunters and the women were the gatherers. But that story might be more complicated. Producer Alexa Lim has more. Around 9,000 years ago, there were all sorts of animals roaming north and South America, mammoths, horses, and even camels. Of course, there were also groups hunting these big animals.

A team of researchers working in Peru uncovered the skeleton of a possible female big game hunter. Their findings are published in the journal Science Advances. So what does this tell us about our understanding of hunter-gatherer groups? My next guest is here to fill us in. Randy Haas is an author on that study and an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Alexa. Thanks for having me. So in your study, you looked at a 9,000-year-old site in present-day Peru.

Can you kind of give us an idea of what that community was like there during that time? Well, 9,000 years ago in this part of Peru probably would have not been all that different from what we see today in terms of the environment. The social landscape, however, was certainly very different. Today, this landscape where the site is found is the home of the Ayamara people. The community that's near the site is called Muyafaciri. And those people who live in Muyafasiri today are agri-pastoral. In the past, it would have been very different. People at that time were hunters and gatherers. They didn't have

domesticated products, no agriculture, no domesticated animals. Instead, they would have been living in small, highly mobile groups that basically moved around the landscape and procured wild resources. And the economy at that time would have been largely focused on hunting big game animals. And the two species of big game that lived in that part of the world were the vicunia, which is the wild ancestor to the alpaca, and the Taruka, which is a type of Andean deer. So you've examined the burial site of a female big game hunter, but that wasn't initially apparent.

How did you come to find out that this was a female? When we first discovered the individual ceremoniously buried in the ground, we realized right away that it was an adult individual. They were laid on their left side. And what was surprising about this individual was that they were interred with a collection of big game hunting tools. And we knew these were big game hunting tools because they included things like,

projectile points, the kind of stones that go on the ends of spears that are used in hunting animals. And it also included butchering tools and hide processing. So we knew right away that they were very likely a big game hunter. But we didn't know at that point that they were a female individual. In fact, we actually, shamefully assumed the opposite. We assumed that this individual was probably a male. And I remember distinctly the conversations around the excavations. And the conversations went something like, oh,

He must have been a really great hunter, a really important person in society. Maybe he was a warrior or a chief or something like this. And, you know, I remember thinking, okay, maybe that's possible. I don't know. But the real finding came later in the lab when our project bio-archologist, Dr. Jim Watson, at the University of Arizona, analyzed the skeletal materials more closely. And he came, I remember he came to me one night and said, he said, Randy, you know the hunter burial? You guys found?

I think he is a she. Oh, really? Okay, well, that's interesting. But he was very cautious because, as you may have seen in the imagery, the burial is very poorly preserved. So it was a very tentative identification. But the real clincher came later when I was working with Dr. Glendon Parker, a forensic scientist at the University of California, Davis. And he had developed a technique for sex estimation using the, using proteins in the sex-linked proteins in the dental enamel of individuals. And was this surprising to you? Or were there other clues that maybe there were other female big game hunters? So this was very surprising to me. Again, I say somewhat shamefully. It was surprising to me at the time. Because although it wasn't off the table that this individual could be a female big game hunter,

it just seemed by chance that we happened to stumble upon an early big game hunter that it happened to be a female, it seemed very unlikely. And this is because we know from hunter-gather ethnography, from looking at recent, and modern hunter-gather populations, that females very rarely are observed to participate in big game hunting. It's an overwhelmingly male-dominated occupation. But occasionally, there's an occasional female that has been observed hunting big game in hunter-gatherer societies. So on one hand, it didn't seem totally impossible that we had a female big game hunter on our hands. On the other hand, it seemed somewhat counterintuitive that by chance that this is what the one individual we found with big game hunting tools was female.

So that led us to basically two possible explanations that we just couldn't really unpack from the burial alone. On one hand, this individual could have been sort of a one-off, a rare instance of a female big game hunter in a world where males dominate that occupation, or it was hinting at a broader behavioral pattern in which both males and females equally participate in big game hunting. Do you have any idea which one that might be?

We think we do now. We needed to figure out a way to pack them. The way you'd like to be able to do that is go out and excavate a whole bunch of burials associated with big game hunting tools and count up how many of them are female and how many are male. And that would be the way to do it. Unfortunately, archaeological science is a slow science. You don't encounter discovery like this every day. So what I did at that point was I hit the literature and started looking for any recorded instances of human burials that predate 8,000 years ago in the America. because this is roughly contemporaneous with the burial that we found.

If you look at the raw numbers, the sample size is not enormous. By archaeological standards, it's a wonderful sample size. By most standards, it's a rather small sample size. But if you look at the counts, I think it was 11 females and 16 males. That translates to a ratio of approximately 40% female to 60% male. But if you want to know what the possible ratios are that could give rise to that sample, this is a statistical question. Turns out that anywhere between 30 to 50% female participation in hunting could give us the sample that we see.

And that makes it a gender neutral enterprise, or at least nearly so. That's not like an insignificant number. That's like pretty high. That's right. And when you compare it to what we see in the ethnographic record of hunter-gathers, which is on the order of 1% or less female participation, it's several orders of magnitude different than what we see in the archaeological record.

The site you were looking at is located at very high altitude, and these hunter-gatherers would have to make some adaptations to that. What did this study reveal about that? Yeah, one of the models that we were working with in this particular case is a cooperative hunting model. we think that maybe we were thinking at the time, and I think it's still on the table and maybe even finding more support now in light of our recent findings, that one of the ways that people solve the adaptive challenges of the Highlands was to work together in the cooperative acquisition

of big game. And this finding now suggests that indeed everybody in the community was participating in big game hunting. And today in this very part of the world, IAMRA communities regularly get together on an annual basis to do a roundup of these wild vicunya themselves. And everybody participates, men, women, and children. And they do this not to hunt the wild bocunia. They do this to harvest a very precious wool that vicunia provide,

and then they sell it for use on the market. What's next for your study, or what questions have this brought up for you? Yeah, so these surprising findings are pointing us in some, I think, in some exciting new directions. Now we know we have two ends of the spectrum of occupation in the Americas. We have the early end of the spectrum where we now seem to think that subsistence labor was not divided or was not heavily divided, was nearly, was gender neutral or nearly so. And at the other extreme, we know that in recent times in the Americas, subsistence labor was heavily divided along the, sex lines. So now the question is, how did we get from point A to point B? So I'm hoping that we can continue to do some of this meta research, this analysis of the literature in different times and

places, to see how that process evolved in the Americas. And there's this narrative of males as the hunters and females are the gatherers. So how does this idea of female hunters reframe ideas how these hunter-gatherer societies are organized? It depends on who you talk to, but I think for most anthropologists, we had all accepted the idea that males are hunters and females are gatherers in our species evolutionary past. And this idea, this model, this sort of man the hunter model was supported by ethnographic observations, by observations on recent and contemporary hunter-gatherers. And we simply projected that idea back onto the past. And as I say, most people, I think, readily accepted that idea. So these findings really,

encourage us to change that understanding, right? When we think about it, when we step back and look at it in hindsight, the recent Hunter-Gatherer past, the ethnography, is really just a drop in the bucket of human history, of, you know, several tens of thousands to millions of years of human prehistory, right? And it now seems that if these data bear out and if they extrapolate to other parts of the world, which there's some reason to think that they might. It now suggests that our species evolutionary history was marked by rather tempered sexual division of labor in which both males and females participated in similar subsistence activities. And I want to play a clip from a conversation I had with Marin Pallude, who is an anthropologist at the University of Nevada Reno. And she studies

the rural women in warfare in prehistoric hunter-gathers in what's now central California. I think it's just our Western notion of gender roles is so entrenched in everything that we do and see. And it's really difficult to remove ourselves from our own culture when we try to and look at cultures in the past. It's hard when we think, you know, men do this and women do this to see that there are other ways to do things and other ways to behave and that there is sort of a spectrum to gender and behaviors and gendered roles. and that's going to change from culture to culture. Yeah, I think that's true. I think on one hand that there was valid empirical reasons to project these kind of gender constructs onto Hunter-Gatherer pass, again, following from ethnographic observation.

So I think it was a perfectly reasonable model to start from in that sense. But I do think there is this other layer of sort of sexist Western norms that were also preventing us from potentially recognizing some of the evidence when we were confronted with it. Well, we've run out of time. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Randy Haas is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of California Davis. For Science Friday, I'm Alexa Lim. After the break, we'll talk about the rise of conspiracy theories and misinformation,

whether it's about the election COVID-19 or Q&ON, and how online platforms are being used to spread them. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Maybe you've seen a relative say on Facebook that President-elect Joe Biden did not win the election two weeks ago, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Or a friend on Twitter claiming wearing a mask to protect their communities from COVID-19 actually interferes with their oxygen access. Also, despite no evidence, or perhaps someone you know has passed on a YouTube video about a little conspiracy theory called Q&1. on a completely baseless set of theories that have helped propel misinformation about the coronavirus, the election, and more. Well, whatever the topic, misinformation, conspiracy theories,

and outright disinformation, they are thriving on our social media platforms in a way that's completely different from what we saw even during the 2016 election cycle. And indeed, you might have noticed your social media have looked a bit different in the lead up to this year's election. Twitter has been flagging certain claims about the election as disputed. More than 300,000 tweets during the lead-up and immediate aftermath of the election, including some from President Trump. And in the immediate aftermath, Facebook appended posts, making claims about vote tallies with notes that votes are still being counted. And in a hearing Tuesday with the Senate Judiciary Committee and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook's CEO, Mark

Zuckerberg defended his company's fact-checking as having been successful. We've built sophisticated systems to protect against election interference that combine artificial intelligence, significant human review, and partnerships with the intelligence community, law enforcement, and other tech platforms. We've taken down more than 100 networks of bad actors who are trying to coordinate and interfere globally. We've established a network of independent fact-checkers that covers more than 60 languages. altogether, and I'm glad that from what we've seen so far, our systems performed well. So where does misinformation come from, and how does it spread so widely if these platforms

are taking so many precautions? Here to talk about it is Davy Alba, technology reporter, covering disinformation for the New York Times, and Dr. Joan Donovan, director of Harvard's Schorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. Thanks so much for having. us. Davy, help us understand. We've talked about the kinds of misinformation people might see in the election lead up. What kinds of claims have you been finding yourself debunking? A whole host of different claims, much of it around mail-in ballots because this election is so different from any election we've had in the past. So ballots being magically found or lost, vote tallies changing. That was

a big one during the election week, widespread voter fraud, dead people voting, you know, votes being stolen by people who were using folks made in names and a lot, a lot more. What is new about the misinformation on the internet in 2020? Because didn't we see some of this in 2016? We did. In 2016, we saw a lot of content that. really pushes people's buttons. And the lead-up to 2016 and the immediate aftermath, it was all about foreign disinformation. So we heard, obviously, about Russia interfering in our elections, and disinformation became a buzzword then. Now the content on social media platforms, the various posts that contain false and misleading information,

look quite the same, but the platforms have gotten a lot better at detecting and removing foreign disinformation when they have technical signals on the back end that show that posts come from, you know, a foreign country, that kind of thing. The problem is a lot of those posts actually do, they do prey on real emotions and feelings of outrage and the economic woes, of real Americans. So that stuff, when it is coming from Americans in the U.S. and spread conspiracy theories that help them understand their situations, unwittingly in a lot of cases, that stuff is still up there and that the platforms are less willing to take down. How does it spread so far and so fast? Well, there have

been many, we should say, I call them influencers who have track records of spreading misinformation. And those folks have been able to amass audiences over the past few years and have become networked. A lot of these folks play off of each other's posts, use similar hashtags, coalesk around a specific theme, and they spread it far and wide. And there are a lot of communities that have formed around these influencers. There are different camps like, you know, people who are susceptible to anti-vax content. There's QAnon, as you mentioned, the set of conspiracy theories about the deep state controlling politics and the global economy. there's coronavirus truthers who believe that masks don't work and that the virus itself has long been planned.

And all of these communities have collided in 2020 to make a very different environment compared to years past. And Joan, I just rattled off a few big groups of falsehoods people might be exposed to. And Davy just also mentioned some. Are they all related somehow? Yeah, so the way that I think about how people end up encountering misinformation is that any range of searches online, you're going to get, you know, you put in your keywords and the algorithms are going to tell you basically what's fresh and relevant. And unfortunately, misinformation tends to be, as Davey was saying, densely networked and fresh and relevant. That is, it's of the moments. And so algorithms tend to reward engagement on these very emotionally charged topics that have all of the things that draw in humans like they're scandalous.

There's Hollywood intrigue. There's palace intrigue in the sense that we don't know who our next political ruler is going to be. And so people tend to enter into search probably very, you know, with a very open attitude as to what they're going to. to find. But the way in which our communication system and our media ecosystem online is designed, unfortunately rewards the tactics of media manipulators and disinformers. It's almost as if sometimes I look at it as if people are trying to live a reality TV show in real life. Yeah, I mean, it does have this feeling of like the Truman show, right, where everything is constructed around you in a way that, you know, once you're, you know, once you're,

or, you know, even the matrix, right? Once you see through the matrix, you see everything differently. And that's the way in which I think conspiracy theories provide us with a sense of mastery over the world. It feels a lot less dangerous to go out in public if you think coronavirus is a result of some kind of grand scheme rather than what it is, which is a virus that rather randomly affects any and all types of people. Is there something special about 2020 this year, this point in our history that makes us as a society more susceptible to misinformation? Well, I think we can't talk about 2020 without understanding what the pandemic has brought us in terms of the way in which we have all been isolated. Most of us are getting online much more frequently and seeking answers where we're also.

seeking answers about very similar things. And so even the key words of coronavirus COVID-19, we didn't have those prior to 2020. But if you look online, the hyper-concentrated attention on those key words means that media manipulators, grifters, hoaxers, scammers, are going to flock to it in order to try to get a piece of that attention. And so medical misinformation, conspiracy theories, and then also election information and misinformation all gets bound up in one giant, you know, grotesque hairball, and it becomes really difficult to disentangle. Do we have any evidence, though, that people actually do anything with this information? Do conspiracy theories on social media actually affect our daily lives, Joe?

Yeah, so we have a new resource out at Media Manipulation.org. where we are going to be adding case studies every week to this casebook. And what we try to focus on as a research team is this effect we call the wires to the weeds. That is, how does what happens online show up in people's lived experience, right? How do people in one area think that somehow Antifa and protesters are going to be bust or flown into their area? And therefore, they need to take up arms and go protect the public school. That happened in Idaho. That was real. Ways in which people assess coronavirus, you can see it very

clearly. And if they believe that masks are going to help them or not, this is an effect of encountering medical misinformation and then being staunchly opposed to any kind of medical advice. One thing in particular that I think we really need very sweet. with action on in terms of the platform companies is the delivery of timely local, relevant, and accurate information. And that is not how these companies designed their tools to work. But we need that now more than ever as people are trying to navigate the risks heading into the holidays here. I mentioned all the things that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media say they've been trying. They say they're really trying their best to slow the spread of misinformation.

Davy, how do you react to that? Well, I think, again, as I said earlier, the social media platforms are much better at taking down foreign disinformation. Now, you know, these social media platforms are more willing to label posts and call out when a claim is disputed. What we don't know is how effective the, Those posts are at actually stemming the spread of conspiracies that are, as Joan said, designed to catch fire and spread quickly among the population.

So these baby steps are good, but it took a lot of years of researchers and journalists kind of yelling about the problem and trying to demonstrate and document the consequences of misinformation for them to edge towards taking these measures. Do you think there's going to be some legislation? We had those hearings this week with the social communities trying to defend their actions. Do you see anything coming out of this, Davey? It's hard to say. Obviously, we have a new administration stepping in. We don't know how the Biden administration is going to bring down the regulatory hands. on these companies yet. But, you know, the flip side of stronger regulations is you don't necessarily

want your government to be exerting that much control over speech. So, you know, there's a balance to be struck there and it will take all the different pillars of society kind of watching and scrutinizing this process that will come out of any government regulation. And we should all be part of the effort to raise our collective media literacy to look at this problem and think of solutions. It's going to be a community-based effort, not just relying on the government or relying on the social media companies themselves. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

In case you just joined us, we're talking to New York Times reporter Davy Alba and misinformation researcher Joan Donovan about the spread of conspiracy theories online. Joan, do you agree that it's going to be a community-based effort? And if so, what do online platforms need to do? Well, certainly we can't leave it up to these companies to decide how they're going to be regulated because internally they are at war. And Davies reporting as well as others is really pointing us to this reckoning within tech companies that even the workers themselves are leaking so many different documents and missed opportunities for platform companies to get a handle on this problem. And so it's really important that we understand that internally, even the folks that are building these systems, maybe not in the executive suite, want change. And so it's up to journalists, researchers, the people that work at these companies to keep the pressure up. I've been looking really at some of the older epidemiological literature around secondhand smoke, right?

We had to invent this concept of secondhand smoke because once we started to see that smoking wasn't just an individual choice, but was actually something that was harming many more people that were encountering people who were smoking, then the concept of secondhand smoke made legislation possible. And so what I'm trying to understand as a researcher right now is who pays the true costs of social media. The fact that an entire beat of journalism had to develop on disinformation over the past few years in order to counteract the negligence of these platform companies is really astounding. As well, public health professionals are, you know, asking me, every day? How do I become an influencer? And that's just the wrong model. We actually need social

media to deliver timely, local, relevant, and accurate information so that our doctors can do the work of doctoring. And the list goes on for professions that have been paying for social media and paying for the widespread disinformation campaigns that are happening. And if you think even Davies' recent reporting on election officials, for instance, in the ways in which people, have had to come together to counter the messaging of disinformation campaigns. We are facing an enormous problem and we really have to get beyond just demonstrating the harms and move into a regulatory schema that deals with misinformation at scale. Because scale is different.

More is different than just, you know, someone being diluted. And so that's what we really have to reckon with over the next four. years. Well, it's been a great conversation and a very sobering one and something that we will all be having in the future months and years as they go by. I want to thank both of you for taking time to talk with us. Davy Alba, technology reporter focusing on disinformation for the New York Times. Dr. Joan Donovan, director at Harvard University's Scherenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. Thanks again for taking time to be with us today, and happy holiday season to you. Thank you. Thanks so much.

After the break, we look at decoding the history of our cities with small clues from manhole covers, pavement markings, and more, with 99% invisible host Roman Mars. Stay tuned for that coming up after the break. Hey there, folks. It goes without saying this has been a challenging year, no. And if there's one thing we know for sure, it's that the need for fact-based journalism and the need for science are stronger than ever. At a time when science is continually called into question, Science Friday remains committed to filtering out the noise and discussing the evidence, supporting the science that you need to make informed decisions. You know that demand for Science Friday this year was higher than ever, but you may not know that your donations are what's keeping us running.

And right now, Science Friday has a dollar-for-dollar donation match, which means that any donations will be doubled. So, if you have a few dollars to spare and agree that this world could use more science, please support Science Friday with a donation. Any amount makes a difference. Go to sciencefriiday.com slash give. That's science friday.com slash give. Thank you and stay safe.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, if you take a walk through your city, or town, you're probably taking what's going on around you, right? The big buildings, the parks, the patches of green space, the people buzzing around.

But my next guest says to really decode the history and what really is going on in the city, you need to look at these smaller, almost invisible details like the manhole covers, the cryptic markings on a pavement where to dig and, well, we're not to dig.

Lots, lots more. So here to talk about some of these unseen clues built right into our cities and how those environments adapt to change. Roman Mars, host of the 99% Invisible Podcast, co-author of the book, The 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design. Roman, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be here. Nice to have you. Just a reminder that this conversation is being recorded in front of a live

Zoom audience, and we want to hear your questions. We want to know from you what hidden parts of your city, have you discovered that you think people have overlooked? Or has there been a detail or a feature of your city that you've noticed and wondered why it was there? You can give us a little bit of what you think in our live Zoom audience, and we will try to answer some of those questions as many as we can get to in our conversation. So let me begin with you, Roman, and ask you, in your podcast and your book, you on earth all these little unseen details, why are you so interested in cities? Well, I like cities because they're what brings us together. So I use the built world as a lens to talk about who we are as people and what our values are and what we're

prioritizing at a given moment. And a city is this kind of partly designed, partly, you know, clujy ad hoc collection of all the things that we do and value when we're trying to live together. And in that sense, it's a really good artifact to talk about who we are as humans. Do you remember David McCauley's the way things work books? Were you influenced by them at all? They were terrific, right? That and connections and all these sorts of things. I love all that stuff.

I was like raised on that, which is sure that's why I am the way I am. Do people find you staring at things in the city as you walk around looking and saying, what is that guy doing, you know? Yeah, especially I like sidewalk stamps a lot, which are often like contractor stamps or our little placards that tell you, you know, like about an easement of some kind. I like to crouch down and take pictures of those. And I also, I'm a big plaque reader. I'm a big believer in reading plaques, even if blacks are not always telling you the best story or the accurate story. I still think it's important to read

as many as you can. Well, tell me about a little bit about your history. Before 99% invisible, you were in school to become a scientist. You were studying population genetics. Does your science background and help you decode all these things that you're looking at? I think that the same brain that made me interested in science to understand the hidden processes at work made me love genetics and it also makes me love design and, you know, thinking about these things. I mean, there's a, you know, there's a different force at work, you know, different, you know, types of intent at work. But I still like to, you know, to use the critical eye of science to explain things. And I often use and think about metaphors of an ecosystem when I think and talk about cities. It really is a complex ecosystem with some, you know, adaptive parts and some non-adaptive parts

and vestigial like organs that are sitting out there and all kinds of things. And it is a really good metaphor to explain cities. Well, let's get into some of these details because I found your book extremely fascinating. Spoke to me as another geeky person who like to look at cities. For example, you look at the Holland Tunnel. For those of us in New York, we try to speed through it as fast as we can. But you looked at the ventilation system. And in fact, because I've looked at these over the years, the facade of the Brooklyn Battery

Tunnel Air Shaft in Brooklyn is used as the headquarters of the film Men in Black. I remember what I saw that. I said, wait a minute. I've seen that in real life. What I love about that in particular was how much effort at that time period was to make this piece of very functional infrastructure into something that was striking, you know, in and of itself, is something that represents. how we were thinking of infrastructure at the time, whereas I think that today, an equivalent

structure would be pretty utilitarian and would never serve as the headquarters of men in black, you know? And that's one of the things I love to sort of mark, you know, one of the ways that you can sort of mark how in our architecture is how we feel about government at different times. And, you know, like there was a period of time when all these state capitals went up in the early 20th century and they have domes and they have gold on them and they're these busy filigree and they're in the Beaux-Arts style. And then later on, you see them as being very functional, very modernist, very square, and there was no waste, and there was no notion that you had to put on a ton of gilded edges

to represent us to say that government represents the best of us. And it's no, no, you have to save money. And so I love these little moments. And those structures being so grand and so interesting tells you something about what they thought of the Holland Tunnel at the time, was that it was like an amazing achievement. and it should be reflected in the architecture that it is an amazing achievement. And that's what I like about that story. One of my favorite stories in your book is something that we folks in the New York area can relate to.

And it's the story of the can opener, a bridge in Durham, North Carolina that was not tall enough to let all the trucks pass under. Hence, they lose their tops when trying to get through. They get can opened. We have that in the New York City area all the time because we have the old, not before the super highways, we had the parkways. they have overpasses that are not big enough to allow a truck to get in. And you mentioned this in your book, is that no matter how much signage they put up on the roads, trucks still, they just ignore them, don't see them, whatever. And that's what happened with the can opener, right? This bridge in Durham, North Carolina was like a real problem because it was just low enough

that people driving trucks thought they could make it. And it was so consistently a problem that a fellow in a nearby office building just set up a camera. And he would, he would take a video of it and they put them up online. And if you go to like 11.8.com, you can like watch videos of the tops being scraped off of trucks. And the problem was, it's really a problem of bureaucracy. So the signs didn't work. And I think about there's a lot if I'm driving a truck or if I, you know, like I rent a trucker and I go through a drive-through and says it's only like nine foot eight or something like that. And I'm like, well, I didn't, I don't know what the height of this truck is.

I mean, like that's like it's not a thing you sort of naturally internalize. But the problem was is that each sort of part was owned by different constituency. So the overpass was owned by the railroads. The area underneath the road was owned by the city. And no one could really take responsibility enough to fix it. Because as you can imagine, to raise an overpass for a train, you have to actually do the grade really, really far out. And so it cost way too much money.

And there was too much like important sort of sewage underneath to let. lower it. And no matter what, you know, lower the road, and no matter what they did with the signs, it didn't work. And then finally, they did raise it a little bit. And somebody took some responsibility. But it still causes problems, but there are still accidents. It doesn't matter. Yeah. Because you say in the book, when infrastructure works, it is the physical embodiment of amazing things we can make when we work together. And when it fails, it reveals the cracks in the system where we can improve. And that's exactly the kind of thing you were talking about. Let's go to first listener question. Let's go to Meg Somerfeld from Rockville, Maryland. Hi, Meg. You're up next. What is

your question? Hi, I was wondering, and thanks for taking my question, what is your favorite hidden small park or garden in a major city? And is there any particular period in history when there were more smaller parks or gardens developed in large cities in the U.S.? Good question, yeah. Yeah, it's an excellent question. Oh, my favorite. This is always hard for me because I really do like little Charming Park really works on me, like extremely well. And one of the phenomenons here in the Bay Area, and I know that there are analogs and other places, are these things called Popos, we call them. They're privately owned public spaces.

And in order for somebody to enclose a space to have a building the way it is, it has to be allowed to have some public use. And so they're privately operated, but they're known to be public. And so there are these little tiny pockets that are sometimes in a breezeway or on a roof. And you have to like use the access of an elevator to get to it. But it's meant to operate in public. And so they have a special signage here in the Bay Area. And I like exploring those in particular because I think that this notion of what is public and what is private is worth exploring for all of us.

You know, like when you don't use rights, you lose them. And if something is a public park, you should try to treat it as a public park, you know. Parks are a huge representation of our value and how we trust people in public spaces. And they're fascinated watch for that reason. Meg, my vote goes to Savannah, Georgia. Just go to Savannah. There are two dozen cute little square public parks that are beyond description. They're just so beautiful to walk through in and to play around in and have incredible historical value.

Let's talk about people in cities and how they're going to need to adapt. pandemic has really turned everything we know about how we live in cities upside down. Do you think we're going to have permanent structures, symbols, signage infrastructures, for example, might we see a sign about with a face mask on it now? You know, like you might see a stop sign. You need to wear a face mask in this spot. You need to have social distancing in this spot. We'll come up with the signage, you know, ventilation systems changing, elevators,

staircases, all that kind of stuff. I think ventilation will be a huge one. that there'll be a focus on making ventilation. I think it'd be a huge focus on making spaces and homes more versatile because like, you know, I record podcasts in my home. My kids are in the next room doing classes. We need more walls in this place. If I was looking for my next house, I would be thinking about the versatility of a space if pandemics are part of our life to continue. And there's a lot of people that think that they might be. Elevators are the weirdest form of public transit that people don't consider public transit that I'm really kind of

interested in because you know this is a tiny box that were with people and and you know there was a real change in architecture uh when the odis self-breaking elevator was was invented before the elevator was popular and safe the top floor of a building was the worst floor no one wanted to do that they had to climb all these stairs and if you were rich and you you know wanted the nicest place you you you are on the first floor and uh now if you you know because we have to sort of of distance ourselves if we have to wait a long time to get in an elevator. And if it takes like 15 minutes to get to the top floor, the top floor might not be as desirable anymore.

And the sort of value of what place you are in a building might change. Maybe buildings will be shorter. Who knows? There's all kinds of stuff like that. The one thing that cropped up a lot during the pandemic that I was interested in was just the markings on the floor, like the soft infrastructure, soft architecture that showed up like where to be, how to be socially distant. I have to admit, that was the one I kind of liked. I kind of like being told, you know, where to be and where the line is and things like that.

Because often if you're like, you know, out of deli and everyone's like surrounding and no one knows where to do, what to go, you know, it's nice to have a nice orderly cue. I'm a big believer in an orderly cue. And if we can use the space and the information layer on the floor to tell us where to stand, I'm all for it. Have people grabbing at that pastroma. You've got to be careful. Let's go to our next call. Joe Nemick from Sleepy Hollow, Illinois. I know we have Sleepy Hollow in New York. Didn't know we had it in Illinois. Hi, Joe.

Hi, how you doing? It's great to talk to both you. So I was wondering, in 1992, we had the Great Chicago Flood, and they had eliminated street parking in the downtown area temporarily. It never really came back that way and really changed the landscape and the way the downtown work. I was wondering, how often do events like that restructure the way city, changes. Well, they certainly can. And one of the things that is just like that that's, that's pretty common is like once you give somebody access to something, it's hard to take it away.

And I think that that's going to be another thing about the pandemic, which is going to be really interesting because we're experimenting with our relationship with roads for the first time in like a hundred years. I mean, roads, you know, weren't just the domain of cars for most of their existence, you know, like roads served all kinds of constituencies, like including trolley cars. And there were automobiles on them like about a hundred years ago there are automobiles trolley cars people horses all kinds of things and then we just gave them over to cars and now that we need socially distant space outside more cities are experimenting with the idea of you know having cafes like extend out into the road and close down roads for periods of time just for restaurants and and make little parks

and make little places where we can gather because we do need to be together even if we're being safe and being apart. And I think that this next phase of experimenting with how we use city space and how we prioritize, you know, more like park and open public space for pedestrians over cars will be a really interesting time. And we've seen this before. There's, there were experiments in in Bogota in the in the 60s and 70s that led to, you know, people basically taking over streets for periods of times. And in Barcelona, there are all kinds of experiments in the 90s. to make a safer space of these super blocks where only the outside was available to cars and the inside was all used for pedestrians.

And I think that experimentation will continue, especially in the current moment. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, we're talking with Roman Mars, host of the podcast 99% Invisible, co-author of the book, The 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design. Do you think that though for this all to work, that people have to buy in to the changes? They have to agree that these are useful. They'll have to be politically active to get their representatives to spend the money on it. Yeah, I think so.

I think that we learned that you don't necessarily have to spend a ton of money on it. Like in Times Square, you could start by putting out some folding chairs and then have people like begin to take it. And then it becomes codified. And then it becomes like habit. And then, you know, and then people have the. strength and political wherewithal to to make it a rule. But I think that what I would love to see is that cities, you know, sort of borrow from the guerrilla activists so that that sort of mess with this sort of infrastructure and play with it a little bit by making pocket parks and making

a parklets. And they use that to try things out. And when they do and when their constituency likes it, and I think that people will find that they have the four. and the ability to make some of that permanent. But also maybe permanent isn't, you know, isn't the most important thing. Just being nimble and reactive is is worth it. And I think that the magnitude of what is happening here with COVID gives people the will. Like you become a little bit, you know, sort of unanchored from the norm. And it allows people some freedom to experiment and try stuff out.

It'll be interesting to see what sticks. Unfortunately, we have run out of. time. I want to thank you, Roman. Thank you so much. I had a pleasure being here. Roman Mars is the host of the podcast, 99% Invisible, and co-author of the book, The 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design. And you can watch the entire video of this interview

and sign up to find out about sitting in on future Zoom interviews, all there on our website at sciencefriiday.com Slash Events. If you missed any part of this program, or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. And on the Science Friday Vox Pop app this week, the question is, as we near the end of the year, we want to know what Science Friday stories impacted you the most this year. Tell us about it. What Science Friday stories impacted you the most this year? That's on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, wherever you get your

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