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FACT: Parking says a lot about who we are as a society
My partner recently read a really interesting book—“Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World” by Henry Grabar—and told me all me about it over dinner and NA beers. It turns out people go cuckoo bananas as soon as they step into a vehicle and try to park, and there’s lots to unpack.
There are social and psychological reasons behind parking and road rage. Many rules of the road are self-imposed. (e.g., “The left lane is the passing lane, don’t hog it up”). People get angry when they see other people not doing this “socially acceptable” thing and take it upon themselves to correct the other person—sometimes in violent ways.
Parking theorist Sarah Marusek says that parking follows what she calls “frontier law,” where people find a public spot and claim it as theirs a la the 1800s. They don’t need to do that, however: There are between 1-2 billion parking spaces in the US. A study of 27 mixed-use neighborhoods found that parking was over-supplied by 65 percent. Neighborhoods with resident-reported “parking shortages” were still oversupplied by 45 percent.
Drivers are pretty much toddlers who don’t want to share their pencil for fear of losing it and never getting it back, despite there being plenty of other pencils in this world. We as a society struggle with sharing and being inconvenienced, which we see in everyday life through so many things, like the response to COVID-19, college debt relief, healthcare … and now, parking.
FACT: Some penguins take 10,000 naps a day
As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, sleep is both very mysterious and very important. All animals do it—even ones without brains or central nervous systems (I’m looking at you, jellyfish). And many single-celled organisms have circadian rhythms, meaning they have biological functions that follow roughly 24-hour cycles.
We know sleep is essential, but we don’t know exactly what it does or how it evolved.