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Vox
6 days ago
- Politics
- Vox
The curse of America's high-speed rail
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. If you're traveling in America, there are plenty of ways to get to where you want to go. Interstate highways make road trips possible. Planes let you go from one side of the country to the other in a matter of hours. But there's one mode of transportation that still eludes the US: high-speed rail. Countries in Europe and Asia have safe high-speed trains that can take you from city to city as fast as 200 miles per hour, while a little more than half of Amtrak trains reach speeds up to 100 miles per hour. So what is the state of high-speed rail in the US? 'Nonexistent and terrible,' says Michael Kimmelman, editor-at-large of the New York Times's Headway, a section that focuses on progress when it comes to the world's biggest challenges. 'The United States has consistently failed to build high-speed rail, and there's been conversation about it for a long time.' Despite the setbacks, it still could be on the horizon. 'There's some glimmer of hope. High-speed rail exists all around the world.' Today, Explained Understand the world with a daily explainer, plus the most compelling stories of the day. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. What's the deal with the lack of high-speed rail in the US? Why hasn't the country caught up? And will we ever have high-speed trains? That was the question we explored in this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Kimmelman, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How'd we end up falling behind in passenger rail? The story is usually told that we once had a great rail system. The country was connected by the transcontinental railway in the 19th century. And we gave up that advantage. Once the automobile became something that people could afford, and it wasn't just for rich people, people wanted roads, so we invested less and less in trains. We have a million obstacles to progress and very few easy paths. That's part of the story, but there are a lot of other reasons why we failed too, which is that we've become a country that's extremely regulated and that has made it very difficult to build anything big anymore. We have a million obstacles to progress and very few easy paths. Who is getting high-speed rail right? China has built nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail just in the past couple of decades. Japan, of course, has a famous high-speed bullet train called the Shinkansen and has had that for decades. And most of western Europe is connected by high-speed rail. It's perfectly normal in Europe to go to your local train station and get on a train that will take you 200 miles an hour to another city. We were supposed to have high-speed rail in the US. What happened to that project out in California that was supposed to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco? Back in the 1980s, Gov. Jerry Brown had this idea that California could use high-speed rail. By the 1990s, California had a plan in place. It took them until 2008 to approve a measure that set aside about $10 billion to construct a high-speed rail, which was going to connect LA and San Francisco. It would take about two hours and 40 minutes to get directly from one city to the other, the cost estimate was around $33 billion, and the completion date was 2020. But by 2018, it was clear this was never going to happen. The cost estimates more than doubled, and they would ultimately triple. When Gavin Newsom, the current governor, succeeded Brown, he spoke about the fact that this was obviously not going to be possible anytime soon. And his big promise was that possibly California might have high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities in the Central Valley that no one had really asked for high-speed rail to travel between. Now, that's pretty unlikely too. The estimated completion date would be sometime in the 2030s perhaps, and at a cost of well over $110 billion. That's California. Is there high-speed rail in other parts of the country? Florida's a good example. Brightline is a privately owned and operated rail line that runs between Miami and Orlando, on what used to be freight line tracks. In short, they didn't have to go through a million of these approval processes to get it done because they kind of already owned the route. California to Vegas is the plan for Brightline 2. It's not just that you have a private investor as opposed to a government; it's also that you have a given route which presents itself that makes economic sense and makes sense for consumers. As a consequence, that may actually happen. And that might be in fact the first genuine high-speed rail in the United States. The safety record of Brightline in Florida is really troubling. Partly it's growing pains transitioning from a freight rail to a passenger train that runs through the middle of cities, but the company bears a lot of the blame. It's clearly a crisis and a learning curve for the company and those Florida communities. How hopeful are you about the future of high-speed rail in the US? I think it is a possibility. The fact that we're having conversations around our inability to get big things done is actually not the same as the conversations we were having five or 10 years ago. You see some signs of that change in California; for instance, the repeal of some of the environmental regulations that have been weaponized to prevent things like high-speed rail, and other things which actually are environmentally good.
Vox
27-07-2025
- Business
- Vox
The real reason we tip
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. We've all been there. Maybe it's when you grab a coffee in the morning or when you finish up a dinner out with friends. Maybe it's when you least expect it, like at the merch table at a concert. You tap your card, only to be confronted with the dreaded tip screen. There's a lot of talk about how much to tip and if you even should tip (more on that later), but why do we add gratuity in America in the first place? Nina Mast has the answer. She's an analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, DC. The point of the tip is to make up the difference between the minimum wage and the tipped minimum wage. 'The tipped minimum wage is the lower minimum wage that employers can pay tipped workers with the expectation that tips will bring their pay up to the regular minimum wage rate,' she says. 'Under federal law, the tipped minimum wage is $2.13 an hour. So tipped workers need to earn an additional $5.12 in tips to bring them up to the federal minimum wage, which is $7.25 an hour.' On this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast, we find out how this system began and why we still have it. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Mast, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. Where does tipping in America come from in the first place? Tipping goes back to the pre-Civil War times in the US. There were wealthy Americans who were vacationing in Europe, and they noticed this practice of tipping where if you had good service, you gave a small extra fee on top of what you paid. Then, tipping started to fade as a practice in Europe but persisted in the US. We can tie that back to the abolition of slavery. Once slavery was abolished following the Civil War, workers who were formerly enslaved in agriculture and domestic service continued to do these same jobs, but employers didn't want to pay them. So instead of actually just paying them their wage, they suggested that the customer paid a small tip to Black workers for their services. That's how tipping started proliferating across service sector jobs and became the predominant way that workers in these jobs were paid. How did the restaurant industry start to do this? It really goes back to the formation of the National Restaurant Association. From the very beginning, going back to the early 1920s, they united around a common goal of keeping labor costs low, essentially lobbying against any efforts to raise wages for tipped workers and to eliminate the tipped minimum wage. It sounds like this whole policy is a direct legacy of trying to keep Black people from getting the same minimum wage as other workers. When were service sectors included in the national minimum wage? It wasn't until the mid-1960s that tipped workers got the same rights as other workers under changes to the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the mid-1960s — this is during the civil rights movement, a few years after the March on Washington, which called for stronger minimum wage protections — amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act established a wage floor for tipped workers. It also increased protections for workers in agriculture, schools, laundries, nursing homes — a lot of sectors in which Black people were disproportionately employed and in which workers of color are still overrepresented even today. This was a big deal. Something like a third of the Black population gained protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act through these amendments in 1966. Even after these amendments, the FLSA continued to exclude farm workers from overtime protections, and domestic workers didn't gain rights until the 1970s. It was a significant change, and a big deal, for tipped workers to be covered, but there was a huge catch in the amendment. It established a lower minimum wage that tipped workers could be paid through the creation of the tip credit system. And that's still what is in use today. This tip credit essentially allowed employers to count the tips that were received by their staff against half of the minimum wage that they were required to pay. In 1996, the FLSA was amended again to raise the minimum wage federally from $4.25 to $5.15. Essentially, that froze the tipped minimum wage at $2.13 an hour, while the non-tipped minimum wage continued to go up. The tipped minimum wage has been stuck at $2.13 an hour since 1991, even though the federal minimum wage has been increased multiple times. And that's still the situation we're in now. Why hasn't this changed? It seems like it would be easier to give everyone the same minimum wage, and you wouldn't have to worry about tipping. I think that's in large part due to the lobbying and advocacy efforts of the National Restaurant Association, its affiliates — groups like the US Chamber of Commerce — and other employer groups that have fought tirelessly to prevent the minimum wage from being raised, both for tipped workers and for other workers. There is a proposal in Congress to raise the minimum wage to $17 an hour by 2030, and it would completely phase out this tipped minimum wage so tipped workers would receive the same minimum wage as everyone else. Some states have already eliminated the tipped minimum wage, but a lot more states haven't been able to do so yet. In most states, the minimum wage for tipped workers is still less than $4 an hour. How does the tip credit system work in practice? Employers are legally required to make up the difference if workers aren't receiving enough in tips to get them up to the regular minimum wage. But in practice, it's extremely difficult to enforce that rule. It's largely left up to the workers themselves to track their hours, their tips, and make some complicated calculations about what they're actually earning per hour per week. Then they have to confront their employer if it seems like they're not actually receiving the minimum wage, which obviously introduces a whole host of issues related to power dynamics. Not only is it difficult to calculate and keep track of, but it's also difficult for workers to demand what they're owed. As a result, it's largely not enforced. Workers who are already earning much lower wages than workers in non-tipped occupations are highly at risk of wage theft. I think as consumers, we're initially taught that tips are a way to reward good service. How should we think about tipping? I think this is a big misconception. People don't realize that they're actually paying the lion's share of their server's wages through their tips. Unfortunately, when you fail to tip your server, you're actually denying them their wage. We don't have the luxury in the US of having the system that you describe where you can pay a tip for particularly good service or pay a smaller tip to indicate that you didn't get good service. How much do you typically tip? I tip 20 percent as a standard, and sometimes, for a really good service, I'll tip more. I think that's basically the standard at this point in the US. It does get tricky, because we've seen a proliferation of tipping across lots of different transactions where a service wasn't necessarily rendered.
Vox
21-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
The steamy, subversive rise of the summer novel
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. As a kid, one of the highlights of my summer vacation was sitting underneath a tree in my grandmother's backyard and getting lost in a book. I don't get a three-month summer break anymore, but tucking away with a juicy novel when it's hot outside is a ritual I still return to. So what makes for a good summer read and how did this practice even emerge in the first place? That's what we set out to find out on this week's episode of Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in podcast. Next Page Book recommendations — both old and new — that are worth your time, from senior correspondent and critic Constance Grady. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. To find the answer we spoke with Donna Harrington-Lueker, author of Books for Idle Hours: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the Rise of Summer Reading. Summer reading is a practice she knows well. 'As a teenager, let's just say I was a bit bookish,' she says. 'That meant that when my family went for its one-week vacation a year — which was a big treat — they were on the beach and I was in some kind of a bunk bed with Moby Dick or Siddhartha.' Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. How did this idea of summer reading even start? Have we always grabbed books when it's hot out? No, not really. My research focused on the 19th century, and I started looking at newspaper articles, advertisements from book publishers, and the like. And I divided it into two periods: before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, summer reading was constructed as a masculine practice. The idea was that men would get away from the heat and the pressures of their lives, and they should read something cool. So the essays of Charles Lamb; poetry was mentioned often as well. That all changes after the Civil War, when there's an increase in travel and tourism. The performance of summer leisure becomes an aspiration for a growing middle class, so you have many, many more people engaging in this practice. You have an increase in railroads as well. So you've got an easy way for people to get from point A to point B, and hotels begin to spring up. And as a result of that, publishers start really promoting summer reading. It takes a very specific form, and increasingly it becomes something that women do. It becomes a rather gendered space. Can you talk about that idea of performing leisure a little bit? I think that's really interesting. Publishers would advertise a variety of things as summer reading, but one of the central things was what I call the summer novel. It would be a novel that would be set in Saratoga Springs or Newport or Cape May, at a summer resort. Regardless of how wealthy or not people were, they always seemed to stay there for an entire summer as opposed to a week or a weekend. It would involve a courtship and over the course of the novel, two young people would meet, they would resolve their differences, they would visit various places, and at the end they would be married. By reading these, you'd get an idea of what these resorts were about, and you'd get an idea of how you performed leisure, what you did once you got there, and what the expectations were. So they were serving that purpose as well. There's also a good bit of fashion, so for the young woman, you'd get an idea of how you're supposed to dress. That's so interesting. So it sounds like it's serving the purpose of a mixture of a Hallmark movie with your romance but the drama and intrigue of White Lotus. Definitely the Hallmark characteristic of it. Absolutely. Were these books purely escapist, or did they get at larger themes too? One of the things that I found interesting was that yes, they are escapist in the sense of allowing you to experience another lifestyle, but they were very, very much kind of a liminal space, a space of betwixt in between. For young women especially, it's doing the cultural work of asking, 'What does it look like to have more freedoms as a young woman?' Because there was markedly more freedom — or at least as these books constructed it — during the summer and at summer resorts. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. Now, admittedly, at the end of all these, order is reasserted. People go back to their normal lives. Marriage as the ultimate institution of tradition gets reasserted. But for the space of the novel there are more freedoms. You have women hiking and women going out on boats on their own and being unchaperoned, opening up vistas of freedom. The novels weren't spaces that were necessarily completely out of touch either. There would be references to a very violent Pullman strike that appeared in one of the summer novels. In the preface to one about Saratoga Springs, there's questions about American imperialism. There's questions about treatment of Native Americans. And so when you take the book as a whole, it's nation-building in a way as well, and it's questioning that in some of them. What was the reaction to the rise of summer reading at the time? Was everyone just ecstatic that people were reading? The publishing industry had a very serious marketing challenge on its hands. Post-Civil War especially, you have rising literacy rates – especially among young women – but you have a very solid and profound discourse that says novel reading is evil, that it is dangerous, especially for young women. The fear was that it would be sexually arousing, that the morals would be questionable. And so you get a lot of criticism, especially among clerics and also a real fear of French novels. They were considered the most problematic. Do we still have a lot of these summer reading conventions in book publishing?
Vox
06-07-2025
- Politics
- Vox
How Black artists are reclaiming the American flag
is the host of Explain It to Me, your hotline for all your unanswered questions. She joined Vox in 2022 as a senior producer and then as host of The Weeds, Vox's policy podcast. Imagine your average Fourth of July party. There are probably hot dogs on the grill, everyone is clad in red, white, and blue, and it culminates in a fireworks show. It may sound like a lovely way to spend a day off. But for a lot of Americans, the celebration, and the flag itself, are more complicated than that. That's the question that Explain It to Me, Vox's weekly call-in show, is setting out to tackle this holiday weekend: What's the relationship like between Black people and the American flag? Specifically, one listener wanted to know, in the wake of the red-white-and-blue spectacle of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter and Kendrick Lamar's Super Bowl halftime show, how that conversation has evolved over time. This is something Ted Johnson thinks a lot about. Johnson, who is Black, is an adviser at the liberal think tank New America, a columnist at the Washington Post, and a retired US Navy commander. 'The flag has sort of been hijacked by nationalists — folks who believe either America is perfect and exceptional, or at the very least, anything that it's done wrong in the past should be excused by all the things that it's done well,' Johnson told Vox. 'And that is not my relationship with the flag. It's much more complicated because there has been tons of harm done under that flag.' How do Black Americans square that harm and that pride? And how has that relationship changed through the years? Below is an excerpt of the conversation with Johnson, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you'd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@ or call 1-800-618-8545. One way to tease out this relationship between Black Americans and the flag is to talk about the experience of Black service members. What's that history? One of the earliest instances is the story of an enslaved man named Jehu Grant in Rhode Island during the Revolutionary War. The man that owned him was a loyalist to the Brits. Grant was afraid that he was going to be shipped off and sold to the Brits to fight for them. So he runs away, joins Washington's army and fights in the Continental Army, and then his master shows up and says, 'You've got my property, and I want it back.' And the Army turns him back over to the guy that owns him, where he serves for many years and eventually buys his freedom. When Andrew Jackson becomes president in the 1820s, he makes it policy to provide pensions for those Revolutionary War folks still alive. And so Grant applies for his pension and is denied. The government says that services rendered while a fugitive from your master are not recognized. That is the relationship of Black service members to the flag. It represents a set of principles that many would be willing to die for and also a way of life that intentionally excluded Black folks for no other reason than race and status of their servitude. And so if you look at any war, you will find Black folks in uniform who have both been oppressed in the country they represent, and are willing to die for that country because of the values it stands for and for their right to be able to serve and benefit from the programs that the military has made available to folks. My grandfather served in the military and I never got the chance to really talk with him about that experience. But I'm curious if you can speak to the motivations of Black Americans who continue serving, especially during the Jim Crow era. Pre-Civil War, a lot of enslaved Black folks that decided to fight did so because they believed their chances at liberty, emancipation, and freedom were connected to their willingness to serve the country. Then we get the draft and a lot of the Black folks that served in the early part of the 20th century were drafted into service. They weren't eager volunteers lining up as a way of earning their citizenship, but the fact that the vast majority of them honored that draft notice even though they were treated as second-class citizens was a sort of implicit demand for access to the full rights of the Constitution. 'There is a belief that the United States is ours as well. We have a claim of ownership. And to claim ownership also means you must sort of participate in the sacrifice.' I'd be remiss if I say that folks joining today, for example, are doing so because they love the flag. The military has a great pension program. The military offers great programs if you want to buy a home or if you want to get an education. So there's a sort of socioeconomic attractiveness to the military that I think explains why Black folks continue to join the military post-draft. But it is also because there is a belief that the United States is ours as well. We have a claim of ownership. And to claim ownership also means you must sort of participate in the sacrifice. When a lot of those service members came back from war, they were met with systemic institutionalized racism. How were people continuing to foster that sense of patriotism despite all that? When Black folks were coming home from World War I and II, many were lynched in weren't even excused from the racial dynamics by being willing to die for the country. One of the most famous genres of music in this period was called coon music. One of the songs was about Black people not having a flag. They talked about how white folks in the Northeast could fly flags from Italy, Ireland, wherever they're from. And white people in the States could just fly the American flag. Black people could fly none of those because we didn't know where we were from and the United States is not ours. And so in this song, they say the Black flag is basically two possums shooting dice and that would be an accurate representation. Wow. That is some classic old-school racism. Yeah, the song is called 'Every Race Has a Flag, but the Coon.' And so we are very familiar with the red, black, and green pan-African flag. This was Marcus Garvey's response to this coon genre of music. There's this idea among Black Americans of, We built this. Of course I'm going to reclaim this. Of course I'm going to have pride in it because I built it. I think that's what we're seeing with a lot of the imagery now. But what about Black artists and also Black people in general who say, Our ancestors may have done all this work, but there really is no way to be a part of this and maybe we should not be trying to be a part of this? If you take pride in the flag because you believe America is exceptional, you're going to find a lot fewer subscribers to that belief system than one where your pride in the country means being proud of the people you come from and proud of the arc of your people's story in this country. On the latter, you will find people who are very proud of what Black people have accomplished in this country. For me, patriotism means honoring those sacrifices, those people that came before us. It does not mean excusing the United States from its racism, from its perpetuated inequality, or for putting its national interests ahead of the people that it's supposed to serve. So it is very complicated, and there's no easy way through it. I will say that I think part of the reason we're seeing more folks willing to sort of reclaim the flag for their own is because of Gen X. My generation was the first one born post-Civil Rights Act of 1964, so Jim Crow was the experience of our parents. Those experiences connected to the hijacking of the flag to connect it to explicit statutory racism feels generations removed from folks who have grown up in America where opportunity is more available, where the Jim Crow kind of racism is not as permitted. And while the country is not even close to being the kind of equal nation it says it was founded to be, it's made progress. I think a reclamation of that flag by Beyoncé and others is a sort of signal that yes, we built it. Yes, we've progressed here. And no, we're not leaving. There's no 'go back to Africa.' This is home. And if this is home, I'm going to fly the flag of my country. There's lots to be proud of about what the country has achieved and by Black Americans in particular. And for me, that is all the things that patriotism represents, not the more narrow exclusive version that tends to get more daylight. I think one thing we need to discuss is the definition of Black we're using here. I am what they would call Black American. My ancestors are from Alabama and Arkansas. They were formerly enslaved. But Blackness in America now has a much wider net. I have so many friends whose parents are immigrants from the Caribbean or Africa. And it's interesting in this moment where there are lots of conversations about what it means to be Black, and who gets to claim it, we're also seeing this flag resurgence. I think probably true that there are more Black people who are first-generation Americans today than there have been since they started erasing our nations of origin during slavery. That means Black American doesn't just mean people who descended from slaves. It means Black people of all kinds. When we talk about Black politics, we don't consider the Black immigrant experience. When we talk about Black Americanism or Black patriotism, we often don't account for the Black immigrant experience, except to the extent that that experience is shed and the American one is adopted. Those views sort of get thrown into this pot of Blackness instead of disaggregated to show how Black folks from other places who become Americans have a distinct relationship with the country that also affects their relationship with the iconography of the country like the flag, the national anthem, and this reclamation of red, white, and blue. There may be some Black artists — I think of Beyoncé — who are reclaiming this imagery, but we also can't ignore who has a majority stake in it. When people think of the flag, they think of white people. Is that changing? It is, but slowly. If you ask people from around the world to picture a stereotypical American, they're not picturing LeBron James, despite the medals he's won at the Olympics. They're probably picturing a white man from the Midwest.
Vox
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vox
Can we ever understand our dogs?
is a senior producer and reporter for, Vox's daily news podcast. These days, Miles is mostly focused on economics stories, but he has reported and produced episodes on topics ranging fromto the campaign of Dog people tend to be pretty confident they know what's going on with their animals. When we put out a call on the Explain It to Me podcast for dog owners to tell us about their connection to their furry friends, the responses ranged from 'soul dog' to 'love of my life' to 'I believe I can read my dog's mind.' But how well can we see inside a dog's mind, really? That's a question Alexandra Horowitz has been investigating for decades. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York and has written four books on how dogs experience the world. When we called her up for our episode, she told Explain It to Me guest host Noam Hassenfeld that understanding that experience starts with the nose. Explain It to Me The Explain It to Me newsletter answers an interesting question from an audience member in a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 'They are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense,' Horowitz said. 'My interest is in saying, 'Okay, let's try to understand the dog's way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they're just like us, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I'm sitting on a couch.'' Horowitz talked to Noam about her experience with nose-first living, how dogs' smell shapes their perception of time, and whether, after all these years of research, she feels any more confident she knows what's going on with her fuzzy friends. Below is a transcript edited for length and clarity. But make sure to listen to the whole thing—it's a great interview. How do you start to take a dog's point of view? You did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? Or how should I put that? Yeah, I tried to step into some of the dog's behaviors in order to understand them a little bit. Humans are visual creatures, right? We see the world first, and we assume the world is out there looking like it is to everybody, the way it looks to us. Of course, it doesn't. But if you're a smelling creature, how do you see the world? Smells don't just appear when you open your nose. If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. Our sniffs are pretty feeble, and they'll do seven sniffs a second if they wanna get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things. That was just the first step, going around and saying, like, 'All right, what are smells down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it?' I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height? Well, I did this in New York City. Right where I live. If a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend. So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it's New York City. Oh no, people moved away from me, that's for sure. But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? I didn't sniff other dog butts cause there are other issues involved there, but, you know, if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend. What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog? The big lesson for me was that, unlike the way I had characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell, or something unappealing, like in New York, garbage in the summer is a very distinctive smell. But for dogs, smells are just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images. You know, when I think of looking at the world, I create a spatial map of the world, right? Like, I'll walk through my apartment and I'll look around. Here's the door, here's the window, here's the hall. What does that mean for the world you live in if you're mapping it by smelling it? Smells move, and that's one of the interesting things about them. We know this — you have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table. So where that coffee is, is a slightly different space to a, let's say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It's right in the cup to me, but to somebody who's seeing the world through smell, it's in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air. Oh, that's fascinating. So things are casting off smells all the time. That doesn't mean that there's nothing concrete and real. It just means that it's a little more transient than we see. Does the way a dog relies on smell also change their perception of time? Yeah, I think time is in smell. My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I've been gone for an hour, I'm still sort of in the room to them, but a little less. After a day, I'm a lot less in the room. And so they're sort time, time passing by the changeability of smells. There's something reassuring in the fact that I'm still here when I'm not here for them. Wow. That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don't know, imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience. Maybe I haven't ever thought of it as sad. I mean in a way, there's something reassuring in the fact that I'm still here when I'm not here for them. When I come home and I've been with another dog or I've had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, they can experience that by just smelling me, and seeing where I've been. To me, that's extra neat, you know, not melancholy. A lot of the people we've heard from in this episode — they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to you, it seems we're actually just really different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?
