[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SOREN WHEELER: This is Radiolab. I'm Soren Wheeler. I'm sitting in for Lulu and Latif today. They will be back next week. But for today's show, we got a good one, and I brought along a friend...

ALEX NEASON: Hello!

SOREN: ...our editor, Alex Neason.

ALEX: Yeah.

SOREN: All right, so tell us what we're—tell everybody what we're up to today.

ALEX: Yeah, so we're here because a little while back, we got a question from a listener. It seemed like a pretty simple question, but the more we got into it and tried to figure out how to answer it, the more it just dragged us into the middle of everything.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah.

ALEX: It's like one big gigantic spiral where I'm like, "What are we? Who are we?"

LAURA ANDREWS: I'm sorry.

SOREN: That's okay.

ALEX: So the question came from a woman named Laura Andrews.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah. My name is Laura, and I'm a student.

ALEX: Laura is an undergraduate student at the University of Missouri.

LAURA ANDREWS: Mizzou.

ALEX: Mizzou.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah.

ALEX: But when she sent us this question—almost a year ago now—she was standing kind of on the precipice at a very particular transition moment in her life.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah.

ALEX: I think you had just finished high school, right?

LAURA ANDREWS: Yes. I was a couple months into my gap year. But I hadn't, like, applied to any colleges. I had planned to, but some personal things went on that just kept me from doing that. So I was living with my parents. The most that I was ever doing was dogsitting once a month or something like that. That was it. And I didn't have any plans.

ALEX: So Laura is just graduated from high school, she's at her parents' house, she's feeding some dogs from time to time.

LAURA ANDREWS: Reflecting on myself and what I'm meant to be doing.

ALEX: Staring into her future. And she starts asking herself a lot of questions.

LAURA ANDREWS: Where do I belong?

SOREN: Sort of philosophical questions.

LAURA ANDREWS: What is my place in the universe?

SOREN: About herself...

LAURA ANDREWS: Where are we in relation to everything ever?

SOREN: ...about everything.

LAURA ANDREWS: What is everything in relation to everything?

ALEX: And Laura told us that when she started thinking about everything...

LAURA ANDREWS: The vastness, the bigness.

ALEX: ...she just felt small. But then she thought, "Am I small?"

SOREN: And that led her to the question that she sat down, wrote out and sent to us.

ALEX: And her question turned out to be weirdly mathematical.

LAURA ANDREWS: "What is the most average size that a thing could be in the universe? If one were to take the size of the largest singular thing—be it a star or a black hole or something, rather than a cluster of stuff like a galaxy—and the size of the smallest thing, my guess would be an electron or something of the sort, and found the exact median size, how big would that be? I've tried to work it out myself, but I'm good at neither math nor science and my answers always seem to be entirely too large. Where's the midpoint between big and small in relation to literally everything ever?"

SOREN: Okay!

ALEX: Okay.

LAURA ANDREWS: [laughs] Okay.

SOREN: Can I ask you, do you have a guess about what the answer might—what an answer might be?

LAURA ANDREWS: One of my thoughts was, like, an apple would be a good size. I mean, you can hold it in your hand.

ALEX: Mm-hmm.

LAURA ANDREWS: You could eat the size of the middle-est thing.

SOREN: Yeah. When I asked my wife she said "toaster," and then we had a...

ALEX: Toaster?

SOREN: ...like, somebody, I think Annie's friend was like, "Definitely a watermelon."

LAURA ANDREWS: [laughs]

SOREN: He was convinced it was gonna be a watermelon.

LISTENER: The first thing I thought of was an atom.

LISTENER: A grain of sand.

ALEX: So we actually put a call-out to our listeners to see what they thought the middle thing was.

LISTENER: A small rock.

LISTENER: A proton.

ALEX: And we got...

LISTENER: Maybe Jupiter?

ALEX: ...a huge variety of answers.

LISTENER: The palm of my hand.

ALEX: But mostly what people talked about was...

LISTENER: How do you...

ALEX: How do you even start to try to answer the question?

LISTENER: Been really thinking about this question a lot.

LISTENER: Thinking about it more and more...

ALEX: What are the boundaries?

LISTENER: I don't know.

LISTENER: I don't know.

ALEX: How do you choose the littlest thing?

LISTENER: Quarks and atoms.

LISTENER: Particles.

LISTENER: Neutrinos.

ALEX: How do you choose the biggest thing?

LISTENER: Massive black holes.

LISTENER: Trillions of stars.

LISTENER: Giant supernovas.

LISTENER: The galaxy!

LISTENER: The universe itself.

ALEX: Actually, what even is a thing?

LISTENER: Like, I don't know.

LISTENER: All the things are still made up of atoms, I think.

LISTENER: That's what I think.

ALEX: And I have to say, I spiraled out in exactly the same way. So much so that I wasn't actually sure if we could answer this question at all.

SOREN: Yeah. I actually weirdly just immediately thought of a particular person.

STEVE STROGATZ: Hi Soren.

SOREN: Hi, how are you? I can't believe that I feel like the...

SOREN: Steve Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell, an old friend of the show. In the past we've called him up to help us untangle impossible logic puzzles.

STEVE STROGATZ: And that was fun.

SOREN: Or understand statistics and probabilities.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, time flies.

SOREN: But this time I just got him into the studio...

SOREN: Well, let's jump in.

SOREN: ...without even telling him what I wanted to talk about.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. I mean, I do feel a little off as far as our usual thing. Because usually I've had something to think about hard before we talk.

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: We're just winging it today. Well, we could see what happens.

SOREN: No, but I mean, I have a very specific thing I want to talk about, actually.

STEVE STROGATZ: Oh. Oh? Really?

SOREN: Yeah, well this was sort of the spark. Here, let me just—let me just tell you...

SOREN: And so I was like, "Let me just hit you with this question."

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay.

SOREN: Laura Andrews wrote in and said, "What is the most average sized..."

SOREN: I literally read him the text of Laura's question.

STEVE STROGATZ: Uh-huh.

SOREN: "Where is the midpoint between big and small in relation to literally every single thing ever?"

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs] Great! What a great question. It reminds me a lot of...

SOREN: And he was into it. So I was just like, "I don't know. Do you think we could just right here on the fly right now rough it out?

STEVE STROGATZ: Huh. Okay. What's in the middle?

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: Well first of all...

SOREN: And right away, Steve was like, "Okay, there's a couple things we gotta do just to get a grip on this question."

STEVE STROGATZ: I think we should measure everything with a common yardstick, let's say meters.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: And a meter is approximately the scale of a person, of Laura herself. Depending on how tall she is, she's between one and two meters tall, probably.

SOREN: Right.

SOREN: "And also, to simplify a bit and make the math doable, we're gonna do some rounding."

STEVE STROGATZ: We don't care about numbers like one or two. We're only interested in up to factors of 10.

SOREN: And in particular Steve said, like, if we're gonna talk about really big and really little numbers, the easiest way to do that is to talk about powers of 10.

ALEX: Remind me what powers of 10 mean?

SOREN: I mean, really, it's just like a math-y way of saying numbers like 10, 100, 1,000. Like, you talk about how many zeros come after the 1.

ALEX: Okay.

SOREN: So 102 has two zeros after the one, which is just like a—that's a hundred. And then 103, the power of 3 has three zeros after the one, which is just a thousand.

STEVE STROGATZ: Sort of like when people talk about salaries. Are you making a four-figure salary or a five-figure salary?

SOREN: So each step going up is just times 10. 10 times each step.

ALEX: Gotcha.

SOREN: And then you can do this in the other direction, like, of getting smaller. So you just do divided by 10, divided by 10. So if you take one and divide it by 10, you get a tenth, that's 10-1.

ALEX: Okay. Okay.

SOREN: And then in that case, you're just talking about the number of zeros that are on the other side of the decimal point.

ALEX: Okay. I believe you.

SOREN: [laughs] Okay, so—so that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna think about what the biggest and smallest things are using powers of 10.

STEVE STROGATZ: But—so back to Laura's question, though. I...

SOREN: Which immediately took us into some very weird spaces.

STEVE STROGATZ: People say that the smallest conceivable thing—a physicist will tell us nowadays the smallest conceivable thing is a unit of the size of space at which space is thought to lose its integrity.

SOREN: Integrity?

STEVE STROGATZ: Something called the Planck length. This is a pretty far-out thing. No one has experience with this in their daily life. But emptiness, the ordinary space between your hands when you hold your hands apart before you clap them together. Emptiness itself has a fabric to it. And at the scale of the Planck length, space would be made of grains of space.

SOREN: Just dots.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, dots. Kind of pixelated. And what we don't know is are they neat little pixels like checkerboard squares? Or is it that space itself starts to kind of rip apart? We have reason to think that, because in quantum theory, everything gets very jittery. Things pop into and out of existence.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah.

SOREN: Anyway, the Planck length...

STEVE STROGATZ: That's 10-35 meters.

SOREN: Okay. [laughs] So that's just a decimal point and then 34 zeros and a one.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's about a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth.

SOREN: Of a meter.

STEVE STROGATZ: Of a meter.

SOREN: So if we start with a meter, which is roughly a person, we have to zoom in to a freckle on that person's cheek, like 10-2, into tiny blood vessels, then a cell in the blood, then the coiled molecules of DNA inside that cell, then down to an atom.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, much smaller than an atom.

SOREN: How big is an atom?

STEVE STROGATZ: Around 10-10.

SOREN: Oh! We're not even close—we're not even close to an atom.

STEVE STROGATZ: Way, way smaller than that.

SOREN: Apparently if an atom was the size of the Earth, then the Planck length would be the size of an atom on that Earth. So we had to keep going into the tiny bits of the nucleus of the atom, the protons and the neutrons. And then to the smallest fundamental particles that we know of.

ALEX: Er...

SOREN: And it's still like a billionth of that.

ALEX: Wow!

STEVE STROGATZ: But anyway, that's what we currently think is the smallest conceivable thing.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: Now what's the biggest thing?

SOREN: Right.

STEVE STROGATZ: So—and then we're gonna get to what's the middle thing.

SOREN: So for the biggest thing, we have to, of course, zoom back up through protons and neutrons and up to the atom. Then out to molecules and dust mites, dolphins, soccer fields, which are, like, 102, oceans, the Earth, about 107, the solar system. Then galaxies and clusters of galaxies. And then out, out, out to include all the vast empty spaces between everything.

ALEX: Wow!

STEVE STROGATZ: It's the size of the whole universe measured from one end to the other. Now what does that mean? [laughs] Okay, we don't know if there's an end to the universe. It's possible the universe itself is spatially infinite. But all we can really observe is how far can light travel since the beginning of the universe?

SOREN: Right.

STEVE STROGATZ: So if you use that estimate, you'd say the universe is something on the order of 14 or so billion light years in diameter.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: Which okay, now that's not—but we were gonna do things in meters.

SOREN: Meters, right. So how do you go from light years to meters?

STEVE STROGATZ: I think if I do it right, I think in meters that's about 1025 meters. We could quickly ask our cell phones.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs] Right? You could say, "Hey, Siri?" Should I do it?

SOREN: Yeah, sure.

STEVE STROGATZ: All right. Hey Siri, how big is the diameter of the universe measured in meters?

[SIRI: Okay. I found this on the web for what's the matter, what's the diameter of the universe measured in meters? Check it out.]

SOREN: Oh, she's just gonna send you to a web page.

STEVE STROGATZ: She's sending me somewhere.

SOREN: She's like, "Here's the internet, Steve." [laughs]

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs] Oh, man! Well, all right. I'm gonna try using—without asking her, I'm gonna type into my phone "Diameter of universe in meters." Okay, this says it's about 8.8 x 1026 meters.

SOREN: Wait. So that—is that 14 billion light years, and that's just changed into meters? Because does that come out right? It's—14 billion light years would be...

STEVE STROGATZ: Well, you may want to get a physicist or an astrophysicist because they say that's not actually the diameter of the universe. They're now quoting a number that is much bigger than that, 93 billion light years. And they say it has to do with the expansion of the universe at the very beginning in this process called inflation.

SOREN: Oh.

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay? So...

SOREN: So that's—that's how you get your number, which is 8.8 x 1026, which I guess with the 8 is really just 1027 for our purposes.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. That'll get you to 27.

SOREN: I mean, if that's what the smarties are saying...

STEVE STROGATZ: Let's go with that.

SOREN: Let's go with that. So that's a one with 27 zeros behind it, which just means that we've taken one meter and times it by 10 27 times.

STEVE STROGATZ: All right. So we're ready to do it.

SOREN: Yeah. Okay, so we just have to take the big and the little and figure out what the average thing is.

STEVE STROGATZ: Well, I think we should be careful about the word "average."

SOREN: Hmm.

STEVE STROGATZ: Because there are lots of kinds of averages.

SOREN: Mm-hmm.

STEVE STROGATZ: You know, kids are taught median, mean. There's all these...

SOREN: Can you—can you remind me what those are?

STEVE STROGATZ: Well, the mean, the way you compute it is you add up all the numbers and then divide by how many of them there are.

SOREN: So we'd need to know how many big or little or medium things there are.

STEVE STROGATZ: Right. For a median, we'd have to count up all the objects in the universe...

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: ...and then put them in a line from smallest to biggest.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: And like all the quarks that there's so many of, they'd all be in line. So there'd be a lot of quarks lined up.

SOREN: Yeah, because every—every big thing is made of little things. So if you add a big thing, you've also added a bunch of little things, I guess.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. So I don't know...

SOREN: Yeah, it seems like it would drag it to the—to the little stuff.

STEVE STROGATZ: So I'm just saying there's a lot of different concepts of "middle," and depending on the context, one is more appropriate or convenient or useful than another. But I—I sort of—when I hear Laura's question about what's in the middle of the universe, I think of—this might be an off-putting word—what we would call the "geometric mean."

SOREN: So Steve said he thought the most intuitive and simplest thing we could do, because we now had the biggest and smallest numbers as powers of 10, is—is just figure out what the average of those two numbers is in a way that would tell us from the middle it would be the same number of times 10s up as it would be, like, divided by 10s down. So that's the one that we're gonna go for.

ALEX: Got it.

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay.

SOREN: Okay.

STEVE STROGATZ: We're ready to answer now.

ALEX: Go time.

SOREN: Yeah, except we're actually gonna take a quick little break. But when we come back, Steve and I actually get to an answer that honestly felt to me—I mean, it sort of freaked me out, but also I felt like maybe we had actually landed in the center of everything.

SOREN: Hey, I'm Soren Wheeler.

ALEX: I'm Alex Neason. This is Radiolab. And we're back doing the math my eighth grade algebra teacher always swore we would use.

SOREN: [laughs] They were right, though! They were right.

ALEX: [laughs]

SOREN: I don't think they knew what we'd be using it for, but we are here with mathematician Steve Strogatz, using that math to figure out what the middlest-sized thing in the universe is.

STEVE STROGATZ: All right, so we're ready to do it. We're ready to answer now.

SOREN: Yeah, so we got...

SOREN: So before the break, we had decided that the smallest thing you could measure is the teeny, tiny, beyond-comprehension Planck length, which is 10-35 meters. And then the biggest thing is the unknowable enormity of the universe itself, which is 1027 meters wide. And to find the middle, Steve actually does this very simple bit of math, almost to the point of being anti-climactic.

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay.

SOREN: Just a good old-fashioned mean of two numbers.

STEVE STROGATZ: So we got 27 on the upside.

SOREN: He just takes the two powers...

STEVE STROGATZ: And negative 35. So I should add them together.

SOREN: adds them up, 27 plus -35.

STEVE STROGATZ: That gives me -8.

SOREN: And then because we want the average of just two things, he divides them by two.

STEVE STROGATZ: Divided by 2 is -4.

SOREN: So the middle...

STEVE STROGATZ: So think 4 below 0 is—4 orders of magnitude below 0 is the middle.

SOREN: So that's—that's 10-4, which is a decimal point and then three zeros?

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah.

SOREN: So wait. Is that—that's a milli...

STEVE STROGATZ: That's a 10th of a millimeter.

SOREN: That's a 10th of a millimeter.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah.

SOREN: So like a—wait, a millimeter would be like a grain of sand?

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah.

SOREN: So it's a tenth of a grain of sand.

STEVE STROGATZ: It's a very little tiny dusty. A little piece of dust.

SOREN: Dust particle.

STEVE STROGATZ: Very little piece of dust.

STEVE STROGATZ: Now if I take a bacterium, say, a cell, you know, that's a single-celled organism.

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: A big bacterium is something like 10-5 meters.

SOREN: Okay. So that's a—that's a little small, but...

STEVE STROGATZ: So...

SOREN: Maybe a—a particularly large cell might get close to...

STEVE STROGATZ: Yes, maybe.

SOREN: It would probably still be a couple steps—a step...

STEVE STROGATZ: It's a good question. I think a eukaryotic—let's see.

SOREN: That's a cell with a...

STEVE STROGATZ: A nucleus.

SOREN: The kind of cells we're made of.

STEVE STROGATZ: Right. I'm gonna look that one up. "Diameter of a eukaryotic cell." Look at that, Soren. It says here, "Diameter of eukaryotic cell: 10100 microns." So a micron is 10-6 meters. And 100 of those is 10-4 meters. So the biggest eukaryotic cell is our happy place in the middle.

SOREN: Hmm. So it's a small—it's a small bit of us.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. Now some people would say this is just an exercise in circular reasoning on our parts.

SOREN: That's what I keep on wondering.

STEVE STROGATZ: That it's gonna come out that—yeah. We're gonna—because of our perceptual limitations, we're gonna tend to see things centered on us.

SOREN: Like a living—a perceiving thing is gonna see out in each direction about the same and thus call itself an average?

STEVE STROGATZ: That's sort of plausible, isn't it?

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: But I feel a certain amount of confidence in all of this. I don't think it's just anthropocentric.

SOREN: Yeah. I mean, we are using science that stretches our senses as much as we, you know, have to.

STEVE STROGATZ: Right. Yeah.

ALEX: Yeah. I mean, yeah, it still makes you wonder.

SOREN: But if you—but, like, what if you—like, set that aside for just a beat, if you can manage to set that aside, what we have here is the idea that the middle-est thing is the most fundamental unit of life.

ALEX: Right.

SOREN: Of complicated life.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah. It's a big eukaryotic cell.

SOREN: Which I—I mean, I think it's kinda—I think that's kinda cool.

ALEX: But, you know, I'm not actually sure if we've answered Laura's question, though. Because she was asking about "things." What's the middle-sized thing? And what you and Steve are talking about is space, I guess.

SOREN: Yeah.

ALEX: I'm just not sure if the universe counts as a thing.

SOREN: Yeah. I was—I was actually thinking the same thing when I was talking to Steve.

SOREN: Well, this—so now to be fair, Laura I think might have asked a question that we were scared to do. [laughs]

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay, all right.

SOREN: Which is fine, because—because I think—I like what we did too but, like—but we have now figured out the middle of all measurables. Or something like that.

STEVE STROGATZ: That's right.

SOREN: She did seem to—like, let me just return to the text. "If one were to take the size of the largest singular thing." And she says, "Rather than a cluster of stuff like a galaxy." So she really is trying to, like, what's the largest thing that you could consider its own object?

STEVE STROGATZ: That is such a peculiar framing, 'cause I don't think there—what is a singular thing?

SOREN: Well...

STEVE STROGATZ: Isn't that a fiction? Is anything a singular thing? Aren't we all multitudes? A star is made of electrons. Electrons are made of superstrings.

SOREN: But we do certainly walk around objecting things all the time, and we do—we could say...

STEVE STROGATZ: We do.

SOREN: ...that's a sun—that's the sun.

STEVE STROGATZ: That's the sun.

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: Right. Okay. Well, let's go with it. But a galaxy...

SOREN: So then we just started trying to figure out, like, what is the biggest thing? If you just think of a normal idea of thing.

SOREN: Do you know pulsar or black holes? Black holes, like, they have a lot of mass, but they're actually sort of small.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, I—I sort of think a big star under her definition is the biggest thing.

SOREN: Right.

STEVE STROGATZ: You know, like a red giant.

SOREN: Do you have a guess about—well, let me just look it up.

STEVE STROGATZ: You can look it up. You got the whole world right there in front of you.

SOREN: This—this show is just gonna be like Steve and Soren Google.

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs]

SOREN: What's the biggest single [laughs] cosmic record holders. Largest exo—no. Largest empty spot? That's weird. Largest star?

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah.

SOREN: It's called UY Scuti.

STEVE STROGATZ: Really?

SOREN: I'm sure I'm saying that wrong.

STEVE STROGATZ: Did not know that.

SOREN: So that's 1012 meters.

STEVE STROGATZ: Uh-huh.

SOREN: Which—whoa! Is apparently so big, you could fit almost five billion of our suns in it.

STEVE STROGATZ: Okay.

SOREN: So I guess for the smallest thing, currently the smallest physical size...

SOREN: And after a lot more Googling and Googling, turns out the idea of measuring sizes of things that are that small gets really dicey, but we eventually ended up settling on 2,000 times smaller than a proton or a rough estimate of the size of, like, a quark.

STEVE STROGATZ: 10-20 meters?

SOREN: Yeah.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yeah, that sounds to me in the right ballpark for Laura's question.

SOREN: So we had our littlest thing thing and our biggest thing.

STEVE STROGATZ: Right. Okay, so the middle...

SOREN: So we've got our same thing, 12 and -20, and we add them up and get -8 divided by two, we get -4.

STEVE STROGATZ: That's the same damn answer! We're back to our—to our big, big eukaryotic cell.

SOREN: That might be the first time I've been spooked in a while.

STEVE STROGATZ: I'm looking at Soren. He's folding his arms.

SOREN: [laughs] I had to lean back.

STEVE STROGATZ: [laughs] He's leaning back. His mouth is hanging open.

SOREN: It's—it seems very odd to me that we got the same—I mean, like, hmm.

STEVE STROGATZ: Well, okay. I don't know what to make of it either. Sort of—I think it's—it's interesting. [laughs]

SOREN: Yeah. All right. So the basic unit of complicated life is the middle.

STEVE STROGATZ: Yes. That's nice! It's the thing that we have in common with all the life on this planet, whether plant or animal.

SOREN: Yeah. Like, complex life.

STEVE STROGATZ: Uh-huh. I think this is the answer to Laura.

LAURA ANDREWS: It's smaller than I expected.

ALEX: Does it feel satisfying for the answer to be a cell that's in us?

LAURA ANDREWS: It feels like it should be profound.

SOREN: [laughs]

LAURA ANDREWS: I mean, I'm not having, like, a mind-blown kind of reaction like I thought I would.

SOREN: I love that. No. Yeah.

ALEX: [laughs]

LAURA ANDREWS: But it—it feels like I should have more of a reaction.

SOREN: What if we were to put some music underneath? [laughs]

LAURA ANDREWS: I mean, it would be more dramatic for sure. [laughs]

SOREN: I love—I totally get that. I—I totally get that.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah.

SOREN: But let me see if I can at least offer you this.

LAURA ANDREWS: Okay.

SOREN: Because there's a little bit of a feeling that, like, I don't know, being small or average or a little bit whatever, in the middle, it makes you feel sort of insignificant or something. But size is actually like a weirdly interesting thing, because when something gets bigger, it's not just a bigger version of the same thing. Like, when you get bigger and bigger and bigger, the physics—the physical stuff actually works differently, mostly because a really large thing has more volume compared to its surface area, and a small thing has more surface area compared to its volume. That's why, like, you can get salt or sugar to dissolve in water if it's in little grains, but if you had a big cube of sugar, it would take forever.

LAURA ANDREWS: Right.

SOREN: So there are certain kinds of physical events that happen differently if you're small than if you're big.

ALEX: Hmm.

SOREN: And there's an argument out there that, like, cells being the basic unit of the way life functions, which has to do with, like, making energy and getting out waste and doing all the things that a body needs to do, you can't be much bigger than the cells are because you have to have the right amount of surface where you're, like, sending things out and bringing things in and interacting with the world given, like, what you've got going on inside. So—so it might be that this average middle size is actually ideal to allow this very rare precious thing, which is life, to even happen in a cold, cold, bit of empty space.

ALEX: Well, when you put it like that...

LAURA ANDREWS: [laughs] I mean, yeah, when you put it like that, it's more profound, for sure.

SOREN: [laughs] Okay, we're making progress!

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah. I mean, I guess the most comforting part of it is that we're bigger than we seem.

SOREN: We're maybe not so kind of tiny as we sometimes feel.

ALEX: Yeah.

SOREN: Yeah.

LAURA ANDREWS: Yeah. Right.

SOREN: Well, thank you Alex for sticking with me and bringing me this one, and going on the journey with me. And not giving up.

ALEX: And thank you to Laura for sending us on the journey.

SOREN: Yeah.

ALEX: We love getting questions from our listeners, and Laura spent so much time talking to us about the question, about the method to find the answer. And again, about the answer itself. So we appreciate you. Thank you.

SOREN: Yeah. She is—Laura is not small to us.

ALEX: For this episode, she was the center of our universe.

SOREN: [laughs] Yes. Yeah, exactly. This episode was reported by me and Alex Neason. It was produced by Annie McEwen, with mixing help from Arianne Wack. And I gotta say, if you're gonna talk about math and space on a podcast, get yourself a Steve Strogatz. Steve, by the way, in addition to being a great mathematician, is also a great writer. And his books on math are gorgeous and yes, they have math but they're also easy to read, fun to read, funny and full of humanity. He also now has a podcast that he does called The Joy of Why, where he talks to some big name scientists of all kinds about their work but also about their lives. You can find a link to that on our website at Radiolab.org.

LULU MILLER: Coming up, we search the universe for the most average...butt. And find a whole backstory of politics, bad-fitting pants and some very terrifying statues and a whole lot of bum data. Stay tuned!

LATIF NASSER: So do you wanna start? Do you wanna wait? Up to you.

HEATHER RADKE: Hold on. I'm just—Lulu has a whole idea here.

LATIF: Oh, where is...

LATIF: Hey, I'm Latif Nasser.

LULU: I'm Lulu Miller...

HEATHER: She's just texting me.

LULU: ...who was running late.

LATIF: This is Radiolab.

HEATHER: Well, the question Lulu wanted me to ask you to start actually is...

LATIF: Mmm?

HEATHER: ...what do you think butts are for?

LATIF: What do I think butts are for? I mean, I—I think they're a—it's a portable cushion to sit on, right?

HEATHER: Huh. [laughs]

LATIF: The cheeks, I'm thinking the cheeks are like a portable...

LATIF: Okay, so today on Radiolab, we're gonna share with you all a conversation that we had with our contributing editor...

HEATHER: Well, I'm not quite...

LATIF: ...Heather Radke.

LULU: Yeah. Over the last few years, Heather has been putting her blood, her sweat, her tears, her back into a book all about...

HEATHER: Butts.

LULU: Specifically, the butt cheeks.

HEATHER: Yeah, the cheeks.

LULU: The junk in the trunk. The booty in the back.

HEATHER: Straight up. It's a book about the cheeks, not the hole.

LATIF: So if you're looking for butthole stuff, it's not here. It's not happening.

HEATHER: No.

LATIF: But Heather's book, it's called Butts: A Backstory. It's—it's pretty hefty.

LULU: [laughs] And cheeky. And juicy. But no seriously, it is a deep think on something that we don't usually think that deeply about.

HEATHER: The gluteus maximus, which is the butt muscle, it's one of, like, three butt muscles.

LATIF: It goes into the why and how of the butt muscle.

HEATHER: Yeah, there's, like, a little bit of a debate. Is the butt for running or is it more for, like, jumping?

LATIF: Not for cushions, apparently. But also...

HEATHER: There's this other part which is actually the part that's, like, way more complicated and fraught, which is the fat part.

LATIF: Because, Heather explained, it's the fat that makes the butt the thing that society obsesses over.

HEATHER: And that's why, like, the Brazilian butt lift is one of the most popular cosmetic surgery procedures in America today.

LATIF: Brazilian butt lift. I've never heard of such a thing.

HEATHER: Oh my god, Latif. You're gonna learn so much...

LATIF: And why is it Brazilian?

HEATHER: ...when you read my book. [laughs]

LATIF: Okay, great. I'm so excited.

LULU: What's up?

LATIF: Oh!

HEATHER: Hi.

LATIF: Hey Lulu.

LULU: I'm so sorry I'm late. I've been so excited for this for weeks. So can—just keep going and I will orient as you go.

HEATHER: Okay. So I guess the—just the, like, to finish this thought, Latif, it's like, so butts are also highly sexualized.

LATIF: Right.

HEATHER: So there's a question that becomes like, is part of the reason they look the way they do is because of sexual selection, not just natural selection?

LULU: And I guess your book kind of looks at how, even just in a few different eras, which are pretty close to one another, just how much the—the in-vogue butt in a certain society changes.

HEATHER: Right. That becomes the question.

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: Because, you know, like elbows for example. We don't put a lot of meaning into how elbows look. But what a butt looks like is like, it's a sign of beauty, it's a sign of disgust. It's been highly racialized. It's, like—was used to put people into hierarchies. And there's a real question of, like, why have butts come to mean so much when they could just mean nothing? And so a lot of the book is sort of an exploration of—of all the things they've come to mean, and why they've come to mean that.

LULU: Well, yeah. I mean, so what is the one...

LATIF: So we talked about butts from every possible angle, but the part of the conversation we want to play for you today pretty much straight through actually, was about more than just the butt.

LULU: Yeah. Because at a certain point in Heather's reporting, she uncovered this moment in time where the ideal that so many of us measure our bodies up against—not just our butts, our whole bodies—became concrete in a way that even today still haunts us.

HEATHER: Yeah.

LATIF: All right, go for it.

HEATHER: So I want to tell you about two statues that were made in the late 1930s, the early 1940s.

LATIF: Okay.

HEATHER: They were created by these two artists. Or actually, one guy was a gynecologist and one guy was an artist, Dickinson and Belskie.

LULU: A classic gyno-art duo.

LATIF: [laughs]

HEATHER: So Belskie's the artist. Dickinson's the gynecologist. And these guys were trying to make these statues, one was of a man and one was a woman. And they were called "Norma" and "Normman." And Normman is spelled N-O-R-M-M-A-N. So it's like "norm-man."

LATIF: Norm man. Okay.

LULU: Norm Man!

HEATHER: So...[laughs]

LULU: He's normal!

HEATHER: Well, you kind of get what they were probably up to. They—they weren't trying to be coy, [laughs] I think. Yeah, so they were part of a kind of eugenicist push in the 1930s to show people what, like, a good body is.

LATIF: Wh—?

HEATHER: Yeah, go ahead.

LATIF: Oh yeah. No, no, no. Just one thing that just popped to mind when you first said it before you went into the eugenics route, was this—were these statues supposed to be like, "Oh, this is the average person?" or was it like, "This is the exemplary person?" This is the...

HEATHER: Well, I mean Latif, you hit on it right there. It's the—so one of the things that's so interesting about these statues is—and this time, is that the normal is the exemplary.

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: So, okay. First of all, the purpose of them was they were gonna go into the American Museum of Natural History in New York. They were gonna be put on display there to show the everyday New York person what, like, a normal American body should look like.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Ugh!

HEATHER: Right? And the '30s in America, and the '30s across the world, were a time when people were trying to optimize humans. It was a time obsessed with data and, like, new data was available. And what they were actually doing was they were like, "We're gonna make statues of the perfectly average, the perfectly normal American." So it turns out, if you want—if it's 1939 or eight or whatever, and you want to make the average American man, it's very easy because of the military.

LATIF: Wait, why?

HEATHER: So, you know, when you go into the military, they measure you. So they had all that from World War I. But they actually had no data for women. They looked and looked and looked. The data wasn't as easy to come by. And then they found a data set, and it's a pretty exciting data set for many reasons.

LATIF: This is where Heather's story about eugenics and the birth of Norma, the perfectly average woman, crosses paths with another notable arc in our history starting back in the 1800s, which is the way we make the clothes we wear.

HEATHER: We're talking about the 19th century. We're talking about the rise of the garment industry.

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: Now you should be thinking, like, sweatshops, New York City. Like, the cotton is coming up from the South, they're turning it into clothes for an increasingly large white collar male workforce.

LULU: Hmm.

HEATHER: So a huge amount of money is going into garment manufacturing. And in order to make money, you're always trying to lower costs of production, right? So if you can have a machine that cuts everything, you know, it's like—let's say you have—like, ideally you have three sizes: small, medium, large. You have one machine that's cutting small, one machine that's cutting medium, one machine that's cutting large, right? So if you have a hundred sizes, all of a sudden it costs you a lot more, right?

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Hmm. So the more nuance, the less profitable.

HEATHER: Exactly. And there had been a sizing system for men, but half the population is still having to make all of their own clothes or hiring someone to make all of their own clothes.

LATIF: Because of economics or because they can't afford it, or why?

HEATHER: No, the half is women.

LATIF: Oh, the half is women. Okay.

LULU: So there aren't sizes really at all?

HEATHER: For women?

LULU: Or they're just—yeah.

HEATHER: Not really. And I mean they're trying, because they realize...

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: ...because the men's side...

LATIF: There's a huge market here, yeah.

HEATHER: ...is, like, going like gangbusters. It's, like, really helpful.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: And catalog shopping had become this really big thing. You know, it's like Sears catalog is like—everyone's buying out of the Sears catalog. But people—women were sending back all these clothes because they didn't fit. But then in the '30s, this woman named Ruth O'Brien comes along. And she's at the Bureau of Home Economics.

LULU: Which was a bureau?

HEATHER: Of the government, yeah.

LULU: Okay.

LATIF: A bureau of, like, the US government?

HEATHER: Yeah. Ruth decided that she's gonna try to tackle the problem of coming up with the standard set of clothing sizes for women. And oddly enough, she actually ends up confronting the same problem that Dickinson and Belskie had when they were trying to create Norma, which is that they don't have enough data.

LULU: Like what does a woman's body actually look like?

HEATHER: Right. And so, like, if you're gonna—I mean, it makes sense, right? If you and I—if the three of us were like...

LATIF: Yeah.

HEATHER: ..."Let's figure out a sizing system," it feels like the first thing we'd want to do is be like, "All right, so what are the different sizes of bodies?"

LATIF: Yeah.

HEATHER: And it's the—it's the '30s, so the WPA hires women across the country to go out into—to little towns and whatever. They're called "measuring squads." And they [laughs]—I know!

LULU: Like, measure their neighbors?

HEATHER: Well, it's like they have these little measuring parties, kind of, and they—like, women gather. They put on these kind of government-issued bras that are like, you know, those like bandeau bras, like, that are just like boob covers, and little cotton undies. I think there's like 26 different measurements. So it's like, elbow to their wrist. Their...

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: ...thigh girth, their heel length. These kinds of things. So they're measured a gajillion different ways. And the idea was to try to find, like, as many different kinds of American women but, like, let's put a specially large asterisk there.

LULU: [laughs] So how did they...

HEATHER: Okay, so there were some...

LULU: ...go...[laughs]

HEATHER: ...some problems with this, as you might guess. One is that older women didn't want to do this. So a lot of the...

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: ...data skewed younger, and they had to adjust for that. The other thing was that Ruth O'Brien erased all the data from non-white women.

LATIF: Whoa! What was that about?

LULU: But they didn't get—but if they had to erase it, you had to get some, right?

HEATHER: Well, okay. So imagine it this way. It's like—I'm, like, Susie Q Measurer, and I'm like, "Okay. I'm gonna put an ad in the newspaper in Cleveland or Cincinnati or whatever" and say, "Come to this place." Maybe you—everyone gets a cracker, or they get some money or something. And some of the people who come are not white. And especially, let's just remember, this is a time when "white" is also—like, Italians probably weren't considered white. Eastern Europeans, Jewish women. These people were probably...

LATIF: Not white.

HEATHER: Not considered white. So, you know, maybe a Jewish woman, maybe a Black woman shows up. So Ruth O'Brien actually says in her materials that we should still measure these women so as to not create bad feelings amongst the group, but then we will throw out the data.

LATIF: Pssh!

LULU: Whoa!

LATIF: What? That's just so...

LULU: I'm not—so we're getting this data, but I don't care?

HEATHER: I know. It's so weird.

LATIF: And you would also think—oh, sorry. Go.

HEATHER: Well, yes. You would also think women who are not white buy clothes, and so...

LATIF: Correct. That's what I was about to say...

HEATHER: ...it would be useful to know.

LATIF: ...that it's in their financial best interest—it's in the garment industry's financial best interest to have this be as representative of as many people as possible.

HEATHER: I mean, I think—I guess a thought I've had about it, and this just is, like, further racist, it's just more specifically racist is, you know, at this point in history, race wasn't just being codified based on skin color, but on—but also based on morphological difference, invented or not. And so probably she was thinking something like, "Well, if we have Black women and Italian women and Jewish women, the clothes won't fit white women."

LATIF: And did it seem to—even though it was only for white women, did it seem to—like, did women clump to the sizes? Like—like, was there a...

LULU: Oh, Latif!

LATIF: ...like, a—like, an obvious small, medium, large? Or was it just like...?

HEATHER: So we're gonna talk about that, and it's a whole complicated answer. But let me—I'm just gonna—first let's talk about Dickenson and Belskie and what happened with the statues, Norma and Normman.

LATIF: Okay, great.

HEATHER: So they found Ruth's data and they were, like, super psyched because, as we have discussed, it was a time of data. And they—I mean, for sure, they thought that thing about her throwing out all the non-white people was a feature not a bug, you know? And they—they do statues, and then they were first displayed at the American Museum of Natural History as part of, like, one of those eugenics congresses. And people could come and see them, you know, just like they go see the T-Rex now.

LULU: Can we take a second to all look at Norma and Normman together?

LATIF: Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure.

LULU: Okay. I just found one. Or you probably have one. Wanna just shoot it in the Slack?

HEATHER: Well, I'll send—there's this—there was a cat—here. I'll put it in the...

LATIF: Yeah, put it in the Slack.

HEATHER: Okay. Let's see.

LATIF: Or the chat, whatever. Oh, that's Norm?

LATIF: Oh, Norm!

HEATHER: Oh, yeah. Wait, this—this is a good one too. This is...

LATIF: Oh.

LULU: It is weird looking at these statues, these white, alabaster visions of the eugenicist brain and the eugenicist vision. Like, it—it feels almost like looking at something evil to look at them.

LATIF: I mean, it does—it does—it does do that. It also—there's also something about it, though, that is—feels ridiculous a little bit.

HEATHER: Like, when I look at Norma, first of all, she has no body hair, which is—I find weird.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: Although Normman does.

LULU: Oh, my God, you're right. He has!

LATIF: Oh, Normman does and Norma doesn't.

LULU: They're naked! Like, how messed up...

HEATHER: I also think her breasts are so strange, like, it's like somebody who had never seen breasts...

LULU: Sculpted breasts.

HEATHER: ...just affixed them to her. [laughs]

LULU: They put two grapefruits on a torso.

LULU: Yeah, so he's got—so they're naked. You're right. So Norm—Normman has, like, pubic hair and she does not.

HEATHER: Yes. She does not.

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: And I think—I mean, I have a picture—it took me a long time to actually get a picture of her from behind, which I obviously...

LATIF: Oh, yeah!

LULU: Right!

LATIF: So—so tell us about her...

LULU: Show us that!

LATIF: ...her butt. Tell us.

LULU: Yeah. What...

LATIF: Tell us about her butt.

LULU: Tell us about her butt.

HEATHER: I mean, it's very—it's very normal. [laughs] I don't know how to say this. It's, like, exactly the butt you imagine on the other side.

LATIF: Huh.

HEATHER: It's—it's, like, not that big. It's not that flat. It's sort of a little bit strong. It's kind of pert. It doesn't seem like it would, like, fill out a pair of pants completely, if that makes any sense? [laughs]

LULU: But they're—but seeing them in this—there's this one picture here with them side by side, and they look like robots. They're standing stick straight, and they're just these, like, specimens of...

LATIF: Like Stepford wives or something?

LULU: Yeah, there you go. It's like a Stepford wife and husband...

HEATHER: Well, I think...

LULU: ...that are just like...

HEATHER: ...one of the things about them is, like, they're not artistic. Like, there's like—like, they're so—like you're saying, they're, like, ramrod straight. It's like it's not meant to evoke something emotional. It's meant to invoke something intellectual, maybe?

LULU: Yeah. It's just like, "Here's normal. Come behold."

HEATHER: Yeah, come behold normal. And, you know, okay, so normal is a very exciting idea at this moment in history for reasons that I think we can be critical of and also sympathetic towards.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: Like, this is—you know, World War II is happening in this era. Like, the other headlines in the newspaper are like, "Hiroshima Bombed."

LULU: Yeah, right.

HEATHER: And it's like a big moment where, like, people are like, "I'd really like for my person who's fighting in the war to come home and maybe, like, we just get married and have, like, a pretty simple, straightforward life." Like, you can sort of see why in this moment, normal and Normman and Norma is an appealing idea.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

HEATHER: Like, even in—even though we can be kind of critical of it, I also think it's like—like I'm saying it's kind of a reasonable thing.

LULU: Yeah. Okay. Okay.

HEATHER: And so then after they were displayed at the American Museum Natural History, they were bought by this hygiene museum in Cleveland. And hygiene museums are a very eugenicist project. They're—like, the guy who ran this museum, he was—he had—his thing is like, "I want people to want to be normal." So—and when I say normal, I want them to be, like, properly white, et cetera, et cetera, all the stuff that we've been talking about. So he decides that he's gonna have a contest to find the most normal girl in Cleveland.

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: [laughs] And like was it truly a contest? It was like...

HEATHER: Yes! So this is, like, big news in Cleveland.

LULU: [laughs]

HEATHER: Like, it's in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. So what they're encouraging women to do is measure themselves and send in their measurements.

LULU: I hate that. I hate this so much.

LATIF: It just gets better and better. Yeah.

HEATHER: So all these women are sending in their measurements. Like, your ankle width and your, like, knee-to-hip ratio. It's not just like, you know, like, when you measure for clothes, you measure like three or four things. This is 10 or 12 things, and you're sending this in. All told, 3,864 women enter this contest.

LATIF: Whoa!

LULU: Wow.

HEATHER: Yeah. How—how—how many surv—like, how many winners are there in this contest, do you think?

LULU: None. I don't think any are, like, exactly Norma. That's my guess.

LATIF: I think there's one winner.

HEATHER: Well, you're sort of both right. None of them are Norma's measurements, but they had to choose a winner because they did all this stuff. [laughs]

LATIF: Right.

HEATHER: So they choose this woman named Martha Skidmore, who's the most normal girl in Cleveland. And she apparently is the closest. And she also, like, just so perfectly fits the story of the time. She's a ticket taker at the local movie theater. She has recently quit her job as, like, a gauge grinder at a factory so that like the boys coming home can have...

LATIF: Their jobs.

HEATHER: ...have the job back. And this is the quote from the newspaper. "She likes to swim, dance and bowl, and thought she was an average individual in her taste, and nothing out of the ordinary had ever happened to her until the Norma search came along."

LULU: Oh, my God! Until the...

LATIF: Oh, the act of being chosen herself as the norm—most normal made her not normal anymore.

LULU: Wow!

HEATHER: And then I tried to track her down. I, like, really tried. She dead. But I tried to find some people who knew her or something. I found her obituary and, you know, we can't know how the rest of her life panned out, but she—you know, the obituary suggests she did have a pretty, like, quote-unquote, "normal" life for the rest of her life. She had a couple of kids, she never left Ohio.

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: And that's all we know about Martha Skidmore. Okay. So we talked about Ruth O'Brien's study. And I kind of—I kind of love this and also hate it because it's like, in a very practical way, this would be a good problem to have solved at some point. Out of her data, she creates, like 26 or 27 different sizes.

LATIF: Huh.

HEATHER: That's too many. [laughs]

LATIF: Clearly too many, right.

HEATHER: But we still kind of use a version of this. So the garment industry sort of takes her 26 sizes and then turns it into, like, a version of this sizing system we have now for women, which is, like, two, four, six, eight, 10, 12. There's not 26 sizes. Even if you had the 26 sizes, it probably still wouldn't work because human bodies are diverse enough that they're consistently resisting the standardization of sizing.

LATIF: Wait, there's no odd number sizes?

HEATHER: [laughs]

LULU: No!

LATIF: Really?

LULU: Does it work—do men have the same sizes?

HEATHER: No.

LULU: Oh, they don't?

HEATHER: No! [laughs]

LULU: They don't have—wait. You live your whole life without two, four, six...

HEATHER: They have...

LULU: ...eight, 10, 12?

HEATHER: Lulu, you know how men's sizes work?

LATIF: I know what I am. I don't know what anybody else is.

LULU: What are you?

LATIF: Okay, so for my pants, let's say, right?

LULU: Yeah.

LATIF: I'm, like, sometimes a 28, sometimes a 29.

LULU: Oh, because that's the actual inches.

HEATHER: Yeah, that's the thing.

LATIF: Oh, that's...

LULU: Different.

LATIF: ...different.

LULU: That's not a size, that's just like...

LATIF: That's a different, different thing.

HEATHER: No, no, no.

LULU: It's like a...

HEATHER: That's why it's smart.

LULU: Wait. Men don't have...

HEATHER: No.

LULU: ...sized pants? They just have...

HEATHER: Well...

LULU: Oh my God. We're in different shopping realities!

HEATHER: No, Lulu. They do have sized pants...

LATIF: Completely.

HEATHER: They're just—they make sense. It's like, the 29 is—it's like 29...

LULU: It is 29 inches.

HEATHER: ...waist or whatever.

LATIF: Right.

HEATHER: A size eight has no meaning of any kind. [laughs]

LATIF: So weird!

LULU: Okay. I just need a moment from that—my mind being blown that, like, men don't go to their Forever 21 section and have...

HEATHER: No.

LULU: ...like, sizes as well. Okay. But in the story...

HEATHER: Yeah.

LULU: ...after Ruth gets a decent data set and then messes it up by throwing away anyone who's a person of color, apparently...

HEATHER: Mm-hmm.

LULU: ...does that literally then turn into sizes?

HEATHER: It does.

LULU: It's not just like, "Here's a recommendation." It's like "That is...

HEATHER: No, no, no.

LULU: ...our sizes."

HEATHER: It's a recommendation. And then it becomes standard. I mean...

LATIF: But she recommends 26 sizes.

HEATHER: Yeah. And then they're like, "That's—we're not doing that."

LULU: "That's undoable. But we'll do 10."

HEATHER: And then they come up with a different set.

LATIF: Right.

HEATHER: And that...

LULU: Based on her data?

HEATHER: Based on her data. Then that sizing system, they keep it for a while as, like, the rule, if that makes any sense. Like, that's like—like, this is how it's supposed to be. Then it becomes optional. By the '70s, it's...

LATIF: It becomes optional?

HEATHER: By the '70s, it's optional. By the '80s, it's like...

LATIF: Meaning like a company...

HEATHER: ...completely arbitrary.

LATIF: ....if they had their own schema that they wanted to use, they could use it?

HEATHER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also basically it means that, like, a size eight is no longer standardized. And now...

LATIF: Right. Which seems stupid.

HEATHER: So what happens is, like, okay, I work at H&M or whatever, Levi's or some—one of these companies, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna make a pair of jeans." First I design the pair of jeans on a mannequin.

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: So a mannequin is, like, pretty far from human. It's hard and immobile. And these things actually kind of start to matter in a way. Like, I hadn't actually thought that much about, like—the next step after that is they get their fit model to come in and try it on.

LATIF: A fit model?

HEATHER: Yeah, because there is one person who every garment fits.

LATIF: What?

HEATHER: It's a fit model.

LATIF: So like a—like—like the king? The king's foot.

HEATHER: Yeah. Basically. Except it's like...

LATIF: She's the king.

HEATHER: A woman named Natasha whose...

LATIF: [gasps]

HEATHER: ...whose butt is the butt that jeans companies use to make the jeans fit.

LATIF: Even different companies? I would've imagined that there was one king for each company, but there's one king for even multiple companies?

HEATHER: She's the king. She's the king for, like, seven or eight companies, and it's like—she's, like, got the...

LATIF: Wow!

HEATHER: ..."butt du jour." She got like the sort of "body du jour" for the...

LATIF: Who chose her? How was she chosen? How was she anointed?

HEATHER: She went, she was like...

LATIF: How was she crowned?

HEATHER: She was like a—in college, and went with her friend to pick up a check at her modeling company. And the modeling agent was like, "Hey, you kind of got, like, a good—a good butt," basically. "Like, maybe you wanna do some fit modeling?" And then these companies like her because her—basically, her butt's not too small and it's not too big.

LATIF: Is her life just, like, incredible? And she just walks around and she has...

LULU: Like everything fits?

LATIF: ...like, no problems at all?

LULU: 'Cause everything's...

LATIF: Everything fits?

LULU: ...modeled off her body?

HEATHER: I mean, I think clothes fit her really well and...

LATIF: Wow!

HEATHER: ...and she's kind of—it's kind of—the thing I think about is like she's the only person they fit. I mean...

LULU: [laughs]

HEATHER: ...unless you...

LATIF: Right!

HEATHER: ...have her exact body, you know, and her exact measurements. I mean, she try—and, you know, it's like this whole process. She tries them on several times. She, like, helps them. I mean, she's lovely. You know, it's like not her fault that she's like...

LATIF: No, sure.

HEATHER: She makes sure that the—like, the belt loops are in the right place and yeah.

LATIF: And she's a white lady, I'm guessing?

HEATHER: White lady. Yep. In LA.

LULU: Is it the Ruth O’Brien constructed butt though? Were they like, "Wow, you're exciting to us because you're so norm—quote-unquote 'normal'?" Is it like "You are...

HEATHER: It is a little like she's Norma. She's the new Norma.

LATIF: She's the new Norma.

HEATHER: I mean, it's a little—there's like some ways it's different than Norma. But it's—I—I think the idea is that normal is actually this kind of ideal. It's a fantasy, just like "perfect" or "best" or, you know, "most beautiful" is, because there's kind of no such thing. And also, like, Natasha, you know, she's a relatively thin white woman. You know, I'm not sure we would quite call her "average" either in the sense that, like, the average American woman weighs surely more than her and has very different proportions than her.

LATIF: Hmm.

HEATHER: So...

LATIF: But at least that's a—that's like a real person who exists, who we know. Those—those proportions...

HEATHER: Oh, it's much better than if...

LATIF: ...make sense. Yeah.

HEATHER: Yeah. I mean, because this is what happens: they take the thing they made for the mannequin, and then they give it to Natasha. And she puts it on and she's like, "Actually, like, there's a huge gape in the front." Or like, "When I pull up these pants, the belt loops are gonna fall off."

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Hmm.

HEATHER: I kind of love this part because it's like about having an actual body, no matter how perfect your body is.

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: Like, the fact that it's, like, fleshy and has a digestive system and needs to, like, sit down sometimes. [laughs]

LULU: And, like, sweats. I mean, yeah, so what is the fit? Is it just like in a nice clean air-conditioned room? Or are they like, "Go take 'em for a spin for two days, and make sure you run some stressful errands so that you sweat"?

HEATHER: No, it's not like that. But it is like, they do several rounds of this where she'll sort of try on, like, a first draft and they'll go, like, through several drafts.

LATIF: Wow. Interesting.

HEATHER: And basically, like, they try—they make them fit her perfectly.

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: You know, that—so like, let's say she's a size six, they're making hers to be the size six. Now of course, I'm not a size six, most people aren't. So they have to make size two, four, eight, 12. And that is a matter of proportions. And it's all mathematical measurements. So there's no—it's not like there's a size...

LULU: There's no other...

HEATHER: No.

LULU: There's like a "two" Natasha.

HEATHER: There's not a 'two," a four," an "eight," a "12" Natasha.

LULU: Huh.

HEATHER: But you can sort of start to see how this might be flawed.

LULU: I know!

HEATHER: ...right?

LATIF: So it is possible that no human being actually fits any of the other sizes.

HEATHER: That's right. [laughs]

LATIF: That is insane!

HEATHER: Yeah.

LATIF: Because I keep—I keep imagining—trying to imagine like analogs to—in other industries.

HEATHER: Well, I think one way I think about it is like this: it's like manufacturing was meant for—like, if you make a car, "Okay, we're gonna get iron ore, turn it into something that's uniform. And then we're gonna turn that thing into the hood of your car. And we're gonna make them all exactly the same." In this case, bodies cannot be forced into that kind of interchangeability. But we have to treat them as though they're interchangeable in order to be—I mean, in order to make clothes for them at, like—for cheap, basically.

LATIF: Right.

HEATHER: Like, we have to treat our bodies like they're all the same, even though they are not in any way the same at all.

LULU: Maybe is it because, as the expectations of fashion have gotten more brutal, it's like, have it be—it's not—it's like sure, a small, medium, large t-shirt could probably fit everyone. But as we want, like, a well-tailored pant that's tight here but loose here and has room to breathe and like—maybe it's just that our—that fashion is...

LATIF: Right.

LULU: ...getting like the tunic and the belt worked!

LATIF: Right.

LULU: But as we want...

LATIF: We got—we got too picky.

LULU: ...we want, you know, like a—like, I just—that—maybe it's just that as fashion's closing in and we want every millimeter to look good.

HEATHER: And it's not—yeah, I think that's right, because it's not just that we want to look good, it's that we have impo—we have imparted this idea of what it means to have something fit you.

LULU: Right.

HEATHER: Like, I mean, it's the—it's the moment in the dressing room where you're like, "Why—why doesn't anything fit my body? Something's wrong with my body." It means something to us when clothes fit or don't fit. And it doesn't mean something about the clothes, it means something about us.

LATIF: Mmm.

HEATHER: Like, we—we ascribe the problem to our bodies rather than to the object.

LULU: And you're saying, like, that—that humiliating feeling, a feeling not measuring up, like—I think something many people have been told is like, "Oh, it's a false standard of beauty. Like, normalcy isn't real." But to see it so nakedly laid out. Like, you finding that creation story of a Norm and a Norma, like...

HEATHER: Mm-hmm.

LULU: ...there's something that is relief. That you can just be like, "This is a specific concept of norm that, like, I can just reject, 'cause I don't like their science. I don't like their mission." Like...

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: It doesn't matter if it doesn't fit 'cause that's Norma, and that is a monster I don't wanna be haunted by. There's something empowering about you finding its Genesis story.

HEATHER: I think I said this last time, too. It's like I sort of love now that, like, the idea that bodies can't be fit into these mechanized creations, like, that—it's like the 20th century and the 19th century too to some extent, it's like all these people are trying so hard to make bodies into interchangeable parts, but they can't be. And it's because, like, we're all sort of specific and particular and exciting in our own ways. And I don't know. It's sort of corny maybe?

LULU: Or is it like you'll just never dream of something fitting 'cause you're like, "It never will! Bodies are cooler than the fashion industry."

LATIF: Right.

LULU: Or, "Bodies are more expansive."

HEATHER: Yeah. I mean, I think that would be the ideal. But then at the same time—I mean, actually this is in the conclusion of the book, like—at the same time, I—you know, I go and I try on clothes and I still feel like...

LULU: Yeah.

HEATHER: ...you can't unbrainwash. Like, information...

LATIF: Like, even knowing that...

HEATHER: ...doesn't quite work that way.

LATIF: You can't stop projecting the—like...

LULU: Yeah. Does knowledge bust shame? Does knowledge, like, bust your shame?

LATIF: Yeah. Does it? Or do you—yeah, do you...

HEATHER: No! Of course it doesn't. But it does—you know what it does is, like, you can sort of go in that dressing room, and you can try on your jeans and you can be like, "Oh, dang, I wish these jeans fit me." And then you can sort of be like, "But they don't, they fit Natasha."

LATIF: Yeah.

HEATHER: [laughs]

LULU: And Norma. And Martha.

HEATHER: And it's not—I can sort of tell myself a different story.

LATIF: Yeah.

HEATHER: It's—the story isn't, "There's something wrong with my body. My butt's too big. My thighs are the wrong proportions," whatever the story is that you're telling yourself about your body. I have, like, a different story, which is like, the sizing can never work. Even if they wanted it to, they can't make it work. And this isn't supposed to fit. You know?

LATIF: That was our contributing editor, Heather Radke. Her book, "Butts: A Backstory," will be out very soon. You can find a link to pre-order it on our website, Radiolab.org.

 

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