Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving

Summary

Podcast Summary: Something You Should Know Episode: Ridiculous Rules of the English Language & How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving
Host: Mike Carruthers
Release Date: May 19, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into two intriguing subjects: the convoluted rules of the English language and the intricate infrastructure that keeps cities functioning smoothly. He engages with two experts—Gabe Henry, author of Enough Is Enough: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, and Sybil Darabel, Professor of Urban Engineering and Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago—to unpack these complex topics.

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Part 1: Ridiculous Rules of the English Language

Guest: Gabe Henry
Timestamp: [05:00] – [29:18]

The Complexity of English Spelling

Gabe Henry opens the discussion by highlighting the unique challenges posed by English spelling. Unlike other languages that have more consistent spelling rules, English is notorious for its irregularities. For instance, words like "rough," "tough," and "cough" all have the same ending but different pronunciations, none of which include an "F" as the spelling might suggest.

Gabe Henry [07:06]: "English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings, the sheer number of pronunciations of the letters. We're really alone in that."

Historical Attempts at Spelling Reform

Henry traces the history of spelling reform efforts, noting that despite numerous attempts—from the 12th century monk Ormond doubling consonants to signify short vowels, to Noah Webster's simplified spellings—most have failed to gain widespread acceptance.

Gabe Henry [09:30]: "The story of simplified spelling is really a history of failure. It's a history of radical-minded, eccentric people highly committed to one singular idea."

Impact on Language Learners and Native Speakers

The irregularities in English spelling not only pose challenges for non-native speakers but also affect native speakers, often leading to stigmatization of poor spellers from a young age.

Gabe Henry [15:01]: "There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling. Children are told they're bad spellers, which can impact their self-esteem and perception of their own abilities."

Modern Manifestations of Simplified Spelling

Henry discusses how the simplified spelling movement has influenced modern branding and advertising, leading to memorable brand names like "KoolAid" and "Krispy Kreme" that deviate from standard spellings to stand out in the market.

Gabe Henry [18:04]: "In the 1920s, brands like KoolAid with a K and Krispy Kreme emerged from the simplified spelling movement, making these products more catchy and memorable."

The Future of English Spelling

Despite ongoing resistance from language purists, Henry believes that English spelling will continue to evolve towards simplification, especially with the influence of digital communication methods like texting.

Gabe Henry [24:02]: "200 years from now, I would probably be surprised if we're spelling in the same exact way we're spelling now. I would tend to think that it will become simpler and shorter."

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Part 2: How Infrastructure Keeps Cities Moving

Guest: Sybil Darabel
Timestamp: [32:47] – [50:50]

The Complexity of Urban Infrastructure

Sybil Darabel provides an overview of the multifaceted infrastructure systems that underpin modern cities, using Chicago as a primary example. She explains how various systems—water, electricity, gas, and internet—are intricately connected yet physically separated to maintain functionality and safety.

Sybil Darabel [34:14]: "The pressure in the water system is dictated by the fire department to ensure that hydrants can function effectively, which influences how water is pumped to tall buildings."

Challenges of Aging Infrastructure

Darabel emphasizes the pressing issue of aging infrastructure, noting that much of it was built decades ago and is now in dire need of maintenance or replacement.

Sybil Darabel [49:44]: "A lot of water pipes in the streets are 100 years old. We're making decisions that will impact our grandchildren and great-grandchildren."

Multifunctional Infrastructure Solutions

One of Darabel's favorite innovations is the concept of multifunctional infrastructure, where a single system serves multiple purposes. She cites Malaysia's use of tunnels that double as both transportation corridors and stormwater storage systems.

Sybil Darabel [50:50]: "In Kuala Lumpur, they have a massive tunnel that eases traffic congestion during dry periods and stores stormwater during heavy rains, preventing citywide flooding."

Interdependency of Systems

Darabel highlights the interdependency of different infrastructure systems. For instance, water treatment relies heavily on electricity, making the resilience of one system dependent on the other.

Sybil Darabel [46:40]: "Water treatment requires a lot of electricity. If something happens to the electricity supply, it affects water distribution and, consequently, the entire population."

Strategies for Modernizing Infrastructure

When cities need to upgrade or add new infrastructure, they often have to decide between replicating existing systems or innovating based on current needs and technological advancements.

Sybil Darabel [35:12]: "You can either look at what other cities are doing and reproduce it or leverage what you have and optimize based on your city's unique needs."

Addressing Depopulation

Darabel touches on the issue of depopulation in smaller cities, where shrinking populations make it challenging to justify the maintenance and expansion of existing infrastructure.

Sybil Darabel [43:36]: "When a city starts to lose population, you're left with aging infrastructure that's oversized and lacks the resources for proper maintenance."

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Conclusion

This episode of Something You Should Know provides a deep dive into two seemingly disparate but fundamentally crucial aspects of everyday life: the complexities of the English language and the vital infrastructure that keeps our cities operational. Through insightful conversations with experts Gabe Henry and Sybil Darabel, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of the challenges and innovations in these fields, highlighting the ongoing evolution and adaptation necessary to meet future demands.

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Notable Quotes:

• Gabe Henry [07:06]: "English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings..."

• Gabe Henry [15:01]: "There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling..."

• Sybil Darabel [34:14]: "The pressure in the water system is dictated by the fire department..."

• Sybil Darabel [50:50]: "In Kuala Lumpur, they have a massive tunnel that eases traffic congestion during dry periods and stores stormwater during heavy rains..."

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This structured summary encapsulates the key discussions and insights from the episode, providing a comprehensive overview for those who haven't listened while highlighting the expertise of the guests through notable quotes.

Transcript

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Gabe Henry]

There were early efforts people were proposing spelling words like laugh laf though the story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure.

[Mike Carruthers]

Also why doing fun things alone may be more fun than you think. And infrastructure all the systems that make a city or town work.

[Sybil Darabel]

It's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris because they will have a different system partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves and partly based on when the systems were built because things evolve.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Sybil Darabel]

Something you should know, Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today. Something you should know with Mike Kirk.

[Mike Carruthers]

Rothers I'm going to guess that you are less likely to use cash to pay for things than you used to. I think that's true for most people, and the problem is that that's having an effect on your bank account. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something you should know. We're not yet a cashless society, but we are a lot closer than we used to be. Consumers generally report that they prefer to pay for purchases when with plastic rather than cash. And consumers generally concede that they know they are more likely to spend more money when they use plastic or their digital wallet than if they use cash. There just seems to be something to the idea that by not using real money to pay for things, you're likely to spend more. Now let's get a little more granular. You are likely to spend more money with a credit card than a debit card, and you're likely to spend more with a debit card than with cash. So just by using cash instead of plastic, you will spend less. But even that gets more interesting. The next time you need cash, skip the ATM and go to the bank and ask for new $50 bills. Why? Because research says you're more willing to spend older bills than newer ones, and you're much more willing to spend smaller denomination bills than larger ones. So skip the plastic. Stuff your wallet with new 50 or maybe even hundred dollar bills. And it's almost for sure that you will end up keeping more of your own money. And that is something you should know. If you remember back to your early days in school, you probably recall being stumped by the fact that the way many words in English are spelled makes no sense at all. Why, for example, these three rough, tough, and cough. None of these words have an F in them, but they are pronounced as if they do. And I'm sure it wouldn't take you long to come up with a bunch of words that are spelled differently than the way they're pronounced. Why? Why don't we change the spelling to make it easier for everyone? Well, here to explain these strange oddities of English is Gabe Henry. He's the author of a book called Enough is Enough, Our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. Hi, Gabe. Welcome to something you should know.

[Gabe Henry]

Hi, Mike. Happy to be here.

[Mike Carruthers]

So, first, I'm curious if other languages have this same problem, if they have words that are spelled in nonsensical ways the way we do in English.

[Gabe Henry]

English is unique in its spelling inconsistencies. French is a little bit inconsistent. It's probably second to English in terms of its inefficient use of letters. But English really is on its own in terms of the unreliable pronunciations, the unreliable spellings, the sheer number of pronunciations of the letters, Ough, though, tough, cough, bow. We're really alone in that. The reason being is we. England was really subject to a lot of invasion over thousands of years. Viking conquests, new settlements, dialects, spellings, pronunciations. And we're just really trying to manage that. And we're really an accidental language that came together from many different regions, many different histories, many different peoples. And trying our best to pretend to be one homogenous language.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, what a mess.

[Gabe Henry]

It sure is.

[Mike Carruthers]

So why didn't someone many, many years ago say, you know what, we need to have a meeting. We need to sit down, look at this language we've got here and standardize some things so it's not so crazy.

[Gabe Henry]

There were early efforts, as early as the 12th century, there was one man named Ormond. He was a monk. And his problem that he saw in English was the inconsistent ways that we denote long and short vowel sounds. So he came up with a solution of denoting short vowel sounds in which he doubled the consonant that follows it. So you take a word like sir, sir, and he would spell it S, I, R, R. And he tried to get this to be picked up. He wrote a whole book of poetry in this new spelling. Ultimately it was just too much of a sprawling lengthening of the language. And what people really craved was something a little shorter. But his effort was the first to try to bring consistency to it. Then there were efforts in the 1500s, the 1600s, and it was in the 1700s that it really became the domain of America and American intellectuals to try to simplify the language they were speaking.

[Mike Carruthers]

And it seems like they failed.

[Gabe Henry]

They generally failed. The story of simplified spelling, the story of spelling reform is really a history of failure. It's a history, it's a history of futility. It's a history of radical minded, eccentric people highly committed to one singular idea and kind of blocking out everything around them, tunnel visioned on this one thing. So people were proposing spelling words like laugh, L, A, F, though, T, H, O. And these weren't just nobodies. These were people like Noah Webster, who was responsible for Webster's Dictionary. He had radical ideas for simplifying every English word to its most pure phonetic essence. And yes, generally I'd say about 99% of these efforts failed.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, you would think if anybody had the chops to anyone had the right influence to change the language, it would be Noah Webster, since he was the dictionary guy. So if he couldn't do it. So where are we now? I mean, as you say, people have tried throughout history, but are people trying now or have we pretty much thrown in the towel and we've just said this is the way we spell these words? Live with it.

[Gabe Henry]

There is a version of the simplified spelling movement that still exists. It doesn't have momentum, but there is a community of people that are continuing to try to simplify it.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, like so many things that never get off the ground, there's no money in it, right? There's no profit motive for changing the language, at least not directly that, that anybody could probably see. And so if there's, if there's. No payoff, then there's no payoff.

[Gabe Henry]

There were profit values, there were profit motives for this. Specifically among businessmen in the late 1800s, they viewed simplified spelling as something that would increase productivity and efficiency in their workforce. Let's say you were a, you owned a publishing company or a newspaper or even a factory. You would look at simplified spelling and see it as a way to save time, save money, because these words are shorter to write, you would save ink, you would save paper, and all in all, you would be able to accelerate the productivity of your workforce. That drove a lot of these people. Noah Webster made some calculations back in 1789. And he concluded that his version of spelling reform, which was actually kind of more moderate, he calculated that it would save printers about one page out of every 18, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for a 180 page book, that's 10 pages. For a 360 page book, that's 20 pages. And this is the kind of marginal profit calculation you're trying to make if you're running a business. So there was money in it, but I think the aesthetics of simplified spelling were always working against it.

[Mike Carruthers]

I know one of the things that confounds people who don't have English as their first language are some of the weird silent letters we have, like the B in doubt or the B in debt or the l in salmon. Do other languages have silent letters like that?

[Gabe Henry]

There are languages with silent letters. French has silent letters. The problem or the distinction between those languages and English is that you can learn a set of rules for those languages and the rules apply in most cases. So you can teach a child that in this word, you're going to have a silent letter after your s. In every case, you're going to have this following this. And once you learn these rules, you will know and understand spelling. In English, we don't have a set of rules that apply in every case. We have mnemonics like I before E except after c. But even that has so many exceptions, it's probably not even worth calling a rule. We depend more on photographic memory of how a word is spelled, as opposed to appealing to your knowledge of the overall rule system.

[Mike Carruthers]

You know what I wonder, and maybe you know the answer to this. If you ask someone who has had to learn English as a second language as an adult, and also learned another language as an adult, they've learned two additional languages beyond their native language. How does English compare to the other languages? Is English a particularly difficult foreign language to learn? Or are all foreign languages difficult just in their own way?

[Gabe Henry]

That's a great question. I tell you that the people I've spoken to that speak English as a second language, they found it relatively easy to learn the grammar and syntax of spoken English, but very difficult to learn our spelling.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I think even people, many people who are native English speakers have trouble with spelling. I've always felt I was a pretty good speller, but I know plenty of people who, who grew up having trouble spelling fairly common English words.

[Gabe Henry]

There's a stigma surrounding poor spelling. So children that are growing up six, seven years old, if they're told once that they're a bad speller. I think they carry that sense of inferiority into their life. I think it's the first intellectual merit assessment of how their brain works. I think it's the first time that an authority points to you in your life and says, you're not quite good enough for this thing. And I think that you carry that stigma for a while.

[Mike Carruthers]

We're talking about why so many words in our language are spelled in a way that has no resemblance to how they're pronounced. My guest is Gabe Henry. He's author of the book Enough Is Enough. Our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. I am definitely not a big clothes shopper and probably like you, I've bought clothes online that were disappointing. But I have a very different experience with quints and I've come to find out that so many people I know shop Quince. So far I've gotten a couple of shirts and sweaters from Quince and well, you'll know what I mean when I say this. And every time I get something new from Quince it goes right to the top of the rotation. My Quince clothes are my go to clothes. If you don't know Quince, you are going to love their website. Quince has all the things you actually want to wear, like organic cotton silk polos like the ones I have, European linen beach shorts, pants for every occasion. Really nice pants. And here is the very best part. Everything at Quint's is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands you see, by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quint's gives you luxury pieces without those big markups. I've really been amazed at how many people tell me they shop at Quint's. It's become like the place to go to buy clothes. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U-N-C-E.comSYSK to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comSYSK you chose to hit play on this podcast today.

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[Mike Carruthers]

So, Gabe, in one sense, we do have some simplified spelling, at least in terms of the way some products are named. Rice Krispies with a K or Krispy Kreme or Kool Aid. They are spelled differently than the correct way of spelling them, which helps make them stand out. But you could also say they're spelled correctly in the sense that they're spelled the way they're pronounced.

[Gabe Henry]

Right. This trend came about in the early 20th century, and it came right after Theodore Roosevelt stuck his hand into the simplified spelling movement. So in 1906, he came out publicly and as a proponent of simplified spelling. And he made some efforts in his political circles to change the way his Oval Office and the federal government would spell in their correspondences and their communications. And his efforts lasted about three months. He was eventually mocked. And what it did, incidentally, was it raised the profile of simplified spelling. It boosted its visibility in the pop culture, and little by little, simplified spelling began seeping into the pop culture. And this was particularly prominent in advertising. So in the 1920s, you get brands such as Kool Aid with a K, Kleenex with a K, Krispy Kreme. And there was a name for this trend that was coined by one linguist in the twenties. She called it the craze for K. And she blamed this directly on the simplified spelling movement, which had been pushing words like character with a K and chorus with a K since the days of Noah Webster.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, because when you think about it, there are a lot of those kind of words that. Products that start with K much more than, say, n or f. Right.

[Gabe Henry]

There are reasons that people have proposed for this. One is that K doesn't begin many words naturally in the English language. And often when it does begin a word, it's silent. So there's a novelty to seeing K begin a hard C word. So it catches your eye a little bit. It draws your attention to that aisle in the supermarket, the snack foods, the. The Krispy kremes, the. The KitKat bars. And then there's another possibility, which is that anyone who has dabbled in comedy or humor knows that K is an inherently funny sound. It's considered to be. To have some quality about it that is just funny to the ear.

[Mike Carruthers]

It would seem to me you could make the case that there is kind of a simplified language movement in the sense that texting tends to get simplified. People use the letter U for the word U. People, you know, people abbreviate in ways to make it quicker and yet you still know exactly what they mean. And, and yet if you try to put that in a document, in a letter, in a report, you're chastised for that. But in texting, it's completely acceptable.

[Gabe Henry]

Well, we are living in the digital world, and the digital world moves fast. And generally speaking, the Internet breeds shorter and quicker content, shorter and quicker communication, just to meet our pace of life. And historically, a lot of these simplified spellers had the same motive, efficiency, speed, a more direct one to one correspondence, more direct one to one communication. If you can shorten that time it takes to communicate an idea to someone, that's probably the best, most efficient form to communicate with them. A lot of the simplifications we see today in texting and in social media, words like though spelled T H O thru spelled T hru, these were initially proposed hundreds of years ago. And the irony is that these words never caught on when it was some kind of elite class imposing it upon the population. But when it came from the bottom up, when it came from texters and social media users and people typing it out with their thumbs for an informal conversation, these did start to catch on. So in a way, the simplified spelling movement has these downstream effects in today's world. But the difference is no one is trying to turn it into the authoritative way of spelling the way those reformers tried to do.

[Mike Carruthers]

Is the resistance to simplified spelling more of a resistance of, oh, it's just too much trouble, it's going to cause trouble and let's just not bother? Or is the resistance coming from real gatekeepers who want to keep English the way it was written, that the way it was intended, the way that they're purists.

[Gabe Henry]

In other words, every generation has had these gatekeepers, these language purists, and they tend to see simplified spelling or texting shorthand as some loss of tradition or maybe the downfall of English as we know it? They're the purists that try to hold the language in its place. And then there are the people who look at these changes and they see it as a natural evolution, a kind of reflection of how language tends to bend toward that natural simplification that takes place when you have a more interconnected, fast paced society. I tend to fall into that latter category.

[Mike Carruthers]

Even the purists have to acknowledge that English is always changing. I mean, if you compare English today to English 200 years ago, it's a very different language. So you can try to hold the gate closed, but it's never closed. There's always evolution. But the spelling Stuff doesn't seem to be subject. I mean, words come and go, but spelling seems to be pretty constant.

[Gabe Henry]

It does. And the reason it seems that way to us is because we have authoritative dictionaries. We have Webster's, we have Oxford English Dictionary. But these dictionaries are adding new words all the time. New spellings, OMG and LOL are now in these dictionaries. Other digital editions like binge, watch and selfie. And you're right that we see mostly additions of words and not respellings of words. But I think over time, what these dictionaries are trying to do is reflect language as it exists in its current state. And as long as spelling continues to simplify in our informal communication, I think that these language authorities will try to reflect that. And I think you just have to look at the long arc of it, the long timeline. 200 years from now, I would probably be surprised if we're spelling in the same exact way we're spelling now. I would tend to think that it will become simpler and shorter.

[Mike Carruthers]

So there are very distinct differences in the way some words are spelled in American English versus English English. Do we know why that is?

[Gabe Henry]

These are actually the only remnants of successful spelling reform. These come directly from Noah Webster. So Noah Webster had tried to push these radical extreme reforms in 1789. And these are words like I mentioned, laugh, laf, love, l u v. He even had the word tung spelled T u n g. And they all failed. He realized that they weren't going to work in a practical way. So 20 years later, as he's putting together his Webster's Dictionary, instead of pushing for these extreme reforms, he selectively incorporated some of his earlier simplifications. Words like color and honor without the U, or plough and draft spelled without the British gh, which it continues to use today. And once his dictionary became widely used, these spellings gained legitimacy and ultimately shaped American English as we know it today.

[Mike Carruthers]

Have there ever been any examples of that you can think of off the top of your head of words that the simplified spelling was just so good and so practical that it won or not?

[Gabe Henry]

The word donut really came about in the early 20th century, 1920s, 1930s, push for simplified spelling and advertising, which was really just a way to catch the eye. And Dunkin Donuts, one of the first large national chains to use that spelling, D o, n u t. Rather than the way more complicated D o u, g, H n u t. It caught on from there. So that's an example of where advertising is influenced by the pop culture and then in turn influences the pop culture.

[Mike Carruthers]

There are so many little quirks in English that seemingly make no sense. Like why so many words that start with ph are pronounced as, as if it were an F. Like why I.

[Gabe Henry]

I don't know what to tell you, but if you take a word like physique, which I've always hated, you can clearly see a history in Greek, you can clearly see a history in French. But if you look at it, it's two syllables. It should be a simple word to spell. But if you look at each individual letter, you'll notice each letter makes a different sound than it would typically be expected to make. P, H. Even Y is used as the sound of I s instead of the sound for Z. So it is stupid. It is dumb, I think. And it's not that people are bad at spelling. It's that spelling is bad at spelling.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I think that's brilliant. It's not that people are bad at spelling. It's spelling that's bad at spelling. And I think that lets a lot of people off the hook. The rules are so crazy that it's understandable why people might be bad at spelling. I've been talking to Gabe Henry and the name of his book is Enough Is Enough. Our failed attempts to make English easier to spell. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes you find can Gabe, thanks. Thanks for letting people off the hook.

[Gabe Henry]

I appreciate it so much. Thank you, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Mike Carruthers]

Maybe you've thought about this before. I certainly have. If you stand in the middle of a major city and just look around and think about the infrastructure that makes that city work. It it's mind boggling. I mean the network of roads, how the water gets in there. I mean how does all that water get pumped into a city and then into all the buildings and all the way up to the tall buildings so that there's enough water everywhere that it's available on demand to anyone. Then there's the electricity and the gas lines and wiring for the Internet. And there are so many things that have to work to keep a city working and the same thing is true for smaller cities and towns on a smaller scale. There are systems that have to work. And here to give a peek into how the infrastructure systems work is Sybil Darabel. He is a professor of urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He's author of a book called the Infrastructure Book, how cities Work and power our lives. Cybil, Hi. Welcome to something you should know.

[Sybil Darabel]

Thanks a lot for having me, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

So let's start with water, because I've always been amazed. You look at a big look at the Empire State Building in New York. Somehow the water gets all the way up to the bathrooms near the top of that building. It must be some amazing pump.

[Sybil Darabel]

I mean, it is amazing for tall buildings, but it's more amazing for entire cities, right? Which is what we do with again with Chicago draws 12 pumps for all of Chicago. Now, for tall building, what happens is that you also have a pump in the bottom. So usually when you have a pump for an entire city, you want to have enough pressure. The pressure in the system is dictated by the fire department. They want to make sure that when they connect their fire hose to the hydrant, they can put out a fire. And so that's why usually that pressure is about enough for that water to go up to a five or six story building. So that's why five or six story buildings usually don't have a pump in the basement, but tall buildings do.

[Mike Carruthers]

When there's infrastructure for something new, like one day a city has to decide, okay, we need to wire the Internet for everybody and the city's already here. How do you do that?

[Sybil Darabel]

You have two options, right? One is you look elsewhere, you see what they're doing, and you reproduce something similar. And your second option is you see what you have and you try to do the best with what you have. So in the case of telecommunication, one of the things they did is, well, we like fiber optic cables, so we have to lay fiber optic cables there. And so they went to, in New York, for example, I think they went to a lot of the old Western Union pipes that were there for some cables, and they just replaced all the cables with fiber optics. But it's usually it's one of those things, you know, where it's fascinating to hear about what's happening in Chicago versus New York versus Shanghai versus Paris, because they will have a different system, partly based on the specificity of the cities themselves and partly based on when the systems were built, because things evolve.

[Mike Carruthers]

But do People from, like, different cities ever get together and say, well, how did you guys do that? Because we need to do that, and we're not really sure how to do that. So can we see how you did that or you just. People just do what they do.

[Sybil Darabel]

Well, you'd assume that that would be the obvious thing that you do. Right. But in my experience, usually they don't do that too much just because things evolve so fast. So especially I talk with a lot of people in the transit industry, and when you look at how they handle a system in, you know, again, New York, Boston, D.C. chicago, often it's going to be pretty different. So again, you would assume that they get together and that there's a one common system for everywhere. But often it's not the case. Water is another good example because the way that you treat your water really depends on your quality of the raw water that you get. And so there's no way you can have the same system in New York as in Chicago because the quality of the raw water is different.

[Mike Carruthers]

What happens to all the waste? The wastewater, the waste from the toilet, where does it all go?

[Sybil Darabel]

Wastewater is my favorite infrastructure of all. By training, I'm more of a transportation person. But wastewater is what I prefer because it's incredibly complicated, because you don't have one wastewater, you have two. There's the wastewater that we think of, which is the toilet, the showers, you know, whatever we do at home. But there's also the wastewater coming from the rain, so that's called the stormwater. And so in older cities, you tend to have combined sewer systems. So you have one single pipe in the middle of the road that has to handle the sanitary sewers from people and the stormwater from the rain.

[Mike Carruthers]

And.

[Sybil Darabel]

And in newer cities, they tend to be separate. And so depending on the diabe system, you'll do, you know, you'll have different strategies, but usually what you want when you have, you know, separate system is to treat the water that comes from homes, and you don't really treat the water that comes from the storm. But in systems in cities with the combined sewer, then you treat everything. And so that's where you have to go, to a wastewater treatment plant. You treat your. All the water that's coming in, and then you put it back into the environment in usually a way that's clean enough where it will not harm, you know, anyone or the species or animals downstream, but not clean enough that you can drink readily out of it.

[Mike Carruthers]

And when you say, when the water comes in, you treat it, what does that mean?

[Sybil Darabel]

Oh, that's so. That's a great question. So the first thing you do is you're going to try to separate some of the solids. So again, screens, you know, sometimes you might have, again, branches, water bottles, you know, toilet paper, all you have. You try to screen everything that you can physically out of it. Then you put some chemicals to favor something called flocculation. So you have all those particles that are there. Those particles tend to be negatively charged. So essentially, no matter how long you let it sit there, they're like little magnets that just expel one another. So it's never really going to sit to the bottom of a tank. And so you put some chemicals to neutralize that negative charge, and then you just let gravity do its job. And so that means all those little flux are going to settle at the bottom of the basin, and then all the greases are going to float at the top. So you remove all the. You skim all those greases from the top, you remove everything from the bottom, and then you're left with clear water. But it's still not good water because it's got a lot of diluted stuff, you know, nasty stuff, but also detergents and soap and everything. And so then what you do after that is you leverage nature. And by that I mean that all that discussing stuff that I just talked about is actually amazing food for. For microbes. So then you use biofilters, and as the water just goes down the biofilters, all those microbes feed on all that stuff. And then after that, then you tend to have some pretty clear water. And you can put some ozone or you can use some UV light to kill whatever is left there. And then you release it to the environment.

[Mike Carruthers]

And what does that mean? Release it? Put it in the sea.

[Sybil Darabel]

In the sea? In the river, usually a river, you know. That's why you tend to have water treatment plants upstream of a river and then wastewater treatment plants downstream of a river. One of the things I love to tell people when they fly is when you fly, when you take on them, when you board a plane and you start to ascend, look at what's out there. And very often you'll see a wastewater treatment plant. You'll see huge circles with water. You don't really know what it is, but it's a wastewater treatment plant. And the reason why you see that is because airports tend to be built wherever there was space. And that used to be normally in, like, low marshland or in a place that used to flood a Lot. And that's usually downstream of a river. And so that's why you have the wastewater treatment plant there and the airport just next door.

[Mike Carruthers]

But the solid stuff that gets pulled out of wastewater, where does that go?

[Sybil Darabel]

Oh, so that. Well, then there's different treatments for that. It's called the sludge. And so usually you try to dry it and then it ends up in a landfill with your, you know, with the waste that you throw as well, you know, your garbage. So it just goes to a landfill. Yeah.

[Mike Carruthers]

So you mentioned before, like, they'll put fiber optic cables in the old Western. So is there a lot of old infrastructure underneath cities that. I mean, because you don't take it out, right? I mean, you just build beside it.

[Sybil Darabel]

I mean, every city is different. The older city, the more infrastructure you'll have there. The funny thing about cities is that at least for the ones that really expanded 1950s and 60s, we don't even know what's out there. You can ask your electric utility or sometimes the sewer systems, they don't really know what's out there because a lot of it was built in 1950s and 60s, and they didn't keep detailed record about that. That's the funny bit. So often that's why you hear stories of, oh, we've started digging and then we found this, and we didn't expect that. And so something that was supposed to take two weeks actually takes two or three months, just because. Yeah, we don't necessarily know everything that's down there.

[Mike Carruthers]

So natural gas that runs in pipes everywhere throughout cities, towns, everywhere, that natural gas is odorless naturally. It doesn't have a smell.

[Sybil Darabel]

Exactly. So natural gas naturally is orderless. So when you collect it, it's orderless. When they transmit it in those large gas lines, it's odorless. And then just when it arrives at the city, they add something called mercaptan that gives it its wonderful, beautiful rotten egg smell. They started to add that smell. I think it was in 1920s or 30s when there was a big tragedy in Texas in a school where a lot of children died.

[Mike Carruthers]

Let's talk about transportation. And sometimes you look at a city, particularly an older city, the way the roads go and the highways, and it doesn't really look like there's much of a plan. But there's always a plan, right?

[Sybil Darabel]

Oh, there's always a plan, right? There's always a plan for transportation. If there's one thing that people need is to be able to go from places to places. I mean, there's very few infrastructure systems as important as transportation for the economy as people can go as far as possible as fast as possible, is probably one of the leading factors for the economy. So there's always a plan. Always.

[Mike Carruthers]

I know one of your areas of expertise or that you're working on right now is depopulation. Can you explain that?

[Sybil Darabel]

Depopulation means that your city is actually losing population. So usually when you talk about infrastructure, when you build infrastructure, you always have a growth plan. You're like, okay, now we have X number of people. We assume that it's going to grow by 1, 2, 3% in the next few years. And at some point the opposite happens. So a city actually starts to lose population, and then you might need new infrastructure. But it's hard to justify it because there's no growth. There's actually, you know, you're shrinking, and so you're left with a lot of infrastructure that's now oversized, often that's aging, and that needs to be maintenance, but there's no resources for it.

[Mike Carruthers]

And what cities are shrinking?

[Sybil Darabel]

There's many of them. I actually published an article last year, and you can look at all the cities in the US that are shrinking. Most of them are small, right? Most of them. There's usually a lot of media attention when large cities are shrinking, like Detroit, but most of them are smaller.

[Mike Carruthers]

Where's everybody going?

[Sybil Darabel]

A lot of people are going to the cities. The big cities. The big cities, yeah. You know, and places like, like the U.S. you know, pretty rich countries. Usually the birth rate is pretty low. And so most of the population growth is coming from immigration. And when you have immigrants, usually they prefer to go to larger cities than smaller cities.

[Mike Carruthers]

Going back to water for a moment. For years, people have talked about desalinization, that that was going to help with droughts and things that if we could take the water from the sea and take the salt out of it, that we would have plenty of water. But always the cost of doing that was so prohibitive that you couldn't do it on a big enough scale. So where are we with that? Has the price come down?

[Sybil Darabel]

So the price really came down. It's actually in Israel, I think it's 80%, 70 or 80% of water consumed in the country is coming from the sea. So it's absolutely possible. Before, we really tried many technologies, and the one that works best right now is something called reverse osmosis. And so you really take. So you have a membrane and it's very packed, and it looks like it's impermeable, like water can't get through, but you have tiny pores, but they're so small that only pure water can get through. So you push that salt water, you push it very, very, very hard against that membrane, and then only the pure water gets through and you collect all that pure water. Once you have it, you don't distribute it yet because that pure water is good, but doesn't have any minerals. And humans need minerals. So first you bunt, you, you, you, you put a bunch of rocks into that water, so a lot of limestone to add minerals. And then you distribute that water and you know, you can consume it and you can drink it.

[Mike Carruthers]

In a city where there's all this infrastructure, there's transportation and water and electric and gas and all that typically, does everybody exist that works on those in silos, or is there somebody that oversees the whole thing?

[Sybil Darabel]

That's the shift. That's the trillion dollar question for this coming century. What happened in the 20th century is that they were very, very much siloed. So, for example, a good example is water, water treatment. You need a lot of electricity. You don't really care where it comes from. You just ask your electric utility company, give me that electricity and I'll pay you for it. And the problem with that is that whenever something happens to electricity, then it affects the water and then it affects the people. And so it's so interdependent that now we're really trying, talking, figuring out how we can have those people talk with one another there a lot more so that systems that are interdependent by nature are a lot stronger, a lot more resilient. So that's a conversation that's happening now. And I think that's one of the biggest shifts that's going to happen in this century in infrastructure.

[Mike Carruthers]

Now, you had said earlier that like in a city you've, they keep, they try to keep electric and water apart. So one goes down one side of the street and one goes down the other. Is that, that's a thing?

[Sybil Darabel]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. In the US a lot, a lot of times you have the, you know, back alleys or you might have. Some of those cables are not underground. It might be overground, but usually in cities that have both underground. Yeah, you'll keep water on one side and electricity on the other, but that's like physical. Right. They're separated physically, but you still need a lot of water for electricity. So the way that you generate electricity usually requires a lot of water. And you also need electricity to treat and distribute water. So they're Interrelated, but they're physically. The infrastructures are physically apart.

[Mike Carruthers]

But wait a minute. So if you have a street and you've got water going down one side and electricity going down the other side, the buildings on the other side need the other guy. So the electricity has to cross the water to get across the street to the people over there, and the water has to cross the electricity to get to the people over there.

[Sybil Darabel]

Yes, yes, but these are the smaller lines, right? So your mains are far away from your big electric distribution lines, you know, so your, your large pipes are away from your large wires, and then you have the smaller pipes crossing over. But that's okay, because if you have a leak, it's not going to, you know, impact it too much for the small pipes.

[Mike Carruthers]

I see. Well, that makes sense. And where's the gas? Right down the middle.

[Sybil Darabel]

That's a good question. It depends on the cities, right? Cities are going to have different regulations. The other funny thing, by the way, is even when you dig there. So not only are they separated, but the types of gravel that surrounds them are different. So for example, with electricity, they have a special type of gravel to make sure that the rocks are not sharp and they don't kind of dig in the wire. So you might have different regulations. So that's again, different cities have different regulations.

[Mike Carruthers]

And what about the aging of all of this? To me, I would think that would be what keeps people up at night, is that this stuff gets older by the day and much of it was built a long, long time ago. And isn't it just a time bomb waiting to go off?

[Sybil Darabel]

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. We know this infrastructure is aging. We know it will have to change. Either we do the same thing, right? So we just take away one pipe and you put another one, or you're rethinking how we do it in the first place. And my big thing with this book at least, is let's get everyone to understand the engineering principles of how that works, and then we can have a honest discussion about that and think about the type of infrastructure that we want for the next 50 to 100 years. A lot of water pipes in the streets, a lot of them are 100 years old. So we're not talking about some decisions for five or 10 years, right? We're talking about decisions that are going to. That will have an impact on our grandchildren and great grandchildren. So let's make sure that we have a common ground and all talk about it.

[Mike Carruthers]

What is something that some city somewhere has done uniquely that you think is Very forward thinking or different or unique about just a solution to an infrastructure problem that nobody thought before.

[Sybil Darabel]

My huge pet peeve is multifunctional infrastructure. So right now, when you build infrastructure, it does only one thing. But what if it could do multiple things? And one of my favorite examples is in Malaysia. So Malaysia, tropical climate, and it rains a lot. But also Kuala Lumpur is a big city and all big cities suffer from traffic congestion. So what they've done there is they've got a massive tunnel, four cars, so that to ease the congestion a little bit, except that when it rains, the cars are just, they all go away, they close the tunnel and they flood it with stormwater. And then this way stormwater is stored in that big tunnel as opposed to going in streets or flooding the entire city. So that's one example where you have one infrastructure system that does two things. Multifunctional infrastructure.

[Mike Carruthers]

As I said at the start of this, whenever I'm in a big city like New York and I look around, I look up and I think, how does this all work? And it's great to get a little insight into some of the ways that it does work. I've been speaking with Sybil Darabel. He is a professor of Urban engineering and director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He's author of a book called the Infrastructure How Cities Work and Power Our Lives. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Great, Sybil, thanks for being here. Have you ever not done something fun just because you didn't have someone to do it with? Like going out to eat or going to an event just because you don't have someone to go with is not a good reason not to go. First of all, one of the reasons we don't do things alone is we fear we will be judged by others as one of those people who has no friends. Yet according to a study published by the Journal of Consumer Research, the judgments that we fear we will get are much harsher than we would ever give if we saw somebody out doing something alone. The same study looked at people's prediction of how they would enjoy an activity if they did it alone. Going to an art gallery in this case, versus how they actually did enjoy it. And it turned out people's predictions were off. People enjoyed doing things alone much more than they thought they would. So the next time you don't do something just because you have no one to go with, maybe step out of your comfort zone. And you might be surprised how much you enjoy it and that is something you should know. Something you should know is produced by Jeff Haveison and Jennifer Brennan. The executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm micahruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Sybil Darabel]

I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

[Mike Carruthers]

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the League, Veep, or my non eligible for Academy.

[Sybil Darabel]

Award role in Twisters. We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, like Amy thinks a that Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas and I don't. He's too old.

[Sybil Darabel]

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that.

[Gabe Henry]

Dune 2 is overrated.

[Mike Carruthers]

It is.

[Sybil Darabel]

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk.

[Mike Carruthers]

About good movies, critical hits, fan favorites.

[Sybil Darabel]

Must sees, and in case you missed ems, we're talking the Home Alone From Grease to the Dark Knight. We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

[Mike Carruthers]

And we talk about horror movies, some.

[Sybil Darabel]

That you've never even heard of, like Ganja and Hess. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

[Mike Carruthers]

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sybil Darabel]

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

[Unknown]

From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time, through the sapphic history that shaped them, comes a brand new season of cruising beyond the bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrieli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more.

[Mike Carruthers]

For 11 years, every night women slept illegally on the Common.

[Gabe Henry]

We would move down to the West.

[Mike Carruthers]

Indies to form a lesbian nation. Meg Kristen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music.

[Sybil Darabel]

And that's kind of the origins of the Combaheever Collective.

[Unknown]

You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th.