Hello, it's Avery. Let me just break the fourth wall here for a second and just say thank you so much for listening to Articles of Interest.

I really can't tell you how much it means to me. This is... I mean I make this by myself. I also am like the engineer and the one in Pro Tools.

It just takes so long to make all these shows and I strive to make Articles of Interest something that is worth your time and your attention is just the most valuable gift you could give.

So thank you very much for letting Articles of Interest be a part of your life.

So I'm going to do something this episode that I haven't done yet, which is a rerun, but it's got a really good reason.

This is the episode that I did way back in the first season of Articles of Interest in 2018 called Pockets.

And man, it is like the story that launched a thousand conversations. There's so much to say about Pockets. So much so that there is going to be a part two after the rerun of a conversation that I had with author Hana Carlson, who is in the original episode and her book entirely about Pockets is out now, and we were in conversation live at the New York Public Library.

And I've condensed that and added a little bit at the end for you. Enjoy.

Are you curious about the hidden side of everything that I have the podcast for you? I'm Steven Dubner, host of Freakonomics Radio.

Every week we hear from some of the world's most fascinating scholars and thinkers as we tackle a variety of topics like why the best employees can make the worst bosses, why the banana?

Is the most interesting fruit in the world and why we dread air travel, even though it's a miracle. Go ahead, listen to Freakonomics Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

I had never worn a dress before. I'm sure it was like slightly graceless as like all the things I did at the time seem to have been.

I met peers on our very first week in college. It must have been day one or two. It was really early.

We went to a super PC liberal arts school. And so our freshman mixer was a cross-dressing dance, which is such an outdated term now, but whatever. That's what it was called.

I think all they told us was you should wear clothes of the opposite gender. They probably said it in a way that's slightly more, you know, literate in the differences between gender and biological sex than what I just said.

It was a strange way to make first impressions on each other, not because we were scared of wearing dresses or backwards baseball caps or whatever we wore that night.

It was because for many of us, we had to borrow clothes from the other people in our hall. It was weirdly intimate.

Pears and I, complete strangers, swapped outfits.

You're tall, and I'm tall, and I think that you're probably the only person in the hall of not the building whose clothes would have fit me.

I remember I loaned peers a pink, swirly patterned mini-dressed from the 60s that I had bought from a thrift store.

I had no idea if he would take care of it or even return it, but peers tried it on. It looked great.

He went to check himself out in the bathroom down the hall, and here's what happened next.

...