From WNYC in New York, this is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

From sorting to taxonomy, one scientist thought he was ordering the world.

But really, he was fostering more division.

There were eugenics fairs at small town festivals where there'd be competitions and there'd be the best babies or the fittest families.

It was so gross.

It was so gross.

You know what they say about the path to hell?

Also, how librarians are grappling with the legacy systems they use to organize the books on their shelves.

Books on Obama were in 300s. They were separated from books on their shelves. Books on Obama were in three hundreds.

They were separated from books on other presidents.

And that was very disturbing to me.

And that was the beginning of changing Dewey, of rebelling against Dewey.

The powers and perils of classification after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Humans as a species have a fascination with order. We like categories, lists, and rankings, and labeling them all. In fact, much of science is devoted to sorting the seeming chaos of the natural world.

Of course, sometimes we go too far or in the wrong direction by imposing an artificial order

based on irrelevant criteria or bias.

Last year, I spoke with Radio Lab co-host Lulu Miller, who was struggling to impose order on her

own life when she became obsessed with the 19th and 20th century taxonomist and natural historian

David Starr Jordan. Jordan himself was obsessed

with cataloging and ordering the world. A hundred years later, that passion earned him a starring

...