Pushkin.

It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here?

Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn.

In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on theHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

From Pushkin Industries, this is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news.

I'm Noah Feldman. Are you one of the 49.3 million Americans who hit the road this Thanksgiving?

Are you, perhaps, listening to this in a car right now?

If either of these things is true, this is definitely the episode for you.

We're here to talk about how cars have shaped the history of policing in America,

and how the space of the car has been fundamental to the definition of your rights under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, specifically your right to privacy.

To discuss this, we're talking to Sarah Sayo.

She's a professor at the University of Iowa's College of Law,

and she's the author of Policing the Open Road, How Cars Transformed American Freedom. Sarah, thank you so much

for joining me. In reading your book, I was really struck, the first thing that struck me,

and maybe this should have been obvious to me before, but it wasn't, is that probably cars are the single

most significant technological event of the last hundred years in American life. I mean, we talk a lot

about the internet. We imagine that the transformation of social media is so enormous. None of it seems to

hold a candle to the car as a transformative technology.

Do you buy that? I mean, do you think of the car is really the be-all and the end-all of

technological change, making the computer look kind of secondary?

Well, in the 20th century, we call that the automobile age, like the Bronze Age, right?

And so we've defined that century as defined by

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