Pushkin.

You're listening to an I-Heart podcast.

Hey Last Archive listeners, it's Ben.

I've been hard at work on another show at Pushkin called Revisionist History, and I've done

four episodes for this most recent season that I wanted to share with you too. They run the

gamut from an argument about why we don't need emergency vehicle sirens as much as we think we do,

to a history of psychology involving some mischievous raccoons and a two-part blowout about

a big trade secrecy case that turns on the top

secret recipe for Thomas's English muffins. We're going to be releasing one a week over in this

feed, and we're starting today with the episode about sirens. You can find more episodes of

revisionist history wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and enjoy.

Hello, hello, everyone. This is the first of what are going to be a couple of episodes

in this mini-season from my colleague Benadhaff Halfrey. Ben is the guy when you're hiking

through the wilderness who says, let's go this way. And there's no

trail. And you think, oh, I'm going to get eaten by bears. And then, no, you find some lost

civilization and large piles of glittering gold. Ben started telling me this story, and I stopped

him halfway through. And I said, oh, Ben, this is a spandrel. And what's a spandrel?

One of my all-time favorite concepts invented by Stephen J. Gould, the spandrel is the thing that

doesn't have a function, but which hangs around like a random hitchhiker because it happens

to be riding along with things that do have a function. Like your earlobs. I mean, what are they there for?

Doesn't it seem like they were all just along for the ride

with the part of our ear that actually does useful things?

...