Now I Know More

by Lewis, Dan

  HOT TO SHOP

  HOW ONE OF AMERICA’S LARGEST MALLS AVOIDS SCARY UTILITY BILLS

  The Mall of America is located in Bloomington, Minnesota, just a few miles outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul. It is enormous. Beyond the nearly 3 million square feet of retail space, the Mall of America is host to Nickelodeon Universe, the largest indoor theme park in the country; the Sea Life Minnesota Aquarium; a mini-golf course; a wedding chapel; and other attractions typically reserved for vacation destinations. At a massive 4.2 million square feet, it’s the largest mall in the United States. (The King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania has slightly more square footage dedicated to stores than does the Mall of America, but the latter has more total area.) For residents of the Bloomington area, the mall is also a respite from often-harsh weather—from December through February, for example, the average high temperature is below freezing, and residents are regularly greeted with snow.

  Yet despite its size and location, the mall’s heating bills are low. As in, almost zero.

  Construction for the Mall of America began in the summer of 1989 at the site of Metropolitan Stadium, a then-retired baseball and football stadium, which was the home of the Minnesota Twins and Vikings. When constructing the complex, the owners and developers decided that heating the common spaces, especially in the cold winters (nearby St. Paul averages about fifty inches of snow each year) required special attention. Instead of installing a massive central heating system, the mall’s owners decided to go green, and, hopefully, save a lot of money in the process.

  The mall has more than 1.2 miles of skylights, each bringing in a little bit of sunshine and warming the corridors that connect shops to one another. Then there’s the excess heat from all the things being used throughout the mall—escalators, lights, and the roller coaster (yes, the mall has a roller coaster)—which helps keep the mall toasty even during the winter. Most important are the shoppers, tourists, and employees themselves—their body heat means that you’ll rarely find a day where the internal temperature of the mall falls below 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Some stores still have their own heating systems, and many of the entranceways to the mall have heaters as well, but for all the common areas, heat is abundant, thanks to the mall’s design and inhabitants. In fact, it may be too abundant—at times, all this free heat makes the mall overly warm. It’s not uncommon for the air conditioning to be on even during the winter, as particularly busy days may lead to uncomfortably warm conditions inside.

  BONUS FACT

  You’ll not find a lot of air conditioning in Amish communities, whose people are famous for eschewing what most of us would consider modern conveniences. However, among some Ohio-based Amish, solar panels are so common that, as of 2007, you’d find more in use, per-capita, than among any other community in the state. That’s because contrary to popular belief, the Amish aren’t against using electricity. Rather, according to Wired, they “rejected the enticements of the public power grid, deciding they did not want to be too directly linked to, or dependent on, the outside world.” Solar panels, to a large degree, come without those dependencies.

  THE POTATO FARMER AND THE HARES

  HOW SHEEP REVOLUTIONIZED ULTRA-LONG-DISTANCE RUNNING

  The Westfield Group owns and operates shopping malls throughout much of the English-speaking world. Two of those malls are in Australia (where Westfield is headquartered) and are situated about 544 miles from one another—there’s the Westfield Parramatta in Sydney and the Westfield Doncaster in Melbourne. In 1983, those malls were Westfield’s two largest in that nation. Perhaps as a publicity stunt, their parent company organized a race between the two sites. The Westfield Sydney-to-Melbourne Ultramarathon started in late April. As one would expect, most of the entrants were young but seasoned long- and ultra-long-distance runners. Within the circles of those who follow such things, they were household names.

  Five days, fifteen hours, and four minutes after the runners took off, the winner crossed the finish line. His name was Cliff Young. He was a potato farmer who ran funny, had fallen miles behind the competition on the first day, and, oh yeah, was sixty-one years old.

  He won by ten hours.

  To be fair, Young had been running all of his life; he just hadn’t been doing so competitively. Even at age sixty, he was working and living on the family farm on which he grew up. Potatoes were the major crop there, but the 2,000-acre farm was also home to a 2,000-strong herd of sheep. As he explained in various media reports, growing up, his family couldn’t afford tractors or horses. When storms came to the region, rounding up the sheep therefore became a major ordeal—and Young had to do it himself, by foot. He claimed to run around, herding sheep, for two or three days straight—often while wearing rainboots. Endurance like that, he correctly believed, gave him a huge advantage over the other runners.

  But when the race came, it didn’t start off well. Young didn’t run with long strides like most of the other runners, instead shuffling his feet over very short distances, a movement that was more of a waddle than a step. Most of the runners left him in the dust. By the time the race was eighteen hours old and racers went to get their typical six hours of sleep, Young was so far off the lead that he was at best a curiosity and at worst a punch line.

  Six hours later, the other runners woke up to find that Young hadn’t stopped to sleep and was now well in the lead.

  It’s unclear how much he slept over the five-plus-day run—by some reports, Young didn’t sleep at all—but however much it was, it wasn’t much. Young finished well in first place because he spent a lot more time running (and less time sleeping) than his competition. He attributed his endurance to his experience chasing down the sheep and, counterintuitively to those watching and participating in the race, his funky-looking running style.

  And it turns out that may actually have mattered. Young’s running style, now called the “Young Shuffle,” is commonly believed to require less energy than other forms of running, making it an attractive option for ultramarathoners, including a few subsequent winners of the Sydney-to-Melbourne race in years after Young’s win.

  BONUS FACT

  The world record for most time awake without sleep? 264 hours, according to Scientific American. The record was set in 1965 by a seventeen-year-old who stayed awake for roughly eleven days as part of a science fair experiment.

  THE WALK MAN

  THE MOST PEDESTRIAN OF SPORTS

  Walking is a pretty fundamental method of locomotion for people—almost all of us can do it and do it often. It is also something we take for granted, hardly giving it a second thought. Why would we? While walking may separate us from many other animals, it’s so commonplace that we don’t think of it as anything special.

  Compare it to the requirements of today’s great athletic competitions. Baseball, basketball, football, tennis, and soccer players run. If you play ice hockey, you skate. Gymnasts seem to fly. There are cyclists, swimmers, and even people who dance while trying to punch each other unconscious, all in furtherance of athletic accolades and often in front of cheering crowds. In each of these sports, there are heroes, from Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan to Michael Phelps and Muhammad Ali.

  No one ever earned fame for winning a walking competition. Except for a guy named Edward Payson Weston, that is.

  Weston was born in 1839 in Rhode Island, and in 1860 he made a bet that would change his life forever (and the world of sports temporarily). He wagered that Abraham Lincoln would lose the upcoming presidential election, agreeing to attend Lincoln’s inauguration if he lost the bet. The wrinkle was that Weston would have to walk to Washington for the event, which was particularly problematic because Weston lived in Boston, nearly 500 miles away.

  Lincoln won the election and on February 22, 1861, Weston started walking. The trip took him ten days and ten hours, and the weather didn’t cooperate—he had to battle through snow, ice, and rain, making the grueling trip even less of a walk in the park. He barely slept, he ate while he
walked (which was hard to do in the days before granola bars and ziplock bags), but he managed to arrive on time for the festivities in Washington. His trek drew media attention, and he became a minor celebrity. He even got to meet Lincoln; as Wikipedia notes, he received “a congratulatory handshake from the new president.”

  Weston had found his calling and kept on walking. As retold by ESPN’s Grantland, “In 1867, he became a household name by walking from Portland, Maine, to Chicago in 26 days, 1,200 miles along the post road. Weston was greeted by massive crowds everywhere he went; newspaper writers around the country worked themselves into a froth debating the merits of the undertaking.” His efforts, defying common sense and the elements, ushered in a nationwide interest in a new sport called “pedestrianism”—competitive walking.

  For the remainder of the 1800s, pedestrianism continued to grow throughout the United States and even found significant popularity in Great Britain. Some races were city-to-city jaunts, at times taking weeks, but the big commercial value lay in “six-day races” at arenas such as Madison Square Garden. Matthew Algeo, author of the book Pedestrianism, which chronicles the sport, explained in an interview with NPR that competitors would walk around a track, typically an eighth of a mile long, from midnight Monday morning until midnight the next Saturday evening. The rules varied, but in many cases, whoever walked farthest won; at other times, the competition was to see who could last the longest without collapsing. (In all cases, competitive walkers were afforded a brief sleep break each day, but nowhere near eight hours of it.) These races attracted thousands upon thousands of fans, spectators, and gamblers, each willing to pay for a ticket and various concessions.

  In the sport’s heyday, Weston was a household name on both sides of the pond. He dedicated most of his life to the sport, even as its popularity waned. In 1913—then age seventy-three or seventy-four—Weston walked from New York City to Minneapolis in fifty-one days. The trip was more than 1,500 miles; that’s thirty miles a day.

  Competitive walking waned around the turn of the twentieth century. It almost entirely disappeared after the invention of the car (although the much-less-popular racewalking persisted for a time), which, in a cruel form of irony, also robbed Weston of his notable skill. In 1927, well after he retired from his now-dead sport, Weston was hit by a taxicab. He would never walk again, competitively or otherwise, and was confined to a wheelchair. He passed away two years later.

  BONUS FACT

  Walking can also be a job in and of itself in modern times—notably in Tehran, Iran. Because of Tehran’s traffic and pollution concerns, the government only allows cars to take to the roads on alternate days—cars with license plates ending in odd numbers on odd-numbered days and even plates on even days. Some drivers, wanting to get around the law, hire people to walk behind their cars in the traffic-heavy areas, obscuring their license plates and helping the drivers avoid traffic tickets.

  DABBAWALA

  HOW TO BRING YOUR LUNCH TO WORK IN INDIA

  Imagine a man on a bicycle carrying two dozen or so metallic cylindrical containers, each of which resembles a small beer keg or a transportation capsule for toxic waste. The containers—most often made of tin or aluminum—are called dabbas. There are 4,500 to 5,000 dabbawalas riding around every alley and street of Mumbai, India, every day, even during monsoon season, often traveling long distances. Collectively, the dabbawalas traffic as many as 200,000 dabbas each day.

  But don’t worry. They’re delivering lunch.

  Translated literally, dabbawala means “box person” or “one who carries a box.” A dabba is a box—in this case, a bit of a misnomer because the “boxes” used are clearly cylinders—while wala is a suffix for one who does something with the item. In this sense, a dabbawala is simply a food delivery guy, which sounds like a rather pedestrian (pardon the unintentional reverse pun) occupation. But in Mumbai, being a dabbawala isn’t just a job—it’s a skilled trade all to itself. And a highly successful one at that.

  The dabbawala trade began in the mid-to-late 1800s during the British Raj, the British rule of India. Many Britons who came to India did not enjoy the local cuisine and wanted to eat a more familiar lunch (called “tiffin”) at work. However, their offices did not have kitchens, and carrying a lunch was either too cumbersome or beneath the generally aristocratic colonial rulers. It became necessary to transport lunches from the homes of British colonists to their places of work, and a cottage industry cropped up. By 1890, a 100-person delivery company was running much of the lunch delivery business in the area, and over the course of the next half-century or so, the dabbawala industry formed a union, now known as the Nutan Mumbai Tiffin Box Suppliers Trust. Today, although the British Raj is long gone, the business is still growing; in 2007, the New York Times reported that the dabbawala industry was increasing at 5–10 percent annually.

  Why is business so good? Mumbai’s traffic can be nightmarishly bad, making the trip from suburbs to city by car unworkable for most people. Taking the train is a better option, but that makes it difficult to carry items, and the commute is so long that lunch would have to be prepared the night before. A small but meaningful percentage of Mumbai office workers choose to let the network of dabbawalas handle the lunch part. Each day, one delivery person picks up lunch later in the morning, bicycles it and others along its route to the train, and another dabbawala transports the lunch the rest of the way. For 450 rupees per month—that’s about $8.25—workers can get their home-cooked meals brought to them with nearly 100 percent reliability.

  Yes, nearly 100 percent. The dabbawalas, who are often illiterate, navigate the roadways of Mumbai with incredible efficiency. As the Guardian noted, “Forbes awarded the humble dabba-wallahs [sic] a 6 Sigma performance rating, a term used in quality assurance if the percentage of correctness is 99.9999999 or more. In other words, for every six million tiffins delivered, only one fails to arrive. This error rate means in effect that a tiffin goes astray only once every two months.” In 2011, when the team from the television show Top Gear tried to beat a dabbawala delivery service by using a car instead of the train, they failed miserably.

  The dabbawalas themselves earn 8,000 to 10,000 rupees per month (roughly $150–$175), or about 100,000–120,000 rupees annually. This is much higher than the per-capita income in India—about 53,333 rupees (about $975) per year—but that’s not enough, many claim. Due to the higher cost of living in the Mumbai area, combined with recent upticks in inflation, the dabbawala union recently requested taxi-operator permits for 2,000 of its 5,000 members.

  BONUS FACT

  If Guy de Maupassant, a famous nineteenth-century French writer, wanted his lunch delivered by dabbawala (leaving aside that there are none in Paris, certainly not when Maupassant was alive), he would have had them deliver the cooked meals to the base of Paris’s Eiffel Tower. Not because he liked the food at the Tower’s restaurant. The Tower, completed in 1889, was not immediately well received by many, and especially not Maupassant. As the New York Times noted, Maupassant “saw the tower as an affront to his nation’s proud cultural heritage and dined regularly in its restaurant because that was the one spot in Paris from which he didn’t have to look upon ‘this giant and disgraceful skeleton.’”

  FLUSHED WITH LOVE

  THE THRONE THAT COMES WITH A LICENSE TO MARRY

  The requirements for obtaining a marriage license in the state of New York are rather boring. Each person has to be at least eighteen years old or have parental consent (and in no case will the state issue a marriage license to someone under the age of fourteen). Certain close relatives can’t marry, and people who are currently married to other people are similarly ineligible to marry someone else. You have to fork over $40. But it’s pretty straightforward, as you’d expect. By requiring that the grooms first send in a picture of their commode before issuing a marriage license, the government is incentivizing the start of a cultural change via infrastructure improvements.

  But to participate in a pa
rticular marriage ceremony in the Madhya Pradesh, a state in India, you need to prove something else. The groom needs to show that his domicile comes with a toilet.

  Really.

  In early 2013, Madhya Pradesh officials conducted a mass marriage ceremony to provide a way for women from poor families to wed their would-be grooms. It’s a program that has been around since 2006 or 2007. The recent ceremony attracted just under 200 couples to the proverbial (but in this case, nonexistent) altar, and the program has seen nearly 2,000 poor couples enter into marriage this way in about a year’s time. And the state is using it as an opportunity to fix another problem.

  According to the World Toilet Organization—yes, there’s a World Toilet Organization (and it’s actually a pretty serious charity)—there are about 2.5 billion people without access to a functioning private toilet. Most of them live in developing regions and are very poor, and the fledgling families in Madhya Pradesh are no exception. A recent survey suggests that half of all Indian households lack a toilet, which is a major public health issue. As Fast Company points out, improperly disposed-of fecal matter is the largest killer of children across the world, claiming over 1.4 million young lives a year. According to a 2007 report by Bloomberg, India accumulates as much as 100,000 tons of human excrement in fields each day.