Here we have the amount of damage done by internationalized civil wars and pure civil wars. And we see that civil wars of the recent decades are far less destructive than the interstate wars of earlier decades. So if you now aggregate the total number of deaths from all wars combined, you get a pattern as follows. Again, I'll show it as a stackedlayer graph. Here we have the number of -- the rate of death from colonial wars which has petered out to zero. The number of deaths from interstate wars which has followed a
But I sympathize with the American population, because yeah, it's a hard place out there. The interstate is in itself its own kind of place. This was just a photo that I found while I was pulling out the other ones, but this was to-- in America they say-- air up your tires, which
So that kind of process always interrupting you. And "Interstate " won-- it won an award for travel book of the year last year. I gave half of the prize money to the ACLU.
Like the good old days was not-- they just weren't so good across big portions of population. The interstate highway system cut through the heart of many African-American neighborhoods. The GI Bill was not shared equally across the population, either racially-- very few women benefited from the GI Bill, for instance.
He jumps in his car and races down I-75. As he approaches the interstate line, he sees the vehicle. A violent struggle ensues.
And she stays home with our child. And he left the interstate and went someplace that I knew wasn't on the way to the airport. So I realized, great, I just totally got some guy.
and that you find, again, at the roadsides. And the title of "Interstate " was kind of no coincidence in that respect. Starting out, then, at the beginning of the trip, which began in New York City, as we can see.
My previous two books are also narrative nonfiction. One is about interstate highways and serial killers, and the one before that is the untold history of Niagara Falls. And an interesting thing, if you're purchasing the book today, is that the first printing of this edition screwed up the subtitles of the last two books.
Well, it's beyond faith. he promulgated this interstate highway program.
And for a while, he was making a go of it selling gas and fried chicken until he realized that Walmart up the hill on the interstate or on the state road and Sheet's Oil next door with low-cost gasoline were squeezing him so that he couldn't compete.
40 years ago demographically but it is true that we be trying to keep an eye on somebody that we only see two or three intersection of every interstate and that's what a lot of them are but there are also the forerunners of these or
there's more small communities that have voice, and story and identity that, you know, we can touch into by taking a back roads route that will be different than if we take an interstate and stop in major cities along the way. Umm, it's just not as diverse a journey across America and really not really necessarily as representative of the diversity of culture that exists in the United States.
because it's all about the crop. Likewise on the interstates -- it's a car saturated culture. And where it's sort of not many signs of human life.
and they'd never get anywhere. And I think of that as the interstate is a little bit like a monocrop in some ways. In the way that we mass agriculture, you have a field where they're growing the crop and nothing else grows within it,
We were innovators in this. From the transcontinental railroad to the interstate highway system from universal public education in the 1840s to the GI Bill after World War II, we innovated it and built the commons.
Not just with water, but with other entities, which is that the government makes a decision that the land on which you live might be better used for the interstate or a big industrial complex or something of the sort, the law of eminent domain which we've all heard about.
has to be incentivized to provide basic public goods, like roads. So this is what they call interstate number one. This is one of the main highways in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
You're going to see it happen right here in this area. How is that not a barrier to interstate commerce?
--last year, which displays majestically the variation that you talk about. So when we drive down the interstate and we're just confronted by Walgreen's, and McDonald's, and everything looks the same, once you get off the interstates it really isn't. And what you say is so true that out of this astonishing variety, which still exists, nonetheless connective tissue, which makes everyone able to say,
the crucial question is which wars kill more people?" The many civil wars that the world has seen recently or the small number of interstate wars that have been tapering off? This graph shows that the -- how much damage an interstate war has done per war per year plotted decade by decade. And it shows that the deadliness of interstate wars has been in steady decline.
eastern sky and blot out the stars. Conquistador. Casa Calusa. Monteview. Mirador. The cars, buses and trucks on the Causeway and bridges and the north/south interstate and the traffic jam turnpikes to the suburbs have switched their headlights on. And the high-rises and skyscrapers downtown, fluorescent night-lights ignite floor after floor as the cleaners, janitors and watchmen begin their night's work and from the rooftops and pent houses, slender beacons
And so I was sitting on Interstate 10, with like hundreds of cars around me, all of us not going anywhere and Rita was coming.
In the United States, interstate transportation of stolen property is one of these crimes.
It's the only place where a large interstate freeway goes through-- a highway goes through Manhattan.
Man, we built the interstate highway system.
And his quote from his brief into the Interstate Commerce Commission, I thought, really summarized my sense of how this relationship between
And much as I think there's an awful lot of unjustified fear in American society, American popular culture, American news stroke entertainment, I do think, as I say, there are a lot of people on the interstates and highways of the US who in Europe would be either getting professional help or would simply not be there because migrating south for winter is something that doesn't really belong in the 21st century wealthy nations.
So they're as likely to search a twisty local road as an interstate highway, as long as they have the same weight.
We ended up arresting more than 100 people that were involved in these interstate thefts.
States from the creation of suburbia, the interstate highway, to where, very often, someone got their first kiss, long weekends, all sorts
Every time I read about someone going the wrong way on the interstate and having a head on killing four or five people, it just breaks my heart
But what I learned announcing traffic in particular is you have 30 seconds. And you know, sometimes you'd have two interstates shut down. You had all this stuff to say and you had 30 seconds to get it done.
big old cars, highways, and this adoration for the interstate system, which is really cool to me, and those bastions of 1950s kitsch.
She drove from Dallas to Austin, three hours down Interstate 35.
So the aviation training pipeline goes through, and it's like a major interstate , I-95, and there's off ramps.
that could be a federal crime, because they are interfering in interstate commerce.
So as a result, we could charge him in interference in interstate commerce.
And this sort of led me to the genre, if you like, of politics at roadsides, basically. And as John says, the book that I'm talking about today is "Interstate ," from the United States, which is actually more of a hitchhiking book.
But many people believe the infrastructure budgets, the spending, and I look at it, and I think, interest rates are at huge lows, the return on infrastructure, I think, would arguably be very high-- think about the interstate highway system of the '50s, and so forth-- so if you're going to spend money on infrastructure, this is a pretty good time to be doing it.
You're seeing the spider web of things that are joining the cities, the interstate highways, some things of that nature.
What's worse is they're explicitly spun off from the ICC, Interstate Commerce Commission, which managed railroads.
And everyone in the family was doing something different. One of the journeys that I really enjoyed for this book was discovering the origins of the interstate highway system.
And everyone in the family was doing something different. Conventionally, we believe it's known as the Eisenhower system of interstate and defense highways because Eisenhower saw the autobahns in Germany in 1945.
The carrier, if you will, was from the Interstate Commerce Act where the language was taken from.
results in as few as 25 deaths a year. So it's an inclusive graph. The bottom most layer shows the number of colonial wars and that's a category of war that no longer exists as the European empires gave up their colonies. Here we have interstate wars a government on each side and those have been tapering off. Here, however, we see the number of civil wars -- both the number of pure civil wars and the number of internationalized civil wars where some foreign power has butted in to prop up the government against an insurgent
shows that the -- how much damage an interstate war has done per war per year plotted decade by decade. And it shows that the deadliness of interstate wars has been in steady decline. Here we have the amount of damage done by internationalized civil wars and pure civil wars. And we see that civil wars of the recent decades are far less destructive than the
near Memphis, Tennessee. You had an interstate highway system and of course you had Ray Kroc, in the 1950s, bought McDonald's and built it into a nationwide, now even a global, powerhouse.
We identified him. We were able to charge him with the Hobbs Act robbery, because he was interfering in interstate commerce.
And with the car, you created roads, and highways, and the interstate system.
But he wasn't sure if he'd voted for the Republicans or the Democrats, which was, I thought, really kind of nice insight on what people There was one time when I asked him, I said to him as we went by a tornado shelter, which they have at the interstate roadsides for when tornadoes