The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power

by Deirdre Mask

maps aren’t magic,” he continued. “They are tools by which we locate a series of discrete events and make them into a class, and then make arguments about that class. The more data we have the more specific we can be.”

When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.”

In the end, London’s cholera epidemics stopped not because of his work, but, ironically, because those who believed smell was disease just got tired of the smell. They built elaborate sewers and cleaned up the Thames.

Perhaps great cities can’t even be designed; perhaps they just have to be born and nurtured like a child.

“Looking over Richard’s shoulder once at the file directory on his Amstrad computer,” Baker told me, “I saw he had a folder called Deathshit, which impressed me deeply.” The file collected information that would, Baker said, nowadays be described as “horrible history”—“stuff about plague, pollution, miserable accidents.”

Baker was astonished to learn for the first time that Grope Lane used to be Gropecunt Lane. He was even more surprised to find out that it wasn’t the only Gropecunt Lane in England.

I’m just a Gropecunt Lane dilettante,”

The post office also hired women, apparently believing that they had superior analytical talent and could therefore decipher addresses more easily.

bedrock principles of the Enlightenment: rationality and equality.

In the United States, federal officials openly despised Native American naming practices, which were often gender-neutral and fluid