“If you take the hundred thousand interactions with the stone in aggregate, all over the city, the absence is thousands of people making the same decision. Now, suddenly, you have a picture of a system of traffic at a place like Pompeii where we had zero evidence ever before.” Poehler paused, and I thought about all the absences in my home city that mark the places where crowds gather: bald trails worn through park grass; the dings in subway paint where commuters have whacked their bags into the walls repeatedly; and yes, the scars in streets where cars took turns too quickly, or bounced as
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