Radiolab - Quicksaaaand!

For many of us, quicksand was once a real fear -- it held a vise-grip on our imaginations, from childish sandbox games to grown-up anxieties about venturing into unknown lands. But these days, quicksand can't even scare an 8-year-old. In this short, we try to find out why.

Duration: 16m
Broadcast on: 10 Oct 2013
Audio Format: other

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Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR. Hey, I'm Jad Abumran. I'm Robert Kolwich. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. Yes, thank you. See, we're a little off our game right now, because we are not in our normal studio. We're actually in Detroit right now. We're on tour, and we're in the first leg of our tour. It's super fun going well, but we do have an interesting podcast for you. We do indeed, but it might be more efficient if we go back to New York, where Soren Wheeler is standing by, because he and I had a conversation with someone. We can just, yes, do you want to do it? Do you want to carry it, Soren? Sure, do it. So today we have a story of an obsession that swallowed reporter Dan Inger, pretty much whole. Yeah. Of all the things to catch your attention, how did this happen to pop into your head? It happened to pop into my head because I was talking to a friend of mine, who's an elementary school teacher, and we were discussing quicksand, as one does. Oh, of course. This elementary school teacher and I. And she just said, you know, the kids in my class just don't even, they don't, they've never heard of quicksand. Like second graders, they're great, like what? Nine-year-olds. What's that? Nine-year-olds. They're great. That's like fourth graders. That's prime time for quicksand. Right, when I was nine, quicksand was a major part of my life. Yeah. We would, you know, pour water in the corner of the sandbox and say, oh, it's quicksand. But your teacher's friend's students didn't. Right, but so I went to her, I visited her class, and I discovered that she was wrong. Almost all of them had heard of quicksand, but she was right in so far as quicksand was not important to them. In fact, they thought it wasn't scary at all. I mean, I was like, well, what are you afraid of, and they said, you know-- Zombies, the alien empathetic rim ghost. When I was actually lost in writing, being attacked by a dinosaur, that would be totally even more scary. So we actually went and talked to some third graders, and while some of them said-- Well, I guess it's sort of scary, but-- Most of them weren't scared of it at all. I don't think so. I usually don't think about it. They thought it was something that maybe their parents had been afraid of. They told me that when he was little, his friends always said like, look out, that could

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