Mutant Rights
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In this podcast short, a strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human.
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Oh, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab from WNYC and NPR. Hey, I'm Jada Boomeron, I'm Robert Krollwich, this is Radio Lab podcast. And today on the podcast, we're going to talk about containers. Well, no. Yeah, why not? Well, because it's bigger than containers. What's categories? Because you don't say a boring word for containers. No, it's not at all boring. Taxonomy. Can we say this? Yes, this is a story about what goes where and what doesn't go there, and what should go there if you were only smarter about it. Right? So you've kind of asked, are you around? Yeah, that's what I want to talk about. All right, so you have a story to tell us, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So you tell us your story. Yeah, set it up for us, Ike. Well, let's start back in 1993. Okay. Yes. I'm Sherry Singer. And my name is Indi Singh. Singer and Singh. Singer and Singh. And one day, the two of them are looking at this customs book called the Harmonized Tariff Schedule. What was it called again? The Harmonized Tariff. Harmonized Tariff. You almost harmonized it. The Harmonized Tariff. It's this huge book, chock full of customs classifications. Milk products, milk products, vegetables. It's got everything in it. Literally thousands of provisions. So they're flipping through this big book. And what they noticed that day is that in this book, we're the following words. Representing only human beings. They saw this fateful phrase right next to the word doll. Under the Harmonized, a doll was something that represented only a human being. A doll represented a human being. Only a human. Only a human being. Yeah, it could not be any other creature but a human being. So Barbie is a doll. Right.
Transcription truncated.
In this podcast short, a strange twist of legal taxonomy causes a dispute over whether X-MEN action figures are toys or dolls and sparks a court case about what it means to be human.