![There you have it, a ringing endorsement from mills! You too can, uh, have nightmares if you read this New Yorker article about elevators. I found my way to that piece because of that recent real-life nightmare in which a woman was crushed while entering an elevator.
A couple more notes on the New Yorker piece:
“Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—’intimate distance,’ the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, ‘Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.’”
The takeaway from this article is that freak accidents aside, elevators are very very safe: “short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error” (as seems to be in the recent case). Airplane rammings of course evoke the WTC, whose elevator design the article spends several paragraphs detailing. One of my most vivid memories of reading the 9/11 Commission Report is the description of elevators, severed, falling to the ground floor lobby and opening to reveal burned bodies. The surreal thing is that while fire raged 100 floors up, everything seemed normal down below. Except the elevators.
For your nightmares.
Update: These elevator nightmares just keep coming…. [Woman Burned Alive in Brooklyn Elevator]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwd4e82ERN1qz9sl3o1_1280.png)
There you have it, a ringing endorsement from mills! You too can, uh, have nightmares if you read this New Yorker article about elevators. I found my way to that piece because of that recent real-life nightmare in which a woman was crushed while entering an elevator.
A couple more notes on the New Yorker piece:
- “Edward Hall, who pioneered the study of proxemics, called the smallest range—less than eighteen inches between people—’intimate distance,’ the point at which you can sense another person’s odor and temperature. As Fruin wrote, ‘Involuntary confrontation and contact at this distance is psychologically disturbing for many persons.’”
- The takeaway from this article is that freak accidents aside, elevators are very very safe: “short of airplane rammings, most accidents are the result of human error” (as seems to be in the recent case). Airplane rammings of course evoke the WTC, whose elevator design the article spends several paragraphs detailing. One of my most vivid memories of reading the 9/11 Commission Report is the description of elevators, severed, falling to the ground floor lobby and opening to reveal burned bodies. The surreal thing is that while fire raged 100 floors up, everything seemed normal down below. Except the elevators.
For your nightmares.
Update: These elevator nightmares just keep coming…. [Woman Burned Alive in Brooklyn Elevator]
