"If I pretend to be crazy, nobody will sit next to me!"
Boarding a bus can be a battle. First you have to fight through a line of other passengers, then struggle through a too-tiny aisle, and when you finally collapse into an empty row, the hard part is only beginning. Now you have to defend your extra seat from a horde of sweaty strangers. To learn more about the various tactics that people use to save the next-door seat, one brave sociologist went undercover. Over the course of two years, Yale University’s Esther Kim rode Greyhound buses for thousands of miles---including trips that took days---while observing and sometimes interviewing her fellow commuters. And some of her findings
were...pretty obvious. In the fight to preserve some personal space, people have many tactics: fill the empty seat with luggage, use plugged-in headphones or a phony nap to become temporarily deaf, toss ...
