CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK
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Dude, Where’s Your Car?

I’m currently holed up on Cape Cod, doing little more than eating fried clam rolls and reading Philip Hoare’s thunderously good book The Whale, hence the silence around these parts (save for a quick appearance on WBUR to talk about my Boston Globe piece, “Trooper Down”).

But just a quick note to say my latest Slate column is up; it’s on how people without cars, or who don’t drive, are depicted in Hollywood films, and many of the ideas came from your good submissions to my earlier blog post. So thanks, and I’ll be back next week.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 11:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Dude, Where’s Your Car?”

  1. David Moulton Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 12:09 pm

    Have a nice vacation! I enjoyed your “Trooper Down” piece.

  2. Noah Says:
    July 30th, 2010 at 7:12 pm

    I forgot to respond to your cars in movies post, but there’s on that’s coming out that looks promising. It’s a bike messenger action movie called “Premium Rush.” They’re still filming, but there are some photos from on-set out there.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1547234/

  3. Nate Briggs Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 5:56 pm

    Tom:

    Really impressed by the SLATE article. And I absolutely think that the time you spent discussing THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN was valuable. Steve Carell’s bicycle commute near the beginning of the film expresses everything, everything, EVERYTHING about how the bicycle was viewed at the time of the movie - and how many motorists look at it, now.

    I believe that biologists refer to “display behavior” when talking about males trying to attract mates. Carell’s ride was exactly the opposite of display behavior.

    Keep up the good work.

    - Nate (SLC)

  4. Michael Prager Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 9:16 am

    Great Slate piece. If movies helped making smoking cool and sell cigarettes, then maybe movies can help promote car sharing, walking, biking and public transit. Movies don’t show that much driving (who wants to watch people drive) and when they do it looks like happy driving on short trips with little traffic. Like car commercials, there are scenic things to look at or intersting conversations in the car, not one person driving alone in traffic for an hour down an ugly street.

  5. Philipp Angermeyer Says:
    August 9th, 2010 at 11:10 am

    Not really about carlessness, but watching the Wizard of Oz with my daughter, I had to wonder how Miss Gulch influenced Hollywood’s take on bike-riding…
    Great article!

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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