This Airport is a Bus Terminal if You Trespass Hard Enough and Believe in Yourself

My trip to the Midwest Junto for the History of Science, and the untapped potential of suburban airports as regional ground transportation hubs.

I went to the Midwest Junto for the History of Science[^1] last week, which this year was held at Purdue University, in West Lafayette Indiana. There was a lot of interesting work shared at the conference, including:
- ⚗️ ⚔️ Patrick Gamez at Notre Dame connecting chemical weapons, the CIA's Cold War obsession with chemistry, and the blossoming of a totalizing and terrifying approach to war he called "chemist's way of war"
- 🍁🛫 Blair Stein at Grand Valley State University, who has a new book coming out soon on the history of Trans Canada Airlines (TCA; now AirCanada), mentioning CTA's access to government infrastructure allowed it to computerize its reservation system before the (private) US airlines.
- 🖋️🌗 Elizabeth Carlton at UC Riverside combining art history and science history to uncover the exquisite methods, fascinating philosophy, and catty politics behind the first maps of the moon.[^2]

Purdue's got some really interesting stuff going on, including a new center for Social Genomics (which I visited in October) and a markedly successful approach to avoiding the Eye of Sauron in DC that targets higher ed apparently at random nowadays (Have former Republican Governor Mitch Daniels run your university for a decade and turn it into a STEM powerhouse that reflexively says and does "free speech" in a way that's acceptable to Republicans, but unnatural for a lot of more liberal academics and administrators.)

But but but this post is about how I got there. I used Chicago O'Hare Bussport.

Haven't heard of it? You probably know it as Chicago O'Hare "ORD" International Airport, the fourth busiest airport in the US. But it's also something of a regional transport hub, connecting the fine people of five different states not only to O'Hare but to each other. It just hasn't been designed that way—and using it that way seems to be, at least technically, illegal. Let me explain.

The accidental bus station

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