99% Invisible: Recent Episodes
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When reporter Julie Blussé got on a plane to Hong Kong last November, she thought she was going to cover the aftermath of a disaster. The evening before, she’d seen the images on the news: seven huge residential towers in the Tai Po neighborhood, all part of a complex called Wang Fuk Court, completely engulfed in flames. By the time she landed, twenty hours had passed, and she figured she’d be documenting wreckage.
Instead, the towers were still burning. In a park across from the complex, she met a 73-year-old local named Ma Ming who had watched the fire start, the flames racing up all thirty-two floors so fast that firefighters lost control within twenty minutes. All seven burning towers had been wrapped in bamboo scaffolding for renovations, and the narrative already forming in the news was that the bamboo had fueled the blaze. But when Blussé asked Ma about it, he was adamant: it wasn’t the bamboo. It was the plastic netting draped around the bamboo that caught. With the buildings still burning behind him and nearly three hundred people unaccounted for, it seemed like a strange moment for a careful, almost lawyerly distinction between construction materials. That distinction would turn out to matter enormously.
If you’ve ever seen images of Hong Kong, you’ve seen its bamboo. Entire skyscrapers get fully encased in it, countless stalks enveloping glass office towers like a veil, and it’s as much a part of the city’s identity as its ferries, dim sum restaurants, and neon signs. Even the little plastic miniatures of Hong Kong buildings sold in tourist shops come with bamboo scaffolding attached.
You won’t see anywhere near this much bamboo in the rest of China, where metal replaced it decades ago and most of the knowledge required to build with it has disappeared. In 2022, the mainland banned it outright for housing and municipal projects. Hong Kong is one of the last places on earth where bamboo scaffolding survives as a living practice, not as a heritage performance but as the actual way buildings get built. Perhaps no city on earth more proudly displays its own upkeep.
There are good reasons the tradition survived here. Hong Kong has little flat land, so the city is extraordinarily dense, its streets narrow and its alleys narrower, and construction in those spaces requires constant adaptation. Bamboo is far lighter than steel, lighter even than wood — it’s technically a grass — so it can be carried and assembled by hand, and cut down to suit whatever space it needs to fit. It doesn’t have to be anchored to the ground, either. A typical bamboo platform often starts at the 65th floor of an office building, shooting straight out of a window with nothing but air underneath. From there two scaffolders working alone can build it out in any shape or direction without ever touching the street below. As one bamboo master put it: wherever a person fits, a bamboo scaffold fits.
Metal scaffolding, by contrast, usually has to be built from the ground up, out of fixed tube lengths, clamps, and standardized parts. On a flat, open site it’s fast and cheap. On a curved facade on a Hong Kong hillside, it becomes slow and expensive, which is why bamboo still accounts for roughly eighty percent of all scaffolding in the city, and why even Hong Kong’s most daring architecture, including an irregularly shaped Zaha Hadid building, went up behind bamboo.
Blussé watched the craft in action in a tiny alley in Prince Edward, where a third-generation scaffolder named Timmy So and his father had come to build a platform reaching an air conditioning unit on the 14th floor, probably the single most common job scaffolders do in a city whose AC units sit crammed into hard-to-reach mazes of pipes and fixtures. Their cart was custom-built by Timmy’s father to slot exactly inside a standard Hong Kong elevator. Strapped into a harness, Timmy stepped out of a window 45 meters up, drilled brackets into the wall, and lashed together a small enclosure that some in the industry call a bird cage while his father handed him poles one at a time, each handoff confirmed by a twist of the bamboo so that nothing ever dropped. Ninety minutes later, the cage was finished, just another piece of bamboo scaffolding floating above one of the city’s busiest neighborhoods, and the alley had gone about its business the whole time. But just because bamboo is easy to work with doesn’t mean it’s easy to learn. Becoming a master takes years of apprenticeship, and the knowledge has been passed down father to son, job by job. Twelve years in, Timmy still calls his father Sifu. Master.
On the second day of the fire, with the towers still not fully under control, bamboo master Timmy was called to an emergency meeting at Hong Kong’s Development Bureau. On the table was an agenda titled Roadmap on Adoption of Scaffolding: a timetable for the complete phase-out of bamboo at every construction site in Hong Kong. The official rationale was straightforward, since metal is more fire-resistant than bamboo, and the government had already begun pushing contractors toward metal months earlier, under pressure from Beijing. Timmy spoke up against the ban, but only briefly. It was already clear that more than a hundred people had died, and resistance felt both pointless and almost inappropriate.
Then something unexpected happened: the public pushed back. People began posting videos of themselves trying, and failing, to set bamboo alight, pointing out that it doesn’t ignite until at least 260 degrees Celsius. Instagram accounts ran posts declaring that bamboo is innocent. At a makeshift memorial near the site, right next to notes of grief for the victims, were messages reading: don’t blame the bamboo. The scaffolding had burned along with everything else. but questions remained as to whether it had also caused the fire to spread, and to many Hong Kongers, the rushed ban looked like scapegoating. In the fire, 168 people died and thousands lost their homes in the fire. Hong Kongers wanted answers, but blaming bamboo looked like a way for the government to declare the case closed instead of finding the real culprit.
The bamboo ban also fits a pattern Hong Kongers have come to recognize since the city was handed back to China in 1997 with a promise of one country, two systems. That arrangement has largely collapsed: since 2021, the city’s government has consisted only of Beijing-approved patriots, and residents have watched the things that made Hong Kong distinct get taken down or demolished, including historic buildings and the city’s iconic neon signs, also in the name of safety.
Under the National Security Law, criticizing the government is a potential crime. After the fire, a student was arrested for calling for an independent investigation and a commentator in his seventies was arrested for criticizing the government’s response. But so far, no one has been punished for defending bamboo, which has made talk of bamboo a kind of coded speech, a way of saying the things that can’t be said out loud.
More than half a year after the fire, no one is blaming the bamboo anymore, including the Hong Kong government. Investigations have instead zeroed in on other highly flammable materials, the styrofoam boards covering the windows and the netting around the scaffolding, just as Ma Ming said on day one. It has also emerged that no safety check ever flagged those materials even though residents explicitly complained about them. Seven people connected to the renovation companies have been charged, but no one from the government has been held accountable, and the bamboo phase-out is moving forward anyway. Classes for new bamboo scaffolders have been cancelled, and the city’s roughly 3,500 bamboo workers are being incentivized to retrain on metal. Timmy, who is 38, assumed he had decades of work ahead of him and a craft to pass on. He still doubts bamboo can ever be banned completely, not as long as there’s an air conditioning unit in a hard-to-reach spot, in a narrow alley, between two oddly shaped buildings, 65 stories up.
In 1821, two Rhode Island brothers went looking for buyers for their woolen fabric, and stumbled into a lucrative, captive market: Southern slave plantations. Roman Mars and historian Seth Rockman trace the strange life of so-called “Negro cloth” — a textile category defined by nothing but who it was worn by. Along the way, they uncover how enslaved people shaped the very cloth used to control them, and how New England manufacturers convinced themselves they were the good guys.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
Stories about biomimicry can be catnip for design journalists. They’re catchy, and there’s something seductive about a designer borrowing from a legacy solution in nature to solve a human problem. It makes for a simple and compelling narrative. Japan’s Shinkansen is a classic example: the bullet trains were hitting tunnels so fast they punched the air out the far end, creating a boom loud enough to rattle windows in the neighborhoods along the track … until a birdwatching engineer named Eiji Nakatsu took inspiration from the kingfisher, which dives from air into water after fish with barely a splash, and gave the train a long, beak-shaped nose.
Biomimicry: How Designers Are Learning from the Natural WorldBut some of the most richly interesting biomimicry stories are more complex, with messy causality, dead ends, or undeserved hype. The following three examples run from relatively straightforward to surprisingly inverted and dazzlingly complicated. Headline grabbers can be fun, but deeper dives are often the most rewarding ones.
Shipworms and the Thames TunnelIn the early 1800s, London was already the largest city in the world, with the largest port, and yet the only way across the Thames near it was the notoriously crowded London Bridge, a choke point for everyday traffic and commerce alike. A second bridge downstream would have interfered with shipping, so that was a non-starter. The only real alternative was to tunnel under the river, but there was no precedent for burrowing under a wide active waterway. Tunneling in that era using mining techniques, developed for solid rock and soil, not the soft, watery ground under a river – attempts to tunnel underneath the Thames had ended in collapse. One engineer, Marc Brunel, had written the whole thing off as impossible, until he came upon the work of a navy shipworm.
In a naval dockyard, Brunel found and examined a piece of condemned ship’s timber that the shipworm, Teredo navalis, had bored full of holes, and under his magnifying glass he noticed the walls of those little tunnels stayed smooth and stable even in waterlogged, rotting wood. The shipworm that created these isn’t actually a worm but a bivalve, a strange cousin of the clam whose shell has evolved into a pair of grinding plates. And to create its stable passageways, it does two things at once: as it scrapes the wood in front of it and moves forward, it extrudes a lining that coats and reinforces the tunnel behind it, so there’s never a gap.
In 1818 Brunel patented a system that would work the same way, digging and reinforcing at the same time. He called the key piece of it a “tunneling shield” — a cast-iron frame that protected dozens of miners chipping at the face, while bricklayers walled up each exposed section right behind them, just like a shipworm. It worked, albeit with dramatic setbacks. At one point, the Thames broke through and drowned six workers, and Brunel’s own son barely made it out alive. But the tunnel was eventually finished in 1843, the first of its kind. It’s still in service today, part of the London Overground rail network.
And for its part: Brunel’s shield became the foundation of modern tunneling, with similar tunneling shields used to build the subways of London and New York. Some modern machines have converged even further on the mollusk, placing precast concrete tunnel sections as the system bores onward in a smooth and contiguous process.
Boxfish and the Bionic CarIn 2005, Mercedes-Benz made a big splash with the Bionic, a concept car with a biomimetic origin story. The company claimed a first-of-its-kind approach, borrowing not just one element from nature (like a bird feather or whale fin) but an entire model organism: the boxfish. This fish is basically a floating cube with fins, which is boxy (like a car) and yet not something one would imagine as a prototype for a new sleek ride. Yet according to researchers at UCLA and Caltech, ridges along the boxfish called keels create little eddies that help it course-correct, aiding stability. And Mercedes ran its own drag tests, concluding the fish was an “aerodynamic ideal.” The resulting Bionic got featured in National Geographic and installed at MoMA, and for a while it was the most widely circulated example of automotive biomimicry in the world.
And the story would end there, except for new research done a decade later, turning the original findings upside down. Newer research using more sophisticated 3D modeling showed that the blunt, boxy front plowing head-on through the water does fine going straight, but the moment the fish turns its head, everything destabilizes and forces shove further aside. The boxfish is not an aerodynamic ideal – quite the opposite: it is unbalanced by default. And that makes sense if you look at where and how the fish lives. Boxfish aren’t racers. They thread through reefs and evade predators, and they need to turn on a dime, flicking their fins and rotating in three dimensions, which is the opposite of what you want in a streamlined and stable vehicle. The original researchers, to be clear, weren’t wrong: there are elements that help stabilize the boxfish – but they exist to counteract its natural instability.
As for Mercedes: they never updated their story. The Bionic’s official webpage still calls the boxfish highly streamlined, despite the evidence that derails that idea. Then again, it was never really about whether the car worked – it was always a concept vehicle, made to showcase various green innovations, garner public attention, and then sit forever on the shelf.
Honeycombs and HexagonsPeel back a panel on a Boeing plane or a NASA shuttle and you’ll see an array of hexagons, called honeycomb sandwich panels for obvious reasons: they will instantly remind you of a beehive. People have admired honeycomb since ancient times, and geometers worked out long ago that hexagons are one of only three shapes (along with squares and triangles) that tile continuously without gaps. They’re also the one that gives you the most area per unit of edge, so you can build with the least material. Bees benefit from that efficiency, and so do humans. For the most part, no one really thought much beyond those basic material facts.
But in the 1800s another contingent saw the honeycomb as evidence of divine design; one clergyman-naturalist called bees “heaven-instructed mathematicians.” Darwin took the argument seriously as a threat while he was writing On the Origin of Species. If evolution is incremental, how do bees arrive at a perfect geometry? A slightly-off hexagon isn’t a step toward a good one; it’s just a bad shape. So, theological naturalists asked, where are the in-between versions?
Darwin was so concerned about this critique that he kept bees for research even as he worked on his opus, and what he found is that they don’t build hexagons outright. They dig roundish, basically bee-shaped holes; it’s just that when a bunch of them dig side by side, they bump into their neighbors and naturally flatten shared edges into hexagons. It’s not something built from an architectural plan – just the organic outcome of how they excavate.
He folded that into Origin as evidence for evolution, reinforcing the link between honeybees and hexagons in one of the most popular books of that era. And so, naturally, hexagonal designs a century later got dubbed honeycomb panels. After 2,000 years of back and forth amongst geometers, scholars, theologians, biologists, it’s hard to say whether the idea of using this shape traces to bees or humans – or most likely: an interplay of both. It’s just not a straight line.
Full ~~Circle~~ HexagonThere is, however, a more recent development that is a bit more straightforward, at least in isolation. For over a century, aerospace engineers have worked with a platonic ideal of honeycomb geometry: an equilateral six-sided polygon. But in the late 2010s, the additive manufacturing researcher Dhruv Bhate began questioning that abstracted model. Bhate had spent years 3D-printing honeycomb structures for industrial clients, and recognized that his methods could reproduce geometries traditional fabrication had necessarily simplified. So he sought out an entomologist at Arizona State University’s Biomimicry Center.
Comparing manufactured panels to actual bee comb, the pair saw visible differences at a glance: industrial hexagons have sharp corners while bee cells have rounded ones. With NASA funding, they looked closer, X-raying and characterizing combs from dozens of species of bees and wasps, cataloging variations in wall thickness, corner geometry, and the way separate comb sections are joined together. They 3D-printed cores incorporating these features and tested them against conventional designs. In a discovery unlikely to surprise Darwin, subtler elements of the comb’s shape improved structural performance, bringing the science full hexagon (and beyond).
In isolation, this last little story has the makings of a straightforward biomimicry tale – but looked at more broadly, honeycombs and hexagons illustrated the richly complicated interplay of animal engineering, human science, and interspecies design.
In 1925, the world saw the birth of what just might be the greatest gadget in American History: the Brannock Device. The metal contraption transformed the way we measure feet forever, and more than a century after its invention…it has barely changed. Roman Mars and journalist Paul Lukas trace the life of the Brannock Device, from its role outfitting WWII sailors to its surprising endurance into the modern era, even as the entire world changed around it.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
When reporter Olivia Humphreys had her first baby in London, the hospital sent her home with an underwhelming package: a small drawstring bag containing a few tiny samples of baby shampoo and diaper cream, and tons of coupons. And looking through the bag she couldn’t help but wonder if there was anywhere in the world where new parents were given something more substantial to care for their newborns. That’s when she learned about the Finnish baby box.
Picture: Veikko Somerpuro
©KelaIn Finland, new parents also get a package of freebies. But instead of sample-sized products and advertising flyers, they get a large cardboard box full of supplies for a newborn and its parents: items like picture books, nipple cream and warm booties for the freezing Finnish winters. The box itself even doubles as a crib. It’s a starter kit of everything a family will need for the first six months of a baby’s life, and virtually every new parent in Finland is eligible to receive one.
Researching the box, Olivia learned that in its almost 90 years of existence, the Finnish baby box has evolved from a basic survival tool to a national symbol, a rite of passage— and possibly the cutest social engineering tool in the world.
The story begins in the late 1930s, when Finland was almost unrecognizable. The country had recently emerged from a brutal civil war, and revolutions in neighboring Russia meant it had lost its biggest trading partner. Most of Finland’s grain came from Russia, and the loss left many people starving. Finns were living in crowded, unsanitary conditions and dying in outbreaks of tuberculosis, smallpox, and measles. Almost 20 percent of children didn’t make it to their fifth birthday. Since the 1920s, a Finnish charity had been lending struggling families baskets of baby essentials, with clean clothes hand-sewn by volunteers from donated fabric, an alternative to the common practice of swaddling newborns in old rags. The government used those baskets as a blueprint for something more ambitious. They kept the clean clothes, added soap and towels to help slow the spread of disease, and packed it all into a cardboard box that could double as a crib. In 1938 they started giving the packages to poor families not as a loan, but as a gift.
When World War II broke out a year later, fabric was scarce, so some of the baby clothes were made of paper. Early wartime boxes also included a sheet of paper to give birth on, a way to create a sterile birthing environment at very low cost. Then in 1949, Finland made the box a universal benefit, given not just to those in need but to everybody, a citizen’s right. It was one of the first steps in building the Finnish welfare state, alongside free school meals, child payments, and new maternal health clinics opening across the country. The box was also a way to pull expectant mothers into those clinics: to get one, a woman had to have her health checked while pregnant. The lure worked. By the early 1950s, more than 90 percent of mothers had registered at the new clinics. And almost eighty years later, the deal is basically the same. Visit a prenatal clinic in the first four months of pregnancy, and the box is yours.
What’s inside changes every year. At Kela, the Finnish social security agency, the process of choosing the contents begins two years before each box is released, in consultation with a panel of advisors. There are representatives from the Maternity and Child Welfare clinics, the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Social Affairs. and the Finnish Safety and Chemical Agency— all weighing in on the contents of the latest box.
By law, every item has to provide for the health and wellbeing of mother and child. Usually the connection is obvious, like a bath thermometer or a teething toy. But the box has always been about subtly influencing people’s decisions, and so some items carry a message. There is no baby bottle, for instance, because Finland strongly recommends breastfeeding for the first four to six months. Not all of these nudges are popular. In the 1970s, the state decided to add condoms to the box, which some people felt was too intrusive. In 2006, experts swapped disposable diapers for reusable cloth ones on environmental grounds, and some parents pushed back; most reported never using them, and within a few years the cloth diapers were out again. The public takes the contents personally. When a blanket was dropped one year, the uproar brought it back by popular demand, and since 2020 parents have been able to weigh in by voting on the patterns for the snowsuit and sleeping bag.
It’s easy to wonder whether today, the Finnish baby box has outlived its usefulness. The box came about at a time when Finns were poor and infant mortality was a big problem. Now, thanks in part to the baby box, Finland ranks among the countries with the lowest infant mortality in the world, and is frequently named the best place to be a parent. And yet the box endures as a beloved part of Finnish society. Parents actually get the choice to take a cash alternative instead of a box, currently 210 euros, but almost all first-time parents choose the box. Collecting and unpacking it has become a rite of passage: grandparents and great-grandparents might come over to pore over the contents and reminisce about what came in their boxes, and old ones sit in garages and attics, filled with favorite items waiting for the next generation.
One reason for the continued popularity is that the box lifts the mental load of new parenthood. In a marketplace happy to sell anxious, sleep-deprived parents high-tech products, the box provides a curated selection of what a baby actually needs. The box also creates a kind of visual equality that is culturally important to Finns. There’s no stigma to using items from the box because everybody does. The real problem is picking out which child is yours when they’re all running around in identical snowsuits.
The idea of the baby box has now spread across the world. A recent study by researchers at Tampere University found more than 90 baby box projects in about 60 countries, on every continent except Antarctica. Only Chile and Scotland have gone universal like Finland; other programs cover a particular state or city, or target the people who need support most, from first-time mothers to refugees to women in jail. The box isn’t always a box, either. A South African project packed its items into a plastic bathtub, sturdier than cardboard in a humid settlement with insects and rats. In Malawi, mothers rejected the cardboard box because it resembled a coffin, so the program opted for a basket. Despite the differences, the boxes almost always come with strings attached that echo the original Finnish bargain, like requiring birth at a healthcare facility.
Not all international baby box programs have gone smoothly. In Scotland— where the government box has been going for nearly a decade— a right-leaning tabloid once tried to turn the public against it, by setting one on fire to prove it was flammable. The box is made from heavy-duty corrugated cardboard, and it apparently took seven minutes of concerted effort with a lighter to set it on fire, so it wasn’t quite the gotcha they’d hoped for. Take-up has hovered around 90 percent, roughly the same as in Finland.
Kela gets constant emails from people abroad who want to buy a box, but it’s illegal for the agency to sell a government benefit. Entrepreneurs have spotted the gap in the market and launched commercial baby boxes, but in the United States it became illegal in 2021 to sell a cardboard box marketed as a sleeping space for a baby, and elsewhere a lot of the businesses have gone bust after a few years. Maybe that’s because the appeal of the box was never really the contents, but the sense of being cared for and being part of something, a feeling that loses its magic when the box comes from a company. The box is full of practical items, boring items even, but they connect parents to the most profound moments of their lives, and in Finland to generations of parents before them, all of them tucking their newborn children into the humble masterpiece of a simple cardboard box.
In the early 1970s, Bruce Lee made nunchaku (nunchucks) cool — kids were building their own and buying them in record numbers. But the nunchucks craze coincided with something much bigger: the birth of a radical new Asian American identity. Roman Mars and historian Jeff Chang trace how nunchucks went from ancient weapon to symbol of resistance — not only uniting Asian Americans in the fight for their own rights, but connecting them to every other group pushing back from the margins.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim: a complex and interconnected history of the world told through 100 objects in the British Museum collection, presented by the museum’s then-director, Neil MacGregor. For 2026, BBC Studios decided to revamp and reimagine that ambitious series, this time focusing on the history of the United States, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To their credit, they figured that British broadcasters might not be the best equipped to curate 100 objects telling American history. So they reached out to Roman Mars.
The new series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects, gets out of the museum. Its objects are overlooked, thrown away, mass-produced, and misunderstood—not priceless museum pieces, but everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large. Before getting too far into the project, Roman went looking for sage advice from the one person who had done this before. This episode is that conversation.
The original series began almost as an internal British Museum project. Neil MacGregor had arrived at the museum from a paintings collection, and what interested him was what it meant to put objects from all over the world into one building. The format the BBC settled on, five themed programs a week moving chronologically from the earliest hand tools to the present, meant that every week MacGregor sat down with curators from the Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, and Americas collections to work out which objects might speak to each other. For scholars trained in a single discipline, the question of what in their collection related to something happening in China at the same moment was one nobody had ever asked them, and they found it thrilling. Choosing the one hundred objects involved no table pounding, just a certain amount of shrill advocacy and some sulking when a favorite piece didn’t make it.
The deeper purpose of doing history through things, MacGregor explains, is that written history limits you to the small bit of humanity that wrote, and mostly to the people in control, who wrote the history and made sure it survived. Objects let the people who never got to tell their story be heard through what they made. Telling it on the radio, where you can’t see any of it, turned out to help rather than hurt: if you can only hear about a thing, you have to imagine it, and you take possession of something you imagine more fully than something reproduced in front of you. It’s a perversity Roman knows something about, having launched a radio show about architecture and design that same year.
Objects also have many more lives than people do. Nobody carving the Rosetta Stone’s tax decree, which is boring beyond boring, had any idea what it would one day come to mean. That dreary bit of broken granite went on to play a starring role in three different stories, the last of them the most famous decipherment in history: the cracking of hieroglyphics.
MacGregor’s description of the whole venture is Gulliver’s Travels. You go off around the world and find astonishing things, but the point of Gulliver’s Travels is that when you come back to England, you realize you’re the peculiar ones. To remove yourself as the norm, he argues, is the precondition of tolerance, and that is what the series was meant to be about. It’s also why the title matters: this was a history of the world, not the history—one particular route through the subject told entirely through objects that now resided in one building in London. How that happened was one of the stories the series told almost without saying so. Some foreign publishers still flattened the article in translation, to his lasting annoyance.
For most of the run, the maker of the object was long dead. The very first program, on a stone chopping tool made one and a half million years ago, had David Attenborough on hand to explain how the thing fit into the animal-human differentiation. Not until a set of David Hockney prints about gay life, chosen to mark the new freedoms of the 20th century, did the series reach an object whose maker could speak for himself. The hundredth object was nearly a counterfeit Chelsea football shirt, made illegally in China and bought in Latin America. What won out was slightly more serious: a solar-powered mobile phone, the modern descendant of the hand ax.
For the American edition, MacGregor suggests looking for the things America gave the world that changed it, like tobacco and blue jeans. He had also heard an early episode of the new series, on the 60-degree screw thread, and endorsed the approach: an object with almost no outward significance, where any screw would do, used to plot how the US dislodged the UK as the industrial determinant of the world. His other piece of advice concerned object number 68, the one where Roman will wonder whether he can bear to go on and whether anyone is still listening. The answer is yes.
This episode ends with MacGregor’s Rosetta Stone installment in full.
New episodes of A History of the United States in 100 Objects air on Fridays, right here in the 99% Invisible feed. A History of the World in 100 Objects was a landmark collaboration between BBC Radio 4 and the British Museum. Listeners in the UK can hear more of it on BBC Sounds. Everyone else can find it wherever they get their podcasts.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
In 1982, a twelve-year-old paperboy, Johnny Gosch, vanished from a quiet Iowa street and sparked an unlikely campaign: the faces of missing children printed on milk cartons by the billions. Roman Mars and Annie Brown trace how a regional dairy campaign exploded into a national symbol — and how the “stranger danger” fears it stoked shaped American misconceptions about child safety that still echo today.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
Family stories have a way of sticking around, even when no one can quite prove them.
This week we’re sharing an episode of Family Lore, a show produced by former 99PI producer Katie Mingle. It follows the story of Charles Frederick Page, a self-taught inventor from central Louisiana whose family has long believed he designed and built an airship before the Wright brothers took flight.
What begins as a piece of family lore opens into a much bigger story about invention, historical memory, and the people who get left out of it.
Listen to Family Lore wherever you get your podcasts.
In 1902, an American classic was born: the teddy bear. Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, the toy became a huge hit, and sparked an idea…maybe every president from then on should have their own viral stuffed animal. Jon Mooallem tells the story of the ill-fated billy possum, and how our fickle feelings about animals have shaped the history—and perhaps the future—of our relationship with the natural world.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects
C. Thi Nguyen teaches philosophy at the University of Utah, and he got into the field because he’s drawn to life’s big questions. Weird, romantic, bizarre questions. What is art for? Are we just wasting our time on our dumb hobbies, or are they the best part of life? Then he started teaching, and learned that what makes a “good” philosopher at a prestigious school had less to do with curiosity and more to do with metrics: your value was whether your papers were getting published in highly ranked journals. Nobody ever told him to care about the rankings. Everybody just talked in that language, and soon he found himself automatically assuming that climbing the list was what success in philosophy meant. All the joy got sucked out of the thing he loved. He was so bored with what he was writing that he nearly quit the profession after burning ten years in it. Instead he did something that looked like career suicide: he threw out the metrics and went after something harder to measure. His own curiosity.
That story opens his latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, which expands the definition of games to cover all the ways metrics and scoring systems play out in our lives: journal rankings, Duolingo, step counting, and beyond. At its center is a concept Nguyen calls value capture. Your values start out rich, subtle, and still developing. Then some institution or technology feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of them, and the simplified versions take over. You have been here. Maybe you started going to school because you wanted to learn, or started walking more for your health, and then a metric took over (straight As, ten thousand steps) and suddenly you were very far from whatever drove you to the thing in the first place.
Even Nguyen gets captured, and he’s been working on this stuff for five years. Watching his kid, he catches himself thinking: I should reduce his screen time. But if you think about it, screen time is a crap metric. One week Nguyen’s own numbers skyrocketed. The reason? He was reading two different translations of Kant on his iPad. Not exactly a vice. Meanwhile his nine-year-old’s screen hours might be the dumbest possible ASMR videos, or videos explaining the rise of the two world wars, or dumb clicker games, or architectural masterpieces in Minecraft with coded logic gates. There’s no way these are valuable in anything like the same amount. But a device can’t tell the difference. It can capture minutes, and that’s it. Which is Nguyen’s core worry: we’re outsourcing our values, and usually not to some Machiavellian telling us what to want. Just to whatever process happens to be convenient at scale.
So why do we keep falling for it? Partly because life is full of nauseating existential tradeoffs (more time with the kids, or on hobbies, or answering email), and deciding that one measurable thing matters shelters you from the storm. And partly because metrics make you instantly comprehensible to other people. While researching scoring systems, Nguyen got deep into yo-yoing, and telling fellow adults at a dinner party that a philosophy professor spends his free time yo-yoing gets him looks. The real reasons a weird obsession moves you don’t transmit over appetizers. A record to beat would make the whole thing legible in seconds.
Here is the paradox that drives the book: the same scoring systems that drain the soul out of work and education are the beautiful, animating heart of games. The difference is who’s in charge. Scoring systems are little dictators, little definitions of success and failure, but in games those definitions are temporary, playful, and under your control; if you don’t like one, you can throw it away and never play again. In institutions, they’re authoritarian. Games use scores to hand us alternate selves and alternate desires. Make baskets, collect sheep, get to the top of the rock, and suddenly an activity you never cared about unlocks. Nguyen distinguishes achievement play, where you actually want to win, from striving play, where you temporarily adopt the desire to win in order to experience the struggle, and what matters is whether the struggle was interesting.
Games also work because they happen inside what the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga called a magic circle, where the meanings of your actions are screened off from ordinary life. The points are, galactically speaking, valueless, which is exactly what releases players to lie, scheme, and hunt for each other’s weaknesses across the table without anyone taking it personally. And a game’s rules can act as a support structure for states of mind that are hard to reach directly. Fly fishing, one of Nguyen’s obsessions, forces a kind of hyper-focus: reading the water for rising trout, tracking insect hatches that can change every twenty minutes. Left alone at a river, he’s bored in a minute. Given the game, he can focus for hours, until he arrives at altered mental states that seated meditation has never gotten him to.
None of this means metrics are simply evil. Nguyen points to the quantification of New York policing, a story he cheerfully admits he learned from The Wire. In the early days nobody could tell which precincts were doing well, so the city put in clear numbers everyone could understand: arrests made, cases closed. At first it worked great. The brute clarity exposed corruption and bias and forced them out of the system. Then people learned to game the numbers. Want a better case-closure rate? Discourage people from reporting crimes. Or write speeding tickets, which open and close a case in the same stroke. Still, some targets really are stable at scale. Everyone counts lifespan and deaths the same way; nobody counts mental health the same way. That’s what makes metrics so good at coordinating vast efforts like cutting emissions or raising vaccination rates, and it’s also the price. We over-attend to the things everyone can count, and under-attend to the ones nobody can.
So what do we do with all this? Nguyen won’t give the peppy answer, because quitting isn’t symmetrical. Quit a game and nothing happens. Quit your KPIs and you get fired, and then you starve. But you can keep some ironic distance: there’s a difference between wanting the most subscribers and wanting to communicate, needing subscribers to do it, and being willing to trade them off. And where you can, design the game you actually want to be playing. Nguyen realized that for all his complaining about the tyranny of metrics, he was in charge of a huge one: his students’ grades. He was being an unthinking authoritarian. So now, in his tech and design ethics class, students democratically design their own grading system and assignments. How did it go? Amazing. Unbelievable. The system they built was actually quite good, but Nguyen kind of doesn’t care, because arguing seriously about what an education is for, what grades are for, what AI in the classroom is for, got him what he wanted from the class in the first place.
After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the streets to protest police violence against Black people. And if you look at images from these marches, you will probably start to notice a common color scheme — one involving a lot of red, black, and green.
[Content warning: This episode contains some offensive language]
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — Crews have removed concrete barriers, artwork, flowers and other items from a Minneapolis intersection that became a sprawling memorial to George Floyd, known as “George Floyd Square.” (via @AP‘s @Mohamed1brah1m) https://t.co/or61yEhMoZ
— Aaron L. Morrison (@aaronlmorrison) June 3, 2021
The flag was invented to unite Black people all over the world living under racial repression. When it first came into existence, the flag posed some bold questions about where Black people owed their loyalty: was it to the nations where their lives were demeaned and threatened? Or to a new nation – one they would build entirely for themselves? For hundreds of thousands of Black people, the red-black-and-green symbolized the answer.
The story of Black Americans creating their own national flag goes back to at least 1900 when a particularly racist song called “Every Race Has a Flag but Not the Coon” became a staple on vaudeville. In the lyrics, the head of a made-up Black social club addresses a meeting, and says he’s just been to a Labor Day parade, where he saw all these different national flags. “Ev’ry nation can brag ‘bout some kind of a flag,” he laments, “Why can’t we get an emblem of our own?” The song goes on to propose a flag for Black people that is crammed with racist stereotypes.
While shocking to a modern audience, this tune titled was not entirely surprising given the era, made when the US was not even two generations out of slavery. Reconstruction had been undermined. The Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” laws, and much of Black America lived under Jim Crow or some other anti-Black social order. At the same time, lynching and other terrorist violence surged. Black Americans were being shown that they were not respected or safe, or really even considered fully American. The message came from all directions, including popular music.
As gross as the song was, the lyrics hinted at something that actually did resonate for Black people – “that actually a flag was something that enabled people to be welded together,” says Colin Grant, author of Negro With A Hat – The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey. “That idea was one which many Black people understood.” In the decade or so after the “Every Race Has a Flag” song came out, at least one person took its offensive lyrics as a challenge to design a flag that could represent Black America. A Black professor in Ohio came up with a flag that featured the faces of famous Black leaders. His flag never caught on.
Among those proposed for a new flag: Major Martin R. Delany, Bishops Richard Allen and Daniel A. PayneBut the idea that Black people needed a flag persisted until it was picked up by Marcus Garvey – a Jamaican-born labor organizer and journalist. Garvey had traveled around Central and South America, witnessing abysmal conditions in mines, tobacco fields, and banana plantations. He tried starting some advocacy newspapers, but without much success. So partly to earn money, and to see how Black people like himself were living in other parts of the British Empire, he decided in 1912 to go much further abroad.
Garvey headed to London, where he landed a job at The African Times and Orient Review – a newspaper that carried stories about Black life throughout the diaspora. The paper’s owner got Garvey a reader’s pass to the British Museum, which had a large library. Between the British Museum library and the bookshelves at the newspaper office, Garvey was reading ideas totally new to him – ideas about the greatness of Africa’s past, and about the possibilities of a global Black nationhood. Garvey began realizing a whole new way of thinking about what it meant to be Black in the anti-black colonial world, particularly the idea that Black people on the African continent and throughout the diaspora share a common identity, a common fate, and a common responsibility to protect and advance “the race.” He had a vision and newfound passion for Pan-Africanism, which “is concerned with the unity and liberation of Africa and people of African heritage,” explains historian Hakim Adi, author of Pan-Africanism – A History. “I like to think of it as a mighty river, with many streams and currents,” he says.
The Evolution of a Pan-African VisionThe term “Pan-African” was relatively new at the time, but it had long and deep roots in history. The Transatlantic Slave Trade had forced together millions of people from across the giant African continent. Adi believes Pan-Africanism started as those people with different languages and cultures began understanding their shared conditions, and then aligned to change them.
By the early 20th century, Black intellectuals had done a lot of thinking and writing about global, Africa-centered Black identity. For his part, Garvey had come to London with the sense that his blackness was something special, but reading about these different ideas helped him think of Africa itself as part of that story. He began to think of the continent in a new, much more positive way that was totally different from the negative stereotypes he’d been taught growing up in Jamaica.
In London, Marcus Garvey also discovered the writings of Black American leader Booker T. Washington (above). He was not a Pan-Africanist, but Washington’s writings about Black self-sufficiency had a tremendous impact on Garvey.Garvey was also reading about Black self-sufficiency — the call to build a Black world that was economically, politically, and culturally independent from white society. Garvey combined these ideas with his new-found Afrocentrism, and a political philosophy started to emerge.
In June of 1914, Garvey headed back to Jamaica a changed man. In the two years he’d been away, Garvey had found a new mission in life — to create an African empire. Garvey put his Pan-African thinking to work almost as soon as he landed in Jamaica. He formed an organization called the Universal Negro Improvement Association (or: UNIA). Its primary objective was “to establish a universal confraternity among the race,” designed “for the purpose of bettering our industrial, commercial, educational, social and political conditions.”
The start of this new organization was slow. In order to raise money and build a following, Garvey left Jamaica again, and headed to Harlem. When he arrived in 1916, Harlem was going through some major changes of its own. The Black population there had been surging for about a dozen years. Folks were coming from other parts of New York City, from down South, and from the Caribbean, like Garvey had himself.
A Clash of Two TitansIt was the beginning of the so-called “New Negro” era, or the “Negro Renaissance.” In art and politics, folks from throughout the diaspora who’d converged in Harlem argued furiously over what it meant to be Black. Garvey jumped headlong into the debate. He’d get up on Harlem’s famous sidewalk soapboxes and address crowds with his nascent Pan-Africanist ideas.
His bold ideas had their detractors, including the famous W.E.B. Du Bois and his organization: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois felt that full civil rights were the keys to Black freedom in a country that was hostile to their survival and peace. He believed in America as a viable nation for Black folks. It would take real struggle, but there was a path for Black people to be whole and safe in the land of stars and stripes.
W. E. B. Du BoisMarcus Garvey saw things totally differently. He came to believe that the fundamental problem for Black people in the West was the West itself. There was no way the US or Great Britain or any other Western power was going to let Black people be truly free. Garvey believed that Black people were, as he put it, a “mighty race”, and that the only way for them to realize their full potential (and to survive the anti-blackness of the West) was to come together and build a separate Black world. The more time Garvey spent in the US, the firmer that position became. In the South, he witnessed first-hand the struggles of rural Black America living under Jim Crow. He’d come from Jamaican society, where class often outweighed race privilege. But in the US, he noticed that dynamic was flipped – which inspired Garvey to center his message on blackness. Colin Grant says Garvey believed “that you only became powerful by uniting together, by having a powerful voice through sheer numbers. And therefore we should cleave together as Black people, and place a primacy on race.”
Then the US entered WWI, and the conflict put the differences between Du Bois and Garvey in sharp relief, and gave Garvey an opportunity to really articulate the Pan-Africanist vision that he had been developing since his days at the British Museum. As President Woodrow Wilson declared that “the world must be made safe for democracy,” Garvey and many other Black leaders asked: what about liberty and safety for Black people in the US? Indeed, as the US headed into the war, racial violence was exploding in American cities and towns, with some of the worst in East St. Louis. DuBois thought the war was an opportunity for interracial cooperation and for Black people to prove once and for all their commitment to American ideals. Garvey argued that Black people should not go fight and die in Europe for freedom and respect they don’t enjoy in their own country. He also predicted that once the war was over, Black veterans would return to a nation ungrateful for their service and just as lethal to their survival. Sure enough, those who did enlist came back to even more racism, including a nationwide wave of anti-black violence known as the Red Summer of 1919. If the question was to whom do Black people owe their loyalty, Garvey’s answer was clear: Black people owe their loyalty first to other Black people – in Africa and the diaspora. And at the heart of this was Africa itself, the place that Garvey saw as the birthright of all Black people.
The Red, the Black and the GreenImage by: Becker1999 from Grove City, OHThat Garvey had foreseen the post-war racial violence in America gave his movement traction among Black people. “I think that made him seem, in the eyes of many Black people, a kind of prophet, a seer, someone who could see into the future,” says Colin Grant. “But also someone who was fearless. I mean, he was fearless. And that was very empowering. People wanted to align themselves with him. They saw that he was a winner.” Garvey used that momentum to expand the UNIA, and he continued to spread his message of Black unity and self-sufficiency. It was in this moment that Garvey designed his powerful symbol of Black nationhood: a flag with three horizontal bars (red above black above green). According to the UNIA, the red stands for the blood spilled in the fight to protect and defend Africa; green represents the continent itself – its lushness, and the motherland Garveyites saw as their birthright; and black stands for the people of the continent and the diaspora.
Garvey introduced the Pan-African banner in 1918, and it quickly became the symbol of his rapidly growing international movement. That success came partly from the sheer potency of Garvey’s message, which he spread throughout the Americas during his exhausting speaking tours. The UNIA’s newspaper The Negro World also circulated Garveyism internationally.
Garvey’s single biggest recruiting tool was probably the UNIA’s commercial and passenger steamships called The Black Star Line.
The Yarmouth was the UNIA’s first Black Star Line shipGarvey wanted a fleet that would sail between ports throughout the Americas and Africa. The Black Star Line would be one hundred percent Black-owned and operated. In a world where public transportation was often segregated and Black people were routinely limited to the lowest classes of travel, the Black Star Line promised comfort, respect, safety, and speed to its black passengers. The Black Star Line first set sail in 1919 from Harlem. Although it never became as big as Garvey had envisioned, those ships inspired pride and hope in Black people around the world. Every vessel in this fleet hoisted the red-black-and-green on their masts.
Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey is shown in a military uniform as the ‘Provisional President of Africa’ during a UNIA parade up Lenox Avenue in Harlem.UNIA members also played a major role in making the red-black-and-green a symbol recognized throughout the Black diaspora. Two million people around the world had joined UNIA by the late 1910s, and many proudly flew the Pan-African banner – at their homes and business, at UNIA meeting halls, anywhere they could. The UNIA officially declared red, black, and green “the colors of the Negro race” at its 1920 convention, which lasted a month and had an estimated 25,000 participants from around the world filling Madison Square Garden.
Marker at Marcus Garvey Square, photo by Mark Gstohl (CC BY 2.0)Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist rhetoric, as inspiring as it was, also drew attacks from multiple sides. Federal investigators had been pursuing Garvey since his first years in the US. Several Black American leaders also had issues with his politics and business dealings, and campaigned successfully to get Garvey imprisoned for mail fraud. He served nearly three years, and was deported from the US in 1927. In the years that followed, the UNIA shrank rapidly. Finally, in 1940, Marcus Garvey passed away at age 52 after returning to London.
In the decades after Garvey’s death, several African countries incorporated the Pan-African colors into their own national flags as they gained independence.
The flag of the Republic of Kenya reveals Garvey’s influence on that country’s first leaders.In the US, the red, black and green colors were prominent during the Black Power movement and the Black Consciousness renaissance of the 1960s and 70s. Starting in the late 1980s, the tricolors became a big part of hip hop fashion.
Cross Colours became a staple in hip hop fashion in the late 1980s.“Show me the race or the nation without a flag,” Garvey once wrote,“ and I will show you a race of people without any pride.” And while Garvey’s legacy is much broader than any one artifact, the Pan-African flag and its colors remain powerful symbols around the world.
Coda: The Juneteenth FlagFlag Day (June 14th) may be over, but there’s another big day coming up later this week that involves its own flag — Juneteenth, which is a portmanteau of June and 19th. Juneteenth has other names, too, including Freedom Day or Liberation Day. But by whatever title, the day is really important — it commemorates the emancipation of slaves in the United States. It has been celebrated in many places for over a century, but some activists want to see it become a national holiday — and as part of this push for recognition, its advocates created a flag.
Like the American flag, the Juneteenth flag incorporates red, white and blue, but its design and symbolism are quite different. The flag features a central white star, referencing the Lone Star State where the last of the country’s enslaved population finally learned of their freedom in 1865. Around that is another multi-pointed white star outline, symbolizing other states of the union. These stars are set against a red and blue background. Below, the red arches up to form a symbolic “new horizon” where it meets the blue above. And of course, the color scheme overall serves as a reminder that enslaved people were and are Americans. Broadly, the flag is a symbol for supporters to rally around as they lobby for broader recognition of Juneteenth.
Commemorative plaque in Galveston, Texas on the corner where General Order No. 3 was issued from Union Army headquarters at the since-demolished Osterman building on Monday, June 19, 1865. Image by William C Teller (CC BY-SA 4.0)One of the curious things about the flag is the central “lone star” relating to Texas. After all, emancipation wasn’t limited to that one state. But that reference is actually critical to the flag’s history, because June 19th is a very specific (and perhaps surprising) choice for a day to remember this historic shift. Some memorial holidays are picked because something official happened on that day, like the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. or the declaration of Independence. Juneteenth, though, is about a practical outcome: the day in which formerly enslaved people in Texas finally learned of their emancipation. In a way, it’s a more accurate day to celebrate, because it reflects the actual liberation of people who were only theoretically freed by official decree. It was, in short, the day that those people actually got their freedom. Meanwhile, Juneteenth is still not a national holiday, but it may get there soon, in part with the help of its flag, which like any good flag has become a rallying symbol for this day or remembrance.
Vexillology Revisited: Fixing the Worst Civic Flag Designs in America
In President Trump’s first term, Roman Mars treated the U.S. Constitution like a warm blanket, something to turn to for comfort as Trump stomped all over the country’s laws and centuries of precedence. Roman even enlisted his neighbor and constitutional law professor, Elizabeth Joh, to co-host the podcast What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law.
But in Trump’s second term, Elizabeth says we the people must act as the warm blanket to the Constitution, lending it support and affirming our belief in its importance. And in order to do that, we must understand it.
And so we bring you The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Constitution.
Each month, Roman and Elizabeth will tackle a different section of this 7600-word document so we can treat the Constitution as a text to be analyzed, dissecting its meaning and understanding the historical context and present-day applications. The second half of each episode will be an installment of What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law, where we look at a recent event through the lens of constitutional law.
Introducing the KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board Keymap (or KURTY for short!), a free plug-and-play system enabling one-handed touch-typing on two-handed QWERTY keyboards. After a debilitating injury to my right arm and hand, I researched and tested adaptive keyboards, which had some crafty features but also deal-breaking downsides. While frustrating, this experience served as a catalyst, leading me to create this one-handed typing solution, which you are free to download and use!
Composite diagram of keymap shortcutsHow it Works: This setup adds new functionality to the left side of conventional two-handed keyboards, enabling a user to touch-type with just one hand (while pressing familiar keys within a compact comfort zone).
A combination of “modifier” keys (e.g., Ctrl, Alt, Shift) and regular keys form shortcuts on the left that summon right-side functions and outputs. These are intentionally additive, so that a keyboard using this system will still continue to also work as it always has.
The KURTY being a computer-side design solution gives it a number of critical advantages over physical one-handed keyboards. It’s replicable and portable, for starters, working with whatever hardware you have on hand or prefer to use. It’s also customizable, so you can change it to suit your present needs and adapt it to suit future changes in your physical capabilities.
Below you’ll find everything you need to set up the KURTY keymap, including a layout file, installation instructions, and the color-coded user guide … as well as key labeling advice and troubleshooting tips!
How to Install & Test the KURTY KeymapOverview:
You’ll be loading the KURTY configuration from a saved backup file into PowerToys, a free Microsoft utility that supports key remapping and other advanced functionality. Note: the be patient with the first step below, which can take a few minutes.
To set up the KURTY keymap on your computer:1. Download and click to launch the Microsoft PowerToys Installer 2. When the Welcome to Powertoys window appears, click Open Settings to open the PowerToys Settings window 3. Go to the *General tab, click to Restart PowerToys as administrator 4. Click Yes to “…allow this app to make changes on your device.” 5. Download the KURTY layout file (settings_101.ptb) 6. Move that file to the Documents > Powertoys > Backup folder 7. Back in the app settings window, go to the General tab, and under … 8. … Administrator mode, check the box to Always run as administrator 9. … Appearance and Behavior, make sure Run on startup is toggled on 10. … Backup & restore, click the Restore button to launch the keymap * If the* Welcome to Powertoys window does not appear in (2): Click the app icon to launch *PowerToys (Preview). You may need to do this twice – once to launch the utility, and once to open the Settings window)*
With that, you should be good to go! Below are a few test shortcuts to make sure the keymap is working, plus instructions for reviewing and editing key combinations. Following that you’ll find the full User Guide.
(Optionally) get a feel for how the keymap works: Open up a document, text file, or browser tab to get a cursor, then: * Hold down Alt and press the E key to generate a semicolon (;) * Hold down Shift and press Tab for Backspace to delete that symbol * Hold down Ctrl [R] (the right-side Ctrl key) and press D to generate a K * Hold down Alt & Shift and press A to move the cursor back/left (⬅*)
(Optionally) review shortcuts and/or edit the keymap: Click the Input/Output tab on the left, opening a small sub-menu * Select Keyboard Manager (note the option here to toggle on/off) * Scroll down to Shortcuts to see the full list of modified key sets * Select Remap a Shortcut* to add, remove, or edit combinations
If you do opt to experiment, you can back up your changes in the same place you originally uploaded (i.e. restored) the KURTY keymap file.
Side Note: While this keymap only works on PCs, I’ve been reliably informed that a viable MacOS alternative to PowerToys exists in the form of Karabiner, which is likewise free to use, though I know nothing more about using it!User Manual: Color-Coded Shortcut SheetsThis color-coded guide lays out every KURTY key combination in a handy Google Docs spreadsheet, which you can copy for reference (and optionally edit should you choose to reconfigure the existing layout). The first page also features notes and pro tips as well as some examples of how key combinations work. The second sheet in the spread features a condensed key label guide diagram. And the third, well … that’s just a scratch pad of draft layout ideas and guide-building experiments.
Note regarding the gold modifier (listed as Ctrl [R] / Pedal). To type letters and numbers more quickly, I tied that layer to an unused, out-of-the-way modifier (Ctrl [R]), which in turn can be activated by a programmed foot pedal (or other programmable piece of hardware, like a mini keypad). Or you could change things around to use a left-side modifier; I tried that but found it more difficult, since it involved trade-offs that hampered typing speed.Labeling Keys: Choosing Colors & MaterialsAfter sifting through sheets of the adhesive-backed vinyl I was planning to use, I chose four key label colors with an eye toward creating high-contrast adjacencies. Next, I sorted those four by relative brightness (and thus visibility). More visible colors were paired with more important modifier layers — gold, for instance, is tied to the critical layer of letter-and-number keys. I also placed higher priority labels on the right sides of keys, making them easier to see without lifting a finger to get a closer look. Gold labels sit in lower right key corners, for instance, for prominence (without the potential confusion of putting letters side-by-side along key tops).
Below is a summary of each color layer, from greatest to least visibility (and thus importance). These colors are separated out in the full key layout guide, which (I find) makes them easier to experiment with.
- Mirror (Gold): Letters and numbers are mirrored with a single modifier, in my case tied to a foot pedal for higher-speed access.
- Punctuation (Blue): Another one-modifier setup; this layer focuses frequently used marks on easily reached keys in upper rows.
- Navigation (Purple): The arrow pad is set on a central grid of six keys and uses two modifier keys; this placement relies on the ease of resting thumb and pinky fingers on a pair of modifiers below.
- Symbols (Red): Secondary number key symbols and other outputs were mapped to lesser-used keys and a pair of modifiers.
Note:
Finding four colors that work well together may lead you to a completely different set, depending the label-making material and technology you use. That’s not a problem! What’s important isn’t each color as such — it’s prioritizing contrast and visibility as described above.
White-on-clear stickers from a label maker applied to an early version of the KURTYAs for materials: my finished board employs vinyl letters, custom cut with a Cricut machine, thanks to my partner. After testing some other options, I found that matte metallic “chrome” vinyl showed up the best. The cut shapes can be tricky to maneuver, but the material is usefully robust.
That said, conventional label makers are also a solid option. They’re easier, cheaper, and can print labels with colored foregrounds and clear backgrounds or the reverse. In my experience (still having tape labels on one laptop) vinyl holds on better, but tape is easier to replace.
Keymap Troubleshooting & Shutdown TipsTo be clear, if you choose to use the KURTY layout file or follow any advice provided below (or above!), you should know that you do so at your own risk.
That said, I’ve remapped a lot of keys across different iterations, and I’m happy to share what’s worked for me. The first of these was the scariest, but the solution was simple … once I figured it out!
Things go Nucking Futz (Unexpected Key Behavior)If key outputs suddenly get … strange, like: the spacebar turns into backspace, all letters come out as caps, etc… then you probably have a program that is taking up a huge amount of active memory.
- Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete then click to open the Task Manager
- Look for an App (or Apps) using a high percentage of Memory
- If there’s a single program hogging the plurality, either shut it down and decrease its demands (by, say, shutting some of your 42 browser tabs in Chrome) … or disable KURTY until you later quit that program.
Symbol Swapping GlitchThere’s a known issue I ran into with PowerToys that can swap a few key outputs around, such as the “ symbol for @. This is a case of the utility confusing different English keyboards. Here’s how I fixed it:
- Open Windows Settings (shortcut: Windows Key + I).
- Go to Time & Language > Region & Language > Add a language
- Ensure “English (US)” is your Preferred language and keyboard layout. Even if it is Preferred already, you might also Remove other unwanted keyboard layouts to prevent accidental switching.
Disabling the the Keyboard Layout (As Needed)* Open PowerToys * Select Keyboard Manager under Input/Output * Click ‘disable’ to pause it indefinitely (i.e., until reactivated)
The Nuclear Option! (If the Utility Stalls or Freezes) Per The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t Panic!” * Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete then click to open the Task Manager * Scroll down the list of Processes * Right-click any instance(s) of PowerToys and then select End Task * (See, that really wasn’t so scary, now was it‽)*
A Side Note on Keyboard/Mouse HardwareTechnically, this has nothing to do with the KURTY as such, but I have found that a certain feature of the keyboards I use (both on my laptops and externally) has been extremely helpful since my injury. For context: I’ve been using Lenovo (previously: IBM) ThinkPad devices for decades. In fact, I’ve continued to stick with the brand because of this one feature. All the way back in college, while my contemporaries were learning trackpads, I was learning to use the TrackPoint, a rare and quirky option even then.
Basically, a TrackPoint is a small finger-driven mouse situated in the center of a keyboard. The location makes it extremely convenient — in my opinion much more so than a trackpad. That said, I’m clearly quite biased. I feel fortunate to have learned to use it with both hands over the years, so I can’t speak to the learning curve for a new user, but for what it’s worth: it has really helped me reduce hand movement (and thus strain) since becoming a functionally one-handed typist. YMMV!
Adaptive Technology: Honorable MentionsWhile I’ve found my custom keymap exceedingly helpful, I should mention that I use other adaptive tools in addition to it. As you’ve already seen in the default KURTY configuration, I use a foot pedal programmed to send a Ctrl [R] signal to my computer, which in turn activates the mirror layer via PowerToys. I have also toyed with other programmable hardware tools, such as buttons from Microsoft’s Accessible Accessories lineup.
Early on, I tried out the latest Dragon as a potential supplementary speech-to-text option, but was underwhelmed. It seems to be the industry leader in stand-alone STT software, and it’s OK if you need something universal. But most programs I use, including Google Docs and Android’s default messenger app, have built-in STT functionality that works way better IMO. But when in doubt: research and test! After all, that’s how I came up with the KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board Keymap in the first place (as well as its ridiculous name)!
Left to Write (1 of 3): Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies for One-Handed UsersSpeaking of which: in case you missed them, above and below are parts one and two of this three-piece set, respectively. The first article compares other one-handed (hardware and software) solutions I researched and tested. The second goes over the design process behind the KURTY, starting with sources of frustration and inspiration.
Left to Write (2 of 3): Designing a Single-Handed Keymap for Half of a QWERTY BoardHere’s to a Decade of Design Stories at 99piSo there you have it, folks — not just the end of this article, or three-piece Left to Write set, but the whole twelve-part Adapt or Design project. Perhaps I’ll circle back to write more on adaptive design at some point, but meanwhile: I hope you’ve found this useful, entertaining, or maybe even both!
Adapt or DesignWriting this saga has been a curious combination of cathartic and melancholic, but it’s past time I return to my regular beat. So stay tuned for stories about spite houses, elevator shafts, and other wonders of everyday design … in the lead-up to celebratory fare around the fifth anniversary of The 99% Invisible City. Finally, a fun fact: this fall I’ll be celebrating my 10th year on the show. And what a ride it’s been!
-= Kurt
Adapt or Design — A Project of 99% InvisibleIn the aftermath of a debilitating injury to his dominant right hand and arm, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt faced numerous new everyday challenges. His subsequent search for accessible design solutions set the stage for Adapt or Design, a project in three acts.The six-article mini-series Single Handed explores assistive designs for people with one functional hand. The three-article micro-series Broken Plexus examines how design can support those recovering from long-term injuries. Left to Write follows Kurt’s research into (and testing of) adaptive keyboards, which led him to create a free custom keymap that enables users to touch-type one-handed on a two-handed board!Explore & find out more at 99pi.org/adapt
Last year, 99pi‘s Kurt Kohlstedt suffered a serious injury that initially rendered his right arm and hand both completely numb and paralyzed. Tests revealed severe damage to his right brachial plexus, an essential network of nerves between the arm and spinal cord. Kurt was told to expect a partial recovery spanning years, and has since regained limited use of his impacted limb. New everyday challenges have led him to seek accessible design solutions, which in turn set the stage for Adapt or Design, a twelve-part project of 99% Invisible in three acts. A full set of summaries and links can be found at 99pi.org/adapt
The first act is a six-article mini-series, Single Handed, that delves into inclusive designs for people with one functional hand. The second is a three-article micro-series, Broken Plexus, addressing assistive designs for long-haul recoveries. The third, dubbed Left to Write, is a three-piece set about adaptive one-handed keyboards and typing systems.
In this episode, Kurt and Roman discuss AoD topics including immediate post-injury problems and solutions, such as laced shoe hacks, left-handed pants, magnetic backpack buckles, and adaptive e-reader accessories. They also compare various single-handed keyboard designs as well as Kurt’s custom system for one-handed touch-typing on a two-handed keyboard, which can be replicated across different computers and is freely available for anyone to download, set up, and adapt to their own needs!
This project marks the one-year anniversary of Kurt’s debilitating injury … but this year also features some more upbeat milestones, including: the fifth anniversary of The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, a New York Times Bestseller about built environments co-authored by Kurt Kohlstedt & Roman Mars. It will also be Kurt’s tenth year with 99pi this fall!
The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday DesignPsst! Adapt or Design: A Project in Three ActsWait. You’re still here, and not on main project hub page?! Well then: below you’ll find a brief overview of each act as well as boxed links to the beginning articles of each constituent series. Explore and enjoy!
Single Handed (1 of 6): Design Adaptations for Living with One (Functional) HandFirst, Single Handed is a six article mini-series about adaptive designs for people operating with one functional hand. It centers on everyday challenges and accessible design solutions, including creative shoelace mods, left-handed pants, crossbody-hacked backpacks, assistive e-reader accessories, and more.
Broken Plexus (1 of 3): Designing a Recovery Workbook to Work Out Optimal RoutinesNext, over the course of three articles, Broken Plexus covers designing an organized exercise workbook, optimizing slings and braces, and the seeking out apparel to accommodate sensory nerve damage.
Left to Write (1 of 3): Adaptive Keyboards & Writing Technologies for One-Handed UsersLastly, Left to Write compares adaptive keyboards, reviews the iterative design process Kurt used to develop a custom one-handed keymap for touch-typing on two-handed keyboards, as well as instructions for converting your QWERTY into a single-handed KURTY.
Visit 99pi.org/adapt to explore all of Adapt or Design
As a design writer seeking a one-handed writing solution for myself, I expected to research and test various adaptive options, settle on one best suited to my needs, and then write about it. But as my search progressed, to my great surprise, I came to realize that it would be easier, faster, cheaper, and better all around to design a custom solution.
Previously, we explored various assistive writing technologies, including one-handed keyboards. Next, we’ll go over how you (or anyone else!) can duplicate my one-handed keymap and deploy it on your own (compatible Windows) computer — it’s free and easy to set up in a matter of minutes. This article covers the design process in between, through which I mapped out layers of functionality to enable single-handed touch-typing on a two-handed QWERTY board.
I dubbed this system the KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board Keymap — which can be shorthanded to KURTY (you know, like QWERTY!). Before we launch into that design process, let’s take a brief look at the finalized keymap and its functionality. It might seem a bit backward to start at the end, but sometimes a path is easier to follow if we see where it’s leading!
KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board KeymapThe KURTY keymap can be understood as a system of custom shortcuts that puts everything I need at my (left) fingertips. These shortcuts pair “modifiers” with a regular keys to create desired outputs — much like the Shift modifier causes the letter q key to output a capital Q. Below is an overview of the different color-coded “layers” in play, each of which is associated with specific modifiers and different kinds of outputs. Below, darker-shaded keys are the modifiers for each color layer. Note, too, that only the left half of a keyboard is (needed and) represented.
Note that the right Ctrl and left Ctrl keys are shorthanded to Ctrl [L] and Ctrl [R]. In my desktop setup, a programmable foot pedal also activates the latter, hence “Ctrl [R] / Pedal” above First (above) is the modifier-free (gray) Neutral layer, which is just a way of describing already-labeled keys and the outputs you’re familiar with (e.g., pressing the ‘q’ key outputs the letter q, naturally). * The (gold) Mirror layer “reflects” letter and number keys from the right-hand side of the board over to the left (e.g., holding down Ctrl [R] and pressing ‘q’ outputs its counterpart from across the board: p). * The (blue) Punctuation layer turns letters and numbers into marks (e.g. holding down Alt and pressing ‘q’ outputs an apostrophe). * The (purple) Navigation layer uses a combination of modifiers to turn a grid of six letter keys into an arrow pad (e.g. holding both Alt and Shift and then pressing ‘q’ yields the PgUp function). * The (red) Misc layer is a kind of structured catch-all collecting what’s left; like purple, it utilizes two modifiers (in this case: Ctrl [L] and* Shift).
This merged diagram shows color-coded outputs in their designated label locations in one of four “quadrants” on a given key. Keeping these placements clear and consistent is useful for learning and reference purposes. The Shift key provides a familiar example of how locations help: upper symbols on conventional keys indicate Shift-modified outputs (e.g., The number two [2] key plus Shift outputs an at symbol [@]).
Key Recap: Mirrorboard as Design CatalystI didn’t start out with the goal of creating such a comprehensive system. Mostly, I was just frustrated that none of the keyboards I had tried felt like a fit. But the time I spent researching and testing other solutions wasn’t wasted. Other boards helped push me in the right direction, and served as useful reference models. The most explicit catalyst was one particular adaptive keyboard: the Half-QWERTY.
This aptly named peripheral looks like the left-hand side of a two-handed keyboard. Its most relevant feature, for our purposes, is that primary letter keys on the board can also output secondary letters — from the (missing) right side (of a normal board). This trick is accomplished through the use of a specialized modifier key.
On the Half-QWERTY (shown above), labels indicate other functions and outputs associated with each key. The positions and colors correspond to different individual “modifier” or “lock” keys, which are pressed or toggled alone or in combination to access the labeled functions. The left-centered nature of this board was appealing to me, as a newly de facto lefty.Holding down a modifier key and pressing a letter key generates a secondary output, folded or “mirrored” from the right across what would be the centerline of a full board. For instance: holding down this modifier and pressing the upper-left corner letter “q” outputs a “p” from the upper right-hand corner of a normal board. This mirroring system taps into muscle memory, making it much more intuitive and easier to learn. But the Half-QWERTY hardware had other drawbacks, which start to show once one gets past the core mirrored utility.
Outside Lines: Expanding Keys Along EdgesA (jagged) centerline between left and right — the left side keys are all easily reachableOne of the decisions made by the Half-QWERTY (HQ) designer that I never did understand was the choice to create such restrictive outer boundaries, dramatically limiting the total key count.
Sure, fewer keys can put more stuff in reach, but only up to a point. For instance, cutting off the right half of the board made sense to me … but why also remove the left side of the number row? Two-handed keyboard users don’t find it difficult to reach that row at all, and there are costs to removing more keys than necessary. One big overall advantage of including more keys is that it reduces how many outputs any given key is responsible for generating (and thus also complexity).
Labels on the Half-QWERTY (AKA Matias Half) Keyboard showing up to six functionsAnd so I found myself wanting to apply a mirroring approach to a more expansive physical board, which would offer greater flexibility and ultimately reduce complexity relative to the HQ. Thankfully, in the course of my keyboard research, I found a relatively simple way to create custom modifier-based shortcuts on a Windows computer, utilizing a free Microsoft utility called PowerToys. This would allow me to map key combinations onto a larger section of a full-sized keyboard while still only using keys a left hand is used to reaching.
Including more keys at the outset helped me cap outputs at four per key maximum (versus up to six on the Half-QWERTY), which ultimately simplified the design as well as the learning and labeling processes. More immediately: including the left side of the number row not only made 1 through 5 directly accessible; it also opened up 6 through 0 to being mirrored across the centerline, just like the letters. The HQ, in contrast, only mirrors letter keys, not numbers.
The Gold Layer: Mirror Modifier Leads to Expansion PlanWithin newly broadened borders, I worked out a first (mirrored) “layer” of functionality, using a consistent “modifier” key to reflect letters and numbers from the right over to the left side of the board. Like all other layers that were to follow, this one is strictly additive by design — it simply offers a new secondary, left-side way to tap into right-side functionality … without compromising a user’s ability to tap into the original functions of the underlying keyboard.
Note that while you can use the right Ctrl button (Ctrl [R]) to activate the gold layer, you can program other hardware to trigger it, too. Given its frequent use, I added a pedal so that I could tap it quickly without distracting my hand.The Mirror layer is shown in gold, with its layer-specific “modifier” key: Ctrl [R]. That modifier makes keys output what’s shown on this colored layer. If you hold down the Ctrl [R] modifier and press the q key, for instance, the system will output a p. Understanding this step is critical, as it illustrates how “modifiers” work across this entire custom keymap. Holding down a modifier changes another key’s output. New modifiers also work with existing ones. Let’s say you want to generate an uppercase P. You would press down the gold layer’s modifier as well as the Shift key, as in: hold down Ctrl [R] and Shift, then press the q key. So Ctrl [R] + q = p and then Ctrl [R] + Shift + q = P.Applying a mirror-style approach to my own two-handed (Lenovo) keyboard allowed me to type the entire alphabet with my left hand while keeping it on the left side of the board. I also retained valuable full-keyboard advantages, such as: being able to hunt and peck as a fallback option, and using a built-in, finger-driven (TrackPoint) mouse. But mirroring was only the first step — having taken it, I realized that I could keep going and develop a full one-handed touch-typing keymap.
Inside the Lines: Comfortable Reach is KeyAs the project expanded, reachability became an increasingly vital consideration in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Some combinations I tried required awkward contortions — moves that would be difficult to perform at speed and create stress through repetition. Initially, for instance, I assumed that all left-side letter keys would be ideal candidates for multifunctionally because they were easy to reach. That turned out to be a naive (if perhaps understandable) preconception, which I only discovered through testing and iteration.
Early sketches (drawn with my left hand) included multiple outputs for lower left letter keys, which would later prove less accessible (and thus less useful) than initially expectedAs I tried out various modifier and letter key combinations, I came to realize that with Shift or Alt held down, for example, adjacent lowest-row letter keys (such as Z, X, and C) were extremely awkward to press. (And I had been planning to load those keys up with layers of functions!) Hands-on testing led me to reconsider giving these keys secondary functions at all, which in some ways was just as well: I was already concerned with having punctuation split across multiple layers, and this change reinforced the need to give them their own.
The Blue Layer: Simplicity via Punctuation ConsolidationOn this Punctuation layer, you’ll notice that the q key position has an apostrophe highlighted in blue. Once again, we have a darker shade of blue to indicate which modifier toggles this layer. In this case, holding down Alt and then pressing the q key generates an apostrophe (‘).At first, some lower-left letter keys had punctuation marks as their mirrored, right-side counterparts, reflected in the first (gold) mirror layer. And I had situated other oft-used marks on a (blue) layer, which was made to be easily accessed with one simple modifier key. As lower-left reach issues became clear, however, I realized that I could strip that area’s letter keys of mirrored punctuation and put it all on blue. This play enhanced usability by allowing me to consolidate marks on a single layer and eschew physically challenging key combinations.
The Purple Layer: Preserving a Sensible Sense of DirectionWhen considering the six-unit grid of navigation keys, made up of four arrows and their associated PgUp and PgDn companions, I was again confronted with a conflict between the muscle memory advantages of mirroring and actual usability testing. For the sake of science or whatnot, I gave mirroring a shot briefly, but having the left arrow facing left and the right arrow facing right felt much more intuitive. In fact, this layer was the easiest to learn in the end — likely because I’ve used the WASD grouping as left-side arrow keys for PC games now and then.
The purple Navigation layer turns our now-familiar q example key into a PgUp function by using (i.e. holding down) Alt and Shift modifiers in tandem.Part of this whole process was prioritizing which layers got simpler single modifiers versus sets of two. At first, I had the purple layer tied to just one modifier. But after testing it alongside other draft layers, I opted to tie a pair of modifiers to purple — because I really only needed three fingers to use its six keys. This particular finger trio conveniently left my thumb and pinky available to press two nearby modifier keys with ease (and freed up a valuable solo modifier for use elsewhere).
The Red Layer: Rounding Up Loose Odds & Symbolic EndsThe red Symbol (or Misc) layer doesn’t utilize our prior example key (q), which is already maxed out at four functions. Instead, for instance: use Ctrl [L] & Shift (held down at the same time) to make the Tab key output a plus (+) symbol.With a mirrored layer for letters and numbers, another single-modifier layer for common punctuation, and a third layer for navigation, there were inevitably still some lesser-used leftovers that needed to be located somewhere. These were relegated to a fourth and final layer along with other obscure key outputs, some of which reflects limited number-row mirroring logic (specifically: symbols found above numbers on the right-hand side, which require Shift anyway).
All four color-coded modifier layers sorted into quadrants for reference and labeling purposes.The two label layers (red and blue) situated in the upper right quadrant (of the labeled keys) also highlight some details that reflect minor adjustments made over time. The brackets and parentheses, for instance, were modestly reshuffled based on usage frequency — and, here again, I favored the logical order of the ( and ) symbols over a mirrored reversal. Each round of changes required reconfiguring the reference spreadsheet, laying out new labels, and reprogramming the keymap. So logically, for the sake of efficiency (and sanity) I tested changes, then waited to implement an array of solutions together, limiting the number of fully-deployed draft versions.
Color Choices: Creating Clarity via ContrastAn early iteration of the KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board Keymap using white sticker labelsWorking on physical fronts (with a keyboard) as well as digital ones (spreadsheets and remapping) helped the design retain an unfinished feel, in a useful way. But label changeovers also marked natural stopping points — chances to step back and reevaluate various aspects of the board, including the parameters of the labels themselves.
In early-draft trials, simple white-on-clear labels were used, printed on a handheld label maker. At this stage, the corner of the key in which a given label was located served as the sole indicator of its associated modifier(s) key(s) — helpful, if not always quick and easy to follow. This location-based indicator was preserved but also built upon over time.
To improve visibility (and usability), later versions incorporated colored vinyl labels — these helped distinguish between different layers, including the neutral white baseline labels. Colored squares were also added to modifier keys as a cue for early learning phases. As for color choices: those were largely pragmatic, based on material availability and the need to maximize clarity through highly contrasting hues.
I sorted four picks by relative brightness to reflect the priorities of different layers. More visible colors were paired with more important modifier layers — gold, for instance, is tied to the layer with letter keys. I also placed higher priority labels on the right sides of keys, making them easier to see without lifting a hand to look — punctuation, for instance, is in the upper right quadrant.
The choice to limit outputs per key to a maximum of four (as mentioned earlier) was driven by a desire to make things clearer and easier than on the Half-QWERTY, but it was also framed in part by practical labeling considerations. With this four-function key cap, labels would only have to occupy one of four corner quadrants on a key — they could be larger, more legible, and less confusing.
The colored cue squares on modifiers wound up being redundant. In the end, the process of testing and iteration helped not only with design development but also with learning to use the keymap — much like writing and rewriting notes helps one in a classroom setting. With time, and a resolved design, I’ve gotten better at one-handed touch-typing, which has reduced the need for physical labels in general, too. Eventually, I may even be able to leave them behind altogether, but for now, like my full underlying keyboard, they’re still nice to fall back on.
Left to Write (3 of 3): Setting Up a Free One-Handed Touch-Typing System on Your PCIf you’re interested in trying out the KURTY yourself, click through to find installation instructions and a color-coded user manual, plus other reference and troubleshooting materials. It’s relatively easy to set it up in a matter of minutes. After that, you can also edit my layout, personalizing the keymap for your needs. I sincerely hope some folks in similar situations find this to be a helpful long-term solution!
Adapt or Design — A Project of 99% InvisibleIn the aftermath of a debilitating injury to his dominant right hand and arm, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt faced numerous new everyday challenges. His subsequent search for accessible design solutions set the stage for Adapt or Design, a project in three acts.The six-article mini-series Single Handed explores assistive designs for people with one functional hand. The three-article micro-series Broken Plexus examines how design can support those recovering from long-term injuries. Left to Write follows Kurt’s research into (and testing of) adaptive keyboards, which led him to create a free custom keymap that enables users to touch-type one-handed on a two-handed board!Explore & find out more at 99pi.org/adapt
Last year, an accident left my right arm and shoulder numb and paralyzed. After extensive testing, doctors determined that I had severely injured my right brachial plexus — a crucial nexus of nerve pathways carrying signals back and forth between my spinal column and right upper extremities. It was made clear that I shouldn’t expect to recover full feeling or functionality. Of the many fears accompanying this pronouncement, the most visceral pertained to writing.
Sure, I had a lot of other things on my mind, and many more urgent problems at the outset. But as a writer, I have long relied on using a keyboard, mouse, and pair of hands to process and communicate my thoughts.
My concern ran deeper than just having to slow down, because how we create impacts what we create. Different tools lead to different creations. Suffice it to say: during my week in the hospital, even before I could move (or even feel) any part of my injured limb, I began to research adaptive design solutions for one-handed writing.
Left to Write is a three-article set about adaptive writing technologies for one-handed users. This first piece explores accessible keyboards; the next details the process of developing a new keymap for comfortably touch-typing with one hand on a conventional two-handed board; the third explains how to convert your own QWERTY into a single-handed KURTY.
Voice to Text: The Pathway to VerbosityI started where most people in similar situations presumably do: trying out voice-to-text software options. Thanks in part to ever-evolving AI, such tools are increasingly accessible and work for a lot of people across a variety of use cases. Indeed, I quickly began relying heavily on speech-to-text (STT) tech for crafting straightforward texts and emails.
But for more involved writing projects, I found that dictation-driven approaches played into personal weaknesses, such as my natural tendency to ramble. Using STT as a primary writing tool led to long drafts, which required painstaking self-editing processes. For some, voice-to-text may serve a suitable and self-contained solution, but abilities and needs vary.
For me, writing isn’t just a matter of putting down letters to form words and sentences on a (digital) page — it’s a dynamic and fast-paced activity in which I self-edit on the fly … jumping around between lines, paragraphs, and pages … deleting, rewriting, rearranging as I go … and repeating all of the steps above, in shifting sequences, over and over and over again. And what’s written is inevitably a product of these processes, shaped by a blend of intuition, muscle memory, and more. I sometimes envy those who are able to write more straightforwardly, but for better or worse: I’m not that kind of writer.
One-Handed Typing on a Normal KeyboardIt became clear that I would need to prioritize hand typing in my writing toolkit, but before trying out specialized keyboards, I was curious to see if there were better ways to work with hardware I already had at hand. This line of inquiry led me to one-handed touch-typing methods for using two-handed keyboards. I zeroed in on TypingTutor.club, which has a series of over 400 step-by-step tutorials that teach a style of single-handed touch-typing, one (small) step at a time.
The physical setup is simple, involving familiar “Home Row” keys, with a twist: rather than resting your pinky and pointer fingers on the S and F keys (which is the typical starting setup for two-handed typists), you begin by placing them on the F and J keys — a move of just three keys over to the right. As a bonus, this setup allows you to continue making tactile use of “Home Key” ridges for easy orientation (shown as underlines in the adjacent illustration). From there, you can imagine roughly how things branch out — a newly centered single hand ranges freely across a whole keyboard.
I must say that this system is surprisingly easy to get started on. But an approach forcing it to cover twice as much area puts a lot more pressure on one’s typing hand.
I could see this system working well for someone with a short-term injury, who can afford to put up with a one-sided increase in wrist pain for a bit. But with my long-haul impairment, I feared adding ongoing repetitive physical stress — especially given the newly elevated importance of my left hand (as my only working one). I decided that if I was going to type with one hand longer-term, I would need to find a typing solution optimized for single-handed usage by design. And so I began to dive deeper into the realm of dedicated hardware.
Three One-Handed Keyboard SolutionsAfter a lot of research, I narrowed my focus to three one-handed keyboards. Even though each of these designs shares a common functional goal, they are remarkably different in fundamental ways. Each of these specialized keyboards is also rather expensive (from $500 to $1200). Between their significant differences and substantial price tags, I couldn’t just pick one option and hope for the best – I needed to try each of these three finalists before making a decision. Thankfully, I was able to borrow them from a state loan program, MNStar, which has a library of adaptive technologies for those in need. So I gathered and compared all three contenders, considering pros and cons of each.
A) The ‘Key Bowl’ — Maltron’s One-Handed KeyboardCurving a keyboard for the sake of ergonomics is a common design strategy today, but it was groundbreaking in the 1970s. Back then, a young company called Maltron first made a splash with a curved two-handed keyboard, then came out with a radical one-handed option.
Like other board layouts before it, such as the DVORAK, this hardware featured an optimized layout that was deemed superior to the conventional QWERTY, locating more frequently used keys in more easily accessed places. But it was the dramatic curve that really stood out.
Most of the keys on the Maltron, including the entire alphabet, were set into a semi-shallow, bowl-shaped space (known as a “keywell”). Ergonomics drove this design: a concave space reduces the distance between fingertips and typed keys, so that hand movements are largely limited to small pivoting actions within a confined space. The board is still being produced today, decades after its debut, which speaks to its staying power. But aside from a kind of clunky retro look, the design has some significant functional downsides.
While the design does reduce movement inside of the “bowl” area, there are still a lot of keys outside of the bowl. This was perhaps inevitable, because at the end of the day (like standard keyboards) the Maltron has over 100 keys. That’s simply too many to fit into a curved hand-wrapping space using regularly-sized keys.
Within
the keywell, I did find myself moving my hand less — but larger moves into and out of the well at least partially cancelled that out. After testing the other boards, one unexpected thing I came to appreciate was the Maltron’s full key set. With that, even if the layout made it tricky, I could at least hunt and peck around when stuck. A full set of keys may seem like a given on any keyboard, but the next two designs illustrate that old adage about how less can be more.
B) The ‘Big Fan’ — TIPY Keyboard + Joystick MouseYup, that’s me, holding the TIPY after setting my phone up on a tripod and snapping remotelyLike the Maltron, the TIPY keyboard has its own custom layout, likewise designed to help limit hand movement. But in essentially all other ways, the designers took radically different paths. The TIPY keyboard is essentially flat, shaped like a folding fan (or a traced hand with fingers splayed out wide). Most keys can be reached by just flexing fingers up and down after resting one’s wrist on a bump at the base.
Key reachability on this board is achieved in part by deprioritizing lesser-used keys, making them much smaller and situating them along the curved top edge of the keyboard. But the TIPY also doubles up the characters on a lot of the more central keys — overlaying a number pad, for example, in the middle of the alphabetical key set. Labels added to these and other keys indicate additional functions, and ultimately allow the board to operate with fewer keys in total.
To generate the secondary and tertiary outputs shown on the labels, a user employs “modifier” and “lock” keys – which are familiar to us as key categories thanks to Ctrl, CapsLock, and the like. Like those, custom modifiers and locks on the TIPY add more layers of functionality to keys, particularly: easily reached ones toward the center of the board. Some keys have just one added function, while others have multiple.
The TIPY also features a built-in “eraser head” joystick-style mouse, similar to the TrackPoint ones I’ve been using for years on my Lenovo laptops. For me, that was a pleasantly familiar touchstone; but for any user, having a built-in mouse analog offers a convenient way to further reduce hand movement. This also represented a big difference from the Maltron, which assumes users would employ an external mouse, impairing overall ergonomics.
Despite finding the design compelling and tutorials helpful, I struggled to relearn the rest of the TIPY layout from scratch — a challenge no doubt compounded by my having to do it with my non-dominant and more awkward left hand. I have no doubt that younger people who don’t have to both unlearn an old way of typing and internalize a new method would have an easier time with this board. But after decades of QWERTY, I yearned for something a bit more familiar.
C) The ‘Mirror Board’ — Matias Half-QWERTY KeyboardYup ,it’s me again. How am I photographing this with a non-functional right hand, you might ask? I’m not! I tucked a remote pic snapping device behind the board. Awkward but effective!Unlike the two others considered above, the Half-QWERTY (AKA The Mathias Half-) Keyboard has layout elements in common with a two-handed QWERTY board. But, at first glance, what’s far more striking is that it’s really small — with just 22 keys, it is way smaller than the Maltron, and has about a quarter as many keys as the TIPY.
This smallness puts a lot of demand on fewer keys, ramping up requisite modifier and lock roles to produce all of the functions and outputs of a normal-sized board. We’ll get back to that higher-order complexity in a bit.
But first, we’ll examine the “default” layer of the board — the outputs you get if you press core keys on their own. These keys represent the left half of a QWERTY keyboard’s alphabet. Generating the other half is where the really neat trick of this design comes into play.
Holding down the requisite modifier while pressing a default-layer (left-side) letter key generates the secondary (right-side) letter labeled on that key. But the trick is in the locations of those letters: they’re all mirrored across an invisible center line, or “folded over” from where they’d normally be on the right. So, for instance, a Q (upper left) becomes P (upper right) and so on.
At first, that may seem utterly unintuitive. Why not just “lift” the right side letter set up as a whole, shift it left, and lower it back down, for instance? That does make intuitive sense in terms of our spatial awareness, but touch typing has a lot more to do with muscle memory.
Studies have shown that touch typists often can’t draw a complete keyboard layout, even if they can press every key without looking. It’s less about remembering where each key is and more about which finger presses the key and how. From personal experience: I was shocked at how fast I was able to learn the alphabet on this keyboard. It really does feel like my left hand is tapping into the muscle memory of my right.
The problem I found is that things start to get much more difficult once the learning phase gets beyond letters (and, to some extent, numbers), which brings us back to that pesky complexity problem of using smaller keysets. Removing more keys crowds ever more functions onto those that remain. Keys on this board need up to six labels in various positions (of different sizes and positions and colors) to indicate their additional outputs. If the designer had retained more keys and added some kind of built-in mouse, this could have been an amazing one-handed solution for me. I loved parts of the design, but not the whole.
Choosing Option (D) None of the AboveI set out to consider three keyboards, but am now back to writing on what looks like the same old keyboard I used before my injury, (complete with its built-in TrackPoint mini-mouse). Underneath the hood, however, it works in radically new and different ways**. In the simplest terms: I added an advanced system of shortcuts so that I can touch-type one-handed on just half of a two-handed board.
After growing to appreciate the familiarity of the Half-QWERTY, but also becoming frustrated with its limits, I began looking for similar alternatives. That search led me to discover that there are a lot of people out there creating custom keymaps in various ways, adding new modifier-based outputs to existing keysets. I’m not a programmer, but I found a shockingly easy way to set up custom key combinations on a Windows computer, which would allow me to turn my two-handed keyboard into a best-of-all-worlds typing solution.
The scope of my design ambition was relatively modest at first. I set out to emulate the mirror functionality of the Half-QWERTY, creating a modifier to reflect letters from the right over to the left side of my two-handed board. But then I realized that I didn’t have to stop there. I could add more modifiers to bring over punctuation and navigation keys, as well as other outputs and functions. So I kept going, ultimately pulling the whole board into reach over on one side.
And Thus: The KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board KeymapI’ve dubbed my design the KURTY Single-Handed Half-Board Keymap (a bit of fun up front, followed by a more descriptive tail). The keymap pairs well with my keyboard of choice, with its built-in mouse analog, but the KURTY is a computer-side system that will ultimately work with any attached two-handed board. Beyond that broader flexibility, this software-based solution has a number of other critical advantages over any given hardware keyboard alternative. For instance:
- I can copy it to share between my at-home desktop and portable laptop setups, without: having to buy multiple peripherals …
- … or carry around additional single-purpose hardware
- … or worry about a board physically breaking or needing repair.
- This keymap can also easily be evolved over time, reworked incrementally to suit changes in my needs and physical abilities.
The endless replicability of this solution also makes it easy (for me) to share with other users (like you!) for free. Toward that end, the third and final article in this set includes a setup file, user guide, and other support materials to help you set up your own KURTY. I hope others single-handed typists will find this keymap useful and pass it along!
Left to Write (2 of 3): Designing a Single-Handed Keymap for Half of a QWERTY BoardComing up next: the design process behind the current version of the KURTY, which was developed through extensive testing and iteration. You can also hop straight to the third installment — there you’ll find a layout file with setup instructions as well as a color-coded key guide and troubleshooting tips. It only takes a few minutes to deploy, and you can edit the keymap to suit your needs.
Left to Write (3 of 3): Setting Up a Free One-Handed Touch-Typing System on Your PCAdapt or Design — A Project of 99% InvisibleIn the aftermath of a debilitating injury to his dominant right hand and arm, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt faced numerous new everyday challenges. His subsequent search for accessible design solutions set the stage for Adapt or Design, a project in three acts.The six-article mini-series Single Handed explores assistive designs for people with one functional hand. The three-article micro-series Broken Plexus examines how design can support those recovering from long-term injuries. Left to Write follows Kurt’s research into (and testing of) adaptive keyboards, which led him to create a free custom keymap that enables users to touch-type one-handed on a two-handed board!Explore & find out more at 99pi.org/adapt
In 2022, a group of developers proposed transforming a Nordstrom parking lot in San Francisco into nearly 500 apartments, many of them affordable and close to public transit. But before they could even begin the formal approval process, they faced a preliminary review. This step wasn’t approval to build or denial—it was simply a list of required studies and permits. Even so, it took over 500 days.
That kind of delay is not unique. All over the country, efforts to construct housing, clean energy projects, and public transit face bureaucratic slowdowns. These obstacles aren’t rooted in technology or funding—they’re procedural. And according to Ezra Klein, they are largely self-inflicted.
A Politics of AbundanceEzra Klein’s new book, Abundance, co-authored with Derek Thompson, confronts this crisis head-on. At its heart is a question that Klein believes should be central to politics: what do we need more of, and how do we get it? America’s challenges, he argues, stem from a scarcity of housing, energy infrastructure, and transportation—not because we can’t build these things, but because our systems are designed to prevent us from doing so efficiently.
Instead of embracing abundance, the U.S. has developed a culture of delay. Layers of review and the threat of endless lawsuits have made it incredibly difficult to bring even well-intentioned projects to life.
High-Speed Rail as a Case StudyCalifornia’s high-speed rail project offers a striking example. The state began studying the idea in the 1980s, and a ballot initiative approved it in 2008, promising service by 2020 for $33 billion. As of 2025, no trains are running. The projected cost has tripled, and construction has been whittled down to a limited segment between Merced and Bakersfield—at a cost higher than the original entire project.
The project has been plagued by environmental reviews that stretch over a decade, endless lawsuits, political compromises, and cumbersome negotiations. In practical terms, California has made it illegal to build high-speed rail. This pattern repeats across sectors: what begins as reasonable oversight evolves into a tangle of red tape that delays or kills essential infrastructure.
The Hidden Cost of InactionAuthor Ezra Klein (Photo by Lucas Foglia)Critics of large-scale development often highlight the harms that projects can inflict on local communities, particularly those that are vulnerable. Klein doesn’t dismiss those concerns. But he also emphasizes the cost of doing nothing.
When clean energy projects are blocked, the long-term environmental damage disproportionately affects the poor. When housing isn’t built, affordability worsens. When transit is delayed, mobility and access suffer. Inaction has consequences—and they often fall hardest on the very groups we aim to protect.
From the New Deal to the New LeftKlein traces the roots of today’s regulatory culture to the postwar backlash against the New Deal. While the New Deal era unleashed a torrent of building—highways, housing, dams—it also left a trail of destruction in communities that had little power to resist. In response, a new generation of liberals, environmentalists, and consumer advocates emerged in the 1960s and 70s. Figures like Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader helped create a regulatory framework designed to rein in the excesses of unchecked growth.
These reforms were vital at the time, but over the decades they’ve calcified. Instead of ensuring thoughtful development, they now often serve as levers for delay. Klein argues that our political system has prioritized process over outcomes, stalling the very progress many of these rules were intended to protect.
Voice Without VetoAuthor Derek Thompson (Photo by Shaughn and John, Inc)Klein is not calling for an authoritarian model of governance. He respects the importance of community input and environmental safeguards. But he believes we’ve conflated voice with veto power. The result is a system where well-organized opposition can derail projects indefinitely, often regardless of public benefit.
The key challenge is how to design processes that incorporate genuine input without granting permanent veto rights to any single interest group. It’s a hard problem, and the answer isn’t the same everywhere. But ignoring the issue means continuing to choke off the very infrastructure we need to thrive.
Emergencies Reveal What’s PossibleIronically, when emergencies strike, American governments routinely demonstrate their ability to build quickly and effectively. After the I-95 bridge collapse in Pennsylvania, for example, a project expected to take more than a year was completed in just 12 days under emergency authority.
If government can act decisively in a crisis, Klein asks, why not treat chronic crises—like housing, climate change, and transit—with the same urgency? Declaring an emergency shouldn’t be the only way to make the state function.
A Liberalism of the DetailsKlein describes his framework not just as a “liberalism that builds,” but as a “liberalism of the details.” It’s not enough to pass big legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act or the Affordable Care Act. What happens after—the regulations, permitting, procurement, and construction—is where success or failure is decided.
And too often, liberals don’t pay attention to that part. By the time a project is in the hands of administrators and lawyers, it’s already being reshaped, delayed, and sometimes killed. Real progress requires following through—not just with vision, but with execution.
Building Better, Talking BetterPart of the problem is perception. Americans often encounter government in frustrating ways—DMV visits, taxes, construction zones—rather than through visible, successful projects. Klein urges politicians to build tangible, high-quality infrastructure and to talk about it. Brag about it, even. He criticizes the Democratic tendency toward modesty and procedure, arguing that the public needs visible proof that government can work, and work well.
Success stories like electric vehicle chargers, broadband expansion, or transit improvements should be turned into advertisements for what effective governance looks like. Otherwise, public trust continues to erode, and the case for collective investment gets harder to make.
Learning From What WorksFor those who see Klein’s vision as utopian, he points to places where it’s already happening. Cities like Austin have found ways to build more housing without descending into authoritarianism. Countries like Spain, France, and Japan run efficient rail systems without sacrificing democracy.
The real challenge is not dreaming up a new system from scratch. It’s recognizing the good examples that already exist, studying them, and adapting them. Klein wants us to stop pretending the only alternatives are dysfunction or despotism. There’s a middle path—one that values speed, equity, and public trust.
Toward Institutional RenewalUltimately, Abundance is a call for institutional renewal. The laws and processes that once solved the problems of the 20th century now create new obstacles in the 21st. Rather than scrapping those institutions entirely, Klein wants to update them—to align our systems with today’s challenges, from housing shortages to climate threats.
That means electing leaders with both vision and competence. It means designing laws that allow judgment and flexibility. And it means remembering that the job doesn’t end when the bill is passed. It ends when the public can see, feel, and use the results.
On a recent trip to Puerto Rico, producer Jeyca Medina-Gleason discovered a piece of her family history: a manila folder with her grandfather Tomás Velez Lopez’s photo attached to the front. Across the top in bold letters, it read “Division of Special Investigations” followed by a case number.
This folder—known in Puerto Rico as a “carpeta”—contained over 60 pages detailing her grandfather’s life, including mundane information like his height, weight, and license plate number. But there was no crime listed. Instead, the purpose was simply “to determine his political activities.”
This carpeta was part of a decades-long surveillance operation that tracked more than 150,000 Puerto Ricans, primarily targeting supporters of Puerto Rican independence. For Jeyca’s grandparents, Tomás and Nancy, their activism around the independence movement made them targets of this surveillance.
A History of UncertaintyPuerto Rico has been a colony for over 500 years, first under Spanish rule and later under American control. When the United States acquired Puerto Rico in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, it didn’t follow the traditional path of transitioning territories to statehood.
Instead, the Supreme Court created a unique and ambiguous status for Puerto Rico through a series of decisions known as the Insular Cases. As Columbia Law professor Christina Ponsa Kraus explains, the Court determined that Puerto Rico was “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense” and “domestic in an international sense”—essentially legal gibberish that justified keeping Puerto Rico as neither a state nor fully independent.
The Independence Movement and SurveillanceThe independence movement gained momentum in the 1930s under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, who headed the Nationalist Party. After violent clashes between independence supporters and police, U.S. authorities began surveilling people suspected of supporting independence. This was the beginning of the carpetas.
Pedro Albizu CamposThis system worked like a “three-strike” process. As photographer and researcher Christopher Gregory-Rivera explains, “If they saw you with somebody else or they saw you at a rally, you’d get another card… and when you got three of these index cards, then they would actually formally open a carpeta on you.”
The surveillance program relied heavily on paid informants—friends, neighbors, and colleagues who reported on independence supporters. Though the information was often fabricated or exaggerated, the carpetas served their purpose: suppressing the independence movement by making its supporters feel watched.
The Commonwealth EraIn 1952, as decolonization movements spread globally, the U.S. decided to change Puerto Rico from an unincorporated territory into a “Commonwealth” with its own constitution and elected governor. But this new status created even more uncertainty.
Commonwealth supporters described it as “the best of both worlds,” citizenship and connection to the U.S. while maintaining autonomy. Critics saw it as “the worst of both worlds,” still subject to congressional control while pretending to be decolonized.
As Ponsa Kraus notes, “Puerto Rico is subject to the control of Congress…and if Congress wants to take power away, it can.”
The Cerro Maravilla MurdersThe true extent of the surveillance program remained hidden until something called the Cerro Maravilla scandal broke in the 1970s. The case involved the murder of two young independence activists, set up by a police informant who had infiltrated the movement.
The scandal led to public trials broadcast across the island. During one heated radio debate, a police officer blurted out that everyone knew that the police were keeping files on the independentistas. This led to years of investigations into the carpetas.
After public pressure, in 1988 the Puerto Rican Supreme Court ordered the release of the carpetas. Thousands of Puerto Ricans, including Jeyca’s grandparents, were allowed to collect their files—tangible evidence of decades of government surveillance.
The Legacy of the CarpetasToday, the carpetas remain an open wound in Puerto Rico’s collective memory. The word “carpetear” (to make a carpeta on someone) is still used as a verb, with grandparents warning their activist grandchildren, “cuidada o te van a carpetear” (be careful or they’ll make a carpeta on you).
Though the surveillance program damaged the independence movement, it also galvanized supporters. As Jeyca’s grandmother Nancy put it, “That didn’t stop us. Because the moment we found out, the moment we got those carpetas and we knew what was going on, that only made us stronger.”
Recent years have seen growing interest in Puerto Rico’s political status, with many Puerto Ricans becoming increasingly conscious of the island’s relationship with the United States. In the 2024 gubernatorial race the candidate for the Puerto Rican Independence party got nearly a third of the vote- a historic milestone for the movement. The fight for Puerto Rican independence continues for many on the island. As Jeyca’s grandmother Nancy explains, “I will die for my country. I will believe in its independence because I believe in its people…this is me. This is where I come from. And nothing could take that away from me.”
The Divided Dial is a podcast series about the history of radio from WNYC’s On the Media and longtime 99PI contributor, Katie Thornton. In season 1, Katie explored the rise of right wing talk radio in the United States. The newest season of The Divided Dial is all about shortwave. Across four episodes, Katie dives into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous—connecting people around the world long before the internet ever did. But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic, becoming a propaganda tool for governments, extremists, and cults.
Roman and Katie also discuss a beautiful artifact of the shortwave era, the QSL card.
In 2021, a Canadian farmer named Chris Achter responded to a buyer’s grain contract with a simple 👍 emoji. What followed wasn’t just a misunderstanding—it was a legal showdown that captured global attention.
Achter, based in Saskatchewan, had a long-standing business relationship with the buyer. They often finalized grain deals over text. That year, when the buyer sent over a standard flax contract, Achter responded with a thumbs up. Months later, as drought conditions drove up flax prices, the buyer expected a delivery. None came.
The buyer sued.
The central question? Does a thumbs up emoji constitute a digital signature?
A judge ruled that, yes, it did.
The Emoji That Cost More Than $60,000According to Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, Achter later claimed the emoji was merely an acknowledgment—not acceptance. But the court disagreed, calling the emoji a “nontraditional but valid” form of agreement. The court awarded the buyer over $60,000 in damages.
Goldman put it bluntly: “That single thumbs up emoji was worth tens of thousands of dollars.” 👍
A New Frontier: Emoji LawThe case highlighted an increasingly pressing issue for modern courts: the legal meaning of emojis. We use them constantly—on social media, in texts, Slack messages, and even emails. But when disputes arise, how should courts interpret them?
Google, OFL, via Wikimedia CommonsGoldman tracks every legal case involving emojis. In 2016, there were 26 court opinions referencing emojis. By 2023, that number had exploded to over 200. Yet many judges still don’t include emoji depictions in court transcripts. Some even replace them with vague “[Emoji]” tags—stripping out critical context.
That’s a big problem, says linguist Adam Aleksic. Emojis often act as “tone tags,” shaping the emotional meaning of a sentence. A sarcastic thumbs up can mean the opposite of agreement, especially for younger users.
Emojis Are Not UniversalPart of the challenge lies in how emojis render across platforms. The same emoji can look different on Apple, Android, Meta, or Slack—sometimes with wildly different interpretations.
Take the gun emoji. Once commonly shown as a realistic revolver, it was redesigned into a toy water gun by Apple in 2016, with other platforms following suit. But Elon Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) reverted to a real pistol. On some devices, the emoji faces left; on others, right—potentially changing the implied target of violence in a message.
EmojipediaThese discrepancies are no joke in court. A French man was jailed after sending a gun emoji to his ex. In the U.S., a 12-year-old was charged for using gun, knife, and bomb emojis in an Instagram post.
Enter UnicodeUnicode is the behind-the-scenes organization that ensures text (and emojis) work across platforms. Every emoji has a unique ID, like a digital blueprint. But Unicode only sets the reference point; companies are free to design the emoji however they want.
That freedom leads to branding differences—and legal confusion.
Goldman trains judges to consider both versions of an emoji in court: what the sender saw and what the recipient saw. Without this, critical nuances are lost.
Author: User Antonsusi from the German Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0 DE https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/deed.en, via Wikimedia CommonsCourts Catching UpIn Achter’s thumbs up case, the court did it right. It looked at surrounding texts, previous contracts, and how the two parties had historically confirmed deals via short messages. The emoji wasn’t analyzed in a vacuum—it was contextualized.
Goldman believes this approach should be the norm. “It’s exactly what we would hope the courts would do,” he said.
The Emojigeddon of PoopNot all emoji controversies are high-stakes legal dramas. Some are about…poop.
Keith Houston, author of the forthcoming Face with Tears of Joy, traces the poop emoji’s origins back to a Japanese anime. In Japanese culture, “unchi” (poop) has connotations of good luck. Despite being the least popular emoji among all age groups, the poop emoji has become an unofficial symbol of emoji culture. It’s even immortalized in the Unicode standard—meaning it can never be removed.
That didn’t stop some Unicode members from protesting. One dissenting engineer called the proposal of a sad poop emoji “an excrescence” and predicted a wave of absurd variants like “poop with karaoke mic.”
This internal controversy was dubbed “Emojigeddon.”
Why Emojis MatterDespite their lighthearted reputation, emojis are becoming a serious part of legal communication. They can carry intent, sarcasm, even threats. They can signal community or allegiance. And yes, they can be legally binding.
Human communication has always been messy. Emojis just make that mess digital.
As Goldman says, emojis are just one more way we express ourselves—another layer for courts to decode. Whether you’re signing a contract or cracking a joke, be careful what emoji you send.
Especially if it’s a 👍.
Join Roman and Elliott one last time as they reflect on their journey with you all through The Power Broker, exploring their favorite moments and answering listener questions in this bonus episode.
If you finished The Power Broker with us (or know someone who did), get the 99PI Power Broker challenge coin to commemorate your achievement! Visit 99pi.org/store to get the challenge coin and other 99PI merch.
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The most popular image of Jesus Christ in the world—a white man with blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and a soft, peaceful gaze—comes from Head of Christ, a 1940 painting by Chicago artist Warner Sallman. It’s been reproduced over a billion times, shaping how millions imagine Jesus.
Sallman started as a commercial illustrator, sketching ads for pianos and trucks before volunteering as art director for The Covenant Companion, a Christian youth magazine. In 1924, scrambling for a cover idea, he had a vision in his sleep, grabbed a pencil, and sketched Jesus’s face. That charcoal drawing—Jesus with flowing hair, trimmed beard, and serene eyes—became the foundation for Head of Christ, though it wouldn’t be painted for another 15 years.
Sallman’s inspiration likely included Friend of the Humble (1892) by French artist Léon-Augustin Lhermitte, which he saw in Ladies’ Home Journal. But the deeper cultural backdrop was the rise of “Muscular Christianity”—a reaction to fears that urban life was making men weak and unmanly. Protestant leaders wanted a stronger, more masculine Christ to inspire young men, and Sallman aimed to deliver exactly that. He later called his image a “manly” Jesus.
Friend of the Humble (Supper at Emmaus). Léon Augustin Lhermitte, 1892.The turning point came in the late 1930s, when Warner Press, a Christian publisher, suggested turning Sallman’s black-and-white sketch into a color oil painting. Sallman initially ignored the idea but eventually created Head of Christ in 1940. When Warner Press rep Fred Bates saw it hanging over the family piano, he was captivated. He saw commercial potential.
Head of Christ. Warner Sallman, 1940.In 1941, Warner Press printed 100,000 copies, selling out in two months. By year’s end, over a million had been distributed through churches, catalogs, and Christian bookstores. Then came World War II. As part of a campaign called “Christ in Every Purse,” pocket-sized versions were given to soldiers, many of whom carried them through the war. For them, it became a talisman—an image of comfort, protection, and faith.
By the 1950s, Head of Christ was everywhere—public schools, hospitals, and even courtrooms—just as “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. The painting had become the default image of Jesus. Before 1940, depictions of Christ varied widely, but after Head of Christ, it became the Jesus, the standard by which all others were judged.
But its dominance also cemented a white Jesus in the cultural imagination. Scholars point out that the historical Jesus, a Middle Eastern Jew, likely had darker skin. Yet Head of Christ reinforced whiteness as central to Christian identity in America. As historian David Morgan puts it, “It gave white Americans a Jesus that was theirs.”
Still, Head of Christ wasn’t only embraced by white Christians. Black churches often featured it on handheld fans and in Bibles—largely because religious merchandise was controlled by white companies that prioritized profit over diversity. As theologian Willie James Jennings notes, black churches simply took what was available.
Wales Window. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama.By the 1960s, the tide began to turn. With the rise of the Black Power movement, black congregations started rejecting white Jesus imagery. Some replaced stained glass windows and murals. After the KKK bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four black girls, the church later installed a stained glass Wales Window—a striking image of a black Jesus dressed in white.
Despite these shifts, Head of Christ remains deeply embedded in Christian culture. It continues to define how millions picture Jesus, a testament to its power—and its lasting influence on race and religion in America.
When the Endangered Species Act passed in 1973, it was considered a bipartisan home run. The Act established protections for plants and animals on the endangered and threatened species lists, and across the aisle, everyone seemed to agree that it would be bad for a bunch of species to go extinct. When the act went to a vote, not a single senator voted against it. Flash forward just over fifty years and the story could not be more different. Today, communities across the nation are clashing over the ESA, and a whole legal specialty has sprung up around how to use it and how to fight it.
The first season of Montana Public Radio’s The Wide Open, hosted by Nick Mott, is about the past, present and future of the ESA. Mott says that the rise of the environmental movement in the 1970s led Richard Nixon and Congress to pass many of the United States’ bedrock environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. But when it came to the ESA, most lawmakers didn’t understand the law’s true implications. Believing it would mainly protect large charismatic animals like whales and grizzlies, very few of them even read it.
But the ESA didn’t just protect big charismatic species; it protected any species that was considered endangered or threatened, and far more species were under threat than anyone realized. Thousands of smaller, less well-known species of animals and plants soon wound up on the rolls of the endangered. As a result, any individual could sue using the Endangered Species Act to stop government projects and private land developers in their tracks, just so long as the project in question threatened an endangered species. At least, that was the theory.
The first big lawsuit to test that theory was brought against the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plaintiffs – a ragtag team of environmental lawyers, some fresh out of law school – wanted to use the Endangered Species Act to stop the completion of the Tellico Dam, which would flood the last wild stretch of the Little Tennessee River. And the endangered species they chose to use wasn’t a bear or eagle or even a river trout. It was a tiny, assuming fish called a snail darter.
The case was hard fought. The diminutive size of the snail darter was mocked by the opposing counsel, who brought snail darters in glass jars to court to demonstrate the supposed silliness of the species in question. The plaintiffs, for their part, at times resorted to selling T-shirts to raise money and awareness. But the case went all the way to Supreme Court, which ruled in favor the lowly fish. In so doing, the environmental legal movement proved that the ESA could be leveraged to protect large areas from development.
But the victory proved short lived — at least for the Little Tennessee. The case demonstrated the lasting power of the ESA, but the Tellico Dam was ultimately granted an exemption by the Carter administration and put into operation in 1979. The snail darters were transplanted into the Hiwassee River in southeastern Tennessee, where their population recovered. They were taken on the threatened species list in 2022. But, by that time, the last wild stretch of the Little Tennessee River was already long gone.
In 2008, a billion gallons of toxic sludge spewed across 300 acres of Tennessee in the middle of the night. It was just before Christmas. At the time, Jared Sullivan was in high school and remembers the disaster. For over fifty years a power company called the Tennessee Valley Authority – or the TVA – had been burning coal at a power plant near Jared’s hometown. Burning all that coal helped bring electricity to the region, but it also created a mountain of ashen waste. Over the years, this mountain grew to be 60 ft high and 84 acres wide. And on December 22, 2008, the earthen embankment that contained this mountain of waste collapsed. A lethal wave of coal sludge inundated the countryside.This disaster came to be known as the Kingston Coal Ash Spill. And the culprit wasn’t a private company – it was the TVA, a federally owned electricity provider that had been set up by the government during the New Deal. Immediately after the disaster, 900 workers from around the country descended on the site to help clean it up. Everyone expected that they’d find bodies under the sludge — it was a miracle that no one died that night. The real tragedy came years later, when many of the workers in charge of the clean-up fell sick and even died from health issues caused by inhaling the toxins found in coal-ash. The fallout from what happened at the Kingston Coal Plant led Jared to look more closely at the company in charge, the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA has been around since the 1930s, and today it provides electricity to more than 10 million people. Its presence in the Southeast had a huge impact in transforming the region. The TVA is a backdrop to life as portrayed in Southern literature, film, and music; it’s part of the region’s folklore.
Jared wrote about the TVA in his new book, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal Catastrophe. Jared’s book follows the aftermath of the disaster at the Kingston Coal Plant. In doing so, his book reveals an even larger, ongoing American tragedy: how the TVA started out as a mission-driven public institution, but ended up acting like a private for-profit company.
Jared Sullivan’s new book, Valley So Low: One Lawyer’s Fight for Justice in the Wake of America’s Great Coal CatastropheThe story of TVA begins with Franklin Roosevelt, who, as a young man, contracted polio and began making trips to Warm Springs, Georgia for treatment. And on those trips, he got a first hand look at how dire the situation was in the Tennessee Valley.
During the 1920s, the Tennessee Valley – which is an area covering nearly all of Tennessee, large chunks of Alabama, Mississippi, and Kentucky, and bits of three other states – was deeply impoverished. Much of the Valley was farmland, but only 3% of these farms had electricity. The area also had a per capita income of less than half of the national average, and about a third of the population was stricken with malaria. On the farms, crops would suffer from an uneven climate. Constant flooding from the Tennessee River would badly damage the soil. Sometimes, the outlook was so bleak that people would abandon their farms altogether.
Congress was aware that something needed to be done. If not simply for the good of the people, then at least to prevent some sort of populist uprising. At the time, big power companies were owned by private holding companies, and they had no financial incentive to provide power to sparsely populated rural area. But as a result, these communities had been stuck without access to power.
Then in 1933, FDR got sworn in as President. And pretty quickly got to work on New Deal programs, one of which was to establish a power company: the Tennessee Valley Authority. Their idea was simple. Electric power should become a public good. Because if you want to improve people’s lives, you have to give them electricity. And for almost a quarter century, the TVA was the single most ambitious public works project in the world. Its mission was to lift the rural South out of poverty by making electricity more accessible to all.
The TVA had three basic goals: to control the Tennessee River, produce power, and improve agriculture. The Tennessee River’s propensity to flood not only damaged farmland, but also sometimes took out entire towns. The goal was to control the river and generate hydroelectric power. And so began the construction of the dams. TVA used eminent domain to remove about 20,000 families from their homesteads. And in their place, they peppered the Valley with dams and brutalist concrete buildings. The first dam they complete is called Norris Dam, just outside of Knoxville.
Norris DamIn all, TVA built 49 dams, which helped control the river and generate much needed electricity in the South. And in addition to dams, they invested in other projects connected to improving the region. The TVA launched a mobile library service and a ceramics laboratory. It created 13,000 demonstration farms where it taught farmers best practices. The TVA also established a town called Norris. Norris was created to house the workers building the nearby dam. But the town was also a way to show America how cooperative living could work. Norris was completely walkable, with most homes facing each other instead of the street. It included a greenbelt, a school where dam workers could take classes, a post office, a gym, and even a farmers market.
In those first few years, TVA continued to steadily build more and more dams. And in the process, they became the largest producer of electric power in the United States. But these massive government interventions came with a lot of pushback. Wendell Wilkie, president of a large private power company in the South, led the fight against the TVA. Wendell and other power company reps complained bitterly about what they saw as unfair competition. They took the TVA to the Supreme Court and lost, twice.
The TVA was ultimately successful in electrifying the South. The dams tamed the rivers and controlled the floods, which meant healthier soil and more productive farmland. Hydroelectric power was cheap and available, which meant the standard of living increased dramatically. For those who benefitted, it was a social revolution.
For the first time ever, the Tennessee Valley could be lit up after dark. In one of the most conservative regions in the country, millions of people got their electricity from a federal agency that had no shareholders to answer to and no profits to make. And then… something happened that caused the TVA to suddenly change direction.
When WW2 broke out, The TVA, which was a program of the federal government, was suddenly summoned to support the war. Electricity was needed to produce weapons and military equipment, and to build atomic bombs. In fact, the government decided to base the Manhattan Project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee in order to be close to TVA’s power production in the area. What all this meant, though, was that electricity that was previously going to the public was now being siphoned off for war.
Then in the early 1940s, Congress feared a power shortage. They forecasted a dry year ahead, which would affect the river levels throughout the Tennessee Valley, and reduce the effectiveness of the hydroelectric dams. And so the following year, at the government’s urging, and with its funding, the TVA began construction on its first coal-fired power plant. It meant that at least some of the TVA’s power would no longer depend on the weather.
Tennessee stayed in the bomb making business long after WW2. This time, there was a need for uranium enrichment for the Cold War nuclear arsenal. And so, the demand for TVA’s electricity kept going up. At one point, almost half of the TVA’s power production went to the government bomb making facilities in Oak Ridge.
Meanwhile, the South was also seeing an uptick in population. And TVA’s power production couldn’t keep up with the growing demand from both war manufacturers and people living in the Valley. So they started to build more coal power plants. TVA builds 11 of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants to meet these energy demands. Coal plants were cheap and helped the bottom line – it was the easiest way to produce more power under so much pressure.
Then, in 1952, Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, and unlike FDR, he was highly skeptical of TVA as a whole, accusing it of being an example of “creeping socialism.”
Eisenhower’s administration affected TVA’s ability to expand, even though more people were in need of electricity than ever before. Republicans in Congress who were aligned with Eisenhower repeatedly withheld appropriations from TVA. And then, in 1959, Eisenhower cut the TVA off from federal funding entirely. This change meant that the TVA, although owned by the government, needed to start operating like a private corporation in order to finance itself. Since 1959, the TVA has raised capital for its electricity projects by issuing and selling bonds.
This new financial model meant that the TVA began to shift its priorities. What was once FDR’s mission-driven project to lift up the Southeast from poverty shifted its focus to building profit. There was no time or money anymore for cute little walkable towns where you learn how to farm and do ceramics. In this new chapter in TVA history, those social services were the first to fall away. The TVA had to focus on making profits unlike it had before.
Over time, the TVA kept pumping out electricity, producing large quantities of coal powered electricity throughout the Valley. Then they start plotting a transition to nuclear power. In the late 1960’s, the TVA feels the pressure of a wave of new environmental laws. In response, they decide to build 7 jumbo nuclear power plants with 17 nuclear reactors. In 1965, the TVA announced plans for its first nuclear plant. A Knoxville newspaper headline read: “Nuclear Roars at King Coal.” But, their attempt at nuclear is a disaster right from the beginning.
There’s a well documented record of TVA’s nuclear projects running far behind schedule, far over budget, and many times being abandoned altogether. Of the 7 nuclear power plants TVA had intended to build, only three of them were completed. Plans to build the rest fell away after the TVA amassed $10 billion in debt because of their nuclear endeavors.
And then in 1975, TVA’s first nuclear plant in Browns Ferry, Alabama accidentally caught on fire. It forced an emergency shutdown of the plant and causes millions of dollars of damages.
Even though nuclear power is cleaner than coal, it’s a lot more expensive to implement. The TVA didn’t have the money to really invest in this experiment. And its initial nuclear failures, along with other well known nuclear disasters like Three Mile Island, mired public perception of nuclear power’s potential to pivot to cleaner energy.
Throughout the 1980s, the TVA cancelled or put on hold many of these nuclear projects. Some exist today only as blueprints, while others are fragments of concrete and metal that dot the landscape of the Tennessee Valley. The nuclear fiasco has left the TVA with a total debt of nearly $20 billion. All this also meant that the TVA was still heavily relying on coal to produce its power.
In his new book Valley So Low, Jared Sullivan writes more about the consequences of TVA’s decision to stick with coal: that billion gallon toxic sludge eruption at the Kingston Coal Plant in Tennessee.
The Power Broker Breakdown may have concluded, but if you’re just tuning in (or if you just want a quick refresher), this episode is a compilation of the summary portions of the The Power Broker Breakdown series.
If you finished The Power Broker with us (or know someone who did), get the 99PI Power Broker challenge coin to commemorate your achievement! Visit 99pi.org/store to get the challenge coin and other 99PI merch.
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The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker
In July 1980, a group of Salvadoran migrants crossed the border between Mexico and Arizona. They walked over a remote mountain range and halfway across a wide desert valley in the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. There were more than two dozen of them—people who had left behind lives and jobs to come to the United States.
Note: This episode originally aired as two episodes in 2017.Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Puerto Blanco Scenic Drive by Ken Lund (CC BY-SA 2.0)The migrants had hired guides to lead them on their journey through one of the most desolate areas of the Sonoran desert. But the heat proved too deadly and they hadn’t anticipated how far they would have to walk. Around a dozen of them died the first day out.
Southside Presbyterian Church signThe survivors were eventually found huddled in the sparse shade of some scrub brush. They were delirious and suffering from intense dehydration and heatstroke. U.S. Border Patrol agents brought them to a hospital in Tucson. It was there that a Reverend named John Fife of Southside Presbyterian Church first encountered the migrants and began to learn more about why they had crossed the border.
These migrants had fled from El Salvador’s civil war. For decades, the country had been ruled by a series of oligarchs and corrupt military leaders. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, left-wing revolutionaries began to grow in power and influence, and the military responded by trying to crush the resistance. Death squads targeted union leaders, community organizers, and other people they suspected of sympathizing with the guerrillas. Many civilians were caught in the middle of this violence.
A billboard serving as a reminder of one of many massacres that occurred during the Civil War in El Salvador. Image from Wiki commons.Similar conflicts were unfolding in Nicaragua and Guatemala. Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans were trying to get away from these dangerous and bloody civil wars. They were fleeing their countries, making their way up through Mexico, and crossing into the United States.
U.S./Mexico border between New Mexico and Chihuahua by MJCdetroit (CC BY 3.0)Rev. Fife and his congregation began to help these Central American migrants. Their efforts would mark the beginning of a new — and controversial — social movement based on the ancient religious concept of “sanctuary,” the idea that churches have a duty to shelter people fleeing persecution. There’s been a lot of talk about “sanctuary” in the news recently and the modern movement in the U.S can trace its roots back to Fife.
Fife’s first inclination had been to work within the rules of the immigration system to help the migrants seek asylum.
Since 1980—when Congress passed The Refugee Act — the U.S. has asked people to meet a number of requirements in order to qualify for political asylum. Applicants must establish that they have a “well-founded fear” of persecution in their home country, based on their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. They also have to prove their government is actually involved in the persecution or that it can’t control the groups that are.
The headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Washington, D.C. by Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC BY 3.0)While the standards for asylum are straightforward, establishing one’s eligibility can be a challenge. The process relies heavily on a single person’s testimony about what they’ve been through, and there is seldom physical evidence to support the claims.
Despite the challenges of qualifying for asylum, Rev. Fife and his church—with help from some legal aid organizations in Tucson—began arranging legal assistance for the Central American migrants. They started visiting detention centers and helping people fill out the appropriate paperwork. They arranged for lawyers to represent them in court.
But Fife found that, in many cases, even when migrants met the requirements for asylum, they were not getting it. He began to wonder what was behind these decisions to deport people who seemed to be making valid claims about the dangers they faced back in their home countries.
The seal of the old United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, which existed from 1870 to 2003.Central Americans hoping for asylum faced significant hurdles. Just as they began turning up at the U.S.-Mexico border in the late-1970s and early-1980s, tens of thousands of refugees from other places — like Cuba and Iran — were also seeking refuge in the United States. The government was overwhelmed with applications.
Most Central Americans had also historically come to the U.S. for jobs—not because they were fleeing political persecution. The government was inclined to view them as economic migrants.
Asylum policy also intersected with foreign policy in complex ways. Ronald Reagan, who served as president from 1981 to 1989, saw Central America as an important front in the Cold War and the fight against communism. He argued the region was so close to the U.S. that the country’s national security required it to stop communist movements from flourishing there.
The U.S. had a long history of supporting Central American governments that aligned with its economic and foreign policy interests. Because the U.S. government considered the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala to be political allies in the fight against communism, it was reluctant to acknowledge that these governments were involved in the persecution of their own people.
Under Reagan, almost all Salvadoran and Guatemalan border-crossers were classified not as political refugees but as “economic migrants.” Under that designation, many failed to qualify for asylum and were sent back to their home countries. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice, fewer than 3% of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who applied for asylum were approved. In that same period, the approval rate for Iranians was 60%. For Afghans fleeing the Soviet invasion, it was 40%.
This political climate put Rev. Fife and his congregants in a tough position. They didn’t want to encourage the migrants who were seeking help at their church to report to Immigration when they knew it was almost certain they’d be deported.
This was the quandary Fife was in when a man named Jim Corbett got involved. Corbett was a Quaker, and as the refugee crisis in Tucson continued to grow, his religious faith compelled him to take action, and he wanted Fife and his congregation to get involved.
Routes of the Underground Railroad, 1830-1865 compiled from “The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom” by Willbur H. SiebertCorbett pointed to the church’s failings in protecting Jewish people fleeing the Holocaust in the 1930s and 40s. Corbett did not want to repeat that mistake. Instead, he wanted to emulate the actions of some Christians in the 1840s and 50s, when church people helped move runaway slaves across state lines and through the underground railroad to safety.
Corbett had already done some border runs on his own, picking up Central American migrants in Mexico and helping them cross the border to safety in the United States. But soon Rev. Fife and a handful of others started helping him. At first, they used Corbett’s property to shelter the migrants, and then they started using the church as temporary housing.
Soon, on any given night, the church would have dozens of people sleeping in the main gathering space. Church members at Southside Presbyterian provided food, clothes, English lessons, medical care, and access to immigration attorneys. The migrants were still undocumented and faced possible deportation. But the church provided access to resources, guidance, and a place to stay.
Sanctuary showing the church as a place of refuge by artist Richard Burchett (1815–75)In deciding to take the refugees into their church, the congregation was drawing on a long history of other houses of worship doing the same. In Greek and Roman history, people who were threatened with persecution could find protection in temples. When the Roman Empire became Christian, churches took on the same function. The concept of “sanctuary” can also be found in medieval canon law and British common law. More recently, churches had sheltered conscientious objectors during the Vietnam War.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s view was that churches in the sanctuary movement were harboring undocumented immigrants who had crossed into the country illegally. Religious institutions in the U.S. do not have special permission to harbor people who are breaking the law. And, as it turns out, the government was keeping an eye on the sanctuary movement’s growing operation.
Despite potential legal ramifications, Fife thought that by going public the church could generate attention and gain support. They invited a few other churches across the country to join them in a public announcement — and in March of 1982, they hung a huge banner on the front of Southside Presbyterian Church that said, in Spanish, “this is a sanctuary of God for the oppressed of Central America.” They held a service and publicly welcomed a new family from El Salvador to join the other refugees who were staying at the church. And they staged a press conference to explain exactly what the “sanctuary movement” was and what their goals were.
Press conference launching the Sanctuary Movement at University Lutheran Chapel in Berkeley, California. Cover of the National Catholic Reporter, March 29, 1982.As word spread, a network of religious sanctuary spaces began to form. By the mid- to late- 80s, hundreds of churches and synagogues across the country had declared themselves sanctuaries. And those religious spaces were in turn connected to a network of churches that extended down into Mexico and Central America.
One of the government’s criticisms of the sanctuary movement was that it lacked the expertise and resources to evaluate potential refugees. But Rev. Fife argued that they had a vast network of priests and pastors in Central America who could help them vet potential migrants.
The government, however, wasn’t swayed by the religious motivations of participating churches. In 1984, the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service), a predecessor to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), launched a full-scale investigation into the sanctuary movement.
Their goal was to collect enough evidence to indict the leaders of the movement and to stop churches from sheltering migrants. The government believed that sanctuary volunteers were using religion as a cover to push a radical political agenda and to undermine immigration laws. INS decided to investigate the sanctuary movement using the same tactics they might use against any criminal smuggling enterprise. To this end, they enlisted undercover agents to infiltrate and gather evidence.
Sanctuary movement march via CSRPC at the University of ChicagoThe main undercover informants were named Jesus Cruz and Salomon Graham. Both were former smugglers who had been caught bringing undocumented people across the border. They agreed to work with the INS in exchange for payment and for having the charges against them dropped.
Cruz and Graham, along with a couple of other agents, spent ten months undercover. Their methods would eventually come under public scrutiny, because they had not just infiltrated the sanctuary movement— they were also secretly recording meetings, conversations, and in some cases, church services.
In January 1985, sixteen leaders of the sanctuary movement were indicted, including Jim Corbett and Reverend John Fife, the two founders of the movement, as well as a number of other priests, nuns, and congregants. They were charged with multiple counts of conspiracy to violate federal law as well as harboring, transporting, aiding, and abetting illegal aliens.
The sanctuary leaders assembled a team of lawyers to assist in their defense. Attorneys chose two primary arguments to defend the sanctuary movement.
Fleeing to the City of Refuge (Numbers 35:11-28). From Charles Foster, The Story of the Bible, 1884.The first argument stemmed from religion. Many religions have a distinct imperative to assist people who are fleeing some form of violence and oppression. The defense planned to argue that the sanctuary workers were merely acting in accordance with their faith. They also believed the religious rights of the sanctuary workers had been violated by the government agents who’d infiltrated their churches and made secret recordings.
The second part of the defense’s argument revolved around the legal framework of asylum. The law provides that people fleeing certain specific kinds of oppression or violence have a right to asylum.
Refugee Act of 1980This was all happening in the context of a major shift in U.S. refugee policy. Before 1980, the U.S. approach to taking in refugees had been expressly political. It gave preference to refugees fleeing communist countries and countries in the Middle East. In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the Refugee Act of 1980 into law. This legislation was supposed to create a more equitable system by adopting a more humanitarian, non-ideological definition of a refugee. It drew on criteria developed by the United Nations, which identified a refugee as anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
Even though this new criteria was in place when President Ronald Reagan came into office, the lawyers for the sanctuary movement believed the government was not following its own law. They thought INS was turning away large numbers of Salvadorans and Guatemalans who should have qualified as refugees. Between 1983 and 1986, the approval rate for Salvadorans and Guatemalans seeking asylum was under 3 percent. The defense attorneys for the sanctuary movement organizers felt like they had a strong case to make against the U.S. government.
But the defense’s entire legal position was wiped out when the federal judge hearing the case ruled that they were prohibited from saying anything during the trial about a number of subjects: United States refugee law, international refugee law, conditions in El Salvador, conditions in Guatemala, or religious faith.
The prosecutor and judge had effectively reduced the case to a simple yes-or-no issue: had the sanctuary workers engaged in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented people into the country? There was to be no discussion about context, history or motivations.
Over the next several months, the prosecution laid out its case, relying heavily on testimony from their undercover informants. The defense team tried to undermine those accounts in cross-examination, raising questions about context and motivation when they could. But when it came time for them to present a case, they rested, without bringing any witnesses to the stand.
United States District Court for the District of Arizona (Sandra Day O’Connor U.S. Courthouse)The jury deliberated for more than 48 hours across the span of nine days. On May 1, 1986, six months after the start of the trial, the jury reached a verdict. Three of the sanctuary workers were acquitted of all charges, including Jim Corbett. Eight were found guilty, including Rev. John Fife.
The judge gave out surprisingly lenient sentences. No one got jail time. Everyone who had been convicted got five years probation.
Not long after the criminal trial ended, a group of churches and refugee rights organizations filed a class-action lawsuit against the government. They alleged that the government had engaged in discriminatory treatment of asylum claims made by Guatemalans and Salvadorans. In 1990, the government settled the lawsuit, giving people from these countries temporary protected status and work permits. After this victory, the sanctuary movement started by Rev. Fife and others began to wind down.
But even though the churches were slowing their work, the whole idea of sanctuary was spreading. College campuses, cities, counties, and states began to declare themselves sanctuaries—and not just for refugees fleeing persecution, but for undocumented immigrants more broadly. However, what “sanctuary” actually means varies from place to place and depends on context.
2007 map of U.S. cities that have adopted “sanctuary” ordinances banning city employees and police officers from asking people about their immigration status, by Burzum (CC BY-SA 3.0)In some places, police aren’t allowed to inquire about a person’s immigration status (or to give that information to the federal government). In other places, all residents are promised access to city services regardless of their immigration status.
President Donald Trump talked a lot about “sanctuary cities” during his campaign and has pointed to murders committed by undocumented immigrants as evidence that sanctuary cities should not exist. He’s threatened to punish self-declared sanctuary cities by stripping their federal funding and, under his direction, the Department of Homeland Security is gearing up to deport large numbers of undocumented immigrants. In response, churches, local governments, and other institutions are preparing to resist.
In 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a memo saying that some “sensitive locations” including houses of worship, hospitals, and schools require special consideration by immigration officers, meaning the government would not prioritize deporting people from those places. But that practice isn’t codified into law and it could easily change.
Recently, there have been reports of ICE agents targeting undocumented people in places like hospitals and schools. Churches might also be vulnerable. It remains to be seen what role institutions and municipalities will play in the coming years, tangled up in an issue that will almost certainly land back in the courts.
Archaeologists searching through the ruins of the very ancient past are always happy to come across an epic poem or a historical chronicle, but very often the hardest documents to find are the ones that tell historians something about everyday life. About what it was like to be a bureaucrat in Egypt’s middle kingdom, or a soldier in the Persian Army, or a farmer in ancient Sumeria. It’s not that these societies didn’t produce lots of everyday communications. Frequently, they did. But it’s often the most common, ordinary documents that don’t survive. Either because no one thought to preserve them or their society was conquered, or they were written down on a medium that wasn’t meant to last. But in the 1840s archaeologists excavating the ancient city of Nineveh, in what is today northern Iraq, discovered an incredible stash of 2500 year old ephemera that did manage to survive.
Nineveh had been the capital of the vast Neo-Assyrian Empire, which had reached the peak of its power in the 7th century BCE. Very little was known about the Neo-Assyrians, explains Lisa Wilhelmi, assistant professor of ancient near east studies at the Free University of Berlin, until the archaeologists at Nineveh came across tens of thousands of remarkably well preserved clay tablets. They had stumbled upon the Assyrian’s official state archive, built by the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The Library of Ashurbanipal, as it came to be known, included ancient works of astronomy, mythology and literature, including the first discovered copy of the Epic of Gilgamesh. But it also included the daily personal correspondence of the Assyrian court – all of the petitions from ordinary people, all of the letters between advisors, and, critically, all of the messages being written to and from the Assyrian king. A glimpse, in other words, into the everyday life of the imperial court.
A fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh found in NinevehTo the rest of the world, the Assyrians portrayed an image of nearly totalitarian power. David David Damrosch, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, and author of Around the World in 80 Books, says that image included infinite confidence and sagacity on the part of the king and the infinite loyalty on the part of the king’s ministers. But the personal correspondence of one king, named Esarhaddon, revealed a different story, because in private the all-powerful Esarhaddon was actually cripplingly neurotic.
Letter to Esarhaddon About Whether the Pleiedes rising in the sky before Venus will affect NinevehNowhere was Essarhadon’s neurosis more clear than in his over-interpretation of omens. In one exchange, Esarhaddon was getting ready for an important military campaign, but one day, when he was exiting his great palace in Nineveh, a mongoose passed under his chariot. Essarhadon wrote to his chief priest asking what it could mean. He had heard it said that a mongoose passing under one’s legs was a bad omen, so perhaps they shouldn’t invade? Then again, technically the mongoose passed under his chariot, not his legs, so maybe all was well. What did the priest think? The priest wrote back:
As to what my lord the king wrote to me: “Does the omen ‘If something passes between the legs of a man’ apply to something that came out from underneath a chariot?”—it does apply.
However, he went on to say that Esarhaddon had it all backwards. And not to worry because this was actually a bad omen for his enemies.
[So should we say] “mercy” for the Nabataeans? Why? Are they not hostile kings? They will not submit beneath my lord the king’s chariot.
Essarhadon’s paranoia knew no bounds. In addition to over-interpreting omens, he commissioned multiple independent oracles and then cross-checked the results to see who – if anyone – might be betraying him:
Shamash, great lord, give me a definite answer to what I ask you! … Will any of the eunuchs or the bearded officials, the king’s entourage, or any of his brothers and uncles, or junior members of the royal line, or any relative of the king whatever, or the prefects, or the recruitment officers, or his personal guard, or the king’s chariot men, or the keepers of the inner gates, or the keepers of the outer gates, or the attendants and lackeys of the stables, or the cooks, confectioners, and bakers, the entire body of craftsmen … or their brothers, or their sons, or their nephews, or their friends, or their guests, or their accomplices … make an uprising and rebellion against Esarhaddon, king of Assyria … and kill him?
Fragment of Another Letter From Astrologists to EsarhaddonIn fairness to Esarhaddon, a king would not be able to ignore omens and oracles even if he had wanted to. This was a society where divination literature was taken seriously by everyone and therefore was inherently political in its implications. Esarhaddon had also grown up as a boy in a time of deadly court politics – his own father had been killed by one of his brothers in a coup.
But perhaps Esarhaddon’s biggest problem is that he did not know how to read. Reading and writing in cuneiform was hard to learn and usually considered a speciality skill, much like coding is today. It was not expected for kings to learn, but this often put them at the mercy of their more literate scribes and advisors, who could choose not to recite crucial parts of a message. One tablet addressed to the king even included a postscript for the scribe begging him to read the entire letter aloud.
But Esarhaddon’s illiteracy is one of the things that has allowed us to know so much about the Assyrians today. Determined that future kings would not be stuck in his position, Esarhaddon likely is the one who ensured that his son, Ashurbanipal, learned to read and write from an early age. Ashurbanipal became a true lover of letters, even writing his own poetry. When he became king, he collected documents from around his empire, turning the archive in Nineveh into what we would think of as a proper library – one containing both great works of art and science, in addition to the palace’s existing records of daily correspondence.
The walls of Nineveh during the reign of Ashurbanipal, photo by Limin HuanAshurbanipal’s library was burned to the ground and buried under rubble when the Neo-Assyrian’s vassal states rose up and destroyed Nineveh in 612 BCE. But in a further irony, the burning of the city might have been precisely what saved the library’s contents in the long run. When it comes to preserving the records of a society, sudden cataclysm is often better than slow deterioration, and in the case of the library, burning the tablets, far from destroying them, baked the tablets’ soft clay into something more like terracotta. The tablet’s new composition radically improved their durability, allowing them to be excavated largely intact 2500 years later – thereby ensuring that the lives of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanpial would be remembered forever – or at least until our own society’s inevitable decline.
Happy New Year! We’re starting 2025 with four more mini stories! This week we have a sleepy button, electric signs, a very important sticker, and video you can smell. Let’s get into it!
Snooze ButtonsIn the 1950s, General Electric changed alarm clocks forever by adding a snooze button. On top of the clock there was a big fat bar labeled “SNOOZE” and it could not be missed. One smack of the clock and presto, you just bought yourself a little more sleep.The first Snooz-Alarm clocks were built to let you snooze for 10-15 minutes. However, mass production required some standardization and in the 1950s a double digit snooze was too complicated to program into the gears of a clock at scale. So GE got as close as they could with a nine minute snooze.After millennia of trying to get ourselves out of bed at a certain time, the Snooz-Alarm dared to ask – …do you really have to get up right now? And across the country people more or less said…no…I don’t. The clock was a major hit. And as the technology improved, a few competitors ended up offering alternatives to the nine minute snooze. Like the Westclox DROWSE alarm clock.
The Westclox alarm clock gave people the option of snoozing for 5 minutes or 10 depending on if you hit the DROWSE button on its left side or right side. But the DROWSE button didn’t have that sweet simplicity. Nobody wants to wake up and think about how much longer they want to sleep. People just want to sleep more. And the SNOOZ button gave us that. Or at least that’s what we thought. Despite the fact that many of our phones are still factory preset to snooze for 9 minutes – today we all know deep down that the snooze button doesn’t really give us meaningful sleep. And it also doesn’t let us rise. Instead it catches us at our weakest moment. When we are least capable of making decisions. When it’s far easier to slap a button than to put two feet on the ground. In the end, the key to waking up might just rest in not giving yourself any other options. And the key to more sleep? Who knows?!
Neon Signs with Kelly PrimeIn the 1950s, a new and unique style of neon signage popped up across the Eastern Bloc. At the time, Eastern European countries were right in the middle of the cold war and people were starting to rebel. Soviet leadership needed a way to quell political unrest. What they landed on was a state-sponsored plan called neonization. The idea was to transform cities with neon lights, pushing the concept of (ahem) a brighter future and distracting people from the harsh realities of communism.
Courtesy of the Neon Muzeum in Warsaw, PolandTo achieve this, the government enlisted top artists, some unfamiliar with neon, to create large, imaginative designs. Examples included giant neon flowers decorating a flower shop and a pink mermaid symbolizing Warsaw’s public libraries. By the late 1960s, Warsaw was covered in neon, with signs designed to complement each other, creating a cohesive citywide aesthetic.
However, despite the beauty of the signs, Neonization did not fool the public into believing life under communism was sustainable. People continued to rebel. And after the fall of communism, the new democratic government actually paid people to remove the signs. Most of Warsaw’s cold war neons were lost during this period and the few remaining signs were turned off or broken. But in the past twenty years or so, Warsaw has experienced a neon renaissance, with new signs inspired by the original Cold War designs, revitalizing the city’s iconic neon aesthetic.
Japan Fire Stickers with Kurt KohlstedtHigh up and easy to miss if you’re not scouting for interesting architecture, there are equilateral triangles on building windows all over japan. The red triangle is a sticker indicating Fire Brigade Entrance (消防隊進入口) – It’s where firefighters know to lean their ladders and enter when rescuing people, and on the flip side it’s where people know to gather and expect rescue.According to the Building Standards Law of Japan (Article 126 No.6), the fire brigade entrance must be indicated on buildings lower than 31 meters, have three or more stories without balconies, nor large windows. These conditions have been defined to ensure emergency services for buildings lower than 31 meters, the maximum reachable height of the fire ladder. The inside of the sticker also carries an important message for occupants: don’t place things in front of this window! the last thing you want is to have to push and pull a huge copy machine out of the way to get to your rescue window. Like Knox boxes in America, often found on the side of buildings and containing emergency keys for firefighters, these triangles are everywhere, and once you start seeing them you won’t be able to stop.
Smell-O-Vision with Gillian JacobsIn the 1960 film Scent of Mystery, audiences experienced an innovative but ultimately failed film gimmick called Smell-O-Vision. Actress and 99% Invisible contributor Gillian Jacobs explains the bizarre concept of Smell-O-Vision, which was the brainchild of Mike Todd Jr., the son of movie mogul Mike Todd Sr. (husband of Elizabeth Taylor). After his father’s death, Mike Jr. wanted to carry on his legacy of spectacle in cinema and invest in a sensory experience that would engage the sense of smell.Smell-O-Vision was based on a device called SmellBrain, invented by Austrian osmologist Hans Laube, which delivered scent cues to individual theater seats during a movie. The technology was designed to sync scents with specific scenes—such as perfume when a mysterious woman appeared on screen—creating a unique immersive experience for viewers. Scent of Mystery was the first (and only) film to use Smell-O-Vision, with the smell of perfume, flowers, and other elements enhancing the plot.
However, the technology faced multiple problems. Some smells were too strong, others came late, or not at all. There were only a few theaters equipped to show the film in full Smell-O-Vision, leading to its commercial failure. Despite its marketing hype, Smell-O-Vision quickly became a Hollywood joke.
Although Smell-O-Vision failed, the concept lingered. Other films like Polyester (1981) and Spy Kids 4 (2011) attempted similar “scratch-and-sniff” methods, and modern tech like iSmell and oPhone has tried to bring scent to digital experiences like video games. Despite these attempts, Smell-O-Vision remains a curiosity in cinema history, a quirky footnote in the pursuit of multi-sensory media.
We’ve all got problems. Sometimes your problem is a massive roadblock in your life, or maybe it’s this little thing that quietly annoys you that you’ve learned to grudgingly put up with. But regardless of the size of your problem, it would be so great if someone would just fix it for you. Not just fix it, hyperfix it.
Whatever the problem, Alex Goldman — reporter, radio producer, and overconfident idiot — will get to the bottom of it (if there’s a bottom to be found. Results may vary). You may remember Alex as the former co-host of Reply All. When a 99PI listener couldn’t play the show on his Mazda car stereo, Alex and his super tech support team helped us track down the issue and create a special Mazda-friendly podcast feed, which we still publish to today.
Today, we’re playing a great story from Alex and his new show, Hyperfixed. Alex investigates why there’s no door in a place where there really should be a door. You’ll never shop for sour cream or shredded mozzarella the same way again.
There are new episodes of Hyperfixed every other week and bonus episodes on the off weeks. You can learn more about the show and sign up to be a premium member at hyperfixedpod.com.
Every year, millions of eyes turn to Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The ball drops, confetti flies, and people around the world celebrate as one of the most iconic urban spaces transforms into a glowing, glittering symbol of hope and renewal. But this carefully orchestrated spectacle didn’t just happen. Times Square, now synonymous with bright lights and family-friendly entertainment, has lived many lives. At the turn of the 20th century, it was a booming theater district. By the 1970s, it had become a gritty hub of adult entertainment—dubbed “the sleaziest block in America.” By the 1990s, the neighborhood was nearly abandoned, its streets empty and reputation in tatters.
42nd street circa 1984The transformation of Times Square was no accident. It was the result of a massive redevelopment project, fueled by powerful business interests and New York City’s government. In the early 1980s, the city invoked eminent domain to seize large swaths of the neighborhood, aiming to clean up its seedy image. But it wasn’t until a group of property owners, led by the New York Times and theater leaders, formed the Times Square Business Improvement District (BID) that things began to change.
BIDs—private organizations funded by local property owners—stepped in where the city couldn’t, using their own funds to make Times Square feel safe and vibrant again. They cleaned the streets, employed private security, and threw public events to reshape the area’s image. The ball drop itself became a cornerstone of this campaign, reimagined in 1993 as a dazzling spectacle complete with fireworks, confetti, and global fanfare. This was more than just a party—it was a declaration to the world that Times Square was back.
But the clean-up came at a cost. The redevelopment pushed out hundreds of businesses and displaced vulnerable residents, including many who made their livelihoods in Times Square’s underground economy. Critics argued that the BID’s efforts favored big corporations and tourists over locals, further driving gentrification and leaving small businesses behind.Today, Times Square is one of the most visited places on Earth, a success story that reflects the growing influence of BIDs across the country. There are now over 1,000 of these private districts in the United States, shaping neighborhoods with flower pots, banners, and “ambassadors” in neon vests. But while they can make cities cleaner, safer, and more attractive, they also blur the line between public and private power, raising questions about democracy, equity, and who gets to decide what public space is for. As the ball drops each year, Times Square stands as both a triumph of urban reinvention and a cautionary tale. Behind the confetti and celebrations lies a story about cities, power, and the unseen forces that shape the places we share.
Photo by gigi_nyc
This is the eleventh official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brennan Lee Mulligan, a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he’s the creator of Dimension 20 — a Dungeons & Dragons show that features incredibly complex and campaigns, with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories. Season three of Dimension 20 takes place in a magical New York City, where the main villain is a fictionalized, undead Robert Moses, who shares the real Robert Moses’s passion for building roads and destroying lives through bureaucracy.
Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 7 (Chapter 42 through Chapter 46), discussing the major story beats and themes.
REMINDER: We’ve got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.
Join the discussion on Discord and Reddit.
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker
Back in 2008, Nate DiMeo started a podcast called The Memory Palace. Each episode of the show wrapped a little known piece of history inside one of Nate’s poetic essays. His stories have a remarkable way of combining facts with insight to call to mind forgotten moments from the past. And now, after 15 years of podcasting, he’s releasing a new book also titled The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past. The book features a collection of some of the most memorable stories from the show as well as a few new ones.Today, we’re talking with Nate DiMeo about adapting his stories to print and what he thinks is at the heart of a Memory Palace story. We’re also cracking open the Memory Palace archives to play two 99% Invisible favorites. In Below, From Above, Nate tells the story of the everyday laborers who toiled under extreme conditions to build The Brooklyn Bridge. And in Distance, Nate tells a very short story about Samuel Morse and how the death of a loved one might’ve changed the way we communicate forever. These quintessential Memory Palace stories remind us of our shared mortality and the deep, empathetic imagination it takes to understand the past.The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past
comes out November 19th and will be available everywhere books are sold. We highly recommend you check it out!
There’s a particular slice of beach along the New York City shoreline, that, for the past 80 years, has been a pivotal site for queer liberation. It’s called the People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park, also known, simply, as Riis.
Photos by Chris BerntsenThis history is deeply connected to an abandoned, graffiti covered building called Neponsit Beach Hospital. For decades, this large, graffiti-covered structure loomed behind the queer sliver of Riis Beach. It formed a kind of U-shape facing the shore.
But last year, after decades of abandonment, Neponsit Hospital was demolished, and its demolition brings up critical questions about the future of the beach: how did queer Riis come to be? And what might become of it now?
Photo by Chris BerntsenIn 1914, before it was a beach, Riis was a military base for the Rockaway Naval air station. Then in 1915 came the Neponsit Beach Hospital, originally intended to treat children with tuberculosis. There were beautiful porches, open-aired balconies, and eastern and western wing openings all facing the beach.
Shortly after WW1, the military abandoned its base at the beach and the city decided to create a public park there instead: Jacob Riis Park. Jacob Riis was a social reformer and photojournalist who advocated for building parks, playgrounds, and houses for the poor and working class. With bathhouses and picnic tables, the goal of Jacob Riis Park was to provide public transit accessible recreation for New York’s working class.
And then, in the 30s the whole thing was scrapped and re-designed by Robert Moses. With Moses’ redesign, the beach got an expansion, while the rest of the park, like the bathhouse, got a facelift. There was even a golf course built. Neponsit Beach Hospital stayed put, untouched and still operating.
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power BrokerRiis Beach in its entirety is fairly large, 260 acres to be exact. But it’s only here, in front of this hospital, that queer folks claimed as their own, as far back as the 1940s.There was a metal fence that separated the hospital from the beach, but there was a porous relationship between beach-goers and hospital patients; some even remember passing cigarettes back and forth through the fence.
Photo by Chris BerntsenEventually the building transitioned from a children’s hospital to nursing home. And then in 1998, a stormy weekend swept through the Rockaways, badly damaging Neponsit Beach Hospital.
This was when Rudy Giuliani was the mayor, and he made the call — in the middle of the night — to shut down the nursing home. Close to 300 nursing home residents were evacuated. Some died in the process. Renovations to the damaged building were promised to residents, but they never came. And the residents never returned.
The hospital was closed shortly after the evacuation, and it has stayed vacant ever since.
Photo by gigi_nycOver the next few decades, the property was stuck in a political and legal cold war. Proposals shuffled back and forth. To renovate or not, to demolish or not. In the 2000s it was estimated that millions of dollars were spent to maintain the hospital. We’re talking about things like fences, guard houses, cleaning up debris… until Spring of 2023, when the hospital was finally torn down.
Photo by Chris BerntsenLately, arrests at Riis for public nudity and other infractions have been rising. The Rockaway Times, the local paper to that slice of Queens, published a report featuring quotes from local residents demanding an end to “Riis porn”, propping “children’s safety” as their number one concern. The organization GLITS, Gays and Lesbians Living in a Transgender Society, has been working on a proposal: a community land trust that leads to a health care facility that focuses on trans New Yorkers.
Because there aren’t many public and fairly queer spaces that especially don’t surround alcohol and expensive tickets, Riis feels to be one of the few left. But like the history of the Chelsea Piers’ queer past being erased into a playground for the rich, its legacy is at risk of being washed away.
Photo by Jazmine JT GreenYoung RuinIf you’ve wandered around Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum, or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you know the power in a piece of decrepit architecture. And even if you don’t want to leave your house, the internet is littered with evidence of the human love affair with all things abandoned.
People flock to remainders of ancient civilizations, but people also flock to things that just look like they’re ancient. The combination of decomposition and romance makes a perfect cocktail of repulsion and allure. And for San Franciscans, this place is Sutro Baths.
Photo courtesy of Randy ChiuAt the northwestern edge of San Francisco, right on the Pacific Ocean, is a curious jumble of concrete ruins. You wouldn’t know just looking at it, but this ruin is quite young. It’s what’s left of Sutro Baths, a palatial indoor swimming pool and amusement park built in 1898.
Thomas Edison captured it in film.
There was a museum of oddities.
Courtesy of the National Parks ServiceAnd up the hill, was an amusement park along Merrie Way, marketed Coney Island of San Francisco.
Courtesy of sonoma.eduSutro Baths was built by San Francisco real estate tycoon Adolph Sutro. Despite pouring millions of dollars into its various attractions, Sutro Baths just never made money. In the 1950s, after Sutro had passed away, it was bought by an entertainment mogul, who turned it into “Sutro’s,” an ice skating rink and indoor beach.
You can see Sutro’s in its wacky midlife crisis in the 1958 movie The Line Up.
But Sutro’s still couldn’t turn a profit. It was set to be demolished. But before it could be torn down, Sutro’s caught fire. That was in 1966. It’s been the same ever since. The ruin is now part of the Golden Gate Recreational Area.
It’s also preserved in the 1971 film Harold and Maude.
Or you can just meditate on ruins on with Gregory Whitehead.
http://gregorywhitehead.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/pleasureofruins1.m4a
Credit: Sam GreenspanProducer Avery Trufelman spoke with John Martini, author of Sutro’s Glass Palace; Tom Bratton, National Parks Service volunteer and former locker attendant at Sutro’s; and Jill Corral, owner and operator of sutrobaths.com and the @sutrobaths handle.
There’s an image that’s stuck with many of us from the early pandemic: dozens of cargo ships anchored off the coasts of US ports, stacked high with hundreds of thousands of containers filled with goods, just sitting there in a traffic jam. At the same time, grocery store shelves sat empty of essentials like flour, bread and milk. There were also big delays for online orders on everything from furniture and bicycles and car parts, to PPE and medical supplies.
Photo by Russ Allison Loar. CCBefore the pandemic, you rarely heard people use the phrase “global supply chain” – the incredibly complex network of corporations, factories, and transportation companies we depend on to make and move goods around the world. We just ordered our stuff that was often made on the other side of the planet, and it came right to our front doors, sometimes within hours. The system seemed to be humming along smoothly in the background.
But New York Times global economics correspondent Peter Goodman says that for decades, corporate leaders ignored glaring signs that the global supply chain was one crisis away from a system-wide meltdown. And then Covid hit. “It was the moment where it was just inescapable,” Peter explains, “that we are dependent upon these jury rigged supply chains with inadequate supervision, without enough regulation such that there are now some gaping vulnerabilities.” In his new book “How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside The Global Supply Chain,” Peter describes how long-standing problems – like corporate greed, overseas manufacturing, and our appetite for cheap stuff – are what made the system buckle in 2021. He also looks closely at every link in the supply chain for clues as to how the system can be fixed.
Each fall, across the United States and Canada, around 1500 empty storefronts are taken up by the signature yellow, orange and black signage of Spirit Halloween. The seasonal retailer sells Halloween masks, Halloween costumes, Halloween costumes for dogs, Halloween decorations, creepy robots and several different kinds of fake blood. And they do it to the tune of around a billion dollars a year in sales, according to some estimates. While Spirit stores make landfall every August, by early November, every one of their physical locations is closed.Despite being a pop-up store, Spirit has developed a cult following. YouTube creators love to post videos from the ‘opening day’ of their local Spirit locations, and there have been songs and even an independent horror film dedicated to the haunted shop.
The last few years have been considered a “retail apocalypse” for many businesses, with lots of brick-and-mortar chains closing their physical locations. So what does it say about the world of retail that a seasonal Halloween store is taking all of these abandoned storefronts, for three months a year, and making a killing in the process?
The Early Days of SpiritBefore he became a merchant of all-things-Halloween, Joe Marver was the owner of Spirit Discount Women’s Apparel, a clothing store in the Bay Area. In the early 80s, Marver watched as customers flocked to a dancewear store across the strip mall, which received a surge in popularity around spooky season every year. “They were lined up around the block for the month of October, and it was insane because our October stunk,” says Marver. In 1983, the dancewear shop closed. And Marver decided he could not let those customers go someplace else. So he put the women’s clothing in the basement, and bought a crop of Halloween costumes, for one month only, giving rise to the first iteration of Spirit Halloween. By the next year, Marver had expanded to a second location, which grossed an eye-popping $100,000. Soon, he was running six stores, and soon, he had franchises across the state, opening only on a seasonal basis.
Photo by Joe ShlabotnikSpirit locations were built for the short term, using materials that could be put up and taken down quickly. “I remember that the tables for displays were actually the cardboard boxes that the merchandise came in,” says Mike Olsen, a real estate broker who started working with Spirit in the 80s, and is still associated with the company. “You’d pile these boxes up in the middle of the sales floor, drape a black cloth over ’em, and that was your display table.”
The Hermit Crab of Retail Spirit was growing quickly, but early in the development of the business, Joe, Mike and their team hit a major roadblock. Very few landlords wanted to rent their space to a business that was going to put down stakes for eight weeks and then leave the space abandoned. “I was calling around to landlords and other brokers,” says Olsen of the early days, “and they’d look at you like you had three heads.”Olsen says he would drive around new markets and scope out abandoned big box stores, looking for any corporate landlords that might take his call. Mike remembers getting creative to win over one possible landlord with a suite of available spaces, by sending a severed arm as a gag. “I stapled it to a piece of cardboard, put my business card on it, and then right there the gentleman’s name, ‘Hey, lend me a hand. I need your location here.’” Ultimately, the ploy worked and he got the deal.
Photo by Scott SchrantzIf one of these stores closed, landlords were stuck, since these spaces were purpose-built and difficult to repurpose. It wasn’t possible to put a hospital, or an apartment complex into an old big box, unless a prospective owner completely redeveloped the property and sought changes to local zoning.
While Spirit would occasionally take residence in an old bank or, one time, a defunct church, their focus has always been abandoned big box stores. According to Joe Marver, the best space for Spirit is anything over 10,000 square feet, preferably across the parking lot from another popular store. “If it had good traffic, and it was a corner that had across the street, a Lowe’s or a Home Depot, then that would be enough of a draw,” says Marver.
The Corporate EraAfter 16 years in business, Joe Marver sold Spirit Halloween to Spencer’s Gifts, a mall staple most Americans will know for their fine array of lava lamps and novelty t-shirts. Since 1999, under corporate ownership, Spirit has grown from 65 locations to around 1500.In some ways, Spirit has become a more polished operation. Until recently, the company was known for carrying ‘knock off’ costumes for popular characters, including a “Sidekick Bros” outfit that looked suspiciously like Super Mario and Luigi. Today, the company has the license to characters from Disney, Marvel and Nintendo.But not everything about their business has been ‘corporatized.’ Spirit’s physical locations are still temporary in nature. Their yellow, black and orange logo is still plastered on a tarp in front of each storefront. Their display is still made of peg board. And they still pursue the same real estate strategy, by filling abandoned big box stores each fall.Mike Olsen, the real estate broker, says Spirit was able to take advantage of empty storefronts left by erstwhile brands like Comp USA, Circuit City and Borders Books in the 1990s. After the financial crisis of 2008, there was even more space available. “I think the Phoenix Metro area at one time had 256 empty retail boxes, big boxes [in 2009]. Take your pick,” says Olsen. This real estate plan has developed into a meme online. “You’ve probably seen the memes out there that whenever the government shuts down, for example, someone hangs the Spirit Halloween banner, you know, super imposes it on the White House,” says Olsen.This has led some critics to dub Spirit Halloween “the grim reaper of retail.” Rachel Quednau, the program director at Strong Towns, wrote an essay in 2021, in which she criticized what Spirit has come to represent, saying their success is thanks in large part to the policy failures of suburban-style development. “If our cities are thinking about what is a long-term benefit for us financially for our residents, then we shouldn’t be thinking about pursuing really short-term, massive businesses like this,” says Quednau. “Honestly, for all the huge big box stores that are now sitting vacant, I think the best case scenario is to knock ’em down, let them return to the earth, particularly if they’re on the edge of town where it’s hard to access without a car.” Quednau adds that, “I don’t think that there’s something inherently wrong with Spirit. It’s more like a symptom of a bigger problem.” “If our cities are thinking about what is a long-term benefit for us financially for our residents, then we shouldn’t be thinking about pursuing really short-term, massive businesses like this,” says Quednau. For his part, Mike Olsen believes Spirit serves a larger function in the retail economy with their temporary occupancies. “We’ve cleaned more floors, replaced more light bulbs, and fixed more HVAC units across the country than I would think any other retailer at this point,” he says.
“When we go into a space, we need that space to look good. And oftentimes a retailer, when they leave a space, they’re not leaving it in a condition that’s ready to occupy.”While it’s tempting to call Spirit a “grim reaper” or a “zombie,” a more apt metaphor might be a hermit crab, a creature that takes up abandoned storefronts as a temporary home, because they’re so readily available.
EpilogueThis is 99PI’s 600th episode! And today is producer Chris Berube’s fifth anniversary with the show. We’re incredibly grateful to our listeners for listening and supporting us all these years, and to Chris for producing this very fun episode. Here’s to 600 more!
This is the tenth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She’s had a long and storied career editing works of investigative journalism that speaks truth to power and afflicts the comfortable, including so she brings that perspective to her understanding of The Power Broker. Clara hadn’t read The Power Broker before and this podcast inspired her to pick it up and read along with us.
Elliott and Roman also cover the last section of Part 6 and the first section of Part 7 (Chapter 39 through Chapter 41), discussing the major story beats and themes.
REMINDER: We’ve got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power Broker
Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into going way faster than it should want to. And impeccably made fake signs meant to guide you to the right freeway. Three classic, favorite 99PI’s completely updated, remixed, and rescored.
Razzle Dazzle
Listener Dylan Frey created a zine version of this episode. See it here: Razzle Dazzle Zine
This is probably not what you think of when you think of camouflage.Becoming invisible with your surroundings is only one type of camouflage. Camofleurs call this “high similarity” or “blending” camouflage. But camouflage can also take the opposite approach.
Think about zebras. It’s hypothesized that their stripes make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one from another when the zebras are in a large herd. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood-sucking horseflies. This is called disruptive camouflage.
When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle.
Anon, photograph of the USS West Mahomet in Dazzle camouflage, 1918. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 1733Dazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as a design solution to a very dire problem — American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-boats. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean. They needed a way to fend off the torpedoes.
Conventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn’t work in the open sea. Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there’s no way to hide all the smoke left by the ships’ smokestacks.
The strategy of this high-difference, Dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility. It was about disruption. Confusion.
Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there. They had to determine the target ship’s speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope.
John Everett, Painting of the SS Lepanto (© 1918). Postcard. Collection of Roy R. BehrensThe torpedo gunner’s margin of error for hitting a ship was quite low. Dazzle painting could throw off an experienced submariner by as much as 55 degrees.
A journalist at the time referred to these dazzling ships as “a flock of sea-going Easter eggs.”
Burnell Poole, Painting of the USS Leviathan escorted by the USS Allen, 1918. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 42691Anon, government news photograph of members of the US Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps camouflaging the USSRecruit in Union Square, NYC, 1917An American “Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps” did some of the painting.
Dazzle was occasionally ridiculed…
Life magazine, 1918…but Dazzle also became an influence for fashion.
Anon, newspaper photograph of Dazzle-inspired bathing suits at Margate UK, from the New York Tribune, 1919Our expert this week was Roy Behrens, a professor graphic design at the University of Northern Iowa. He’s published several books about camouflage, and also runs the Camoupedia blog.
Credit: Ewan RobertsThe theater of war has changed so camouflage has changed with it, but there is still Dazzle to be found.
But sadly, there are no longer flocks of sea-going Easter eggs.
Built for SpeedI want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them? You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.
Over the course of many years, a psychology researcher named Dennis Shaffer at Ohio State asked students from many different parts of the country this question and the most common response was that the white stripes are two feet long.
Tom Vanderbilt, author of the brilliant book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), reveals the real answer and some of the other perceptual countermeasures that are designed to make you feel comfortable going way faster than your brain can adequately process.
We also talk about how the design language of exaggerated scale and wide vistas is great for limited access highways, but it’s problematic when these features are grafted onto suburban landscapes where they don’t belong.
Guerrilla Public ServiceAt some point in your life, you’ve probably encountered a problem in the built world where the fix was obvious to you. Maybe a door that opened the wrong way, or a poorly painted marker on the road. Mostly, when we see these things, we grumble on the inside, and then do nothing. But not Richard Ankrom.
Courtesy of Richard AnkromIn the early morning of August 5, 2001, artist Richard Ankrom and a group of friends assembled on the 4th Street bridge over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles. They had gathered to commit a crime — one Ankrom had plotted for years.
Twenty years earlier, Ankron, then living in Orange County, was driving north on the 110 freeway. As he passed through downtown Los Angeles, he was going to merge onto another freeway, the I-5 North. But he missed the exit and got lost. And for some reason, this stuck with him.
Years later, when Ankrom moved to downtown Los Angeles, he was driving on the same stretch of freeway where he’d gotten lost before. He looked up at the big green rectangular sign suspended above and realized why he missed the exit all those years ago.
The sign was not adequately marked.
Courtesy of Richard Ankrom The I-5 exit wasn’t indicated on the green overhead sign. It was clear to Ankrom that, the California Department of Transportation (known as Caltrans) had made a mistake.
Ankrom, an artist and sign painter, decided to make the Interstate 5 North shield himself. He also decided that he would take it upon himself to install it above the 110 freeway.
He would call it an act of “guerrilla public service.”
Ankrom started by studying L.A. Freeways signs and holding up pantone swatches to perfectly match the paint color. He dangled over bridges to measure the exact dimensions of other signs.
Courtesy of Richard AnkromMost importantly, Ankrom consulted the MUTCD, The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, which provides “uniform standards and specifications for all official traffic control devices in California.”
Ankrom wanted his sign to be built to the exact specifications of Caltrans, which were designed to be read by motorists traveling at high speeds.
He copied the height and thickness of existing interstate shields, copied their exact typeface, and even sprayed his sign with a thin glaze of overspray of gray house paint so that it wouldn’t look too new.
If he was successful, no one would know that the signs weren’t put up by Caltrans.
Courtesy of Richard AnkromAs a finishing touch, Ankrom signed his name on the back with a black marker, like a painter signing a canvas.
Then came the next phase of the project: the installation. Ankrom planned it with the precision of a bank heist. He cut his hair, bought some work clothes and a hardhat and an orange vest. He even made a Caltrans contractor-esque decal for his pick-up truck.
He feared he could get arrested, or worse — drop the sign or one of his tools on the cars driving underneath. But he felt it was too late to turn back.
On August 5, 2001, Ankrom parked his truck and went to work. He positioned his ladder over the razor wire and made his way up to the catwalk under the sign, nearly 30 feet above the highway.
The whole installation took less than 30 minutes. As soon as the sign was up, Ankrom packed up his ladder, rushed back to his truck, and blended back into the city.
For about nine months, only a small group of people knew that the Interstate 5 shield hanging above the 110 freeway was a forgery. Then one of Ankrom’s friends leaked the story to a local paper. And that’s how Caltrans found out.
Ankrom had hoped he could get his sign back from Caltrans after they took it down; he figured he would hang it in an art gallery. But Caltrans didn’t take the sign down. His guerrilla sign had passed the Caltrans inspection.
More than eight years after Ankrom’s sign went up, he got a call from a friend who noticed some workers taking it down. His sign was being replaced as part of routine maintenance.
When the new sign went up, however, Caltrans had added the I-5 North shield not only to it, but also to two additional signs up the road.
There is another guerrilla public service project in New York City by a group called the Efficient Passenger Project. The EPP has been hanging signs in subway stations informing people where they should board the train to make the most efficient transfers.
Even though the EPP’s signage has the look and feel of those from the MTA, they are completely unaffiliated. The MTA considers these signs vandalism, and is taking down the signs as fast as they go up — they have also done the same with other guerrilla subway signage.
The point being, if you decide to undertake an act of “guerrilla public service,” just know that it may not be received as such, so proceed with caution and avoid getting caught.’
If you’ve been paying attention to our Power Broker series, then you know that bad infrastructure can cause harm. That makes it all the more important to recognize the thought and care that goes into the objects we use and see everyday. Nothing embodies that spirit of recognition more than the history of manhole covers in Japan. Note: this episode is made possible by PNC Bank, who believes—as we do—that the most remarkable designs are often the ones that are most overlooked.Though Japan is one of the most thoughtfully designed countries in the world, even the people living there need to be reminded of the miracle of reliable infrastructure. In Osaka, Japan lies what may be the loveliest manhole cover ever; it looks like an ornately etched woodblock print. This cover was commissioned in the 1980s to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the modern sewer system. It’s not the only one of its kind–colorful illustrations of various styles adorn stylized manhole covers across Japan.
Manhole cover in Osaka, JapanYasutake Kameda, a ranking construction ministry bureaucrat, was behind the rise of colorful manhole covers. At the time, just over half of Japanese households were connected to municipal sewer systems. Kameda wanted to raise awareness for the system, in part to get locals onboard for a modern expansion. He encouraged towns and cities to develop location specific motifs for their manhole covers. The tactic worked, and manholer mania was born.
Manhole cover in Hiroshima, JapanThe various designs have some features in common that offer practical safety solutions. For example, a cross-hatching technique offers traction to prevent wheel slippage on wet metal surfaces. Tapered designs rattle less than conventional round covers when they are driven over, reducing noise pollution. For areas that are prone to flooding, special hinge lids were made to be able to flip up while remaining attached to the road so that it can fall back into place when danger passes.
Manhole cover in Mito, IbarakiJapan isn’t the only place with distinctive manhole designs. Nashville, Tennessee and New Hampshire both have triangular manhole covers that point in the direction of the subsurface water flows. The covers in Seattle, WA feature embedded city maps, with the raised grid also functioning as an anti-slip element. But even the plain, standard U.S metal manhole cover has a beauty to it. It’s worth getting excited about underground water and sewage infrastructure, even if the covers near you aren’t painted, like in Osaka.
Manhole cover in Tokyo, JapanAlvord Lake BridgeThere’s something about rebar that is fascinating, perhaps because it invokes the rare fear of being skewered. Metal reinforcement bars dovetail with a unique structure in San Francisco — a tiny bridge on the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park called the Alvord Lake Bridge.Ernest Ransome, the father of modern rebar, constructed the bridge in 1889. Today, it is a dumpy, cracked, and neglected structure. The inside is a surreal tunnel of phony stalactites.But the Alvord Lake Bridge is, quite literally, the bridge to the modern world. It is one of the oldest reinforced concrete structures still standing. The twisted iron bars embedded in the bridge served as the model for all the rebar containing structures that followed. It is the ancestor to an endless number of reinforced concrete buildings, bridges, tunnels, viaducts, and foundations. Ransome’s major innovation in rebar was to twist the square bar so that it bonded to the concrete better.Concrete has incredible compression strength, but it does not have much tensile strength. So if you want concrete to span any significant distance, you need to embed metal reinforcement.There are plenty of candidates for the most overlooked, most invisible part of the built world, but reinforced concrete has a good claim to being the most invisible of all. Because if it’s made right, you never see the steel skeleton underneath all the concrete structures that you work in, drive over, and walk under.The problem with steel reinforcement is that it rusts. When the steel begins to rust, the bond with the surrounding concrete is broken. The rusted metal also swells and breaks the concrete apart. Because of this, most of the reinforced concrete structures that are constantly exposed to the elements (like our highway system) were only designed to last 50 years. More advanced concrete mixtures and epoxy coated rebar increase the longevity, but without regular maintenance, entropy eventually wins out.Ernest Ransome left San Francisco soon after he completed the Alvord Lake Bridge. In his book “Reinforced Concrete Buildings” published in 1912, you can detect a tinge of bitterness in Ransome’s text as he describes how his twisted rebar was “laughed down” by the Technical Society in California. He left for the east thinking that his revolution of reinforced concrete would have a better chance out there. He left thinking that no one here would fully appreciate his Alvord Lake Bridge, his bridge to the modern world. And looking at it today, I’m sad to say, he was right.
Alvord Lake Bridge in 1890This episode is sponsored by PNC Bank, where “brilliantly boring” means stability that allows you to focus on what truly matters.
In the year 1623, Christian IV, king of Denmark and Norway, built a long series of moats and ramparts just across from central Copenhagen, on the eastern edge of the city’s harbor, to protect the city from Swedish invasion. In the early 19th century, the Danish government added artillery barracks. And in the 20th century, they filled in the surrounding swamps to make room for a modern military base, even as the rest of Copenhagen grew around it. That is until 1971, explains Far From Home reporter Scott Gurian, when the Danish defense ministry closed the base for good, and Copenhagen’s countercultural youth wasted no time breaking into the now vacant fortress and squatting in various buildings. But contrary to what one might expect, the abandoned base was not a cramped, depressing, concrete jungle. At 85 acres, it contained vast green spaces, hills and patches of forest. There was even a lake, with empty stables and ammunition depots scattered in charming arrangements around the landscape. The squatters couldn’t believe their luck, and as word spread about the empty wilderness inside the fortresses walls, the compound quickly became a haven for the unwanted, abused, and dispossessed.
Entrance to ChristianiaThe squatters quickly declared the base in the middle of the city “a politically autonomous anarchist zone.” Or, in plainer English, a commune. Taking a cue from the surrounding “Christian’s Harbor” neighborhood, they called it “Christiania.”
Like many other communes, Christiania’s founders wanted the new world they made within the walls to be as free as possible from all the old world’s rules and customs and hierarchies. They drew up a mission statement, according to which the goal of the commune was quote “to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible for the well-being of the entire community.”
As Christiania’s population swelled to roughly 1000 people, the residents began adapting the existing structures, building fantastical homes out of recycled objects and filling them with amazing art. They turned a former stable into a church, and transformed a military horse riding arena into a concert hall. There were also small businesses, including a factory that made customized bicycles, and a women’s blacksmith shop – and it was all happening within the walls, completely surrounded by Copenhagen’s old city.
Christiania wasn’t totally cut off from the outside world. Its residents would engage in commerce, and come and go into the rest of the city. But inside the walls, the community collected its own trash and recycling, operated its own kindergarten, and even had its own newspaper and marching band.
Aside from a small shared maintenance fee, residents paid no rent. No one owned their home, and when they moved out, there was nothing to sell. There were no building or zoning codes. There were also no laws. The only rules were: no private ownership of land or housing, no weapons or violence, and no vehicles.
Otherwise, people in Christiania were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted. Play rock music in the streets, do drugs, sell drugs, wear their hair long or shave it off, love members of the same sex or a different race. All the things, in the other words, that were still dangerous or impossible in the world outside its gates.
The individual freedom on offer in Christiania attracted people from around the world, but there were other advantages too – like the consensus system the community used for settling disputes and making collective decisions, which called for everyone present at a meeting to work out their differences and arrive at a unanimous understanding before making any decision.
As for what the Danish authorities thought of the thousand or so people squatting on 85 acres of state property in the middle of the nation’s capital: On several occasions in the decade following its founding, the Copenhagen police tried to remove the squatters, only to be met with determined resistance in forms of barricades. Scared of Christiania turning into another of Europe’s squatter battlegrounds, the Danish government changed course and decided to tolerate the commune.
Christiania Entrance SignMeanwhile, outside the gates, the initial perception that this was just a group of lazy, pot-smoking hippies was changing, especially after favorable coverage on Danish television depicted what day-to-day life was actually like in the commune. Hundreds of thousands of tourists began flocking every year to the anarchist parkland in the center of the Danish capital. Its musical venues started hosting concerts featuring everyone from Bob Dylan to Metallica. Christiania slowly became a fact of life and, by the mid 1980s, an iconic part of Copenhagen. Today, it’s one of the longest-lasting and most celebrated communes in the world, and a magnet for people searching for alternative ways of living – existing both side-by-side and within a major European city.
But, starting in the mid 2000s, a cascade of problems forced Christiania’s residents to rethink some of their most cherished freedoms and depend more and more on help from the rest of Danish society. And many worried the changes were making their counter-cultural haven more like the rest of Denmark in the process.
The drug market in Christiania was known as Pusher Street, and it’s considered by many to be where the commune’s problems began. Drug sales on Pusher Street was restricted to cannabis only (starting in the late seventies), and in its best years it was seen as a kind of friendly farmers market for weed and hash. But Christiania was also the only place in Copenhagen where the government didn’t strictly enforce anti-drug laws, so the supply had to come from abroad. That meant dealing with international criminal organizations up the chain who imported from places like Afghanistan and Morocco. As a result, various gangs had an on-and-off presence on Pusher Street starting in the 1980s.
Entrance to Pusher StreetThen, around 2004, a new conservative government came into power and increased the penalties for cannabis dealing. The Copenhagen Police also violated the commune’s (still unofficial) sovereignty by conducting occasional raids on Pusher Street and making arrests – not actually a new practice, but one that now carried much more dire consequences for dealers. The effect was to scare most of the local dealers away from Pusher Street. It also drove prices up, and the gangs swept in to fill the lucrative vacuum. The gangs then began fighting each other for control over Pusher Street, turning it, in the past decade, into a notorious hot spot for gang violence – including beatings, stabbings, masked gunmen opening fire in public, and a string of shooting deaths.
Many Christiania residents have always believed that the best way to fix the problem would be to legalize cannabis in Denmark. Legalization would take power away from the gangs. But so far, that’s something Denmark’s federal government has been unwilling to do. So the residents recently decided they had no choice but to change one of the fundamental things that made Christiania different in the first place. In the absence of legalization – and having lost all control of Pusher Street – they decided to ban drug sales in the community.
Of course, faced with a ban, the dealers working for the gangs would have just refused to leave, knowing the unarmed residents would be powerless to enforce the new law. Which is why the residents also decided to reverse another long-standing tradition. They issued a public statement saying that they were unable to close Pusher Street on their own – effectively inviting the police to come in and enforce the closure for them – which they did in April of 2024. The irony of which was not lost on anyone: To kick the gangs out, the anarchists of Christiania had to ask the state for help.
But some Christiania residents who had been opposed to the decision claimed that the consensus system was actually hijacked by an aggressive minority of people who wanted Pusher Street closed, and that the outcome didn’t reflect the real will of the community. Meanwhile, those who had advocated for the drug ban insisted they were in the firm majority. Either way, it was clear the consensus system hadn’t fully created consensus, and that it, too, might be buckling under the various stresses being placed on the commune.
And recently, Christiania’s residents struck another deal with the government that could integrate the commune with the city even more. Denmark is struggling with an affordable housing crisis, and Christiania’s undeveloped green spaces – so close to the center of the city – could be part of a solution. But the situation has rekindled the residents’ fears of being evicted from their homes, which they still do not technically own. So a few years ago, Christiania and the Danish government struck a bargain. The state will allow the community to own its land outright by purchasing it for far below market value. But, in return, Christiania will have to build government-subsidized, low income apartments for 300 new people.
Christiania Community MapThe new deal has spurred a fresh round of debate among residents. Some think the volume of the new buildings will ruin the landscape that made Christiania iconic in the first place. They also point out that the commune has long had a policy of deciding who gets housing inside the walls – thereby ensuring that the community remains a haven for cultural outsiders. They worry the 300 new residents – who will likely be chosen using more traditional economic needs-based metrics – will not fit in with the existing culture, and eventually turn Christiania into just another typical Copenhagen neighborhood.
But other residents want to use the low-income housing as an opportunity to reinvigorate Christiania’s commitment to the downtrodden and adrift. They believe there are ways to work with the government to both create new buildings that respect the commune’s green space and make sure the new residents will help it carry on being a hub for Denmark’s counter-culture.
They worry that if Christiania isn’t willing to work with the outside world, it will slowly die – or worse, become a kind of hippie museum, with its once radical institutions calcified into outdated traditions. They believe that just like with any community – radical or not – the only real constant is change.
For most of history there was only one way to blow things up. You could pack a bunch of gunpowder in one place and set it on fire. But then in the 1800s one scientist named Alfred Nobel dedicated himself to taming the incredibly volatile substance that was nitroglycerine.
Alfred NobelAfter lots of tinkering and plenty of unintended explosions- one of which killed his brother- Nobel managed to control the explosions and create what we know today as dynamite. The invention of dynamite changed the way we were building the modern world. Dynamite gave civil engineers the ability to blast through rocks and earth from a safe distance.
That level of destructive power caught the attention of the burgeoning anarchist movement in New York City. Dynamite gave them the explosive capability of a small army in a small portable canister. For decades there were hundreds of bombings at the hands of the anarchist party and the city needed to respond.
Wall Street ExplosionThis led to the beginning of many surveillance technologies that allowed the NYPD and federal government to keep track of criminals who up until this point could stay largely anonymous. This era saw the rise of fingerprint technology as a means of identification.
Steven Johnson’s new book The Infernal Machine tells the story of how the government’s ability to organize the chaos led to the downfall of the anarchist movement and ushered in a new era of surveillance that would go to its own extreme.
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Back in 2003, Emily Nussbaum developed a covert guilty pleasure: she started watching the streaming 24-hour feeds of the first season of Big Brother in the U.S. Big Brother is a reality television show that debuted in the US in the year 2000. If you’ve never seen it, the show is basically about a group of people who are isolated in a house that’s under constant surveillance, and one contestant gets voted out each week. For Emily it was a sort of comfort watch.
In the early 2000s, reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor were beginning to conquer network and cable television. Nussbaum was one of millions of Americans submitting to the unscripted TV takeover. At the time, Nussbaum was a freelance writer in search of a book idea. And she had the thought that maybe she could turn her slightly cringey habit into a book all about reality TV. “…And I said this to this friend of mine,” recounts Nussbaum, “and he said, well, you better write that fast. And his idea was, this is a gimmick. This is a trend, and it’s going to die within a very short time. And by the time you write a book on it, it’ll be gone.”
Clearly, that prediction did not come to pass. Twenty some years later, Emily Nussbaum did write that book, and it’s called Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV. It traces the early history of this controversial form of entertainment, its decades-long creation process, how it shapes our world, and why – love it or hate it – you should probably understand reality television.
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This is the ninth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott also sit down with Majora Carter, an urban revitalization strategist and real estate developer from the South Bronx. Growing up, she always viewed the neighborhood as a place she had to leave in order to find success. But as she got older, she began to undo some of Robert Moses’ legacy, like building Hunt’s Point Riverside Park along the Bronx River. She is a champion for bettering neighborhoods like the South Bronx, so that they are places where people want to remain—even when they have been ruined by a tyrant.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the third section of Part 6 (Chapter 35 through Chapter 38), discussing the major story beats and themes.
REMINDER: We’ve got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
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Karen MacDonough had paid her mortgage for years, raised her family, and lived a quiet life in her Quincy, Massachusetts home—until one day, a group of strangers appeared on her lawn, claiming her house was up for foreclosure. What followed was a surreal discovery of “zombie mortgages,” forgotten second loans from the housing bubble era that have come back to haunt homeowners like Karen. As real estate prices rise, debt collectors are reviving these dormant debts, threatening homes across the country.
This episode is from our friends at Planet Money, a podcast about economics…possibly the biggest thing that we all collectively try not to think about, only to have it greet us at the grocery store, at the gas station, even in our homes. This episode illustrates how massive forces pull at the economy like tides and create ripple effects in our lives, like how a decade-old loan can suddenly come back to life and take everything away.
Subscribe to Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts. They also have a digital piece with further reporting on Zombie Mortgages from NPR’s Investigations Team. You can find that at npr.org/zombie.
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Back in the 1980s, Medellín, Colombia was in the middle of a full-blown crisis. 30 years ago, this was the murder capital of the world. Pablo Escobar’s notorious Medellín Cartel was waging a bloody drug war right on the city’s streets. For Medellín’s residents, the threat of random, deadly shootings and bombings was real and constant. To outsiders, the city became synonymous with the cocaine war and indiscriminate violence.
And then, in its darkest hour, Medellín began to find its way out of that crisis. Starting in the mid 1990s, Medellín launched a sweeping revival program. The city built parks and libraries and public spaces, and a world class public transit system.
Medellín’s leaders also invested in poor neighborhoods – locally known as “comunas.” Community programs were created for residents who had long been neglected.This sweeping program was called “social urbanism” – a term coined by city leaders. It was designed to breathe new life into Medellín by investing in the needs of city residents.
It seemed to work. Social urbanism, along with a harder focus by police on drug trafficking, helped the city’s murder rate plummet by at least 80 percent. Against incredible odds, Medellín transformed from a notoriously violent narco capital to a more peaceful, model city. The press called it “The Medellín Miracle.”
The Medellín MiracleAs the city’s profile rose, Medellín’s leaders saw a huge opportunity. In 2003, a handsome, charismatic mathematician and professor named Sergio Fajardo was elected mayor. Inspired by the revival, he and other leaders dreamed of putting Medellín on the map as the most educated, most respected, and most talked about city in all of Latin America.
Sergio FajardoFajardo created a world-class PR team that flaunted the city’s miraculous revival. And by the mid 2000s, Medellín was quickly becoming one of the hottest tourist destinations in the world. The New York Times ran a glowing article in its travel section, explaining why everyone should go and bask in Medellín’s quote-unquote “renaissance”. In 2008, Anthony Bourdain visited Medellín, ate arepas and bandeja paisa, and rode one of the cable cars. Over the next decade and half, Medellín was put on all sorts of lists of must-see cities. In 2022, nearly a million and a half people visited Medellín. Medellín was suddenly experiencing a mass influx of visitors, many of whom decided to stay long-term, which the city wasn’t ready for. And that is having huge ramifications throughout the city.
The Digital NomadsThere has been an explosion of “digital nomadism” over the last several years, thanks to the rise of remote work. Those who can travel freely and work from any place where there’s Internet have fanned out to beautiful places like Medellín, where their vacations can start as soon as they log off. Social media is filled with videos of nomads – mostly young white Americans and Europeans – telling their peers why they should come and stay long term.
In 2022, Colombia introduced a “digital nomad” visa, allowing those who can prove they are employed remotely to work in the country for up to two years. Since Colombia issued the visa, there has been a noticeable spike in foreign arrivals in Medellín. “87 hundred digital nomads are coming to Medellín every month,” says Luis Fernando, a professor of Architecture at Colombia’s National University. He explains the nomads are setting off a major housing shortage in the city. “Although they inject millions of dollars into the economy, they also cause the rise in rents, housing costs, and the displacement of residents. Apartments that would typically be available to locals are now rented out to tourists and digital nomads.”
The rise in rents is forcing locals to move to more affordable neighborhoods, which is triggering a domino effect of displacement that is rippling throughout Medellín. The lack of affordable housing options in the city has also contributed to a nearly 150% rise in homelessness in the last three years. Back in the 1980s and 90s, when the drug cartels and gangs were fighting in the city streets, the constant fear in Medellín was that a bomb would go off outside your home at any moment. “The biggest fear in Medellín today,” says local activist and artist Ana Valle, “is for your landlord to evict you from your home.”
Activist Ana ValleMedellín’s growing social problems are also spreading up into the city’s hillside communities, especially a neighborhood on the west side of Medellín called Comuna 13. During the Pablo Escobar years, Comuna 13 was the epicenter of drug gang violence. It’s a place that’s often neglected by city services. It’s also been the focus of a lot of social urbanism projects – including those giant, world famous escalators that run in sections totaling nearly 12 hundred sixty feet (that’s three and a half football fields).
Photo by Juan Gomez (CC by 2.0)Today, Comuna 13 is a huge tourist attraction. Nearly 6,000 visitors pass through on the weekends, gliding up and down the escalators past walls covered in giant murals. Along those escalators, there are hundreds of souvenir shops, selling Karol G trucker hats, Medellín keychains and a lot of Pablo Escobar paraphernalia.
There are other, more pernicious traces of Escobar’s legacy, too. In the last 20 years, the local street gangs that once worked for Escobar have morphed into criminal enterprises that are taking advantage of the city’s booming tourism industry. Street gangs have taken over the nightclubs and restaurants popular with visitors. When tourists want drugs, the gang supplies it. It’s a very profitable business,” says Deysi Florez, a community activist from Comuna 13. “Even tour guides have to pay an extortion fee to be able to give a tour. The gangs have become so organized that if you give a tour or open a business in the tourist area, they approach you and ask you to “‘kindly make a payment.’”
The Dark Side of the MiraclePerhaps the most disturbing part of this relationship between foreigners and the gangs is the way it fuels the city’s growing sex tourism industry, which is putting minors increasingly at risk. And most of these girls come from low income neighborhoods like Comuna 13. Medellín is getting global attention because of this. A popular online movement called “Passport Bros” encourages American and European men to meet so-called “exotic girls” abroad. Videos with the hashtag “Passport Bros Medellín” have millions of views on TikTok. While ex work in Colombia is legal, the concern among activists in Medellín is for underage girls who are being sex trafficked, especially by gangs.
“The sexual exploitation of minors has dramatically worsened in the city,” says Ivan Muñoz, a public health professor and an expert on sex trafficking in Medellín. “Organized crime controls all aspects of the business. The gangs recruit the girls, and use online platforms to pimp them out to foreigners. Gang members pick the girls up at their homes, and drop them off at tourists’ hotels and Airbnbs around Medellín.”
Things came to a head earlier this year when a 36-year old American named Timothy Livingston was found by local authorities in his luxury hotel room with two girls who were 12 and 13 years old. He was arrested, but soon released, and he quickly caught a flight back to the U.S. The case created a media storm across Colombia.
Thousands of people online were furious at the police for letting him get away and demanded that Livingston be extradited to stand trial in Colombia. The Livingston case really galvanized people in Medellín. It crystalized outrage that has been simmering in the city. It suddenly became very clear to many Colombians – especially Medellín’s locals – where to focus their anger. Not just on the predators, but also on city leaders. Residents blame them for turning their backs on their own citizens.
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Alejandro Echeverri is an urban planner who was in charge of carrying out many of Medellín’s earliest social urbanism projects. He says the current crisis stems from decisions that were made in the first decade of the city’s revival. Thanks to the PR campaign, “some [revival] projects became famous globally,” and he says Medellín’s fundamental mistake was to promote itself so much that foreigners then came flooding in.
Una Ciudad VitrinaToday, Ana Valle describes Medellín as “una ciudad vitrina” – a city that’s been window dressed. She and other locals say Medellín has shifted from a great city trying to serve its people, to a global city focused mainly on impressing and attracting foreigners. She and other activists are trying to address these changes in part by opening up dialogues between foreigners and locals.
“Tourists need to understand that their actions, as banal as they might seem, have real life consequences for people in our communities,” says Deysi Florez, an activist from Comuna 13. “We can all dream of the city we want to live in. We all have the right to the city.”
Post-Narco UrbanismThe post Medellin, Revisited appeared first on 99% Invisible.
The impacts of climate disasters are often measured in terms of property damage. But in places like Phoenix, Arizona, and in hot places all over the world, climate change is wreaking a very different kind of havoc – on living things. In the final episode of Not Built for This, we reckon with the biological limits of climate adaptation.
Not Built For ThisNot Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this story is about a place that managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will actually help it survive climate change. How after more than two decades of tireless work, the residents of Hamilton City, California finally got the levee they deserved.
Not Built For ThisNot Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more flood-prone as the climate continues to change. Residents who live in these danger zones are often trapped in a demoralizing loop—flooding, rebuilding, and praying each time that the pattern doesn’t repeat. However in some neighborhoods the government is trying a different approach. They’re buying out flood-prone homes and helping residents relocate to higher ground. But what’s it like for residents to fight like hell for help, and the only help on offer means leaving the place they love?
Not Built For ThisNot Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as storms get more extreme and unpredictable a lot of insurers are running the numbers on Florida and realizing that the math just isn’t working anymore. For decades, low cost insurance helped mask the risks of living in some of the riskiest parts of the country. However a climate correction is now underway. Prices are skyrocketing. And on America’s riskiest peninsula, residents are beginning to feel climate change where it hurts—in their bank accounts.
Not Built For ThisNot Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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In disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not confined to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading into the surrounding area, as the survivors are forced to go looking for new places to live. This is the story of what happened after the famous fire in Paradise, California, and where many of the survivors ended up. It’s a cautionary tale about a town caught in the cross hairs of both the climate crisis and the housing crisis, and what happened when thousands of displaced people showed up on its doorstep.
If you want to listen to a song that John Michael wrote about his experiences in the Camp Fire, you can find it here.
Not Built For ThisNot Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up call in the form of a devastating flood.
All throughout the United States, people are watching the places they love change in unpredictable and scary ways. Places that once felt safe are starting to feel risky. Places that already felt risky are starting to feel downright dangerous. And as the climate continues to change, people are being forced to make impossible decisions about how to live, and where to live, in an increasingly unstable and unfamiliar world.
This is a series about climate change and how we prepare for the extremely bumpy ride ahead of us. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This.
Not Built For ThisNot Built for This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is the eighth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott also sit down with Shiloh Frederick. Born and raised in New York City, Shiloh is a writer and influencer who shares her love of the city’s history and architecture on Instagram and TikTok. Last year, she chronicled her rather ambitious plan to read The Power Broker in 30 days, and her viral videos about her endeavor ended up making some real change in the city.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the third section of Part 6 (Chapter 33 through Chapter 34), discussing the major story beats and themes.
NEWS: We’ve got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
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This week we’re highlighting a couple of series that live inside the 99pi production tent.
We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for you called Not Built for This, created and hosted by Emmett FitzGerald. It’s a show about climate change, but not in the way you might think. It’s about how the complex systems that govern our lives are not designed for the tectonic changes that are coming our way. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. You can find Not Built for This in the 99% Invisible feed starting August 20th on SiriusXM, Pandora, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We’re also announcing the relaunch of Roman’s side project What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law by featuring a new episode and one from two weeks ago.
Cruel and UnusualIn 1960, a man named Lawrence Robinson was sentenced to 90 days in jail for violating a California law that made it illegal to be addicted to narcotics. This summer, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order telling agencies to clear “dangerous” homeless encampments on state land. What links these two situations? The Eighth Amendment.
Far-fetched ArgumentsAfter an unprecedented several weeks in politics, some on the right are advancing far-fetched arguments to challenge Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and a federal judge in Florida threw out the classified documents case against former President Donald Trump. Neither of these are based on established constitutional precedent.
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There’s a rumor about the 1987 film Outrageous Fortune, a rumor that has dogged producer Jacob Reed since his days in film school. The comedy, starring Bette Midler and Shelley Long, is mostly forgotten. But a feud between the two stars was legendary, a fact referenced on TV by Middler a year later.
The dispute between these stars is only a small part of the rumor. Apparently, both actors had been promised top billing on the film. To resolve the dispute, the film studio allegedly released two versions of the movie – one where Bette Middler was the top billed star, and the other where Long’s name comes first in the credits. And the two versions split America down the middle – on one side of the Mississippi River, audiences would see a film print with either Long or Middler’s name first.
This anecdote speaks to a bigger issue in title design, because deciding who gets top billing in a movie can be a delicate balancing act. Opening titles aren’t just a list of names. They’re also the product of intense negotiations by Hollywood stars and their agents playing out in text form. Title designers have to create something that’s entertaining to watch, while also presenting the names of all the creative people in a very particular order. It’s like a game of Tetris, to make sure everybody gets their due.
Art of the TitleMovie titles are an artform in their own right. Title sequences can be metaphors for the show or movie you’re about to watch, like in Mad Men, which depicts the show’s theme of decline, as a mysterious figure falls from the top of a Madison Avenue building, as the world crumbles around him.
Title sequences can also provide a detailed guide to the program, as in Game of Thrones, where the opening sequence doubles as an intricate map of the fictional world where the show takes place.
But above all, title sequences have to provide details about the production. “Title design is primarily a vessel for information,” says Lola Landekic, editor in chief of the beloved website Art of the Title. “That’s why it’s a design, rather than what we would consider a kind of standalone fine art. It’s a project created to serve a larger work.”
To accomplish this, title designers are given an exhaustive list of requirements at the start of every production. “When we get a title sequence project, there is a legal document or there’s a credit list that has all the specs of the credits,” says Karin Fong, an Emmy-winning title designer at the production house Imaginary Forces. The list includes the order different actors have been promised, font size that is contractually negotiated for certain creative people, and union requirements. For example, the Directors Guild of America requires that a director always get final billing in an opening credit sequence. “So when you see a main title, the director’s name is always last,” says Fong.
The Laverne and Shirley CardThe toughest design challenge for title cards is when two stars both want top billing, like in the case of Shelley Long and Bette Midler. For decades, this was kind of a holy grail of title design. No one could settle on the best way to do it, until a solution was found on a beloved 70s network comedy, Laverne & Shirley.
According to Nick Abdo, a producer for the show, both stars had been promised first billing in the credits. Originally, a plan was hatched to swap the first billing every week, but the producers feared this system could fail. “At some point there’s going to be a mistake, they’re going to put the wrong one, and then there’s going to be a big lawsuit,” says Abdo. “How can we solve this now? Let’s troubleshoot it before it’s trouble.”
According to Abdo, his colleague Eddie Milkis came up with a solution – putting both names on screen at the same time, with one star in the bottom left hand corner, and the other in the top right corner. This way, neither star is obviously higher billed. In English, we read text top to bottom and left to right. This kind of title card split means two names can be given roughly equal prominence.
These days, it’s pretty common to see Laverne & Shirley titles. Some examples include Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us, Damien Lewis and Paul Giamatti in Billions, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston in The Morning Show, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson in True Detective, Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock.
“They’re splitting the difference,” says Karin Fong, who used this type of title card on one of her shows, Little Fires Everywhere. “One person’s lower but the first read on the left and one person is higher but is on the right side, which is the second position when you’re going left to right. So it’s evening it out.”
Giving two people top billing seems like it shouldn’t be possible. But the Laverne and Shirley title cards offer an elegant design solution for powerful Hollywood egos.
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The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the Olympics.
Mexico 68The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first Games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event was an opportunity to show the world that they were a metropolis as worthy as London, Berlin, Rome or Tokyo to host this huge international affair.
Among other ground-breaking aspects of the Mexico 68 Games, the graphic design campaign (including the logo, posters and other graphics) would become one of the most famous in Olympic history. It would go on to set a whole new standard for future Games.
Students protesting in Mexico in 1968, image by Acervo ComitéAnd these government-commissioned designs would also be co-opted by local activists, who wanted to reveal the darker political reality in Mexico — a reality that they felt was being covered up behind the beautiful glossy imagery of the 1968 Games.
Mexican MiracleIn the decades leading up to the 1968 Olympics, Mexico had gone through a period of major economic growth, which would come to be known as the “Mexican Miracle.” The country had rapidly industrialized, rapidly urbanized, and its capital, Mexico City, had grown into an enormous metropolis.
Due to its size and layout, Mexico City was a challenging place to host a major international event like the Olympics. The city itself was sprawling and spreading, still at the height of its “Miracle.”
The Olympic organizers needed to show their metropolis was not just exciting, but also safe and navigable. They wanted to create a visual identity to tie together everything that was going on during the Games, and to really sell Mexico City to all these visitors seeing it for the first time.
So they decided to hold an international competition to find a designer who would create a logo and graphic design campaign for the Games — they wanted a new look that was cosmopolitan and contemporary, and also distinctly Mexican.
Mexican Tradition Meets Op ArtOne of the contenders who flew down for a trial period was Lance Wyman, a 29-year-old graphic designer from New York City. He and his design partner, Peter Murdoch, could afford only one-way tickets. They went down in November of 1966, to try to make a design that would represent Mexico.
….And neither of them had ever been to Mexico before.
Aztec sun stone image by Anagoria (CC BY 3.0)The pair started where most tourists start: visiting museums. They spent a lot of time at the Museum of Anthropology, where they studied artifacts from pre-Columbian Mexico, like the Aztec Sun Stone and ancient Mayan murals.
This stone carving from the South Ballcourt at the archaeological site of El Tajin, Veracruz, Mexico depicts a scene of human sacrifice, image by Thomas Aleto (CC BY 2.0)“I actually was floored by some of the early cultures,” says Wyman, “because they were doing things that we were doing in a contemporary way with geometry and with graphics.” The bold lines and bright colors and geometric shapes reminded Wyman of the kind of Op art that was popular among contemporary artists back in New York.
Movement in Squares, by Bridget Riley 1961OP art, or Optical art, uses contrast, geometry and other tricks to give the viewer the impression of movement. And so, informed by both indigenous artifacts and modern OP art, Wyman came up with a hypnotic logo that riffed on the five rings of the Olympic symbol.
Wyman won the competition, and that was just the beginning.
Wyman took that logo, and turned it into a typeface, and then used that typeface to make more materials. But choosing this young and inexperienced American who had never been to Mexico before was a bit problematic. At the time, Wyman was “very much unproven as a designer…he’s very young and he hasn’t had much time to do much much yet,” explains Luis Castañeda, author of Spectacular Mexico: Design, Propaganda, and the 1968 Olympics. “And yet somehow he’s given this very high degree of responsibility.”
Wyman and Murdoch ended up staying in Mexico for two years to work on the campaign. They, along with a team of designers, many of them Mexican, came up with ways to use their typeface, logo and other designs all over the city. The hypnotic stripes were turned into striped uniforms for the events workers and volunteers. The patterns and colors used in the logo ended up on hats, postage stamps, balloons, and all sorts of products to hype the impending Games. Stadiums across the city were painted with radiating Op art patterns. Bright colors decorated sidewalks and walls and plazas.
These bright, hypnotic designs gave the Olympic Games a visual coherence… but they also helped people find their way around. The graphic design language of the Olympics expanded into an entire system that helped visitors navigate the massive metropolis.
Wyman made simple color-coded icons to represent every sporting event. These were different from the gestural figures often associated with the Olympics. “They were not stick figures,” says Wyman — “they were focused more on a part of the body or a piece of the equipment or combination of the two.”
Game-specific icons designed by Lance WymanVisitors from other countries could use the icons and color schemes to navigate between gaming events, as well as cultural happenings, around the city. Following these signs, visitors could continue to entertain themselves and explore the city after the sporting events were over.
Mexico 68 event ticket graphic designBetween the logo, the typeface, the colors and icons, Wyman created a visual identity that saturated the whole city. It was everywhere. “It was a total design campaign,” says Castañeda: “every single thing, idea, place, object associated with the Olympics is immediately and powerfully recognizable as part of a whole.”
The completeness of the campaign would set a precedent for years to come. “I think it’s safe to say that although design and architecture and the arts in general had been very powerfully associated with Olympics before Mexico 68,” Castañeda says. “It’s after Mexico 68 that it becomes a kind of standard expectation of design campaigns associated with these kinds of events.”
The Games of Peace?The 1968 Olympics were decreed “Los juegos de la Paz” (“The Games of Peace”). So Wyman designed a little outline of a dove, which shop owners all over the city had been given to stick in their windows.
Students call for the release of political prisoners on Sept 13, image by Acerb ComitéBut while Wyman was working hard on this graphic design vision, a protest movement, led by students, was growing in the city around him. These protestors believed the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) catered to wealthy Mexicans rather than the poor, rural and working class. Although the country had been experiencing huge economic growth, millions of people had still been left behind. The “Mexican Miracle” hadn’t reached everyone.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets, repeatedly, throughout 1968. Again and again police violently dispersed them, increasingly desperate to keep unrest from interfering with the Games.
Then, on October 2nd, just ten days before the “Games of Peace” were set to begin, thousands of students gathered at Tlatelolco square in the northeast area of Mexico City to demand the release of people who had been locked up at a previous protest. It was a quiet gathering of people with signs walking slowly around the plaza.
Students in Mexico City’s center after a large student demonstration on August 27, 1968. This protest led up to one on October 2, image by Hector García, Acervo ComitéSuddenly, shots rang out. Soldiers opened fire on the students. The scene was cleared before there could be an accurate body count, but estimates range up into the hundreds. The blood was washed away. Thousands of protesters were arrested and locked up. The government took great pains to cover their tracks.
The government claimed that the students had fired first, to provoke the military. Evidence has since come to light that disproves that claim. “It’s an extremely shocking event for a long time kind of suppressed in Mexican national memory,” says Castañeda. “And in many ways it is the crux of the crisis that sets the stage for the very very dramatic sense for the Olympics themselves.”
Despite his relative isolation at work, Wyman heard about the massacre. “When I heard about it and how severe it was it was a very difficult situation because I was working for the government and I couldn’t do anything about it,” he says. He empathized with the students and had mixed feelings about continuing his work. But, in a way, he didn’t need to choose between the government and the protesters. His designs found a way to serve both sides.
Student protest posterStudents began imitating Wyman’s images and co-opting them. They took a poster he made, with a silhouetted image of runners racing, and turned it into silhouettes of troops beating people with batons. They used his signature typography to create anti-government posters.
Students went around the city spraying a small burst of bright red paint over those doves in all the shop windows, to make it look like the dove had been shot. They were playing with the propaganda of the Olympics and hinting at a darker political reality.
Mexico City MetroMexico 68 set a new precedent for how governments would use design to promote their country’s image to the international community — for better or for worse. And beyond the Games, the event also left a permanent mark on Mexico City’s infrastructure.
Mexico City is one of the largest cities in the world. It’s the largest metropolitan area in North America. Around 4.4 million people ride on Mexico City’s Metro system every day. It is incredibly crowded and very extensive but it is often also recognized as one of the easiest rail systems to navigate, partly because of its iconography. And those icons are there thanks in part to Lance Wyman.
The Metro was supposed to make its debut during the Olympics, but excavators kept unearthing ancient architecture in the path of the tracks, and the opening was delayed. But as their construction progressed, Wyman was still involved in its design — specifically its map. He employed the same visual system he developed for the Olympics to help international visitors navigate the trains.
“In the Olympics,” recalls Wyman, “we relied on the graphics and I thought: well, why can’t a city do that?” So he color-coded each line of the Metro, and created a unique icon for every single stop, allowing visitors to navigate graphically without reading words or characters.
These icons were generally derived from something about the station or its location, “like the station that stopped at Chapultepec Park,” explains Wyman. “Chapultepec means grasshopper hill in the Nahuatl Aztec language so I used a grasshopper.” In other cases, specific historical or architectural features of the place informed icon designs.
Again, some Mexicans took issue with this young foreigner coming in to design something that would be such a huge part of their city. But eventually, Mexican designers took up the project and made it their own, designing additional Metro lines after Wyman left.
After the Olympics and Metro, Wyman did some more work for Mexico, like the design for the 1970 World Cup. Then he went back to the United States and went on to design more maps for places like the National Zoo and the Washington DC Metro system.
The clear iconography of the Metro system is a reminder of a complicated and sometimes terrible period in Mexico City’s history. It’s a simple design that invites you to explore the massive and complex metropolis. It is a graphic design system that assures that, if you get lost, no matter where you’re from, or what language you speak, you can find your way around, and see the city for yourself.
Pentathlon of the MusesThe Olympic Games can seem almost timeless, going back to ancient Greece; it can be easy to forget how recently the modern version of Games as we know them today were launched, just over a century ago. And for decades, a series of now largely forgotten arts competitions (featuring medals and everything) were a huge part of the Games.
The inclusion of the arts can be traced back to the same person broadly credited with launching the modern Olympics: Pierre de Coubertin. He was a French aristocrat who advocated for and ultimately organized the International Olympic Committee, which is still around today.
The first modern international Olympic Games were hosted in 1896. Athens was chosen as the first host city, an explicit nod to the Ancient Greek Olympics. At first, they were the Games as we know them today, featuring sports like swimming and fencing. But after a few successful events, Coubertin sprung the idea to add arts categories.
In 1906, the IOC unveiled five artistic categories: architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture. And the artists participating in this new “Pentathlon of the Muses” were supposed to be amateurs, much like their counterparts in sports. There was some limited precedent for this addition — ancient Olympic competitions for music, singing, even heralding. Coubertin argued that “In the high times of Olympia, the fine arts were combined harmoniously with the Olympic Games to create their glory. This is to become reality once again.” But there was a caveat: the artistic entries were still supposed to be related to sports.
In the realm of architecture, for example, contenders submitted things like athletic stadiums, sporting complexes, playing fields, swimming pools, even ski jumps. Some of these were first ‘published’ during the Olympics, while others were actually built structures already out in the world. When buildings weren’t close by, renderings or photos were used to judge them. But in some cases, the structures were close at hand: In the 1928 Games in Amsterdam, a Dutch architect won the gold medal for the stadium being used in those Olympics. By that time, the arts Olympics were in full swing, with over 1,000 entries that year.
For a while, the arts continued to grow in popularity. It got to the point where the IOC added new subcategories in the arts, like orchestra, dramatic works, even town planning. But as these creative competitions grew popular, they naturally started to draw in more aspiring professionals and veteran creatives. And some participating artists were even selling their works during the Games. Meanwhile, the IOC was really pushing this idea of absolute amateurism in the 1940s, and things like a working sports stadium winning the gold didn’t quite fit this vision for the competitions.
Olympic Architects: Forgotten Gold Medals Awarded for the ArtsThere were other problems, too, like artists not wanting to participate, potentially lose, and thus damage their reputation. Plus the ‘sports’ focus for arts was pretty limiting. Eventually, after the London Games in ‘48, the IOC discontinued the arts competitions altogether. Now there’s a separate Cultural Olympiad, but medals are just for sports.
Perhaps the strangest arts winner was Coubertin himself, who won a gold medal in an arts category in the 1912 Paris Olympics. He got his award for literature, more specifically: poetry, for a piece titled Ode to Sport. Now, there’s a good argument to be made that he was simply trying to spur more competitors at the launch of this new category, but perhaps he had a secondary motive. If he wasn’t a good match for the sports side side, maybe the arts represented his one shot at the gold.
“O Sport, pleasure of the Gods, essence of life, you appeared suddenly in the midst of the grey clearing which writhes with the drudgery of modern existence, like the radiant messenger of a past age, when mankind still smiled. And the glimmer of dawn lit up the mountain tops and flecks of light dotted the ground in the gloomy forests”The post The Art of the Olympics appeared first on 99% Invisible.
From TV commercials and branded soda cans to Emily in Paris spon-con, the Olympics are once again everywhere. In the Olympic spirit, we’re bringing you four stories about the games in all their international, theatrical glory.
In the first story, Christopher Johnson introduces the obscure, non-traditional sports from a forgotten part of Olympic history. The second story, by Chris Berube, offers a glimpse into the financial strain brought about by Montreal’s host venue for the 1976 games. In Vivian Le’s third story, the opening ceremony for Seoul’s 1988 Olympics begins on an unfortunate note. The final story, by Avery Trufelman, proposes a twist on the traditional Olympic host-country format.
The post The 2024 Olympics Spectacular appeared first on 99% Invisible.
This is the seventh official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott sit down with Pete Buttigieg, the US Secretary of Transportation. One of his major responsibilities as Secretary is overseeing the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which has contributed billions of dollars to infrastructure projects around the country.
Secretary Buttigieg was also responsible for several major infrastructure projects when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And he’s talked about the importance of acknowledging and dismantling the racism built into transportation systems around the country — somewhat paraphrasing The Power Broker — and has gotten a lot of pushback for it.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the second half of Part 5 and the first section of Part 6 (Chapters 27 through Chapter 32), discussing the major story beats and themes.
NEWS: We’ve got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power BrokerThe post The Power Broker #07: Sec. Pete Buttigieg appeared first on 99% Invisible.
When you hear the word “river,” you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks nothing like that. Most people who see it probably mistake it for a giant storm drain. It’s a deep trapezoidal channel with steep concrete walls, and a flat concrete bottom. The LA River is a surreal place to be, which has made it a great location to have edgy photoshoots or film movies like Grease or Terminator 2.
Los Angeles was founded around this river. But decades ago it was confined in concrete so that, for better or worse, the city could become the sprawling metropolis that it is today. All these years later the county is still grappling with the consequences of those actions.
The Peculiar RiverBefore the river was encased in a narrow concrete passageway, it wandered freely throughout the Los Angeles basin. After heavy rains, the LA River would swell from a trickle into a full blown river, but with no fixed course. Sometimes when the river flooded, it would cut new pathways, turning different parts of the LA basin into a tapestry of wetlands and inland seas
All of this untethered water had a huge impact on the entire ecosystem of Los Angeles. People today look at LA and think it’s a desert because it’s so dry. But the climate is actually closer to the kind of Mediterranean weather you might find in Spain or Portugal. The river supported dense forests, marshlands, and enormous biodiversity.
Los Angeles River at Griffith Park, c. 1898–1910“The river just not did did not just affect the corridor that it runs in. It affected the whole landscape,” says Matthew Teutimez, tribal biologist for the Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians, Kizh Nation. Teutimez says the Kizh built their lives around the water provided by the LA River. “Now the la River, the ancient name for it is, wenot, which means the “life giver.” That pretty much explains it all in terms of the capacity of what this river provided.”
Even in its original, natural state, the LA River was very boom or bust. During the rainy season the river would flood wide swaths of the LA basin. But during the dry season – which in LA is most of the year – most of the rushing surface water would shrink to a shallow stream. Despite these patterns of flooding and drought, the river was more than enough to support the indigenous communities of the LA basin.
Photo by Alfred Twu on Wikimedia Commons. (CC BY 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)That is until the arrival of European colonizers. Los Angeles fell under the control of Spain, then Mexico, then finally the United States. To settlers from the east coast, the LA River (which seemed both too wet and too dry) was baffling. “Yankee rivers earned their keep. Yankee rivers are rivers where you can float barges and move goods and commerce and people […] so it was a very frustrating river for people who came with these industrial sensibilities to look at and to depend on,” says Patt Morrison, author of Río L.A.: Tales From the Los Angeles River.
When California gained statehood in 1850, the population of Los Angeles absolutely exploded. The city grew from just under 2,000.. to 100,000 people in only 50 years. This growing population began depleting the river and its groundwater. To the point that by the turn of the 20th century, the LA River was completely dry.
To make room for the people and industries of a booming new city, developers built closer and closer to the dried up banks of the river. But this shortsighted development backfired because Los Angeles was built to flood.
Floods, Floods, and More FloodsAlthough the Los Angeles River was at this point mostly dry in the early 20th century, it was only a matter of time before Los Angeles had another big rainy season. “The principal city of Los Angeles, sits in a bowl that’s surrounded by the ocean and then by mountains and hills and all of the rains that come to those areas over the course of a winter have nowhere to go except down, and we are down,” says Patt Morrison. What makes the LA River’s flood path especially dangerous is just how quickly the water can move once it gets going. The watershed begins high up in the Santa Susana Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains, and the San Fernando Valley and drops to a very low altitude in the blink of an eye.
In 1914 Los Angeles was hit with a major flood that caused so much damage that there was a public outcry for the city to address its flooding problems. Twenty years later in 1934 it happened again, only much worse. In the last week of December in 1933, Los Angeles was slammed with a heavy winter storm, and on New Years Day, the banks of the LA River swelled beyond their capacity. This second flood gained national attention (including a Woody Guthrie song) and prompted the federal government to step in. In 1936 Congress pass a law that gave the US Army Corp of Engineers authority over the LA River to build flood control measures.
But it was a third flood just a couple of years later that would lead to the river’s downfall. March 2, 1938 is to this day the wettest day on record for Los Angeles and led to the most devastating flood in the city’s history. In current day value the flood caused about 1.7 billion dollars worth of damage and an estimated 115 people were killed.
That was the final straw. Los Angeles had had enough. Los Angeles residents were tired of living under the constant threat of flood. City leaders also hated the fact that the expanse of the river’s floodplain took precious real estate off the market. So the city decided to take its most drastic step yet: it would pave its natural river.
Straitjacketing the RiverThe plan was to carve out a 51 mile set pathway and seal the river into place with concrete. The river’s sole purpose would be to funnel stormwater out to the sea as quickly and efficiently as possible. Taking this enormous watershed and packing it into a narrow concrete channel was an incredibly ambitious plan. But the United States at the time was in the depths of the Great Depression and when the Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with this channelization project it put 17,000 people to work.
Placing of concrete in a section of the counterforted channel wall on the left bank just above 26th Street in the city of Los Angeles, 1938.Over the next 21 years, the Army Corps of Engineers moved twenty million cubic yards of earth, poured 2 million cubic yards of concrete, and placed nearly 150 thousand pounds of reinforced steel. “It remains the largest public works project west of the Mississippi,” says Jenny Price, a writer and public artist who used to give tours of the LA River. By 1960 the river had been completely transformed and then barricaded behind chain link fencing.
Photo by Laurie Avocado. (CC BY 2.0)The channelization of the river was an extreme, even violent approach to flood control. But in a way, the concrete did what city leaders at the time wanted it to do. The county, so far, has not experienced a flood as devastating as the one in 1938. With the river fastened into place, Los Angeles was also able to urbanize at a breakneck speed. Now nearly one million people live within a mile of the river
But when Los Angeles traded its natural river for real estate, it created a slew of other environmental and social problems. Although the region is plagued by drought, by turning the river into essentially a flood control channel, Los Angeles County has shut off an important water source capable of replenishing its soil with nutrients and aquifers with rain water while also importing a vast majority of its fresh water from other watersheds. The concrete exacerbating cultural and economic divisions within the county.
The Invisible RiverAfter the LA River was paved, it remained mostly ignored for decades. Even though it ran straight through the heart of Los Angeles County, people forgot it was there. For all intents and purposes, the river was just another piece of infrastructure. But in the 1980s, twenty plus years after the LA River was paved, something slowly began to change. Some people in Los Angeles started looking at the river a little differently. They began to question whether the river had to be like this.
Photo by Craig Dietrich. (CC BY 2.0)The first and loudest of these people was an artist named Lewis MacAdams. According to the Los Angeles legend, in 1986 MacAdams and a group of friends cut a hole in the fence surrounding the LA River and went in. From that moment on MacAdams was determined to be an advocate for the LA River. He founded an organization called Friends of the Los Angeles River which was made up of other artists and architects. They made it their mission to get Angelenos and policymakers to start thinking and caring about their river again.
Eventually, the LA River went from being a niche artistic project to a mainstream one. Other groups and individuals started wondering if it were possible to restore some of the natural habitat along its concrete banks, or if the river could be part of a solution to the region’s constant drought, or if the river could create a public greenspace for Los Angeles.
Photo by downtowngal. (CC BY Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International)After years and years of grassroots activism, by the early 2000’s the river was still trapped in concrete, but a few pocket parks had sprung up along the river. Although the river still looked very similar to its lowest point, things had gotten better and there were those in Los Angeles who cared about its fate.
To Boat, or Not to Boat? That is the QuestionIn 2006, right in the middle of the Los Angeles River’s comeback, a Supreme Court decision called Rapanos vs. United States pulled the emergency break on all that positive momentum. The case challenged protections granted by the Clean Water Act. The Clean Water Act states that it’s illegal to discharge any pollutant into quote “navigable” waters. What this case in particular argued was that wetlands and ephemeral rivers – like the LA River – didn’t count as “navigable” waters because they dried out for a lot of the year.
Photo by USFWS Pacific Southwest Region. (CC BY 2.0)In 2008 the Army Corps of Engineers ruled that Of the 51 miles of river, less than four were navigable and therefore worthy of protection. Taking away the its Clean Water protections was basically accepting that the LA River would never be more than a flood control channel, setting back decades of forward-thinking momentum achieved by environmentalists.
Luckily, a whistleblower within the Army Corps of Engineers itself sprung into action. At the time, Heather Wylie was working as a biologist within the Army Corps of Engineers. Wylie leaked the information to a number of top environmental lawyers, as well as the House Oversight Committee. At the same time she was also furiously researching to find any proof that the river actually was “traditional navigable,” which led her to a Youtube video posted by a man named George Wolfe.
It’s a short comedy video that Wolfe and a friend posted that featured a man in a suit, trapped in his car in standstill LA traffic. Out of frustration, he gets out of his car, hops in a kayak, and rafts down the LA River. When Heather Wylie clicked on that Youtube link she realized that this could be a way to prove that the LA River was, in fact, navigable.
Wolfe signed on to help. He assembled a group of a couple dozen kayakers, including Wylie, for a kayaking trip down all 51 miles of the river. They scheduled the trip for the dead of summer when the water runs at its lowest, just to prove that even under the harshest conditions it was possible. The trip took three days as they kayaked through the San Fernando Valley, around the movie studios, through Downtown LA, out to that final open stretch out to Queensway Bay in Long Beach. The team collected data and measurements during the trip, and wrote up their experience into a big report to submit to the EPA. It took two years but in 2010 the EPA stepped in and overruled the Army Corps of Engineers, declaring that all 51 miles of the LA River were navigable and therefore would keep all of its Clean Water Act protections.
The kayaking stunt helped to restore the river’s environmental protections and renewed a lot of interest in it, but river advocates say there is still a lot to be done when it comes to revitalization. The river itself passes through 17 different cities, as well as county, and federal jurisdiction. It also impacts a number of different communities so there are a lot of conflicting ideas for how to make the river a better place for Angelenos in an equitable and responsible way. Although there has been disagreement on what revitalization should look like or how we’ll get there, there is one thing that all of these agencies, and organizations, and advocacy groups, and individuals, and kayakers can agree on: the LA River is a river.
The post A River Runs Through Los Angeles appeared first on 99% Invisible.
In February, everyone who went to a concert in the old medieval town of Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late.
St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany.This is also concert from which everyone walks out early. The performance is of a piece called ORGAN2/ASLSP. ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played, and this particular day would involve a chord change. The last time ORGAN2/ASLSP had a chord change was in 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change, in August, 2026. There is a change the year after that, and the following year, and so on, until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years.
It takes place in the church of a nun’s cloister founded in the 13th century. It’s an old building, with bare stone walls, a floor that’s mostly gravel, and a wood roof. The organ inside does not look like a typical organ. Placed in the middle of the room, there’s a wooden structure with two towers and some metal pipes coming out of it. The pipes make one continuous sound — a chord — that fills the room at all times, at least until until the chord change, when the organ will play a different single sound.
Over the last 23 years, this tiny pipe organ playing this loud drone has drawn in thousands of fans, especially during chord changes. There are people who come for every change, often traveling from thousands of miles away. Others stay in the church all day, just listening. Others are brought to tears. And group of filmmakers is making a documentary about the project which itself is meant to be filmed over 639 years.
The organ used for the Halberstadt performance.The Man Behind the MusicJohn CageThe artist behind this extremely slow performance was John Cage. Cage was an American composer who started his career in the 1930s. His compositions could be complex and modern, but they didn’t always push boundaries. That changed in the 1950s, when he began experimenting not with the sound of music, but with the idea of music.
His most famous piece is probably 4’33”, during which the performer is supposed to sit in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds while the audience listens to whatever sounds are in the room—the air conditioner humming, other people shuffling uncomfortably, the traffic passing by outside. You can read all sorts of meaning into Cage’s work. Some say it’s supposed to make us think about silence, or randomness, or maybe it’s not meant to make us think much at all.
In 1985, Cage experimented with time, and wrote the first iteration of ASLSP with the explicit instruction to try to play it as slowly as possible. If you’re thinking that the letters ASLSP don’t really correspond to the words “As Slow As Possible,” Cage is one step ahead of you. The title is also a reference to a line in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake. The line is: “Soft morning, city! Lsp!” Where lisp is just spelled L S P. Although what that has to do with the music isn’t really clear.
But as more musicians began to take an interest in ASLSP, very soon, performers trying to follow Cage’s instructions hit a wall. Cage wrote this first version for piano, but there’s a physical limit to how long a note can sound on a piano. You press a key, a hammer strikes a string, but the string will eventually stop vibrating. So the first performances of ASLSP only lasted ten to fifteen minutes. Performers were stymied. They wanted a way to play ASLSP much slower than was possible on a piano. But then, in 1987, Cage reworked the music for an instrument that didn’t have any such limitations — the pipe organ.
The Slow InstrumentThe bellows used for the Halberstadt performance.The name organ fits. Like a bodily organ, a pipe organ is an intricate system – one that is all about moving air, which is also the reason an organ can play much much longer notes than a piano. It’s sound doesn’t come from a vibrating string, it comes from air flow. The air is drawn from whatever space the organ happens to be in. In this case, it came from inside the cathedral itself. From the cathedral’s interior, the air goes into the organ through the bellows, which are big pumps. In the old days, bellows had to be manually pushed, sometimes by people standing on them and working them like a big, medieval StairMaster. In modern organs the process has been electrified.
The way the air from the bellows becomes music is by passing through pipes. Every pipe is tuned to a note—A, B flat, C sharp and so on. But each pipe also has its own voice based on how it’s made. It could be big and brassy or thin and reedy.
An organist decides which voices to use by opening or closing what are called stops. If the stop for the big brassy pipes is open, that’s what the organ will sound like. And an organist doesn’t need to choose only one stop. Multiple stops can be open all at once, so a single press of a key sends air through multiple pipes. This is where we get the phrase “pulling out all the stops.” As long as there’s an open stop, a pressed key, and a flow of air, an organ can play a single note indefinitely. So back in 1987, when Cage re-wrote ASLSP specifically for the pipe organ, his instruction to play it “as slow as possible” took on a whole new meaning.
Organ CityHalberstadt, called “Orgel Stadt“ — Organ City — was the perfect location for it. An old church in a former nun’s cloister called St. Buchardi was chosen for the performance. But the performance was far from ready. The only question left was how long to play it for.
Someone suggested playing the piece for the length of time since the town’s cathedral first got its organ, which came out to 639 years, and on John Cage’s birthday, September 5, 2001, the project’s members gathered in St. Buchardi and began their 639-year journey — with a rest.
The bellows for the Cage organ are in the back of the church, in a wood structure about the size of a small car. They have a backup motor that keeps them going, and they haven’t ever stopped pumping air, even if that air doesn’t go through any pipes and just vents out into the church, like it did at the beginning of the performance. The organ’s design was similarly notable for what’s not there. There’s no piano-style keyboard or switches to open or close stops. The only controls are three small wooden keys on the front with tiny sandbags holding them down to keep the air moving through the pipes, which sit in a spare wooden frame. To make different notes, the foundation members replace the pipes, putting new ones into open slots and taking old ones out.
The organ brings in tourists, but currently the biggest threat to ORGAN2/ASLSP is funding. It costs about 60,000 Euro a year to run the organ, plus all the hours of volunteers. Between that and various unforseen disasters that could befall the organ in the coming centuries, the project’s organizers concede that they will never know if the project makes it all 639 years. That will be in the hands of future generations.
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It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, occupying a significant portion of the downtown Los Angeles area. In some ways, it looks a lot like other neighborhoods with its corner stores and street vendors, old brick townhouses and people gathered in its public spaces. But it’s also very clear when you’ve entered Skid Row.
For one thing, there’s the smell. The streets of Skid Row often stink of urine and excrement baking under the hot Los Angeles sun. The gutters are lined with trash. And the sidewalks are mostly occupied by makeshift homes. A dizzying array of tarps and tents stretch out for blocks, improvised living structures sitting side by side.
And there are lots of people on the street, many of them pushing special red shopping carts. The carts are handed out by a local advocacy group because the police used to arrest people for having what they believed were stolen shopping carts. “So all a person gotta do is just be homeless and register and come here and they give you a shopping cart,” explains General Dogon, a community organizer and lifelong resident of the neighborhood. He has lived in both low-income housing and on the streets in the area for decades.
The edge of Skid Row is also clearly defined. “Main Street is the dividing line between the haves and have-nots,” says Dogon. “You’ve got homeless people sleeping on one side of the street, and the loft buildings on the other side of the street.” And this dividing line wasn’t drawn by accident. It’s the result of a very specific plan to keep homeless people on one side and development on the other. And, perhaps surprisingly to outsiders: it’s a plan that Skid Row residents and their allies actually designed and fought for.
Back in the early 20th century, the railroad went through downtown Los Angeles, right around where Skid Row is now. And, like in many other cities around the country, a neighborhood formed around the train tracks. Los Angeles city planner Bryan Eck explains that initially there weren’t any zoning restrictions, and the rail and produce markets around that area “brought a large transient population in terms of the railroad workers and agricultural workers.”
Los Angeles produce market circa 1900Until the 1970s, most people in Skid Row lived in cheap apartments or single room occupancy hotels (also known as “SROs”). There were homeless people, but fewer than there are now. Skid Row was not yet the sprawling tent city that it would eventually become, but it was still considered a rough neighborhood where people went to find drugs or to drink all day and sleep on benches.
As Skid Row grew, the greater downtown area of LA was also growing and developing, and a plan emerged in 1972 to move Skid Row’s population out. Drafted by a group of local businesses and endorsed by many city officials, the so-called “Silver Book Plan” essentially called for Skid Row to be razed to make room for more development.
Activists, meanwhile, began thinking about how to fight back. They argued that demolishing Skid Row would just cause the population to spread out and relocate within the city. And thus an unlikely alliance was born: Skid Row activists and scared residents of other neighborhoods who didn’t want Skid Row in their backyard. A “Blue Book Plan” was pitched as an alternative to the “Silver Book Plan.” This new plan proposed a policy of containment.
Michael Holland with Blue and Silver Book via the Los Angeles Poverty DepartmentThe containment plan advocated some pretty radical ideas, including pushing all the missions and charities and other homeless services to relocate within the newly-drawn borders of Skid Row. In return, the Los Angeles Redevelopment Agency would largely leave the area intact. And they would also form the SRO Housing Trust, charged with protecting and maintaining low-income housing in Skid Row.
The containment plan was enough of a compromise that it managed to win out over the competing plan to demolish Skid Row. It wasn’t a legally binding agreement, but it went on to define the city’s approach to this area for decades. And it was a totally unique approach, designed to use “inducements” to keep area residents within the confines of their neighborhood as much as possible. Amenities would exist within Skid Row, but strong borders around the edges would form a “buffer zone.” The actual text of this containment plan was at times quite harsh:
“With public restrooms, benches, and pleasant open spaces within the contained area of Skid Row, the residents might be inclined to confine their activities to the immediate area. That section would serve as a magnet to hold undesirable population elements in Skid Row, not against their will but of their own accord. Strong edges will act as buffers between Skid Row and the rest of the central city. When the Skid Row resident enters the buffer, the psychological comfort of the familiar Skid Row environment will be lost; he will feel foreign and will not be inclined to travel far from the area of containment.”
Activists who wrote and backed the plan say that if the writing sounds unsympathetic or even offensive, it’s because they weren’t trying to run a public relations campaign to change people’s minds — they were just desperately, frantically, trying to save Skid Row from being destroyed. And containment, they argued, was better than letting the area get bulldozed and redeveloped entirely.
Unpleasant Design & Hostile Urban ArchitectureAfter the containment policy was officially adopted in 1976, the city started to implement it — including many of its meticulous and uncomfortable suggestions of how, exactly, to contain Skid Row’s population. Among other things, “unpleasant design” strategies, like annoyingly bright lights, were used on Skid Row’s bordering streets, to keep homeless people from wanting to expand their territory.
“Main Street always had the regular fancy lights,” recalls General Dogon. “The old metal ones that bent down, and that was it.” These were replaced by what he describes as bright prison lights “targeting people who, like me, would come outside the front of the SRO” to hang out and smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk. Police officers were also more likely to leave people alone if they stayed within the borders of the containment zone.
The containment approach made some practical sense both for the city and the residents of Skid Row, but it’s also a somewhat dehumanizing idea. “It’s a warehouse zone,” says Dogon, and “a warehouse is where you store shit. So the idea was to push all of Los Angeles’s unfavorable citizens into one area.”
Activist at sidewalk encampment in Skid Row, image by Theodore Hayes (CC BY-SA 4.0)For better or worse, over the course of just a few years, LA’s Skid Row became the place to go if you were homeless in Los Angeles. It offered meals, showers, bathrooms, and other necessities. Some hospitals would even discharge patients to Skid Row if they didn’t have a fixed address.
In many ways, the city was funneling its homeless population into the area — a population growing fast in the 1980s due to the crack epidemic. The rise of President Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs” and the government’s aggressive cuts to the welfare system meant the homeless population was exploding. Skid Row went from being mostly white male alcoholics to being overwhelmingly black, with families on the streets who could no longer afford rooms in SROs.
But in the last couple of decades, conditions on Skid Row have changed a bit. There are fewer homeless people and they no longer sleep shoulder-to-shoulder on the street. Nevertheless, Skid Row has endured as a place for homeless people to live and find services — even as other similar neighborhoods around the country have been eaten up by gentrification and their residents scattered around their respective cities. Over the years, the sense of community in Skid Row has also gotten stronger. The neighborhood’s become not just a hub for social services, but for activism around poverty and homelessness.
New and renovated projects on the SRO Housing Corporation website in and around Skid RowApart from the containment plan, there’s another major reason why Skid Row has not been taken over by new apartment buildings: zoning. Aside from the SROs — and a scattering of other low-income housing that was grandfathered in — most of Skid Row is zoned industrial rather than commercial or residential.
But all of that could soon change. Los Angeles is currently undertaking a total overhaul of its zoning code, starting with downtown, and a lot of Skid Row will probably be rezoned as mixed-use. There are a lot of vacant buildings in Skid Row, and the city would like to make some of that real estate available for housing
Unfortunately, rezoning would pave the way for places that would be largely unaffordable to current residents. Craig R., a longtime resident, says zoning is just “the tool they want to use to get rid of the homeless people, to create this new gentrification program. And they’re planning on making billions of dollars on pushing us out, squeezing us out, or kicking us out, meaning us the poor people, the disadvantaged people, the homeless, plus the residents of the neighborhood.”
Even without zoning changes, Skid Row is getting smaller. The containment plan was never a legally binding agreement and the city seems to be increasingly ignoring its advice. There’s a whole new hip neighborhood that juts up against Skid Row (and used to be part of it), filled with art galleries and chic cafés. It’s called the Arts District. And as the areas around Skid Row have continued to gentrify, taking bites out of the edges of the neighborhood, Skid Row itself has changed — the police presence is now much stronger, even within the containment area.
San Julian street mural defines boundaries of Skid Row, by Stephen Zeigler (CC BY-SA 4.0)Back in 1976, when activists came up with the containment plan, they included a map that laid out exactly what the borders of Skid Row would be. They were trying to make a deal — a kind of compromise — to ensure residents would be left alone. Now, the focus of containment has shifted — instead of trying to contain Skid Row residents, activists are trying to contain development and to keep the rest of the city from crowding in.
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For decades, people have been trying to figure out how to create a cigarette without many of the downsides. Cigarettes sans the things that make smoking the biggest cause of preventable death in America like tar, carcinogens, etc.
Photo by Raul Lieberwirth. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)Cigarette companies tried to create “safe,” combustion-free smoking devices as far back as the 1980s. They were huge flops. Then, in the 2000s, e-cigarettes first hit the market. These early models looked almost like cigarettes, but gave themselves away in subtle ways – if you looked closely, you could see they were made of plastic or metal, and they had a little glowing light on the tip meant to resemble the “cherry” on the end of a lit cigarette. None of these ended up breaking into the mainstream.
Photo by Vaping360 (CC BY 4.0 Deed | Attribution 4.0 International)That is, until, in 2015, a company called Juul Labs rolled out a new nicotine vape that caught fire. Two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead—or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Juul e-cigarettes became popular both among adult smokers who used them to kick their habits, and with young people – kids! – who just thought they were cool. When The Juul became a phenomenon; not, strictly speaking, as a smoking cessation device, but as an entirely new habit – Juuling. In addition to limiting some of the harm of smoking, it seemed to threaten an entire generation with nicotine addiction.
The new podcast Backfired: The Vaping Wars dives into the stories behind the Juul’s success, and its failures. Listening to the show, it’s clear that what began as an arguably promising innovation in harm reduction inspired a backlash that, in turn, opened the door to a veritable wild west of vaping products.
Backfired is the latest podcast from Prologue Projects, the award-winning team behind Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice: Michael Jackson. Backfired is a show about the business of unintended consequences—what happens when solving one problem inadvertently leads to a host of new ones?
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This is the sixth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott sit down with Mike Schur, who created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, Rutherford Falls, and Netflix’s upcoming, A Classic Spy. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy Award-winning NBC hit The Office.
Mike also happens to be a big fan of The Power Broker, and has cited the book as his inspiration behind Parks & Rec.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the first part of Part 5 of the book (Chapters 25 through Chapter 26), discussing the major story beats and themes.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
The 99% Invisible Breakdown: The Power BrokerThe post The Power Broker #06: Mike Schur appeared first on 99% Invisible.
On the campus of Florida International University, in Miami, there’s a place ominously named “The Extreme Events Institute.” They map the risk of storm surge for the whole Caribbean, and study how the public perceives the threats from natural disasters. They’re also home to the International Hurricane Research Center. Their hangar houses a dozen giant yellow fans, stacked in two rows of six. Each fan is six feet in diameter. They were originally made for ventilating mining shafts, but engineers here have figured out how to get them to make hurricane-strength winds. This is a lab where researchers are figuring out how we can make our homes and infrastructure survive hurricanes better, especially at a time when more intense storms are going to be more frequent.
Meteorologist Erik Salna stands in front of the twelve fans that help create hurricane strength winds at the Wall of Wind. Salna is Associate Director of Education and Outreach for the Extreme Events Institute (EEI) and the International Hurricane Research Center. (photo by Alana Casanova-Burgess)Hurricane Andrew made landfall in 1992, just south of downtown Miami. It had sustained winds of 165 miles per hour, destroying at least 50,000 homes – ripping some of them right off their foundations. It was the costliest disaster in US history at the time. Meteorologists designated Hurricane Andrew a “Category 5” storm. It’s the highest classification according to the scale used for measurement, “The Saffir Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.” For 50 years, the Saffir-Simpson Scale has been the language we all rely on to understand what kind of risk a hurricane poses. We’re primed to hear the category vocabulary in emergencies.
An aerial view of devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew, which struck the area on August 24th.The scale has also transcended hurricanes. It’s been adapted for various situations because it’s a clear, easy shorthand for damage, and provides a snapshot of probable impact. Five decades on, however, there are doubts now about whether the Saffir Simpson scale is telling us enough in that snapshot, and whether it still serves this changing world we live in. The chaotic nature of hurricanes makes them tricky to characterize, even in an age of satellites and radar. They’re capricious; they can get stronger or weaker and change direction quickly. No two are the same, and even a single hurricane isn’t uniform all the way around; they have a stronger side and a weaker one.
Early MeteorologyModern forecasting didn’t exist until the mid-19th century. Before that, the Taino (who were among the original inhabitants of the Caribbean) taught colonizers how to tell one was coming. It wasn’t until the 1870s that observers began to accurately predict where a hurricane was coming from and going to, and how destructive it might be when it got there.
Father Benito Viñes, aka The Hurricane PriestThat big leap forward came from a Jesuit named Father Benito Viñes working out of a coastal observatory in Havana, Cuba. Known also as the Hurricane Priest, he watched clouds and had plenty of equipment – even some he invented himself, which he used as clues to predict where bad weather was coming from and headed to. Father Viñes set up a telegraph network for hurricane news from across the Caribbean. Even after he died in 1893, Cuba’s forecasts were more accurate compared to the ones from other countries.
1900 Galveston HurricaneIn contrast, the US system was sluggish and conservative. Meteorologists around the country had to wire their reports to Washington DC, where the central office would decide what was real and worth sharing. Warnings went out slowly, if at all, and the public was frequently caught off-guard when big storms arrived. Then, things got worse. In 1898, at the end of the Spanish American War, the US took temporary control of Cuba and its warning systems. Instead of cooperating with their colleagues in the Caribbean, the Weather Bureau restricted access to telegraph cables and promoted their own warning systems instead. They paid the price almost immediately. In September 1900, Cuban meteorologists warned of a storm that was going to intensify, turn into a hurricane, and head to the Gulf of Mexico. Galveston’s population was 38,000 people at the time, and as many as 8,000 died.
Floating wreckage near Texas City – typical scene for miles along the water frontHurricane HuntersDecades later, two airmen – also in Galveston – made a bet to show how tough their planes were and deliberately flew it into a hurricane. When they landed, a meteorologist from the base asked to go up next, and it caught on. By the early 1950s these pilots and scientists formed a cadre called “Hurricane Hunters.” They would fly directly into swirling storms, which gave them an unprecedented ability to observe hurricanes close up. But there was still no way to communicate that forecast clearly and concisely to the public.
In 1969, a hurricane named Camille stalled in the Gulf of Mexico. The National Hurricane Center put out alerts about Camille which went beyond the simplistic language of existing warning systems. But those meteorologists ended up giving the public too much information. Camille’s wind speeds are now thought to have been 175 miles per hour when it made landfall. The winds were so strong that they destroyed the equipment used to record them. Today, we would call Camille a Category 5 hurricane. It killed 256 people, reduced homes to debris, and is one of only four Category 5 hurricanes to have ever made landfall in the US.
The Saffir Simpson ScaleIn the wake of Hurricane Camille’s devastation in 1969, it was clear that the world needed a system for rating storms that would help people understand the threat, and how to respond. At the same time, a structural engineer in Miami-Dade county named Herbert Saffir was developing a hurricane scale as part of a project for the United Nations, and it was based on structural damage from wind. It rated hurricanes 1 through 5 based on wind speeds, and described what you would expect from each level of intensity.
Herbert Saffir (on the right), co-creator of Saffir-Simpson Scale.In 1974, “The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Damage Scale” was first published in a scientific journal, and the National Hurricane Center started using it for the public. The scale explains what each of the five categories would entail. A “Category 1” would likely damage mobile homes that aren’t anchored to the ground, for example. In a 2, there would be some widespread power outages. A “Category 3” would cause devastating damage, including trees getting uprooted or snapped, and power outages for weeks. Category 4 or above was catastrophic.
Category 5’s would bring power outages for months, with the tops of industrial buildings and whole structures getting blown away.
Hurricane Dorian sat on top of the Bahamas in 2019, dumping rain for 48 hours. Although Dorian was technically designated a Category 5, everyone who saw it thought it was way bigger. Its intensity introduced a new question regarding how we talk and think about hurricanes.
We’re Going to Need A Bigger Scale…Scientists say that climate change means stronger storms are going to be more frequent, and that they’re likely to intensify a lot more quickly. That’s true in the Pacific, where hurricanes are called typhoons or super typhoons, and also true of hurricanes in the Atlantic. In the past 50 years, the US has been hit by ten hurricanes that were Category 4 or 5. Seven of those giant storms have happened since 2017. The worsening trend is why some meteorologists suggest expanding the Saffir Simpson Scale to include a Category 6.
Climate change has forced scientists to make other adjustments to their extreme weather warning systems. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology added two new colors, pink and purple, to their maps to convey record-breaking heat. A Category 6 would expand our vocabulary for this greater risk, and drive home the urgency of climate change. But the National Hurricane Center, which administers the scale and is in charge of categorizing hurricanes, isn’t keen on adding a 6 to Saffir-Simpson. There’s fear in the scientific community that expanding it would do more harm than good. It is to do with people’s response when faced with risk, as several do not evacuate for a Category 4 or 5.
Panels at the Wall Of Wind hangar are used to chop up gusts generated by the giant fans in order to simulate a hurricane’s chaotic winds. The air blasts test structures that are placed on the circular platform, which researchers can also turn to change the angle of impact. Sensors on the test structures relay data to the control room. (photo by Alana Casanova-Bergess)At the Wall of Wind, a big government grant is being used to figure out how to build a bigger, stocked lab – one that will go up to 200 miles per hour and have a big water tank to simulate storm surge and waves. The aim is to simulate the whole hurricane, not just the wind aspect, in order to figure out how buildings and infrastructure could withstand stronger storms. That type of facility would add to the Saffir Simpson scale, which does not take into account how much rainfall a hurricane might cause, or the expected storm surge. There are a lot of complicating factors in the relationship between wind speeds and storm surge, like the angle of approach to the coast, or what the continental shelf is like there. This is the reason the National Hurricane Center stripped water out of the scale in 2010.
A collage of the top ten costliest Atlantic hurricanes, up to 2023, in descending cost from top left to lower right.The warming climate is going to bring an increased number of storms. Forecasters say 2024 will be a “hyperactive” hurricane season – with an abnormally high number of storms hitting the North Atlantic. The tools we have for communicating the risk are far from perfect, and these shortcomings must be addressed. As storms get more intense and more frequent, the need of the hour is a system that rises to the occasion, not just another word for catastrophe.
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The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway? In a lot of towns and cities, the gas-powered leaf blower has been banned. In others, there are strict guidelines on where and when they can be used. But in Los Angeles, California, the leaf blower has never gone quiet.
Photo by Hector Alejandro. CC by 2.0In 2024 the state of California banned the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers, but this most recent development is just the latest shot in the Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars. This is a fight that goes back decades, and one that has kicked up questions about labor rights, environmental concerns, and ideas of beauty.
Thar They BlowIn 1970s Los Angeles, it was common for people to hose down their driveways. Homeowners, renters, and gardeners would wash dirt and leaves and whatever else out onto the street. But a serious drought in 1976 and 1977 spurred many Californians to start saving water, and stop hosing everything down all the time.
It was at this moment that Japanese company Echo debuted what they called the “clean-up machine.” Originally invented as a crop dusting device in 1947, it seemed to solve the problem perfectly: a drought-friendly way to move leaves and debris off your yard.
By 1989, some estimates say that about one million leaf blowers had been sold in America. While they were ubiquitous, they were also almost universally hated. Through the 1980s, facing pressure from home-owners and constituents in quiet neighborhoods, many city councils had introduced or passed outright bans on the leaf blower. From the start, Californian cities stood at the forefront of this war against the leaf blower, with the most high-profile ban in Southern California, Beverly Hills.
Despite all of their loudness and fumes, the leaf blower was also very fast at removing leaves from a yard. And for the people who were not just maintaining their own lawn, but many lawns, this speed was a big deal. In 1989 Jaime Aleman left his job in office supplies to start his own landscaping company. A landscaper often starts their business when an older gardener gives them a few houses – or clients. Through much of the 20th century, a lot of the gardeners in Los Angeles were of Japanese descent. But throughout the 80s and 90s that began to shift mostly to Latin American gardeners. Their circuit of clients became known as La Ruta (The Route).
More Leaf Blowers More DollarsThe difference between failure and success for a gardener is all about speed. They get paid per lawn and the margins are already small. Using a blower instead of a rake means they can work a bigger circuit of lawns in a single day. But as Aleman began his business and expanded La Ruta, tension had been building for almost a decade. Word began to spread through the community that the Los Angeles City Council was seriously considering a ban on gas-powered leaf blowers. Jaime saw this proposed ban as an obvious threat to his young business. And he started to ask around, looking for some advice on how to fight it.
Photo by Marc Falardeau. CC by 2.0Doctor Álvaro Huerta, now an associate professor in the Urban and Regional Planning department of Cal Poly Pomona, was a young Chicano activist from Boyle Heights in 1996. He had a small group of activist friends who took on some big issues, like getting UCLA to provide financial aid to undocumented students. Huerta agreed to help Jaime, and with a small group of friends and activists, sprung into action. The Association of Latin American Gardeners of Los Angeles, or ALAGLA, was born. ALAGLA’s opponents were no small adversary. It seemed a city-wide ban would soon be passed into law.
City council, however, hadn’t thought about who was on the other side of these blowers: people like Jaime Aleman. As a landscaper, he was understandably nervous about this crackdown on a tool he used every day. ALAGLA saw that their best chance was to flip public opinion, and began planning protests to attract the press. As more national and international news outlets covered the gardener’s protests, LA’s public perception of leaf blowers became a little more complex.
The gardeners, in turn, had a strong, simple message: this ban would make it hard for them to make a living. Any time somebody said anything in favor of the gardeners, the room erupted in applause. Ultimately, the city council voted down the substitute motion, instead deciding to vote on the single-line ordinance. When they brought up the ban on gas-powered leaf blowers it passed, easily, with 10 to 3 votes. It would soon become illegal to use a gas-powered leaf blower in the city of Los Angeles.
Crime and PunishmentIf caught violating the ordinance, gardeners could face a $1000 fine and up to six months in jail. This seemed cruel and unusual punishment to many, especially for the gardeners themselves, because it threatened their livelihoods. For a while, they decided to collectively ignore the ordinance. In defiance of the new ban, the gardeners kept using the gas-powered leaf blowers. And in January of 1998 when the law was about to go into full effect, ALAGLA decided to go on a hunger strike in a bid to delay, if not outright stop enforcement of this new law.
The hunger strike began on January 3rd 1998. Many, including the organizers, set up camp on the front lawn and slept in front of city hall. Several days in, four of the men had become dangerously weak, and dropped out at the request of doctors. But the remaining seven hunger strikers made it seven days, to Friday. Finally, a few City Council members and Mayor Riordan pledged, in writing, to negotiate with the gardeners. They likely wouldn’t stop enforcement, but they did vote to lessen the punishment. It wasn’t the sweeping victory ALAGLA wanted, but it was enough of a win for the gardeners to end the hunger strike and go home.
Even though public opinion had shifted, the ban on gas-powered leaf blowers still became law. After the ordinance with the reduced fine went into full effect, Huerta and the rest of ALAGLA hatched one final plan. Since the law specifically banned gasoline-powered blowers, some gardeners switched to methanol-powered blowers to circumvent the law. These converted methanol blowers would be just as loud, just as polluting, but technically legal. But because it is difficult to even check whether a blower is powered by methanol rather than gasoline, law enforcement stopped enforcing the ban altogether.
The War Rages OnUltimately, the leaf blower ban didn’t really work. The police decided not to enforce the law. The gardeners lost the fight in city hall, but in the end they won a quiet…or not so quiet – victory. The ban passed, but without real enforcement, the gardeners kept their leaf blowers
The Leaf Blower Wars faded into the background for a while. But in 2024, nearly three decades after ALAGLA’s hunger strike, they’re beginning to flare up again. And this time, the gas-powered leaf blower might actually be on its way out. According to Michael Cacciotti, Vice Chair of the South Coast Air Quality Management District, lawn equipment surpassed cars and light duty trucks as a major source of pollution.
In addition to the evidence of significant hearing loss when subjected to that level of sustained noise, the emissions are serious, as there is no catalytic converter to break down pollutants and reduce smog. However, battery technology and electric leaf blowers have come a long way in the last 30 years, making the modern day fight mainly about getting people to switch to electric.
Noise level of a gas-powered leaf blower using the NIOSH Sound Level Meter app. Photo by Chuck KardousThis time around, the government did offer subsidies to get gardeners switched, and some municipalities made a good faith effort to work with them. But in reality, the electric leaf blower is at best an imperfect alternative. Of the three central arguments against blowers: Noise, Dust, and Emissions…the shift to electric really only solves the third.
Throughout the fight in the 1990s, representatives from the leaf blower manufacturers promised quieter, cleaner machines, but as multiple council members pointed out in the meetings, they never delivered on that promise of a quiet leaf blower. It seems in some part, that this state-wide ban is aimed at forcing those manufacturers to come up with better solutions. An idea is to involve gardeners in the political and design process, make sure they aren’t penalized for doing the job they’re hired for, and in the meantime ask ourselves if beauty is a leafless yard, or a quiet one.
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The Orange County courthouse in Santa Ana, California is a large granite and sandstone building from the early 20th century. There, Jennifer Birch was there doing research for a group called Moms Demand Action. It’s an organization that advocates for gun control and regulation. Moms Demand Action had dispatched volunteers like Jennifer to courthouse basements and local archives all over the country to dig up some of the oldest, most overlooked gun laws in the nation’s history. And their goal, ultimately, was to fact check the highest court in the nation.
What Moms Demand Action discovered is one of the biggest gun cases in American history was decided based on questionable data. But it turns out this problem is bigger than one case, and it’s bigger than Moms Demand Action. The Supreme Court has a long relationship with bad facts. In 2017, ProPublica analyzed recent Supreme Court cases for factual errors. In total, ProPublica found seven Supreme Court decisions, just in recent years, where the Justices got their facts wrong.
Sometimes these mistakes didn’t have much impact on the decision itself…but sometimes they do. Sometimes Justices hinge their decision on these facts. So how is it that the highest court in the nation can get their facts wrong not once, but again and again and again. And what even happens when you prove them wrong?
Formal group photograph of the Supreme Court as it was been comprised on June 30, 2022.
Credit: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United StatesFormalists vs. RealistsFor a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was incredibly narrow. It was to basically look at the question and the question of the case in front of them, check that question against any existing laws, and then make a decision. Unlike today, no one was going out of their way to hear what economists or sociologists or historians thought. Judges were just sticking to law books. The rationale for this way of judging was that if you always and only look at clean, dry law the decisions would be completely objective.
In the late 19th, early 20th century a movement rose up to challenge legal formalism. They called themselves the legal realists. Fred Schauer, professor of law at University of Virginia. says the Realists felt that the justices weren’t actually as objective as they said they were. “Supreme Court justices were often making decisions based on their own political views, their own economic views, and would disguise it in the language of precedence or earlier decisions,” says Schauer. The realists said lets just accept that reality and wanted to arm the judges with more information so those judges could make more informed decisions.
For a long time the debate between realists and formalists had been mostly theoretical. That is until the arrival of the Brandeis Brief. The Brandeis brief came during a pivotal court case in the early 20th century. And the man at the center of that case was a legal realist and progressive reformer named Louis Brandeis.
The Peoples’ AttorneyAs a young, zealous lawyer, Brandeis fought against the biggest railway monopoly to keep the Boston Common as a space for the people. He fought for better life insurance for all Americans. And then, In 1907, Brandeis set in motion a shift that would… for better and worse… change the inner workings of the highest court in the nation.
Louis BrandeisIt all started when he agreed to argue a labor case in front of the Supreme Court. As part of arguing the case, lawyers on both sides submitted their briefs. No facts about the real world. But rather than writing the typical brief, Brandeis went a completely different direction. Instead of just including the basic, dry legal precedent, he filled his brief with over 100 pages of facts that he thought should be present in the courtroom. In his brief, Brandeis included scientific facts about how women needed special protection from long working hours. He included medical reports, statistics, psychology studies, all showing that long working hours affected the “the health, safety, morals, and general welfare of women.”
Many of those facts have actually been debunked, but Brandeis was the first lawyer to go before the Supreme Court to ask the justices to understand facts about how the world works to make better legal decisions. Brandeis took a risk in submitting the brief, and it paid off. The Justices read the brief and all the information he had provided, and they ruled in the women’s favor.
The Amicus BriefBefore this point even Legal Realists wouldn’t have written briefs that the Justices might just ignore. But now they basically had a stamp of approval. That stamp only became more official when Louis Brandeis himself was appointed to the Supreme Court eight years later. Over the next few decades, Legal Realism completely transformed the court’s landscape. Not only did it change the way lawyers worked, it changed the way judges worked too. Judges and justices started taking it upon themselves to read books and articles – related to cases they were in the process of deciding. Which today seems obvious, but this was all new territory.
In a way, it does make sense to bring the Justices down to earth from their high minded, lofty legal theories. The Realists thought they’d created a world where Judges would learn the real facts on the ground, and make better legal decisions because of it. But when the rubber hit the road, things went a lot differently than they imagined. But the Brandeis brief was at its core a tool. But progressives weren’t the only group who could wield it. While the reformers were out celebrating wins like Brown v Board and Roe v Wade they had set in motion a change that would eventually derail some of their biggest wins, and at the center of that change was that thing was called an amicus curiae brief – or “amicus brief” for short.
These are briefs that are typically written by people or organizations who don’t have any role to play in the case. They’re not lawyers for either side. They just have an opinion about how the judges should rule and why. So they write an amicus brief saying how they think the case should go. The idea is that they give perspective, research or context about an upcoming case. Unlike regular briefs, where the lawyers in the case write in, these are written by people outside the case. Any member of the public, or any organization, can submit these briefs. In a way, amicus briefs are exactly what Legal Realists like Brandeis wanted. They’re a means of getting information from the real world into the courtroom.
The Real World Enters the CourtAmicus briefs flowed into all the big cases of the 20th century: Roe v. Wade, Bush v. Gore. And over the decades, they slowly became a fixture of the courtroom. In 2003 came a case that pushed the amicus brief past its humble origins, and into the spotlight. The case was a challenge to affirmative action at the University of Michigan. When Justice O’Connor delivered her opinion in the case, explaining why the court sided the way it did, she mentioned one specific amicus brief that the court had received. For the first time, Justices were showing that not only do they read these briefs, amicus briefs actually play a big role in helping them make decisions. When Justice O’Connor referenced specific amicus briefs in an official court decision, it sent a clear message that if your side sends in the right amicus brief, that could decide the case.
But the dirty secret was that the Supreme Court doesn’t have any fact checking mechanism for amicus briefs. In fact, there’s no fact checking for anything that the judges read to decide their cases.
The situation today is, if possible, even worse. Because we’re not just dealing with the issue of what is in the briefs.
Now, we have a certified Amicus Brief Industrial Complex. Lawyers today don’t just wait for experts supporting their views to weigh in. They actively reach out to the people or interest groups they want to write in. And they’ll dictate what, precisely, they want those amicus briefs to say. Hundreds of these amicus briefs flood into the hands of law clerks who have no capacity and no system for fact-checking. And that is the information that the Supreme Court uses to make its decisions.
The result of the amicus brief industrial complex is that in the worst case scenario, the side with more money can drum up more amicus briefs, and that gives them a huge advantage. And even in the best case scenario, there’s essentially an information deadlock. The Court has a ton of very convenient facts from both sides, and in the end it’s up to the Justices and their chosen clerks to decide which facts to actually believe.
The Supreme Court in Washington DC. Photo by Mr. Kjetil Ree.The post Fact Checking the Supreme Court appeared first on 99% Invisible.
This past fall, hundreds of people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions including treks to the North Pole, the moon, and the world’s tallest mountains. But this latest gathering was held to celebrate the first biological census of its kind — an effort to count all of the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park.
Squirrel in Central Park. Photo by acca-67 (CC BY-SA 2.0)New York’s eastern grey squirrels are so much a part of the urban fabric that for a long time, it never occurred to anyone to study urban squirrels at all, which are everywhere today but were absent just a few centuries back.
The Exotic Squirrel“[In] the mid 19th century, you could walk through a place like Boston or Philadelphia or Manhattan and you would not see a single squirrel,” explains historian Etienne Benson. Cities of the early 19th century were almost entirely squirrel-free. You could really only find squirrels if you left the city and ventured deep into the woods.
Boston Common, October 25th, 1848In fact, squirrels were considered so elusive that the very wealthy liked to keep them as exotic pets. In 1856, an article in the New York Times described how one such pet escaped from its owner’s home in Manhattan. When it was discovered in a tree, a crowd of people gathered in amazement, trying to lure it down.
The squirrels that we all take for granted as we walk through the park or on our way to the gym or the office are only there because we put them there. Squirrels were intentionally put into parks where they were fed and sheltered.
In 1847, Philadelphia became the first city we know of to introduce squirrels. Like many eastern seaboard cities at that time, it was already a highly urban environment. People yearned for a taste of the wilderness that the squirrel was seen to embody. Eastern grey squirrels were captured from forested areas and brought into the city. A few other east coast cities followed suit, but the number of squirrels was small. Philadelphia had only three, which were given shelter and a fence so they could stay safe from predators in their little squirrel home.
This trial run unfortunately did not go so well for the squirrels. The cities of the 19th century just didn’t have the kind of green space and tree cover we see today and the squirrels needed trees for food. A wild squirrel requires deciduous, nut-bearing plants, like oak trees, in order to survive. The feed provided by the city often proved to be either insufficient or nutritionally worthless, so those first squirrels either died off or were sold as pets.
Squirrel-Friendly BeautificationIn the late 19th century, city green spaces like New York’s were undergoing a transformation. These public spaces had been multi-purpose fields used for everything from cattle grazing to slaughterhouses and militia training, but they were becoming spaces of leisure. Cities were beautifying. But even more critically, parks were being designed to mimic the natural world.
Aerial view of Central Park in 1938Designers like Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead pushed parks like Central Park and Prospect Park in New York in a new direction. “They were working with the existing geology and hydrology,” says naturalist Gabriel Willow, who specializes in animal species that live in urban environments. “They took naturally existing small ponds or marshy areas and made lakes out of them.” They also chose to keep the area’s dramatic rocky outcroppings instead of blasting them away, which is what had been done with the rest of the city’s grid.
These new natural-looking parks were filled with hedges, lakes, streams, and critically: oak trees. In turn, these oak trees provided plenty of acorns for squirrels. It was in this landscape in 1859 that the squirrels were reintroduced. Within a few years, what started out as just a few dozen squirrels roaming about soon become an uncountable horde (by 1920, rough guesses would put the number as high as 5000). In Central Park and beyond, squirrels became as commonplace as the leaves on the oak trees in which they built their nests. As this new approach to urban parkland spread to other cities, the idea of populating them with squirrels traveled, too.
The More Than Human CommunityEastern grey squirrels were introduced again to places like Philadelphia and New Haven as well as West Coast cities like Seattle, Vancouver and San Francisco. North American squirrels were also introduced overseas to England, Italy, Australia, and South Africa. These squirrels also weren’t just benefiting from this new, lush environment in itself. At the time, people considered it their moral obligation to feed them. “Up until the early 20th century,” explains Benson, “the dominant way of understanding the proper relationship between humans and animals in the city [was] centered on charity. It [was] centered on the idea that humans have an obligation, a responsibility to create a friendly welcoming environment for certain kinds of animals to flourish” — at least: certain kinds of animals.
Stanley Hawk drawing via Audubon.orgJohn James Audubon’s account of bird species refers to the “bloodthirsty hawk” and “rascally raven.” People would hunt birds of prey because they were considered “mean.” Meanwhile, other animals like pigeons and squirrels were considered peaceful. More than that, they interacted with humans. In terms of the thinking of the times, the sight of an undomesticated animal not only approaching but effectively communicating by soliciting food was a sign of its civilized nature.
This collective experience of solicitation and charity and civilized discourse between humans and birds and squirrels was eventually articulated in a name: the “more than human community.” This model really worked out for the squirrels. By the late 19th and early 20th century, squirrels had everything they needed to thrive and multiply. They had nuts, trees and humans feeding them extra food while also killing off a lot of their natural predators.
As the 19th century led into the 20th, squirrels were busy spreading out and enjoying the largesse of cities and suburbs and leafy college campuses. No one stopped to wonder if there could be such a thing as too many squirrels, which might have been a mistake.
Attacking the GridSecurity expert Matthew Harper worries about an ongoing attack against the power grid being led by squirrels. “In the case of the utility infrastructure, it’s not nation-state actors, it’s the humble squirrel that’s causing most of the issues.” By some estimates, one-quarter of all power outages are squirrel-related.
Grey squirrel on a power line by Tony Alter (CC BY 2.0)Squirrels need to build nests, and they usually build those nests in trees, but they also build them in anything that looks like a tree, like utility poles or transformers. A squirrel’s incisor teeth never stop growing, so they have to chew to keep them filed down. They mostly chew bark and branches and nuts, but they also chew things like power cables. So inevitably some unlucky squirrel will gnaw through the insulation of a powerline or step on two exposed wires at the same time. The circuit is ruined and the poor squirrel loses its little life.
To keep track of all these outages, Matthew Harper runs a (slightly tongue-in-cheek) website called Cyber Squirrel One, which tracks all major squirrel-related power outages, and there’s no shortage of incidents.
In November of 2018, a single roving squirrel knocked out three substations in Upstate New York, causing a string of power outages for more than 12,000 people.There was a case in 2009 where a squirrel impacted 55,000 people in Canada. Squirrels have also shut down colleges, shopping malls and polling stations on election day.
The most memorable incident, however, happened in December of 1987. In the 1980s, the New York Stock Exchange controlled 85% of the world’s stocks, but there was also a new rival exchange in town chipping away at their market share: the Nasdaq. The Nasdaq was an automated exchange that ran on computers. It didn’t need traders, so the 4000 traders on the floor or NYSE — who made trades in person, by hand — hated it. So at least some people had cause for celebration when the system ran into a serious issue.
For 82 minutes, on December 9th, 1987, Nasdaq was offline, losing an estimated 20 million trades, all of which were later traced back to a squirrel. This creature had chewed through a powerline in Connecticut from which Nasdaq drew its electricity.
America’s squirrels have also been wreaking havoc overseas. In Great Britain, the eastern grey squirrels introduced in 1876 quickly began to displace the native red squirrel, driving it to near extinction. Now there’s only a few small pockets of red squirrels left in northern England and Scotland despite a massive eradication campaign to keep the American invaders out of the Scottish highlands. In Europe, they’re officially an invasive species.
The Ecological ModelEven as Americans squirrels were taking out shopping malls and stock exchanges and invading foreign countries, the very things that had allowed them to proliferate in the first place were slowly being taken away.
Starting in the mid-20th century, ecologists, wildlife managers and park officials started to re-examine America’s approach to wildlife. They began to argue that predators like coyotes and hawks should no longer be hunted for the sake of a more than human community.
In this new ecological model, the ideal environment was no longer one that corresponded to notions of civilized versus uncivilized species, but one in which a variety of species (both predator and prey) maintained a natural population balance with only minimal human intervention.
Stubert the squirrel in Minneapolis, MN, image by Kurt KohlstedtIt took a few decades for this idea to spread from the national parks into the cities, but by the 1980s it had arrived. A variety of species that prey on squirrels, like hawks, now are a regular part of the urban landscape in places like New York City, and feeding squirrels has no place in the new ecological model. Providing bread and other unnatural foods can lead to a variety of health problems. And acclimating squirrels to hand-feeding can make them overly dependent on humans and possibly prone to unstable population booms.
Team Ecology vs. Team Fat SquirrelThe New York City Parks Department is currently proposing a rule change that would make it illegal to feed any wild animal in the parks. No human-to-animal feeding, period. Not everyone is on board. At a recent hearing, several dedicated squirrel- and bird-feeders spoke up against the ban.
Photo by Dawn Huczek (CC BY 2.0)Different people provided different arguments for why feeding should continue, and exactly what impacts the blanket ban would have on wildlife populations is unclear, but regardless of the ecological impact, the biggest takeaway from the debate over the ban is that the concept of the “more than human community” has never fully gone away.
Naturalist Gabriel Willow believes there is a different way to connect to these animals — by keeping a respectful distance, we can observe and appreciate behaviors that we don’t get to witness when we invite a squirrel to eat out of our hand.
There’s more than one way to connect to the animals with whom we share our cities. Whether it’s listening to the yipping of coyotes in the middle of the night, setting up a webcam for the hawk nest outside your window, or counting all the squirrels in Central Park. In March, Jamie Allen and the other team members of the squirrel census finished gathering their data. They plan to reveal the squirrel abundance number in June.
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If you’ve spent any amount of time driving through any major American city, you know what it’s like to be stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. But if you’re from Los Angeles – the land of freeways, traffic and smog – you know this struggle especially well.
But Jake Berman, the author of The Lost Subways of North America, says it didn’t have to be this way! Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. In fact, we made an episode about the rise and fall of LA’s Red Car back in 2013.
Los Angeles Pacific Electric Railway streetcar map print, 1926. Jake Berman, 53studio.comIn this episode, Jake tells us about how, time after time, when North American cities seemed just inches away from having a robust, utopian future of fast, reliable, and convenient public transportation systems, something gets in the way. That thing is sometimes dysfunctional local politics, sometimes it’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s the way our infrastructure favors cars over mass transit, and too often, it’s racism.
Take a listen to Jake and Roman go through a handful of North American cities and discuss what went wrong with their public transportation, and find out what exactly makes or breaks a transit system.
Jake’s book The Lost Subways of North America is all about the subways of our past, present and future. Not only will you find great stories about the subways of North America, it also features beautiful transit maps that Jake illustrated himself.
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This is the fifth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott also sit down with Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News who covers misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the internet. Brandy recently finished The Power Broker, and she’s got a great perspective on what the book says about the press and its relationship to power, what has changed in journalism, and what has remained the same.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the last section of Part 4 of the book (Chapters 21 through Chapter 24), discussing the major story beats and themes.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
The 99% Invisible Power Broker Book ClubThe post The Power Broker #05: Brandy Zadrozny appeared first on 99% Invisible.
In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder… why did they fall off the radar?
The Rocket ManHeading into the Cold War, research into jetpack technology was funded primarily by the American military. “Anything to give you an advantage in war is something your military wants. So people are thinking, hey, if we could strap rockets to soldiers who are running across a field and it made them run faster, they’d be harder to shoot, they’d get farther,” says Steve Lehto, author of the book The Great American Jet Pack. The military reached out to a number of contractors to develop a functioning jetpack, and a company called Bell Aircraft Corporation stepped up to the challenge.
American scientists actually developed a working device in the 1960s called “The Bell rocket belt.” The rocket belt was developed by Wendell Moore, a scientist at the aerospace division of the Bell Aircraft Corporation, using funding from the military. The rocket belt used highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide to gain thrust, creating very hot, very powerful jets of steam to gain liftoff. While the belt was technically not a jetpack – meaning it didn’t use jet engines – it was able to lift a person off the ground for twenty seconds at a time.
Photo courtesy of Niagara Aerospace MuseumMoore was the first test pilot for the rocket belt, running indoor tethered flights until an accident broke his knee cap in 1960. In 1961, a different pilot, Hal Graham, ran the first successful rocket belt test, and later a series of public demonstrations. Graham flew the rocket belt in front of John F. Kennedy at Fort Liberty, where the president is said to have been slack jawed watching a man glide through the air.
The military eventually stopped funding the program because it fell short of expectations. The rocket belt was too heavy, too expensive, and could not travel long distances. But Bell Aerospace continued on, and sent the rocket belt on a tour around the world. There was a lot of excitement around the invention – Wendell Moore even told Popular Science magazine that he believed the belt could be publicly available within two to three years.
The Rocket Belt Goes to Hollywood Bill Suitor was a rocket belt pilot for Bell, and helped popularize the device. Suitor showed off the belt at fairs across the country, eventually visiting a dozen countries and 42 states. Suitor flew the rocket belt at the first Super Bowl, and was the stunt double for James Bond in the 1965 movie Thunderball, perhaps its most famous moment.
While the film’s producers wanted Suitor to not wear a helmet during filming, he refused, and in the final scene, you can see Suitor and another stunt pilot, Gordy Yeager, flying over a French castle before Connery lands next to an Aston Martin.
The Rocket Belt Gets GroundedThe rocket belt was all over culture – Suitor even became a spokesperson for Keds – but by the late 1960s, it was clear that the device didn’t have a lot of civilian applications. Wendell Moore developed a new version of the rocket belt, using kerosene instead of hydrogen peroxide, but he only saw the device fly once without tethers before dying of a heart attack in 1969. Bell then ended the program and gave away their prototypes to institutions like the Smithsonian.
Photo courtesy of the Niagara Aerospace MuseumIn subsequent years, hobbyists have kept the dream of the jetpack going, developing new models and flying them at fairs and public demonstrations. Bill Suitor was involved in many tests and public demonstrations, culminating in the 1984 Olympic opening ceremonies in Los Angeles.
Today, there are still pilots and companies developing jetpacks, some of which have real, literal jet engines. But there is less public interest than 50 years ago. The rocket belt may be a technology of the future that belongs to the past. But you can see one at the Niagara Aerospace Museum in Niagara Falls, and other spots around the country.
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If your parents or grandparents grew up in the United States in the 1950s, there’s a decent chance that they know the theme song to The Howdy Doody Show. The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 5pm, kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents’ tiny televisions and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick Howdy Doody.
Portrait of Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody: Fort Lauderdale, Florida (from State Library and Archives of Florida).At the time, there wasn’t anything quite like it. Imagine a singing cowboy performing a puppet show for your birthday, only five nights a week. The show was disproportionately important in the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world of television was strange. In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild-west days of early TV. A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along. Starting with what to put on television in the first place.
The very first TV shows, including Howdy Doody, had no prior TV shows to build on. Instead, they had to steal their programming ideas from other, older mediums, most notably: radio. Buffalo Bob, the show’s lead, had previously been a popular radio DJ, who had hosted his shows sitting at a piano, where he would sing along to records, perform comedy sketches and read the weather — along with his sidekick, a country bumpkin character which slowly evolved into a happy 10 year old boy named Howdy Doody.
Howdy Doody ad from The Radio Annual and Television Yearbook, 1955After the first television sets became commercially available in the 30s, for a long time, well into the 40s, the medium actually had a hard time catching on. For starters, unlike radio, which had a huge variety of shows, there wasn’t much to watch on these small, grainy black and white screens. When televisions first went on the market, few people could afford one, nor was television a nationwide medium yet. Most of the early television stations were in New York, and those first broadcast signals didn’t reach all that far. So nearly everyone who did own a TV lived in the New York area. Also, video playback didn’t exist yet, meaning television shows in the early days had to go out live.
But then, in 1947, NBC found something new to put on the air by borrowing a trick from the vaudevillian playbook. Puppets. Puppets were highly visual. They were live. They were cheap. And – perhaps most importantly – kids loved them. The plan was to do a one hour kids special at the ungodly early hour of 5pm – called Puppet Playhouse. They tapped Bob Smith to host it, along with a puppet version his country yokel sidekick – Howdy Doody.
Bob and Howdy would have all sorts of adventures together, usually designed to teach the kids a valuable lesson. There was also a rotating cast of other characters portrayed by mix of puppets and live actors. Some leaned on racist stereotypes, like an Indian chief named Thunderthud (whose character coined the term “cowabunga”). Other characters included a villainous mayor named Phineus T. Bluster, and a mute clown named Clarabel, who blasted everyone in the face with a horn and a seltzer bottle.
A Certified Hit!The executives at NBC knew they had a quality show on their hands, but the problem was there was no easy way of knowing just how many kids were actually watching it. Nielsen television ratings didn’t exist yet, making it hard to sell programs to sponsors. Not without data, and without sponsors there was no profit. But in 1948 NBC executives devised a scheme to get a better sense of how many children were watching the show. They created a story that Howdy Doody was running for president and asked viewers to send in a postcard with a write in vote for Howdy Doody to NBC. After all of the postcards were counted they realized they that they had an astronomical amount of viewers. Within months, some of the biggest brands in the country wanted to sponsor the show. Colgate, Ovaltine, Kellogg’s. The department store Macy’s wanted to sell Howdy dolls, and NBC was more than happy to arrange a licensing deal. Money was pouring in.
For the next decade, Howdy Doody had an unprecedented run of success. It was the first kids show to be broadcast nationally and the first to regularly broadcast in color. And as the show became more popular so too did television itself. When Howdy Doody first went on the air in December of 1947, there were fewer than 200,000 television sets in America. By 1960, it was the longest running show on TV, and America had nearly 50 million televisions. Almost 90% of the country owned a TV.
Howdy Doody Sells OutIn 1950, Buffalo Bob agreed to sell Howdy Doody to a new company created by NBC and the Wall Street firm Lehman brothers called KAGRAN. When KAGRAN took over, sponsors became increasingly involved both on screen and off. More and more companies started to see the potential of marketing their products to kids.
At the same time, television was evolving as a medium. New children’s shows were popping up. Howdy had competition, including perhaps the biggest development in children’s TV, the cartoon. The other networks realized that airing cartoons was cheaper than filming a bunch of actors on soundstages every week, and kids loved them. Also, competing live action kids shows didn’t go away – they just got more visually sophisticated. Including the show that would prove to be the perfect marriage of live action and cartoon IP, The Mickey Mouse Club. As competing programs evolved around it, Howdy looked increasingly old-fashioned and threadbare.
In 1956, the executives at NBC cut the show back from five days a week to just one, on Saturday afternoon. It went went off the air completely in 1960. But not before helping to prove that television was something more than gimmick – and entertaining an entire generation of American children.
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Some of you may be familiar with a figure called Mr. Yuk, depending on your age and where you grew up, but for rest of you: Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It’s the face you make when you taste something disgusting. He’s the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck.
Aptly enough: he was designed to be the symbol for hazardous substances, aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. The idea what that if you saw a a Mr. Yuck sticker on something around the house, it meant that that something was poison. Parents would get sheets of these and stick them on drain cleaners, bleach boxes, and basically anything else kids might get their hands on.
Mr. Yuk was created in 1971 by a physician named Doctor Richard Moriarty. He was pediatrician and the founder of the Pittsburgh Poison Center. And as head of the Poison Center, he naturally wanted to keep kids from ingesting potentially dangerous substances … but he also wanted to teach parents that when their kid still went ahead and ingested something anyway, they should call poison control first. That call could save you time, money, and a lot of stress.
Poison (Out of) ControlPoison centers are actually a pretty recent phenomenon; until the 19th century, people mostly had to rely on conspicuous packaging and poison labels for poison prevention. Apothecaries were required to store hazardous substances in irregularly shaped bottles so they wouldn’t be mixed up with other products. Also in the mid-1800’s it the American Pharmaceutical Association deployed a mandate to clearly label a bottle with the word “poison,” or with the medically accepted symbol for poison, like: a skull and crossbones.
Still, even in the early 1900s, there actually still wasn’t a ton else being done in terms of preventative poison control. And this was a huge problem because around then a brand new danger was entering American homes: household cleaners. Lots of factors led to their adoption and spread at the time. For one, there was a whole chemical revolution taking place in the United States. At the same time, Americans were developing a kind of obsession with cleanliness and hygiene. And there was a huge rise in mass production, bolstered by the growth of advertising, which meant more of these pre-packaged cleaners ended up in homes across the US. And of course, the makers of these products wanted them to sell, not scare — so they weren’t particularly keen on posting prominent warnings on their labels.
Because chemical companies resisted proper warning label regulation, it was children in particular who were the big victims of accidental poisonings during this time. The rise of dangerous household substances wasn’t limited to cleaning products either. Around the 1940s, the pharmaceutical industry came out with a marketing scheme that probably at the time sounded like a great idea, but was actually terrible in execution: candy aspirin. The results were horrifying. Within three years of candy aspirin debuting, preschool aged children came to represent 80% of aspirin deaths.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the safety equation, many doctors didn’t even know what or how much of those products would be lethal if ingested by children. But Louis Gdalmann, the man who developed the first poison control center, started diagnosing the problem at work he was pharmacist in Chicago at Saint Luke’s Hospital at the time. He saw first-hand the impact of the lack of information on poisonings and decided to do something about it. He started collecting information on poisonous substances and filling it on these little index cards. He ended up accumulating information on roughly 9000 different substances, and by the 1950s he was the go-to poison expert.
WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive HarmPhysicians at Saint Luke’s Hospital, where he worked, started consulting with Gdalman; then word spread to other hospitals in Chicago and eventually to other cities. Gdalman would personally answer calls at any time, day or night from his home. But of course that became overwhelming, so Gdalman, along with Doctor Edward Press, founded the first poison control center in the United States in 1953.
Crossing Off Warning SkullsThe idea caught on, and by the 1960s, poison control centers had proliferated around the country. But the influx of centers came with its own problems, like: the quality of care between the poison centers really could be inconsistent. And that was one of the big problems Doctor Richard Moriarty, the father of Mr. Yuk, wanted to solve in 1971. He wanted to find a way to make sure parents had the information of a trusted poison control center if their child ingested anything dangerous.
On top of the lack of knowledge around reliable poison centers like the one he was running. Doctor Moriarty realized that there was a very unique problem that impacted the children of Pittsburgh, specifically: the skull-and-crossbones had a different association for many, as the symbol for the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team.
So Doctor Moriarty decided that he had to create a brand new symbol that would both spread awareness of the Pittsburgh Poison Center and that was original and free from any other associations; one that would only and strictly mean do not eat. He wanted something akin to Smokey Bear or McGruff the Crime Dog, an anthropomorphized PSA. And Doctor Moriarty believed that for this symbol to be effective with children, they needed to engage with them in the design process.
Do Not Take a Bite Out of Mister YukOnce they honed in on the final design, the Pittsburgh Poison Center mailed many, many sheets of the stickers to households around Pennsylvania and beyond, which definitely got the word out. Parents began sticking them on things around their house. Some versions of the sticker also conveniently included the number for one’s local poison control center, but the utility of this feature expanded when they added the more universal, national poison control number: 1-800-222-1222.
But that didn’t happen for a while, because deployment of the stickers, much like poison control centers, remained uncoordinated and disjointed. Mr. Yuk wasn’t as recognized in most parts of the US. And this war of the poison control mascots kind of illustrated the problem with poison control centers across the country at the time, because there still was no single coordinated poison control agency.
By the 1980s and 90s, the number of poison control centers started to decline and then in the early 2000’s, Congress passed the Poison Control Center Enhancement and Awareness Act, which allocated support to poison centers. So now 100% of the U.S. population is served by just a single toll free phone number from anywhere in the country — which is great. Mr. Yuk, meanwhile, faded to the background.
But had this sticker done its job, at least early on? Well, his introduction did coincide with a dramatic decrease in poisonings, but much of that can be attributed to another big change: child-resistant packaging redesign. In 1970, Congress passed the Poison Prevention Packaging Act, which mandated child resistant packaging. In the intervening years, child poisoning deaths have fallen by roughly 73%, and they have stayed low ever since.
Beyond Biohazard: Why Danger Symbols Can’t Last ForeverThe post Mr. Yuk appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Situated right near downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the world, this is a place where peacocks roam freely — a space out of time. This forest is protected by a religious community. It has survived in a relatively undeveloped state in the middle of this gargantuan city. Importantly, it’s also home to an ancient tradition that’s in crisis — one that is central to the lives (and deaths) of a particular population.
There’s a certain point in this forest beyond which almost no one can step — only special caretakers of these grounds can go any further. They go by many names: khandia, nassassalar, pallbearer, corpse bearer. Their work here is holy. They carry dead bodies to their final resting place – atop stone structures that stand gray against the lush green. These buildings are called Towers of Silence.
The Towers of Silence are part of a death ritual carried out by Parsis, a small but prosperous community in India. Parsis practice Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion originally from Iran. Zoroastrians in Iran were persecuted in the 7th century during the rise of the Islamic Empire, and Muslim armies gave surviving Zoroastrians a choice: conversion or exile. Eventually, a small group of Zoroastrians fled Iran for the shores of Western India, bringing with them any surviving fragments of tradition.
Zoroastrians who settled all over India came to be known as Parsis. Eventually, in the 1600s, Mumbai became their epicenter. This was back when this city was still a collection of swampy, mosquito-infested islands, seemingly far enough away from the civilized world. A few wealthy Parsis bought a vast expanse of land here, and they gave it to the community for one specific purpose.
The Towers of Silence are where Parsis place their dead. And, despite its imposing gothic-era name that’s used by Parsis and non-Parsis alike, Towers of Silence aren’t actually all that towering at all. These structures got that name by the British who wanted an English term to describe them. And in doing so, they made them sound perhaps a bit more grandiose than they actually are.
These Towers, also known simply as dakhmas, are built of stone, usually up to 50 feet tall and up to about 100 feet wide. Imagine something more like an open-aired amphitheater; each Tower is circular and roofless. There are markers indicating where bodies should be placed. And in the very center, there’s a deep well – storage for the bones of Parsi bodies. Wherever large clusters of Parsis settled, they would cultivate forests, or Doongerwadis, and build dakhmas inside them. Five dakhmas were built here in Mumbai which in total are able to handle over a thousand corpses a year.
Zoroastrians have practiced this ritual of sky burial in Mumbai for centuries. According to the faith, as soon as we die, our bodies become contaminated with evil. And this evil must not, under any circumstance, make contact with the sacred elements of fire, water, and earth. Instead, the corpse bearers will place the body atop one of these Towers. Then, they will wait for the vultures to come.
Circling OverheadAccording to some estimates there were once at least around 40 million vultures throughout India. But no one will ever really know an exact number. They were so plentiful, in fact, that no scientific efforts were ever made to do a population count. India’s civil aviation department would even hire people to shoot vultures around airports because they posed such a hazard to air traffic. In the sky, vultures loom large, casting shadows with 8-foot wingspans. And on the ground, sometimes you can only see their bodies, their bald heads often buried deep inside a fresh carcass.
And yet for centuries, a very specific symbiosis played out here in Mumbai, between these vultures, this forest, and the Parsis. Time passed, wars came and went, cities grew, trees fell. But this practice survived. In Mumbai, approximately three new bodies were carried up every day. It was an efficient send-off, one in which your body became your final offering to the natural world. Most of all, it was tradition.
But this tradition would begin to unravel.
A Seamless Cycle for CenturiesParsis practiced this system of placing deceased loved ones atop these Towers — a practice called dokhmenashini — for centuries. It was a seamless cycle of life and death, passed on from one generation to the next. But in the 1980s, one thing in this cycle changed, and then everything started to topple. In the early 1980s, fewer and fewer vultures could be seen sitting and waiting at their usual perch — soon after, it seemed like all the vultures had disappeared altogether.
Khandias would carry a few new bodies into the Towers, only to find that yesterday’s bodies were still untouched by vultures. The vulture deaths were felt outside the Parsi community too. Vultures have scoured the countryside, cleaning up dead cattle for all of human history. So eventually, more people across the country began to notice their absence.
Scientists ran through theories from food shortage to habitat loss. They looked into the possibility of contagious disease. But nothing was conclusive. Then finally, in 2003, they made a shocking discovery. The vultures had been dying of kidney failure. And the culprit was a prescription painkiller, similar to Ibuprofen and Aspirin, called Diclofenac.
OverdosedDiclofenac is a cheap drug that was first introduced in the 1970s for the treatment of arthritis and pain management in humans. By the early 1990s, Diclofenac became a veterinary painkiller. And because of its recently expired patent, it ended up being the cheapest and most popular livestock drug on the market. Hinduism’s reverence for cows means that in India, most cattle are left to die naturally in the fields, where vultures would reliably finish the job. Farmers would give Diclofenac to cows. And when those cows died with Diclofenac in their system, vultures would eat them and get poisoned by the drug. Because India has the largest cattle population in the world, this was happening at an enormous scale. Soon, the vulture deaths became a national crisis.
The irony of an over-the-counter Ibuprofen knock-off decimating the vulture population is that this bird is uniquely known for its biological resilience. Their incredibly strong stomach acids have allowed them to consume diseases like tuberculosis, rabies, even anthrax, and face no consequence. Ultimately, what killed them was a drug humans created to relieve us of our pains. By the early 2000’s, India had lost up to 99% of various species of Gyps vultures. Three years after the mystery had been solved, India banned the veterinary use of this deadly medicine. But banning the drug outright is really hard to put into practice. And in addition to Diclofenac, there are more livestock drugs in circulation in India today that have been found to be just as deadly to vultures. The Indian government banned two of these drugs in 2023, but it doesn’t undo the damage done, years ago. Today, the population of Gyps vultures is nowhere near what they once were.
Revisiting GriefEven before the vulture die-off began, every now and again, some Parsis would question the ancient ritual of dokhmenashini, in the way that people always do with old traditions. But now, with this mass vulture death, Parsis were grappling with the fate of their corpses in a new and urgent way. In Mumbai, about three Parsis were dying per day. Khandias continued to lay bodies atop their Towers, this time for vultures that would no longer come. Much smaller birds of prey began to descend on the Towers, but when it comes to consuming corpses, these smaller birds are inefficient and messy. Wealthy nearby residents, with rare in-the-city views of adjacent green space, started to complain.
Because of the absence of vultures, the bodies atop the Towers were barely being consumed. And from a distance, the apartment residents would complain about being able to see and smell the slowly decomposing bodies. The Bombay Parsi Panchayat — the leadership council that makes decisions regarding the Mumbai Towers of Silence — began conducting a series of experiments atop the Towers. Their goal was to find a way to speed up decomposition in the absence of vultures, or at the very least, to hide the view and smell of the rotting bodies. They tried masking the smell with a strong smelling flower. They tried a composition of herbs and chemicals. But, these solutions weren’t doing quite enough.
New BloodFrom behind closed doors at weekly Panchayat board meetings and on the forums of community newspapers, Parsis discussed any possible solutions they could think of. Zoroastrians from around the world started to write in with suggestions.
Some suggested they use a technique called gasification, which involves high heat, or promession, a method from Sweden where liquid nitrogen is used to deep freeze the body. One entomologist in Germany suggested they try flesh-eating insects. But no one could agree on any one solution. Nothing compared to the efficiency, cleanliness, and theological alignment of the vultures.
Eventually though, the Bombay Parsi Panchayat landed on a plan. They would install solar panels on the Towers. These solar concentrators, as they’re often called, would essentially look like giant mirrors.
The Panchayat hoped that the solar panels would speed up decomposition without involving contact with fire, water, or earth – per Zoroastrian tradition. Solar panels were installed first in Mumbai’s Doongerwadi, and then atop Towers of Silence all over India.
It might sound gruesome, but bodies melting or dehydrating with the solar panels is far better than just rotting. And although some had misgivings about the change, calling it backdoor cremation, it mostly seemed like a massive relief that some sort of a solution had finally been found instead of leaving a body to rot for months.
But even this was not enough. In 2005, a woman named Dhan Baria turned the discourse around topsy turvy. Her grief and rage sent the community into a new level of reckoning. Upon learning that her own mother’s body had not fully decomposed and was still rotting, almost one year after her death, she had photos from inside the Towers made and disseminated throughout the Parsi community. Awful images made the rounds. A 15-minute video showed bodies in various stages of decomposition, images of loved ones with their eyes hollowed out.
The Circle of Vulture LifeMaybe, some thought, the answer was there all along — perhaps there was a way to turn the Mumbai Towers of Silence into a giant vulture aviary. The idea was: let’s bring the vultures back to feed on Parsi dead, but protect them in an enclosure, away from diclofenac and any other drugs that would kill them.
Still, the same problem at the heart of it all persisted: problematic drugs in the bloodstreams of the deceased. If diclofenac was in a Parsi person’s bloodstream, the already-endangered vultures in the aviary would just…die. Just like before. And with four more drugs on the market today that have been tested to be just as killer to Gyps vultures, the Panchayat’s plan was met with a good deal of apprehension. All this made it hard to reach consensus on the aviary project.
With the absence of vultures, the sun is the only thing that can break down the bodies of deceased Parsis. But the taller nearby apartment buildings surrounding the Towers rise, it will become increasingly harder for the sun’s rays to reach the bodies atop the Towers.
In 2015, a Parsi crematorium was finally established in Mumbai. Some are concerned that if cremation and burial grow in popularity and fewer and fewer people take to the Towers, and in the face of encroaching development, that the Doongerwadi land might be taken away from them.
Reviving the VulturesConservationists across South Asia started breeding these endangered vultures in captivity in 2004. And thanks to them, these vulture populations, once critically endangered, did not reach extinction. But these vultures in captivity – and their keepers alike – are, for the most part, in waiting. They’re waiting for safer skies. They’re waiting for the government to ban all vulture-toxic drugs from use. Waiting for farmers to get used to using vulture-safe alternatives.
The possibility of seeing vultures return to the open skies again in huge numbers, it’s all part of the dream. But it’s going to take a lot of time. Meanwhile, caretakers of this sacred place continue to tend to the land, and do their best to honor the dead who pass through the forest.
Reporting for this project was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G Buffett Fund for Women Journalists.
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This is the fourth official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
This week, Roman and Elliott also sit down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. representative for New York’s 14th congressional district, who describes the lasting impact Moses’ highways have made on her district, and her own philosophy when it comes to political power and bringing ambitious projects to life.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the second section of Part 4 of the book (Chapters 16 through the end of Chapter 20), discussing the major story beats and themes.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
The 99% Invisible Power Broker Book ClubThe post The Power Broker #04: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Each week, The Sporkful uses humor and humanity to approach food from many angles, including identity, culture, science, history, economics, and lengthy debates on the best way to layer a PB&J. They like to say it’s not a show for for foodies, but for eaters. This week we’re featuring an episode from The Sporkful‘s series on the creation of “Anything’s Pastable,” Dan Pashman’s new pasta cookbook.
In this episode, Dan an embarks on an epic trip across Italy in search of lesser-known pasta dishes — and to learn about the evolution of pasta more broadly, traveling to Rome, interviewing a pasta historian, and meeting a chef who was there when a regional specialty called spaghetti all’assassina (“assassin’s spaghetti”) was invented. The show asks: What does evolution look like in a food culture that’s so often depicted in sepia tones? And what’s his place in that process?
“Eat your way through a world of new and different pasta sauces with this fun and charmingly obsessive cookbook” Remember: Anything’s Pastable
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Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the 1970s, sapeurs (from: le sape, short for “Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes”) have been known for donning technicolored three-piece suits with flamboyant accessories like golden walking sticks and leopard-print fedoras, and then cat-walking through their city streets.
In recent years, Solange, Kendrick and SZA have all featured sapeurs in their music videos. The iconic British menswear designer Paul Smith did a whole spring line of sapeur-inspired suits and bowler hats.
If you want to be delighted, do a real quick image search. When you see the sapeurs, it’s obvious what makes them so attractive to famous artists and global brands. Their remix on classic menswear is irreverent and colorful and just a joy to look at.
Image via Sapeurs: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Congo by Tariq ZaidiThese images are really different from the stereotypical way that sub-Saharan Africa is often portrayed to the world — depicted as broke and broken. As an American journalist who’s worked here for the past decade, I’ve seen those stereotypes. We all have. And, the reality is, life in places like the Congo is really difficult – especially after centuries of brutal colonization, resource extraction, and underdevelopment. Into that bleak frame strolls the sapeurs, these Congolese mechanics and construction workers and farm hands dressed up like aristocratic peacocks, flaunting their Ferragamo monk strap shoes, silk Chanel scarfs and crisp Versace suits.
Influences of this contemporary style can be traced back to Belgian colonizers — the Congolese found that it helped to look the part of the oppressor, fancy clothes and all. Modern sapeurs have likewise flipped the colonizer script in dramatic fashion. They continue to take the European suit — this thing that was forced on them — and make it wholly, authentically Congolese. And they’ve done it so well that now it’s the rest of us trying to wear our clothes to look like them.
By the 1980s, the Sapeurs had totally rebranded European formalwear. The Belgians had required Africans to wear suits to prove their European-ness; ut American jazz artists — at least, in the eyes of the Congolese — had worn suits to affirm their dignity.
Sapeurs believed that if you could find a way to dress expensively, the world would treat you like an expensive person – whether you were a famous rumba musician or a construction worker. To the sapeurs, fine formal wear announced to the world that you were the kind of person who deserved luxury. In the grand scheme, suits are a small thing. But La Sape formed as proof that anyone could be a person who mattered, just by looking the part. For a lot of young Congolese, that idea was extraordinary. So extraordinary that it didn’t matter that you were going to have to totally break the bank to make it happen.
By the early 2000s, Sapeurs were getting attention around the world. At the same time, journalists and photographers started traveling to Africa, to report on sapeur culture in Kinshasa and Brazzaville.
Last year, Congo hosted the Francophone Games – a kind of Olympics for the French-speaking world. The opening ceremony in Kinshasa was a medley of traditional Congolese dance, song, and puppetry. And then, in the middle of the show, the stadium suddenly went completely black. A row of yellow taxis appeared out of the darkness, headlights blazing. Then the doors flung open. A bunch of people in pinstripe suits and foot-tall top hats and iridescent gold blazers started pouring out.
They had gone mainstream – in the best possible way. This bold, extravagant cult of luxury fashion used to be counter culture. But when I was in Kinshasa, many Congolese told me that now, “la sape, c’est notre patrimoine national” – “la sape is our national heritage.”
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For many young people in Paris, it’s a right of passage to live in a very small, very French type of apartment, called a “chambre de bonne.” Literally, a maid’s room. A chambre de bonne is usually one small room, on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building, and it’s usually just big enough to fit a bed and a table. It’s affordable housing in a city where finding housing is nearly impossible. But while cute, they are also cramped and can be unpleasant spaces for people who have to live there, a living embodiment of the gap between the rich in Paris, and everyone else.
The chambre de bonne has been around since the 1800s, and today, many people still live in these apartments because of the lack of affordable housing in the city. But the chambre de bonne is starting to disappear as a housing type. And many are wondering, where are those residents going to live?
The chambre de bonne was invented during a major redesign of Paris in the 1850s. It was led by a man named George-Eugene Haussmann. He was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III to overhaul the city’s architecture, as Napoleon wanted Paris to be “masterful”, and a “capital of the world”. To reflect these grand ambitions, Haussmann created wide boulevards and avenues.
Haussmann destroyed working-class neighborhoods and replaced them with luxury buildings. Paris was a mess of construction for 50 years. Workers from all over the country came to serve Haussmann’s vision, creating some of Paris’s most iconic landmarks, like the avenue de l’opéra, the boulevard Haussmann, and the boulevard Voltaire.
But all of this construction was at a cost. In some cases, Haussmann cut buildings in half to make room for new ones. Some people called him “an artist demolisher”. Haussmann only designed apartments, because that’s where most people lived in Paris at the time. And he designed every apartment building to be the same, inside and out.
In Haussmann’s buildings, there was always one apartment per floor. And in those luxury buildings, the residents expected to have rooms to house their servants. Life was hard for these workers, and many of them were living inside their employer’s homes, which made them available to work 24 hours a day, with very few breaks.
A lot of young workers got fed up and returned home after life in Paris, exhausted and demoralized. Before the chambre de bonne, in the 18th century, servants lived in areas above the kitchen or the stables, save for chambermaids, who would sleep in tiny rooms near their employer’s bedroom. But the Haussmann redesign changed that.
Before Haussmann, Paris apartment buildings had small triangular roofs made of zinc. There wasn’t a lot of room to install an attic under these roofs, until Haussmann’s redesign included a series of sloped, mansard roofs, which contained a lot more potential for attic space. Haussmann created these sloped roofs because of something very mundane: municipal height restrictions. At the time, Paris had a height limit on new buildings of 65 feet. But the height limit wasn’t for the very top of the building, it was for the cornice line, where the roof begins. So the mansard roof was a hack, allowing a building to be taller without violating city laws.
Vernacular Economics: How Building Codes & Taxes Shape Regional ArchitectureThe resulting triangular attics were large enough to house someone, though they weren’t desirable for the bourgeoisie living in Paris. Instead, the bourgeoisie decided to pay a little extra money for the space, and put their servants up there. That’s how the idea of the chambre de bonne was born. Instead of living with their employers, now maids and servants could live in a private space above them.
The original chambre de bonne was typically about 75 square feet. You could barely fit a bed in there. It was normal for these rooms to have one iron bed, a small table, a chair, and a small piece of furniture to store things. The only bathrooms or sinks were in the hallway.
Finally, in 1904, a law was passed by the French government, so that all apartments had to be 86 square feet. The old chambre de bonne apartments weren’t allowed any more. The new apartments were still just about 9 feet by 9 feet, but it was an improvement. Slowly, the chambre de bonne apartments got even better. Landlords added windows and more toilets in the hallway.
After World War 2, France developed a middle class. By mid-century, it wasn’t all servants and domestic workers moving to Paris to live in chambre de bonne apartments anymore. Now, it was a popular housing type for students and young people coming to the city for the first time. And they had higher expectations.
It wasn’t until 2002 that France passed another law to make apartments bigger, saying “no one should live in under 97 square feet out of decency”. In 100 years, Parisians only gained a few feet of space. Many of the existing chambre de bonne apartments were no longer in compliance, so many landlords decided to demolish the walls between two or three chambre de bonne apartments to make a single, larger living space. And that has created some very strange apartment layouts.
Against all odds, today, the chambre de bonne is becoming a valuable commodity. The price to rent a chambre de bonne has been going up in recent years. There are a couple of reasons for this, including the newfound popularity of elevators in Paris apartment buildings, as well as inflation and housing scarcity.
The chambre de bonne is becoming more expensive, but it’s also beginning to disappear as a housing type. In 1968, there were 66,000 people living in chambre de bonne apartments in Paris. According to the most recent public data, that number is down to just over 17,000. A big reason for this is people with money taking old chambre de bonne apartments and renovating them. In fact, today, some wealthy Parisians will buy up a whole floor of chambre de bonne apartments and make them into one big living space. The apartments have gone from cramped living quarters for poor people, to some of the most valuable real estate in Paris.
Paris is a dense and historic city, where it’s actually illegal to construct high rise buildings. And with a lack of housing stock, the price of housing keeps going up. The chambre de bonne could be a useful part of the solution for this, because many of them sit empty. As of 2015, 85% of the chambre de bonne apartments in Paris are vacant. Many chambre de bonne are just too small to be lived in, but some housing advocates believe renovations could put these old rooms to a new use.
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This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and interesting spots in cities he loves. Roman moved to Athens, Georgia, to pursue a PhD in plant genetics, but dropped out and got into the local music scene instead, and started making his way toward radio. Note: this series is made possible by the all-new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM who heard this idea, gave no notes, and said just go make something cool.
There’s an arch in Athens where the town transitions to the university. This pretty modest three column black metal gateway arch was erected in 1857, and it stands at the top of a couple of stone stairs that marks the entrance to the campus. Roman himself isn’t supposed to walk through the arch, in theory, because he never graduated.
Legend has it that a freshman by the name of Daniel Redfern in 1905 vowed to never cross under the arch because he believed that until he graduated from the university, he did not possess the three virtues for which it stands: That’s wisdom, justice, and moderation. And this morphed into this widespread superstition. And it is now believed that passing under the arch before you get your diploma will bring you bad luck, or maybe even cause you not to graduate (or both).
Walk up the cobblestone street and you’ll find a tree protruding out into an intersection — more specifically: a tree that owns itself. It is a white oak that according to legend has legal ownership of itself and the eight feet around it. Back in the 1820s, a local fan of the tree decided to try and preserve it by making the tree its own master. Of course, there’s no real legal basis for anything of the sort, yet for nearly 200 years, the stated position of the Athens Clarke County Unified Government is that this tree, in spite of the law, does indeed own itself. It is the policy of the city of Athens to maintain it as a public street tree.
An inscription on its plaque reads: “For, and in consideration of the great love I bear this tree, and the great desire I have for its protection for all time, I convey entire possession of itself, and all land within eight feet of the tree, on all sides.” – William H. Jackson. (This is also a brass plaque that reveals that this is not actually the original tree, which fell down in 1946 and was replaced, so some people call this the son of the self-owning tree).
Walk a bit more and you’ll stumble on this is a lovely example of the rails to trails movement, which gained traction in the early 2000s as people saw more and more opportunities to convert disused railway routes into urban trail systems. In New York City, a series of old elevated rail lines on the west side were slated for demolition until citizens got really serious about saving it, and ultimately those raised routes became the now super popular Highline Park trails.
Meanwhile, also in the early 2000s, an old elevated rail line trestle was going to be torn down in Athens where this park is, but it was saved because of the trestle’s cultural significance. And that cultural significance is that in the spring of 1983, one of the greatest bands to ever exist, R. E. M. released its debut album, Murmur, and The track list on its reverse side was overlaid on a photo of an old local wood railway trestle that stood right here. Over the decades, the bridge has been this destination for fans of the band.
Coincidentally, The same year Murmur debuted in 1983, something else happened that led to this park being here, and to the trestle’s preservation. Congress amended the National Trail System Act, and in doing so, they made rails to trails conversions easier to implement. So there was cultural significance, thanks to REM.
Thanks to the National Trail System Act, there was a pathway to turn this into a park trail. But there was still the issue of what to do with the old wooden trestle itself that went over the river. So park planners wanted to use the bridge as part of the trail. But the old abandoned structure that’s depicted on the album was deemed too unsafe. They considered using a series of switchbacks to just bypass the bridge entirely. But the solution was seen as defeating the greater overall goal of creating a continuous, safe, flat trail open to people of all ages.
So there was talk of replacing the old structure plank by plank, like the Ship of Theseus, but that was deemed a little too unrealistic. Ultimately, it became clear that the original framework had to come down and be replaced by something new. Most of the structural elements had been just rotted beyond repair.
The resulting replacement bridge mimics the overall aesthetic of the wood framed Murmur Bridge, but also features new robust engineering elements like a set of arch steel supports as well as overlook platforms up along its length, midway across the new Trail Creek trestle bridge.
It is a really worthy tribute to the past, but it’s infused with new life and new function. It’s this perfect mix of nostalgia and real progress, like making this community better and more welcoming for all citizens.
At the official opening of the Firefly Bridge in April of 2023, R.E.M’s Murmur played in the background, an apt accompaniment.
Projects like this can be this huge boon to the public. Railway pathways tend to be rare direct routes passing through the hearts of cities — their grid-defying lines would be impossible to carve out from the filled-in fabric of modern urban environments. So they’re really special and worth the effort of converting them for modern use.
This segment of the Firefly Trail is a small part of this 39 mile proposed path (see map to the left. It joins a host of really impressive “rails to trails” projects across the US, including: the 606 Trail in Chicago, the Midtown Greenway in Minneapolis, the Los Angeles River Greenway, and other urban projects still under development. Kurt and Roman have a lot more to say about this in our book, The 99 Percent Invisible City.
The 99% Invisible CityIt’s worth noting that there is a lot more to Athens than we’ve talked about here, including a rich variety of historical architecture, some of which was photographed by the Lexus team alongside Roman Mars as they wound their way around town for this episode:
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A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about her experience called The Loudest Girl in the World. And she found herself imagining a fantasy world where everything is tailored to Lauren’s very specific autistic needs. And she called this magical imagined place, wonderfully devoid of overwhelming stimuli “Autism Pleasantville.”
“Obviously,” Ober notes, “there’s not a one-size fits all diagnosis or even definition of autism … as the autism adage goes: ‘If you know one autistic person…you know one autistic person.’ But despite our wide variety of needs, I wanted to know how design is evolving to better accommodate us” — how were ideals being handled in the real world.
She wanted to know what it looked like to accommodate people with autism and sensory disabilities. And she had recently heard of a certification program meant to highlight when a city is autism-friendly, which in turn brought her to Mesa, Arizona.
With the support of city officials, an organization called Visit Mesa rolled out its autism inclusion program for Mesa in 2019. It included itineraries filled with autism-friendly activities in and around the city. Also professional development for folks in all types of industries in Mesa — healthcare, education, hospitality, as well as local government.
They’ve put in a lot of effort, but Ober wonders: even “if we give Mesa the benefit of the doubt, it seems like these businesses are trying to do the right thing. But are these accommodations actually helping autistic people?” For example, a “front desk friend pointed [them] to an escape space down the hall where one could presumably go if they were experiencing sensory overload” — it turned out to be a bathroom.
Some community partners have put education into practice. Two of the city’s museums posted sensory guides on the walls indicating how loud or smelly or bright an exhibit might be. One hotel has adjusted its lobby lights to be more friendly on the eyes. It’s a start.
Still, overall, the Mesa project shows that there are limits to retrofitting spaces to make them more autism-friendly. But there are ways to accommodate neurodivergence before a single nail is hammered. It starts by integrating autistic needs into the design process. And including autistic people early on in the planning.
Ideally, spaces should be designed based on their sensory quality. So if we think of school design, a low-stimulus, high focus math classroom might go next to a low-stimulus, high focus English classroom. High stimulus spaces like a music room or a noisy cafeteria shouldn’t be in the same zone as the low stimulus rooms.
And it’s not just on designers and architects and neurodivergent people themselves to think about these things. It’s also the responsibility of city planners and politicians to consider neuro-inclusive designs both indoors and out. Pedestrian infrastructure, public space, how people physically move from point A to point B, they all need to be addressed.
The reality is that there is no universal principle of design that will work for the entire autistic population. Sure, the autism awareness endeavor in Mesa might be incomplete. But at least it’s a recognition that there are discreet communities that deserve to be accommodated.
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In the middle of the 20th century, the small town of Jasper, Indiana did something that no other city had done before: they made garbage illegal. The city would still collect some things, like soup cans and plastics, but yucky junk, like food waste, wouldn’t get picked up.
This change was made possible by a new appliance: the garbage disposer – that little grinding machine at the bottom of a lot of kitchen sinks. Most people call it the “disposal” (or “InSinkErator,” or even the “garburator”). In other countries, these machines are less common, but an estimated half of American homes have one.
Up until the late 1800s, food scraps would often be saved for another meal or repurposed to make candles or soap. However, with the commercialization of food came more waste. In U.S. cities the garbage literally piled up on the streets. This created not only a smelly problem, but a public health one.
The Jasper City Mill photographed from across the Patoka RiverSome municipalities started collection services to haul their waste to a dump. Others demanded citizens split up their kitchen refuse from their other waste. The discarded food would get sent to local farmers who used it as feed for their hogs.
By the early 1920s, these haphazard systems of garbage collection were struggling to keep up with 20th century consumerism. Cities and towns were burning garbage, even throwing it into their local river. All of this was seen as spreading disease – it was simply unsanitary.
To deal with the growing garbage problem, a few communities started grinding up their garbage in these massive machines and washing it down into their local sewers. General Electric took this totally new concept – mixing sewage with food waste – and tried to expand on it. They figured: if you could use a large scale grinder to get rid of the town’s garbage, you could maybe build small household ones to eliminate garbage at the source.
By the late 1930s, people started getting very excited about garbage disposers. Scientific American predicted that the disposer would make the garbage can obsolete. An article in House and Garden magazine introduced readers to new garbage tech, like rubber plate scrapers and waxed garbage pail liners — but its highest praise was for the disposer.
For his part, the mayor of Jasper, Indiana saw an ad for these new-fangled machines, bought one, tried it out, and developed what became known as The Jasper Plan. The idea was simple, if expensive: every home in the town would be outfitted with a garbage disposer.
A GE Disposall on display at the Dubois County Museum in Jasper (image by Jasper Davidoff)Not everyone thought widespread use of these machines was a good idea. There was a fear that the disposer would clog pipes and lead to expensive repairs. And so some places, including New York City, actually moved to ban garbage disposers.
But the city council in Jasper, Indiana was confident their disposer plan would work because they were already planning to build a new wastewater treatment plant. They could just amend those plans and upgrade Jasper’s sewers to accommodate for all this new incoming garbage.
To enforce the adoption of disposers, the town simply stopped collecting organic waste. Residents were thus pushed to buy the machines, albeit at a steep discount. Other towns and cities in the midwest saw the plan unfold and began to follow suit.
In Jasper and around the country, the garbage disposer worked its way into postwar housing under the guise of public health and the elimination of garbage. The appliance never did deliver on those promises, but garbage disposers remain a staple of many American kitchens for one simple reason – they’re convenient.
Today, treated wastewater organics create a byproduct known as sludge. In most places, sludge is simply shuffled to a landfill, but in Jasper, they use it as fertilizer. Local farmers often get it for free or a pittance. However, not everyone is on board with this approach. Some researchers say applying sludge back onto farmland can inadvertently pollutants into groundwater.
Regardless, all of this sort of obfuscates a larger point. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to build machines or find new ways of dealing with the remains of what we buy. But there’s a more effective way to keep garbage off the streets, out of the sewers, and out of the landfill. It’s figuring out ways to avoid creating food waste in the first place. Still, that would require all of us to take a second and think about what’s gonna happen to our garbage next. Which isn’t as easy as flipping a switch and watching it all disappear down the drain.
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This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
Blank Check podcast co-host and The Atlantic movie critic David Sims is our book club guest.
On today’s show, Elliott Kalan, Roman Mars, and David Sims will cover the first section of Part 4 of the book (Chapters 11 through the end of Chapter 15), discussing the major story beats and themes.
Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit.
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This year marks the 40th anniversary of a lot of landmarks in pop culture, especially sci-fi and fantasy. So many franchises were born in 1984. Some came to define the genre or invent new genres. The great podcast Imaginary Worlds noticed this and produced a three-part series about 1984’s Cambrian explosion of creativity that landed on the big screen, the small screen, bookstore shelves and, of course, the toy store.
In this episode we learn about at two iconic franchises that launched in 1984: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They came from opposite ends of the business spectrum. Transformers was a top-down marketing synergy between American and Japanese toy companies along with Marvel Comics to compete against He-Man — another TV toy behemoth. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would eventually rival them in cultural dominance, but it began with two indie comic book creators making a black and white comic as a lark. But Turtles and Transformers both ended up wrestling with similar questions around what happens when you put the cart before the horse in creating content to sell products.
Documentary filmmaker Isaac Elliot-Fisher and Cartoon Art Museum curator Andrew Farago talk about the incredible rags to riches story of the Turtles creators, and how success changed them. And host Eric Molinsky talks with Bob Budiansky, who created many of the original Transformers characters for Hasbro and Marvel Comics.
More about the show (which you should definitely check out!) below:
Imaginary Worlds sounds like what would happen if NPR went to ComicCon and decided that’s all they ever wanted to cover. The host Eric Molinsky spent over a decade working as a public radio reporter and producer, and he uses those skills to create a sound-rich podcast about science fiction, fantasy, and other genres of speculative fiction.
Fixing the Hobo SuitEric talks with comic book artists, game designers, novelists, screenwriters, filmmakers, and fans about how they craft their worlds, why we suspend our disbelief, and what happens if the spell is broken. Imaginary worlds may be set on distant planets or parallel dimensions, but they are crafted here on Earth and they’re always about us and our lived experiences. The show’s assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.
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Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he’d been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. Especially when he wrote a story that was critical of tech, he’d be accused of being a “Luddite.” Like most people, Brian knew at least vaguely what the term “Luddite”
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All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you’ve listened to over and over again. And then there’s a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— “Who Let The Dogs Out” by the Baha Men.
The story of how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. About ten years ago, Ben Sisto was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song when he noticed something strange. A hairdresser in England named “Keith” was credited with giving the song to the Baha Men, but Keith had no last name and the fact had no citation. This mystery sent Ben down a rabbit hole to uncover the true story and eventually lead to a documentary about his decade-long quest called Who Let the Dogs Out.
“Keith”The story begins in the year 2000 with the Baha Men’s hit. It was the band’s only international smash, and it gained popularity after being featured in “Rugrats in Paris: the Movie,” and gaining prominence as a sports anthem, played in arenas around the world. Pretty soon it was everywhere.
The Baha Men are a multigenerational band from the Bahamas that have been playing together in one form or another since the 1970s. They’re known for a style of music called junkanoo. The group was signed by an a-and-r man named Steve Greenberg, who stayed with them across multiple labels and break-even releases. In the late-90s, Greenberg convinced the group to record “Who Let The Dogs Out,” but theirs was not the first version. The song was already a hit in the Bahamas, and the Baha Men were wary about recording a cover of a song that was widely known there.
Greenberg originally heard the song via a British producer who got his hair cut by a hairdresser named Keith Wainwright, as in “Keith” from the Wikipedia entry. Greenberg instantly knew there was something special about the song’s hook. When Greenberg looked up who wrote the hook, he discovered Anslem Douglas, a singer in the Bahamian music scene, who wanted to use his platform to write a feminist anthem, something that could be a rallying cry for women who were fed up with the “dogs,” or men behaving poorly on the dance floor.
Douglas’s version was actually called “Doggie,” and wasn’t credited to Douglas alone. His then brother-in-law was the host of a deejay mix show called Wreck Shop Radio out of Toronto, Canada, and that show’s producers included two men named Patrick Stephenson and Leroy Williams. Stephenson and Williams wrote promos and jingles for the show, and one of those jingles contained the phrase “who let the dogs out,” followed by the sound of barking. Without knowing too much about music rights, Stephenson and Williams made a deal with Douglas allowing him to publish the song, but they weren’t aware of the Baha Men version until they heard it on the radio.
Douglas ended up signing an affidavit asserting that Stephenson and Williams were the original authors of the hook, but there is even more to the story…
20 Fingers and GilletteIn 1994 a group called 20 Fingers and singer Gillette came out with a song called “You’re a Dog,” which featured barking in the hook, much like “Who Let the Dogs Out,” but with the lyrics “who let them dogs loose.” Stephenson and Williams claim to have never heard the song or anything about the group 20 Fingers, despite the similarities. 20 Fingers made no legal claim to the song.
Miami BoomBut Ben says this isn’t even the first version of the song. Brett Hammock and Joe Gonzalez were a rap duo called Miami Boom Productions out of Jacksonville, Florida, and wrote their own song called “Who Let the Dogs Out” in 1992. Much like Stephenson and Williams, Hammock and Gonzalez were shocked to hear something so close to their original track on the radio so many years later.
The Dog PatchWhen Ben Sisto dug a little deeper, he discovered “Who Let The Dogs Out” may have an even older inspiration. Sisto was contacted by a man named John Michael Davis from Dowaigic, Michigan who informed him the lyric had its roots in his hometown, which is sometimes referred to as “the dog patch.” Davis says the term came from a high school football game where the hometown team, the Dowagiac Chieftains, threw a Hail Mary pass and people in the stadium began chanting, “Oooh, let the dogs out!” The Chieftains won that game, and soon became the state champions with this chant as their motto.
Joe Gonzalez of Miami Boom doesn’t remember ever seeing the Chieftains play, but he says it’s not out of the question he heard the phrase growing up in Michigan. Even still, it turns out variations of a “who let the dogs out?” chant pop up in regional high school sports even earlier. Sisto was able to trace one all the way back to Austin Reagan High School in 1986, which sounds remarkably like the popular “Who Let The Dogs Out” we all know today.
We All Let The Dogs OutDespite these conflicting claims about the origins of the song, Sisto says he believes the saga of Who Let the Dogs Out shows how art and creative work evolve over time. You can never truly know where an idea comes from, but perhaps that’s just the mystery of artistic production.
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Right now, in Manhattan, 18% of office space is vacant. At the same time, the city of New York has a major housing problem, with more than 100,000 people using the municipal shelter system. So Eric Adams and city officials are talking a lot about taking those empty offices, and filling them with people. New
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Swan Real is in this week for Roman Mars, asking: “What makes you sound the way you do? Maybe you’ve been told that you speak like your mom, or that you laugh like your uncle. Maybe you sometimes slip back into an accent that reveals something about your past. Maybe you have a habit of
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Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the first episode yet you should totally go back and listen. It’s a lot of fun. Trail Mix We’re going to kick this second episode once again starting with a conversation with
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A good trail is one that is easy to follow and well maintained. Each trail is designed, constructed and maintained to meet specific standards. These standards relate to the recreational experience the trail is intended to provide. But trails are something many of us take for granted — they are just there, as if naturally
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Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates stuff like furniture and electronics and household appliances. Basically, the agency is supposed to make sure that the stuff we buy is safe, and won’t kill us or
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We meet Andrew Leland as he’s suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he’s midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began
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This past May, the city of Los Angeles rolled out a brand new, state-of-the art feature for bus shelters. It’s called La Sombrita. La Sombrita is a metal screen that’s intended to provide shade for the thousands of people who ride the bus every day. The shade screen is about two feet wide, ten feet
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Since Chick Publications started in the mid 1960s, it has sold more than one billion tracts. There are two hundred and seventy different Chick Tracts, with titles like “The Death Cookie,” “Kidnapped!,” “Mean Momma,” “The Sissy?,” and “Satan Comes To Salem.” Many of these are black and white Christian horror stories that pull from a
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In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity. Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts with Roman Mars, host and creator of 99% Invisible, a sound-rich narrative podcast about architecture and design. They discuss holding pandemic meetings about the business of podcasting, Roman’s journey from science to public radio to 99% Invisible,
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The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s
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After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive
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Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is one iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. A recording that blares from trucks looking to buy old household items and appliances, either to fix and resell or to sell for scrap. The crews inside these trucks are essentially scrap metal haulers and the recording
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Earlier this year, the city of New York closed off several blocks around the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Instead of early morning commuters, the sidewalks around the building were flooded with reporters, photographers, and camera people. They were there to capture the arraignment of former president Donald Trump. Members of the media were so desperate to
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To celebrate the 125th anniversary of the New York Public Library, a list was published of the ten books that had been checked out the most in the history of the library — and most of these were children’s books, like The Cat in the Hat and Where the Wild Things Are. Curiously absent from the list, however, was a familiar classic: Goodnight Moon. According to Slate writer Dan Kois, this wasn’t a function of popularity, but the product of a decision made by a particular children’s librarian, who kept it off the shelves of the NYPL system for decades, from the 1940s through the early 1970s.
New York librarian Anne Carroll Moore is a complex figure, and while her dislike for this book might make her sound like a villain, she actually played a huge role in making libraries more accessible and inviting to children. Jill Lepore, host of The Last Archive, says all of those spaces we take for granted in libraries, oriented towards kids, arguably trace back to Moore. From a young age, Moore loved to read and her family was wealthy enough that her house had books in it that she could read, but alas for other kids at the time, libraries were oriented toward adults as well as boys. Children were too young to read, the argument went, so they had no need to enter. The libraries that did have books for kids often tucked them away to be checked out by adults for their children, not toyed with.
According to editor and children’s author Jan Pinborough, when Moore moved to New York, she became one of a small number of librarians advocating for letting kids into libraries. They wanted to offer more opportunities to working-class kids in particular, who had limited opportunities to read. At a handful of libraries, they began experimenting with stocking a corner with children’s books and then making that area just for kids.
Palaces for the PeopleMoore radically expanded on this experiment. In 1911, the New York Public Library opened its iconic main branch at the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue, and it featured a dedicated children’s reading room run by Moore. She outfitted it with furniture, benches, and other things for small kids. The shelves were decked with fresh flowers and other friendly flourishes. There would be story hours, not just quiet reading, and thousands of books — not locked away for adults, but left on display for children.
This new reading room was an instant success and the idea began to spread. Within just a few years, over 1/3 of the volumes being loaned out by the system’s branch libraries were books for kids. Similar rooms began to appear in libraries around the world.
Still, there was a catch — which is the Anne Carroll Moore’s vision also about what counted as children’s literature and what didn’t. Moore shared her picks publicly to help other librarians decide what to buy. She had created the market for kids literature and then went on to dominate and influence it for years to come.
Moore had strong feelings about what was good and bad for kids — she had high standards for the kinds of literature to be included, but that cut both ways, sometimes resulting in popular, relatable titles getting snubbed. Her favorites were most once upon a time style stories — things that were warm and sweet and lovely and would give kids a break from everyday life. Comforting plotlines in the countryside were the norm, not ones set in urban settings that reflected common experiences.
Children’s Literature by Seth LererIn parallel, though, a group of preschool teachers began going their own way, working just down the street at a progressive school called Bank Street. The school was run by the educational reformer Lucy Sprague Mitchell, and, according to children’s literature historian Leonard Marcus, at Bank Street they believed that children were curious about the immediate world around them, not just magical realms. So they wrote children’s books with less emphasis on flights of imagination than on everyday experiences. They rarely had plots, but instead were more like games — interactive and open-ended. A typical Bank Street story might invite the child to imitate the sound of a train going by instead of sitting and listening to a once upon a time story.
Weeding is FundamentalNone of which was to the liking of Anne Carroll Moore. She made sure Bank Street’s earliest titles were kept off the shelves of the NYPL. But there was another problem with Bank Street’s earliest children’s books: They were stiff and formulaic.
Awakened By The Moon by Leonard MarcusBut in the 1930s, a teacher came to the school — a woman who would go on to author Goodnight Moon — with a vision for change. Margaret Wise Brown managed to make Bank Street stories more engaging by turning them into poems for children, who she believed were still open to novel ways of seeing and expressing the world around them. Children’s author Mac Barnett says she also used page turns to surprise the reader, creating a sense of unexpected discoveries and making connections between previously disparate ideas.
Goodnight Moon was based on a practice she used herself, a process of listing all her favorite things in her room as a way to inspire herself to get up in the morning. For the book, she reversed the ritual — there’s no plot, tension, just a list of things in the bedroom of a little bunny then which you then start wishing goodnight.
By the time this book came out, Anne Carroll Moore had technically retired, but still held a lot of influence in the public library system. Moore saw Goodnight Moon as a horror, and she did not recommend it. At first, the book sold a handful of copies. She was never convinced that this was a worthwhile volume for kids, but as time went on, Goodnight Moon became recommended by non-librarians as a way to help get kids to sleep, and slowly became more and more popular. Finally, in 1972, the NYPL began stocking copies on its shelves. Today, tens of millions of copies have been sold in bookstores as well.
Yankee PyramidsDespite the feud between Anne Carroll Moore and Bank Street writers like Margaret Wise Brown, the books that made the NYPL’s 125th anniversary list owe something to both camps.
Miss Moore Thought Otherwise by Jan PinboroughSo perhaps it’s fitting that today there are children’s books about both Moore and Brown. Miss Moore Thought Otherwise, by Jan Pinborough, chronicles the incredible ways Moore got books into the hands of children. While The Important Thing About Margaret Wise Brown, by Mac Barnett, shows how Brown persevered to write books beloved by parents and children all over the world.
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Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta.
Train SetTrain Set: Track TwoFirst Stop: Shining Time StationIn the cartoon world inhabited by Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, anthropomorphized trains chug chug chug along the picturesque countryside of this hilly, bright and colorful island. But something much darker lurked beneath the surface of this children’s show.
In some episodes you see sentient vehicles being murdered – crushed or ripped apart – dismembered, effectively – often for fairly minor slights or offenses. But one of the most vivid and horrifying examples is an episode called The Sad Story of Henry. It starts off whimsically enough with an engine named Henry who gets a spiffy new paint job and wants to shelter it from the rain as it dries.
So Henry comes to a stop in this railway tunnel and refuses to move. Eventually, the big boss, Sir Topham Hatt, comes along and tries to push and pull Henry. He then declares that they will strip away the train tracks out from under Henry and brick off the tunnel … permanently. His fire slowly goes out, and he is left to wallow forever in an artificial purgatory for the crime of staying dry.
Warning: Torpedoes AwaySignaling an oncoming train to stop can be tricky — visual cues might get lost in the fog, and audible alerts have trouble piercing the noise of the trains themselves. So in the mid-1800s an English mechanical engineer decided to employee something new: explosives.
Trains were outfitted with sets of small “torpedoes” designed to be laid down on tracks behind them should they have to stop. Construction crews were also given these, in case other systems for diverting trains away from worksites failed. Remarkably, this relatively low-tech solution is still in circulation to this day — sometimes simple designs just work.
Short Stop: World RecordsWhile a number of towns, cities, city-states, and nations around the world boast being home to the ‘world’s shortest train,’ it turns out the answer to lies not so much in the actual inches and feet of train track but in how key terms get defined – in this case, words like “short” and “nation.”
The good old Guinness Book of World Records lists the shortest train line by track length as the Fisherman’s Walk Cliff Railway funicular in Bournemouth, England. This wee railway is just 128 feet long. Meanwhile, the Vatican Railway – serving Vatican City would seem to be a very distant second at 4200 feet long – but they claim the title of the world’s shortest “national” railway- which makes sense because they’re the world’s smallest nation.
And in California, there’s Angels Flight, which operates on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. It’s nearly 300 feet long, just one city block, and the ride only takes only about a minute – which they argue makes it the ‘shortest’ train in terms of duration. But really, all (short) trains are good trains — it doesn’t have to be a competition!
All Aboard: Private CarsA lot like the swank private planes of today, a private train car was historically just one of those things rich people could own — and many did. There’s this one car, for example, that was originally designed and built for Charles Schwab, the famous financial executive. It has elaborate woodwork, gas lighting, and multifunctional furniture among other amenities.
But private cars are not just a thing of the past — today, people still own private rail cars and pay Amtrak to park them and to tow them around the country on the backs of other trains. It’s not cheap, but for those who can afford it, it’s a luxurious way to ride the rails.
End of the Line: Slip Coachesback in the mid-1800s, the Brits questioned that most fundamental function of trains: the need to stop them at stations. On some routes, they began using what are called “slip coaches” – cars that would be detached at speed then coast to a stop at a station.
Each slip coach car had a designated engineer – who would unhook the last car in the chain when approaching a target stop, then slowly bring it in for a landing. Meanwhile, the rest of train would continue on its journey. And this went on for decades. The last in-motion slip decoupling in Great Britain was as recent as 1960.
Slip Coaches: Back When British Express Trains Detached Passenger Cars at SpeedA number of things contributed to the abandonment of this design. For one thing, trains were getting faster, exacerbating the dangers. Also, slipping coaches was labor-intensive: each slipped car needed its own engineer. Plus, to make a slip coach work, passengers had to be locked in their individual components and couldn’t access dining cars – and if they got on the wrong car, well, they got to think long and hard about their mistake while stuck in that car, waiting to be slipped.
11 Feet, 8 Inches: Infamous “Can Opener” Bridge Continues to Catch TrucksThe post Train Set: Track Three appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking spots. But even when we don’t resort to violence, we routinely do ridiculous things for parking, contorting our professional, social, and financial lives to get a spot. In the century since the advent of the car, we have deformed—and in some cases demolished—our homes and our cities in a quest for cheap and convenient car storage. As a result, much of the nation’s most valuable real estate is now devoted exclusively to empty and idle vehicles, even as so many Americans struggle to find affordable housing. Parking determines the design of new buildings and the fate of old ones, patterns of traffic and the viability of transit, neighborhood politics and municipal finance, the quality of public space, and even the course of floodwaters. Can this really be the best use of our finite resources and space? Is parking really more important than anything else?
These are the questions Slate staff writer Henry Grabar sets out to answer in his new book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, telling a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful super-organism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between. He reveals how the pathological compulsion for car storage has exacerbated some of our most acute problems—from housing affordability to the accelerating global climate disaster—ultimately, lighting the way for us to free our cities from parking’s cruel yoke.
The post Paved Paradise appeared first on 99% Invisible.
In her new book Nuts and Bolts Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.
Some of engineering’s mightiest achievements are small in scale, even hidden—and yet, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist.
“From the physics behind both Roman nails and modern skyscrapers to rudimentary springs that inspired lithium batteries, Agrawal shows us how even the most sophisticated items are built on the foundations of these ancient and fundamental breakthroughs in engineering.”
“Agrawal explores an array of intricate technologies—dishwashers, spacesuits, microscopes, suspension bridges, breast pumps—making surprising connections, explaining how they work, and using her own hand-drawn illustrations to clarify complex technical principles.”
“Along the way, she recounts the stories of remarkable scientists and engineers from all over the world, and reveals how engineering has fundamentally changed the way we live.” The book is available for pre-order at W. W. Norton in the US and Bookshop.org in the UK.
Three Things That Made the Modern EconomyThe post Nuts and Bolts appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Bad closed captions can be entertaining, but they can be serious, too, because captions are a critical tool for lots of lots of people. There are the people learning a new language, the easily confused, and of course captions are essential for people who are Deaf or hard-of-hearing. In the US, that’s about 15% of the population.
And with so many low quality closed captions out there, those folks are often left trying to piece together meaning from some bizarre sentences, or … to just stop watching.
The issue of crappy captions isn’t a new thing. Activists have been fighting for accurate, widespread closed captioning for decades.
Bad captions aren’t just annoying; they’re supposed to be illegal, at least on television. In America, the FCC is responsible for making sure the airwaves are accessible for everybody. And since 1996, they’ve required all TV shows to include captions that are “accurate, synchronous, complete, and properly placed.”
Broadcasters in the United States also have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which passed in 1990. The ADA says all businesses that serve the public, or ‘places of public accommodation,’ must be equally available to everyone, which means broadcast TV needs to be accessible for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing.
Taken together, the FCC and ADA rules are pretty clear cut. For TV, you need to caption, and you need to caption well. And for a while, those rules were enough. But in the twenty-first century, streaming television changed everything. Listen to the episode by clicking the play button above, and/or take a read below!
INTRO[[MUSIC IN – “Architect’s Medley 2022,” a mid-tempo waltz with strings]]
RM: This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. Last fall, the BBC made a huge announcement. They had picked a new lead actor for the legendary TV show Dr. Who.
CLIP: Hello! I’m Ncuti Gatwa, and I am the next Doctor in the next season of Doctor Who.
CB: If you need some context, a new lead actor on Doctor Who is like a new Pope being selected, but for nerds!
RM: That’s producer Chris Berube.
CB: This announcement should have been a triumphant moment. After all, the actor Ncuti Gatwa was the first Black performer cast as the doctor. But when this video came out, the announcement was quickly overshadowed but something that should have been totally mundane. The closed captions.
RM: Gatwa’s first name is spelled N-C-U-T-I. But the closed captions on YouTube replaced his name with a swear word.
CB: So, while the actor said:
CLIP: Hello! I’m Ncuti Gatwa.
CB: The captions autocorrected his name to “Hello I’m [[shitty]] Gatsworth.”
[[MUSIC OUT.]]
CB: That was…unfortunate. But it was far from an isolated incident. When you start looking for Closed Caption failures, you see them pretty much everywhere. I turned on closed captions for a week on broadcast TV, YouTube, pretty much anywhere I was watching stuff. And I noticed so many errors.
[[MUSIC IN – “Alvaar Alto”, a driving up-tempo beat with synthesizers]]
CB: The fictional country in Black Panther, Wakanda, became “War! Canada.” Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd were suddenly part of an elite group called the “Ghost Buses”. It went on and on.
RM: There’s actually an academic, high-minded term to describe this phenomenon.
Linda Besner: Craptions are captions… that are crappy.
CB: That’s Linda Besner. She wrote about craptions for The Atlantic magazine. And she says there are many, MANY ways a caption can be crappy.
Linda Besner: They are not accurate. They don’t differentiate between speakers. So it’s just, sort of, one long run-on sentence. It’s not grammatically correct. It doesn’t contain punctuation. So they are sort of halfway-there captions.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
CB: Look, bad closed captions can be really funny, but captions are a critical tool for lots and lots of people. There’s people learning a new language, people like me who for the life of me cannot understand the Irish accents on Derry Girls. And of course, captions are essential for people who are Deaf and hard of hearing. In the United States, that’s about 15% of the adult population. And with so many craptions out there, those folks are often left trying to piece together meaning from some bizarre sentences, or, to just stop watching.
RM: The issue of crappy captions isn’t a new thing. Activists have been fighting for accurate, widespread closed captioning for decades. And it’s not clear when, if ever, they will become a reality.
HISTORY + ADA[[MUSIC IN – “Marching Pizzicato”, a mid-tempo pizzicato string arrangement]]
CB: Bad captions aren’t just annoying; they’re supposed to be illegal, at least for television. In America, the FCC is responsible for making sure the airwaves are accessible for everybody. And since 1996, they’ve required all TV shows to include captions that are, quote, [exaggerated reading voice] “accurate, synchronous, complete, and properly placed.”
RM: Broadcasters in the United States also have to comply with guidelines under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was passed in 1990. The ADA says all businesses that serve the public, or ‘places of public accommodation,’ must be equally available to everyone, which means broadcast TV needs to be accessible for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
CB: Taken together, the FCC and ADA rules were pretty clear. For TV, you need to caption, and you need to caption well. And for a while, those rules were enough. Until the rise of streaming TV.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
CB: Howard Rosenblum is the CEO of the National Association of the Deaf or the N-A-D. Howard himself is Deaf, and we interviewed him over Zoom with the assistance of an ASL interpreter. Throughout this story, you’ll hear her voice representing his answers.
Howard interpreter: Here he comes. There we go! He says [sing song voice] “Hello, Chris.”
CB: Howard points to 2007 as the first time the N-A-D got involved in captions for streaming, when Netflix launched its on-demand service.
Howard interpreter: At the time. If you recall, it was the era of DVDs in the postal mail, right? Ironically, there was no law which required DVDs to be captioned. But I would say roughly 85 to 90% of them were. So many of the members of NAD were Netflix subscribers, we’d get our DVDs in the postal mail, and it was all good. Netflix decided then to pivot to streaming. However, streaming at the time, there was almost none. Maybe 10% of them were captioned.
[[MUSIC IN – “From Scratch”, a worried mid-tempo string arrangement]]
CB: Howard and the NAD approached Netflix about this issue, but at the time, Netflix argued the rules didn’t apply. They weren’t television, so they weren’t under the jurisdiction of the FCC. And Netflix argued the ADA didn’t apply to them either. Here’s writer Linda Besner again.
Linda Besner: Title Three of the ADA says that in places of public accommodation, Deaf and hard of hearing people must be accommodated. So they should have an experience equal to that of a person who is not deaf or hard of hearing. Netflix’s argument was, we are not subject to the ADA because we’re not a place. They were like, well, we’re not an amusement park or like, you know, some kind of public forum. We’re not a physical location, so we don’t have to do this.
CB: The National Association of the Deaf argued that, ok, sure, Netflix is not a physical place, but isn’t it a kind of social place?
Linda: You know, what about a family watching a Netflix show together like, this is a social experience. Why should there be a member of that family who is excluded from that content?
[[MUSIC OUT]]
RM: In 2011, the NAD sued Netflix in a Massachusetts court. The judge agreed that the ADA applied to Netflix, and issued a consent decree, saying Netflix had to provide captions for all of its streaming content within four years.
CB: Today, the full Netflix library is captioned. They have teams of captioners working on every show. And some of their captions are really good, and some of them are only ok. But according to Howard Rosenblum of the NAD, Netflix has done a fairly good job.
Howard interpreter: Once that case was done and dusted, we began to approach other companies like Hulu. Amazon. So all three of them agreed to the terms of a phased-in captioning approach.
[[MUSIC IN – “Persistent Myth”, a slow, melancholy synthesizer arrangement]]
CB: Since the Netflix case, the National Association of the Deaf has been playing a game of whack-a-mole with the internet. Basically, a new streaming thing will crop up, and the NAD will helpfully remind them about their legal requirements to caption stuff.
RM: The NAD has worked with companies like Zoom and Microsoft Teams to encourage live captions for online meetings. And in 2015 the NAD sued Harvard and MIT for not providing captions for their online courses.
CB: Most recently…the NAD sued SiriusXM for not providing transcripts on their podcasts.
Howard interpreter: Nearly all podcasts are recorded, right? They’re not live. There’s no excuse for not providing a transcript.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
RM: Full disclosure here, 99PI is owned by SiriusXM. But I’ll note, our show does provide transcripts for all our episodes.
CB: While there’s been a lot of progress on the issue of streaming captions, there is one internet goliath the NAD won’t go after. It’s actually a place used by 80% of Americans, where people watch billions of hours of content every day. I’m talking about YouTube.
THE YOUTUBE PROBLEM[[MUSIC IN – “The Maracana”, a slow, off-kilter keyboard arrangement with driving guitar]]
CB: Linda Besner spoke to YouTube about this problem a couple of years ago, and back then, they made it clear – they had no plans to require captions for all of their videos. Here’s Linda.
Linda Besner: They did say, for example, for things like live citizen journalism, like the spokesperson I spoke with gave the example of Arab Spring. You know, if it’s somebody who is posting a video of, you know, some event that is occurring around them, are you really going to flag for removal that video because it doesn’t have transcriptions?
RM: Even though YouTube isn’t legally required to provide closed captions, they have a lot of Deaf and hard of hearing users. In 2009, YouTube tried addressing the problem of closed captions by rolling out AI-generated captions for some of their videos. It hasn’t been a smooth ride.
CB: The automatic captions are created with Google’s Universal Speech Model, which uses speech recognition technology and AI to identify words, and put them together into coherent sentences.
Linda Besner: Predictive text is something that, you know, you may be familiar with from autocorrect on your phone. You started a sentence and then it wants to fill in your blank, much like maybe your mother does. And much like your mother, sometimes they don’t know what you are going to say and you have to be like, [[voice imitating a teenager]] “Mom, that’s not like, I’m not…I’m actually trying to make the opposite point right now.”
[[MUSIC OUT]]
CB: The early days of automatic captions were pretty rough. And Rikki Poynter remembers them well. Rikki is a Deaf YouTuber. And in 2009, she was watching a lot of beauty videos, using the brand new automatic captions.
Rikki Poynter: I remember, when I was watching a video about concealers, and the automatic captions, I had them on, and they were saying “zebra”, the mammal, the animal, whatever, in place of the word “concealers,” which was so bizarre. [[Laughter.]]
[[MUSIC IN – “Vulnerable Grid”, upbeat, slow-moving guitar-driven beat]]
CB: Rikki started her YouTube career making videos about makeup and beauty products. But she wanted to do something different. So in 2014, Rikki produced a video called “Things You Shouldn’t Say To People Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing,” where she lampoons the clueless questions she was always being asked by hearing folks.
Audio of Rikki from “Things You Shouldn’t Say To People Who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing” – [[Question voice]] Is Deafness contagious? [[Normal cadence]] I don’t know but come over, I’ll cough on you and we’ll find out tomorrow. [[Question voice]] Why don’t you know sign language, you must not really be Deaf? [[Normal cadence]] Well, last time I checked Deafness has to do with whether or not your ears work and not the languages that you know.
CB: A couple of Rikki’s videos focused on the issue of closed captioning. And in one video, Rikki made a call to arms, asking her fellow YouTubers to ditch automatic captions, and write their own captions instead. Or better yet, to hire a professional service to make the captions for them.
RM: The campaign for human closed captions went viral. And Rikki caught the attention of some of YouTube’s biggest stars.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
Archival Audio of Tyler Oakley “Hear Me Out” video: [[Ukelele music playing underneath]] I want to make my little community here on YouTube more inclusive. And one of the ways I have decided to do that in the new year is by closed captioning every single one of my videos.
[[Tyler’s voice fades out underneath.]]
Rikki Poynter: [00:08:38] Tyler Oakley made a video while I was on a plane on the way to L.A., actually. And it was titled “Hear Me Out,” or something, and I was in the thumbnail, and he was talking about the importance of captions. And I had no idea until I had landed in L.A., turned on my phone, and I was getting so many notifications.
Archival Audio of Tyler Oakley “Hear Me Out” video: [[Audio of Tyler fades back in]] I saw a video from a YouTuber named Rikki Poynter talking about the importance of it, and why…[[Tyler’s voice fades out]]
CB: Today, Oakley’s video about closed captions has been watched more than 1.8 million times. And after that, other big time YouTubers weighed in, like Lilly Singh. But Rikki Poynter wanted to push the campaign into a higher gear. So in 2016, she launched a hashtag, called “No More Craptions.”
RM: The term had been floating around the Internet for a while, but Rikki helped bring it to the mainstream. Lots of YouTubers, both Deaf and hearing, made videos pledging to include human-produced captions in their videos.
[[MUSIC IN – “Bonkers Color”, peppy keyboard beat that changes tempo mid-way through, becoming a slow, mournful tune]]
Montage of YouTubers Discussing Closed Captions
First YouTuber: Closed captions help the Deaf and the hard of hearing…
Second YouTuber: Hello, today’s video is about the No More Craptions campaign.
Third YouTuber: Why isn’t this video closed captioned when it’s labeled closed captioned? And I was freaking out, because, [[Exaggerated voice]] Ahhhh…
End of Montage
Rikki Poynter: There’s some big beauty creators that have made announcements that they were going to start captioning. And they would start captioning a couple of videos at a time.
CB: Things were getting better! Human captions were showing up on more and more videos.. Until…some YouTubers just stopped doing it.
Rikki Poynter: As the years went on and like a lot of them would have fallen off of that. So that’s been kind of upsetting. [[Sighs]]
[[MUSIC OUT]]
HUMAN CAPTIONINGRM: Rikki says it was disappointing to see many YouTubers stop captioning their videos. There’s no mystery as to why this happened. Do-it-yourself captions can be time consuming.
CB: Meanwhile, hiring a professional to make your closed captions can be expensive. Professional captioners, on the whole, they aren’t paid very well. But for a YouTuber, dropping $40 or $50 to caption a video can add up pretty quickly. Look, captioning videos at a professional level is hard work.
Emma Healey: Oh, I got headaches. Yeah. And like, yeah, my eyes. I mean, my vision is not great anyway, but it was, it was pretty bad for all that stuff.
CB: My friend Emma Healey started work as a closed captioner in Toronto in 2017.
Emma Healey: The company that I was working for had been subcontracted out by an Australian broadcasting company. So I was captioning with Australian broadcasting rules.
CB: For this job, Emma had to watch a lot of crappy TV.
Emma Healey: A big one that people would complain about was Crocamole, which was an Australian children’s television show about a crocodile that loved guacamole. Named Crocamole.
CB: I got to be honest, our interview devolved into watching Crocamole for like half an hour.
Crocamole song plays, then fades under.
Emma Healey: [[Laughing]] It’s not the most lyrically inventive.
Chris Berube: This is first thought, best thought.
Emma Healey: His eyes are really sad.
CB: Even though Emma was captioning some pretty simple TV shows, the work took a very long time. Emma says she would do about 40 minutes of captioning in an eight hour shift. And that was on a good day.
Emma Healey: The place that I was working there was, I believe, a 75 page manual full of rules, all very technical. And you had to memorize basically all of them.
CB: Emma showed me the manual, which outlines the rules for how captions are supposed to look on Australian broadcast TV. And it made professional captioning seem impossibly byzantine.
[[MUSIC IN – “Mass Trespass”, driving, military-style drum beat]]
Emma Healey: Here we go. Minimum duration is one second no maximum, but 7 to 8 seconds is typical. Do not leave captions on screen overly long for no reason, if the dialog has ended. There must be a one second blank captions starting on the first frame of the program… [[Voice fades out underneath narration]]
CB: It goes on like this. For 75 pages. Emma had to keep all of this stuff in mind, for what was ultimately a minimum wage job.
RM: Professional captioning is complicated, because it’s not just about getting the words right. You also have to nail the punctuation. And the placement of the caption. And lots of other small details. Here’s Linda Besner.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
Linda Besner: So the gold standard for closed captioning would be something where, you know, for example, you and I are talking. When I am talking it might say Linda, colon, and then there would be a capital letter to indicate that I am beginning a sentence. And then it would faithfully represent what I have said, with question marks, where I have asked a question, and commas where commas go. When there is, you know, one of the cats makes a noise in the background [[Cats meowing]], there would be square brackets, cat meowing. If you know, a violent windstorm swept over [[Raindrops sweep against windowpane sound effects]] and you could hear, you know, raindrops coming against the window, it would have, bracket, “raindrops sweep against window pane.” And so this kind of caption really gives you the feeling that you are you are privy to anything in the auditory environment of that video.
CB: YouTube creators could either hire a professional captioner, which is expensive, or do this work themselves, which takes a long time for a beginner. So lots of them just don’t bother. Since Rikki’s campaign, there have been signs of progress.
THE FUTURE[[MUSIC IN – “Roof Test”, hopeful, mid-tempo keyboard song]]
CB: According to YouTube, in the past few years, there’s actually been an increase in the number of human captions submitted by creators. From 2020 to 2021, the number of videos with manual captions on YouTube went up by 30%. But despite this uptick, let’s think about the bigger picture here. Automatic captions are still by far the most common type of caption on the platform.
RM: To this day, Youtube has no plans to require human-generated captions on their videos. And the NAD has said it has no plans to sue YouTube. Legally speaking, Howard Rosenblum doesn’t think the NAD can make an argument YouTube is covered by the ADA. Also, Howard believes it would be incredibly difficult to caption everything on the site.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
Howard interpreter: For YouTube, we do work closely, for example, with Google, who, well, owns YouTube. And we’ve talked through this issue. And there are two separate problems at play, one of which is working retroactively on the millions of minutes of content that is already uploaded to YouTube. Staggers the imagination.
CB: The second issue is the huge amount of new content uploaded every day.
Howard interpreter: I don’t remember the number of hours of videos posted to YouTube every minute, but it’s mind boggling.
RM: YouTube has experimented with ways to encourage more human captioning. In 2018, they introduced a program called “community captions,” where volunteers could submit captions for popular videos. Many Deaf YouTubers liked the program. But it was discontinued in 2020, because many of the volunteer captioners were submitting jokes or promotional material instead of accurate captions.
CB: When I reached out to YouTube, they pointed to a couple of new programs they are rolling out, one to allow users to give ‘subtitle editors’ permission to fix up their captions, another allows you to submit corrections for inaccurate captions on certain videos. But ultimately, it feels like YouTube is putting all of its chips on AI to fill in the caption gap. Just let the automatic captions continue improving until they get closer to total accuracy.
RM: To be fair, the automatic captions have gotten a lot better. YouTube would not share accuracy numbers for this story. But according to the Media Hub at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, YouTube auto-captions are somewhere around 70% accurate. That’s a big improvement from the early days.
CB: Rikki Poynter says she’s noticed the difference. AI captions still don’t include contextual things like the rain is softly falling softly in the background against the windowpane. But the AI has become very good at identifying dialogue.
Rikki Poynter: If I were to read the back of this floss package for a video… I don’t know, somebody is talking about floss out there. Dentists, right? So if I were to say, you know, [[Reading]] “dentists recommend daily flossing to help remove decay causing material from between teeth and under gums,” the automatic captions would be able to write that out, word-wise usually, really pretty well.
CB: There are still some major problems that auto-captions haven’t figured out. Grammar remains a problem. And the AI is pretty good with words in English, but it really struggles with other languages, especially when it comes to names and places. This is a pretty common complaint about AI programs, the way they can adopt certain biases.
RM: And there’s another issue with the captions produced by AI. Many users find them hard to read.
Rikki Poynter: They move in a more, like kinetic… I think that’s the term I learned like a week ago. Kinetic way where it [[Long pauses]] sounds [pause] like [pause] words [pause] are [pause] coming [pause] like this. They show up [[Pauses]] one [pause] word [pause] at [pause] a [pause] time. And that’s not the most accessible way to follow.
[[MUSIC IN – “Dial Up”, driving mid-tempo beat punctuated by the sounds of a dial-up modem]]
CB: Still, despite the challenges and frequent wonkiness, automatic captions just keep getting better. And they will keep improving. I mean, have you been following the terrifying progress of AI lately? There’s an AI program good enough to pass the bar exam now. So how hard are closed captions? Howard Rosenblum thinks the AI captions will compete with human captioners a lot faster than we think.
Howard interpreter: Five years ago, I would have said, ain’t no way. There is no way ASR is going to get anywhere. But now? Like. It’s shocking how much better it’s gotten. In five years, who even knows? I suspect it will be better. Maybe it will be less than five years.
CB: To me, it feels very possible the automatic captions will get close to 100% accuracy, at least for speech. But even if we can get there, the fact is, we aren’t there yet. And Deaf and hard-of-hearing people have real accessibility needs, right now. People like Rikki Poynter.
Rikki Poynter: I mean, would I love for automatic captions to be 100%? Absolutely. But it’s hard to know if that’s ever going to be possible, maybe in the year 3000? [[Laughs.]] I don’t want to wait years and years and years and years for that to happen.
[[MUSIC IN – “Ours to Lose”, contemplative, cello-driven piano song]]
CB: Rikki doesn’t go on YouTube much anymore. Not because of accessibility. It’s because, frankly, she feels like she’s growing out of it. A lot of her friends have left. It doesn’t feel like such a special community these days. Still, once in a while, Rikki checks in on her favorite accounts. Recently, she saw that one of her favorite creators had published her first video after a long hiatus.
Rikki Poynter: Charlie McDonnell, Charlie is so cool. Like, she came back to YouTube.
CB: Rikki was excited to watch the video. But as always, she was dreading the automatic captions. To Rikki’s surprise, the video had human captions. They weren’t totally professional, it looked like the YouTube star had done it herself. There were small mistakes, just little things that might drive some people nuts. But for Rikki, it was good to feel like somebody actually cared.
Rikki: It was fully captioned, mixed case, full words, punctuation and all. And I was like…[[Pause.]]… That’s awesome. [[Pause.]] I would love to see more of that.
[[MUSIC OUT]]
RM: When we come back…is it just me, or are TV shows and movies becoming harder to understand? We have an answer…after this.
CLOSED CAPTIONS CODARM: So I’m back with Chris Berube.
CB: Hey Roman.
RM: So do you use closed captioning? Because I use it all the time for everything.
CB: Just all the time. Yeah, everything I watch on Netflix, everything I watch at this point where it’s available. Yeah.
RM: So why do you use them?
CB: Well, I use them because I get confused easily. Okay. I don’t use them for accessibility reasons, but I’m certainly not the only hearing person using closed captions. There’s this one recent survey. It was more than 1200 people which found half of Americans are using closed captions most of the time, and that number is actually much higher for Gen Z. That’s like 70%. So it’s not just people who have accessibility needs.
RM: So why do you think so many people are using closed captions?
CB: Yeah, there’s a lot of reasons. I mean, one is that captions are just normal now, right? Like, especially for younger viewers, you see this in a lot of TikTok and Instagram videos that they have open captions. Which means that the captions are on all the time. You can’t turn them off. And this kind of an aesthetic choice, it’s just become a thing you see in a lot of videos. But going back to the survey, there’s one big reason that most people cite for using the closed captions. And the big reason is that audio sounds muddled. So people are saying modern dialog is more confusing, it’s harder to follow, and that’s why they like the captions so much.
RM: Yeah, I have noticed this. I call this the Christopher Nolan problem because it’s like he has a penchant for having mumbly low key but very good actors in his movies next to large booming sounds.
CB: I mean, I love Tom Hardy, but Tom Hardy, like, I don’t think I’ve ever heard him deliver a line straight. Deliver a line intelligibly.
RM: And so why do you think that is? I mean, why is dialog harder to follow now?
CB: Well, there’s actually a journalist who looked into this.
Edward Vega: All my friends were like, I can’t understand anything that anybody’s saying. And I was like, Man, I really wish that there is an answer to this.
CB: So that’s Edward Vega. He is a video producer for the website Vox. And he decided to look into this. Actually, the catalyst for him was watching the movie The King of Staten Island with Pete Davidson.
Edward Vega: It’s like it’s the emotional height of the movie. And he says, like, it’s hard. I think it’ll always be hard.
Clip from The King of Staten Island: [[unintelligible]] It’ll always be hard.
Edward Vega: But he mumbles it and he says it so quietly that, like, I swear to God, I went back three times.
CB: So Ed did this big investigation and he discovered, like, this is real. This is not in our heads. And there’s a couple of reasons this is happening.
RM: Okay, What are the reasons?
CB: So big one is dynamic range. So basically, if your movie has voices in it and your movie also has explosions, you have to make sure the explosions are louder than the voices. Right? Like, I mean, that seems obvious, but it’s something where the explosions have to be quite a bit louder so that they have an impact.
Edward Vega: When you’re mixing a movie, if your explosion is going to be the loudest thing in the mix, then your dialog can’t be that loud. And so you have to choose which one you want to move. Do you want to move the dialog down or do you want to move the explosion up?
CB: One of these issues, it is this idea of dynamic range. It’s balancing things out so that the explosion has more impact. As a result, the dialog suffers. So another big issue is the rise of naturalism in performances.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: If an actor mumbles their way through a line, if their words start to run together, there’s nothing I can do to fix that, you know?
CB: This is Austin Olivia Kendrick.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: I currently work as a dialog editor at Warner Brothers and Warner Brothers Television specifically.
CB: So Edward Vega very nicely introduced the two of us, and Austin says movie technology has changed and as a result, actors’ performances have changed as well.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: Back in the day when, um, when sound technology was first introduced to film, there wasn’t that that technology was very kind of primitive. Um. The only real option when it came to filming movies with sound was you were on a soundstage, a microphone was planted above your head and the actors had to stand there and project into the microphone.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: But as sound technology evolved and all of a sudden we have wireless microphones that we can place on actors, that kind of loosened up actors’ performances. They now no longer have to stand in one spot and project. And gave them more freedom and kind of pushed them more into a naturalistic style of performance. And that subsequently could mean mumbling.
CB: So there you go, technology. The second thing, that’s why you’re getting these mumbly performances.
RM: Yeah, but for decades and decades I know that they’ve been doing dialog replacement where like an actor comes in after the fact and records dialog to make it more clear.
CB: Right. Yeah, that’s ADR. And I did talk to Austin about this and she says doing ADR is actually pretty difficult, especially when the dialog. It’s very mumbly.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: When we bring actors in to rerecord lines, they have to match their performance to the way that their lips are moving on screen. And if they mumbled their way through that take, their lips aren’t moving very much. So if they come in and re-record a line with more diction and a lot more separation between the words, that’s not gonna match.
CB: The last issue. And this might be the biggest one. This is something called down-mixing. So this is the idea that a lot of movies and some TV shows are mixed for the best possible sound system, right? Many of them are mixed for Dolby Atmos. That’s the special sound system you get in certain theaters that has 128 channels. Okay. So you can mix something in a very, very specific, particular way. And then after you’ve mixed it for the best sound system, you have to remix it for other platforms like a television or a phone. And that is when you start to get into trouble.
Edward Vega: You’re taking 128 channels and you’re compressing that down into different formats with lesser channels. And most of the time when you’re watching something on your TV, unless you have a surround sound system, it’s going to be stereo or mono. So if you’re going from 128 down to two or down to one, it gets muddy, it gets a lot muddier.
CB: So lots of movies and TV shows, you know, they’re getting mixed on this sound system. Then they’re getting down-mixed for other formats. And Austin says usually the down mix at the end, that’s the last thing they do in the editing process. And sometimes they don’t put quite the same care and effort into it that they would for the initial mix for a movie theater.
Austin Olivia Kendrick: A lot of the times, when it comes to that down mixing, often studios do not want to spend that the money because ultimately time is money and rerecording mixers are very expensive to hire for that extra time you know so oftentimes they don’t want to put they want to put as little money into that area as possible.
CB: So, Roman, there you have it. It’s down-mixing. It’s naturalistic performances. It’s this dynamic range issue. Those are some of the reasons why you did not understand the movie Tenet by Christopher Nolan.
RM: Well, they’re not the only reason I didn’t understand Tenet. But that helps.
CB: Yeah. The time travel stuff also contributes to it. I guess there’s a lot going on, working against Tenet being a comprehensible film. So I have to say before we go, the video by Edward Vega on Vox, it goes into so much more depth on this topic. It’s wonderful. I hope everybody checks it out. And also, I hope everyone checks out. Austin, Olivia Kendrick’s TikTok. If you use that platform, she explains movie sound. And it is so fascinating.
RM: It’s awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Chris.
CB: Thanks Roman.
CREDITSRM: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, with editorial input from Linda Besner. She originally wrote about this topic for The Atlantic magazine. Linda is writing a book about people and their complicated relationships with money – look for it soon at a bookstore near you.
This story was edited by Kelly Prime. Original music by Swan Real. Sound mix by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia, who couldn’t independently verify that Crocamole loved guacamole, but we assured them that this was true and we went with it anyway. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. Our intern is Avanti Nambiar. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Senior Editor Delaney Hall, Christopher Johnson, Jayson De Leon, Vivian Le, Jeyca Maldonado Medina, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.
Special thanks this week to Caroline Mincks and Anne Ballentine.
99% Invisible is part of Stitcher and SiriusXM, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building… in beautiful… uptown… Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me @romanmars and the show @99piorg. We’re on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the summer of 2014. Finally, after more than 80 years of illegitimacy, the City of Oakland has legalized…pinball machines. Today, we travel back to a stranger time in the history of pinball, and 99% Invisible, then catch up and be sure to watch the Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game.
Pinball’s design history can help explain why it was illegal for so long. The game used to be a bit more like billiards — you’d shoot the ball onto the playfield with a pool stick.
Early Pinball game. Photo courtesy of Pacific Pinball MuseumIn the 1860s, the pool cue turned into a spring-loaded plunger, that you’d pull and release to launch the ball. The game was made small, to fit on top of a counter at a bar or drugstore, and it looked like a simple wooden box, with no electricity, flashy art, or bright colors.
Winning an early pinball game was much more about luck than skill since there were no buttons to activate flippers on the sides. You basically had one action: pull the plunger and watch the ball go. Without the flippers, pinball was truly a game of chance — perfect for gambling.
Early pinball game without flippers and (bonus!) taxidermied fox. Credit: HuhuThe ball would shoot up the right side of the board and onto the playfield where there were little pockets that would catch it, and each pocket was stamped with a different point value. To add an extra challenge to the game, pins (which looked like little nails) were hammered into the board to obstruct the ball’s way into the pockets. That’s where the “pin” in pinball came from.
The first pinball games weren’t coin-operated. Bars would buy one and they would rent it out to people who wanted to play it and gamble with it, like a card table. By the 1930s pinball games were coin-operated and you’d find them all over the place, like in bars and drugstores, where you could win a cigar or a pack of gum with your spare change.
Then the owners of pinball machines started giving out cash prizes which solidified pinball’s status as a gambling machine. It’s around this point that pinball became electric, with lights and buzzers and bumpers that the ball could bounce off of to get more points.
Early Pinball machine with bumpers. Photo by Avery TrufelmanThose points needed to be tallied up on a scoreboard, which lead to what is now referred to as the “back glass”— the part of the pinball machine that faces you as you play. The art on the back glass became one of the most iconic things about the pinball machine.
On newer games, a lot of the art is licensed from movies, like the 1991 blockbuster ‘The Addams Family,’ but a lot of the old games feature pictures of ladies in bathing suits, to appeal to men and boys.
The back glass of “Marble Queen” photo by Katie MingleAll of the lights and buzzers and women in bathing suits just made people want to put more and more money into the machines. Pinball became really profitable. The mafia got involved.
With so much money disappearing into pinball machines, the authorities started cracking down. In the 1940s, more and more laws were being enacted to make pinball gambling harder, and manufacturers would try to circumvent these laws with labels that said, “FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY: no prizes no wagering.”
Still, everyone knew what the games were really for.
Signposted on Pinball game by the manufacturer Photo by Avery TrufelmanBy the end of the 1940s pinball was banned in most major cities including Chicago and Los Angeles, but the pinball crackdown was most extreme in New York City, where, in 1942 Mayor LaGuardia ordered the NYPD to round up all of the machines. At a press event, the mayor personally shattered some of the machines with a sledgehammer and had them dumped into the Hudson River.
NYC Police Commissioner William O’Brien in 1949. Photo from the Brooklyn Public LibraryLaGuardia later reported that 2000 new police billy clubs would be made from the wooden legs of old pinball machines. Perfect for knocking the heads of pinball-playing ruffians.
LaGuardia did not succeed in ridding the world of pinball entirely though. It was still legal in some cities, and in New York, the game just moved into seedy underground establishments.
Meanwhile, game designers were still developing new features to save pinball. The most important development was the addition in 1947 of flippers, which allowed you to swat the ball around the playfield by pressing buttons on either side of the machine.
Pinball flippers. Credit: StefanWhen the flippers were added to the pinball machine, it should have changed the game’s legal status. It wasn’t a game of chance anymore, because players could control the ball. Pinball manufacturers and game designers just needed some way to prove this.
Roger Sharpe proved to the New York City Council that pinball was a game of skill. Photo courtesy of the Pacific Pinball MuseumNearly 40 years after the introduction of the flipper, In April of 1976, pinball champion Roger Sharpe was called before the New York City Council to prove that pinball was a game of skill. With much dramatic flair, Sharpe demonstrated that he could move the ball with intention, and the city council voted 6-0 to pass the legislation and legalize pinball. Other cities followed New York’s lead, and within a year, pinball was legal again in most places across the country. It just took Oakland a few decades to catch up.
Ironically, after decades of fighting to prove that pinball could be a game of skill, it turned out the most lucrative bet for game makers was on gambling machines.The last big corporation to manufacture pinball machines lost millions of dollars on its pinball division and decided to shut it down in favor of a more profitable operation: making slot machines for casinos.
Bally’s Casinos used to be in the pinball business, and their name comes from their first hit pinball machine called “Ballyhoo.”
Credit: Avery TrufelmanIn 1999, Pinball tried to make a comeback with a game that integrated a video screen with the traditional mechanical playing field.
Despite the mountains of hyperbole heaped on the promotion of Pinball 2000, it never really caught on.
Still, pinball has a devoted fan base, that love of the game for its vintage, analog feel. Even long after the pinball was freed from seedy backrooms and smoky bars, it still feels like a rebel’s game. You don’t have to be smart or athletic to play it. Anyone can suck. Anybody can be great. It’s a nerd’s game, an underdog’s game, and now, it’s totally legal.
You can play tons of old pinball games and check out the early games at the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California.
Michael Scheiss at the Pacific Pinball Museum. Credit: Katie MingleThe post For Amusement Only (Free Replay) appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Last year, Roman Mars teamed up with Hank Green to guest host Dear Hank & John — this year he’s back on the Greens’ show once again, but this time with Hank’s brother John.
In their podcast Dear Hank & John, “hosts John and Hank Green (who are also authors and YouTubers) offer both humorous and heartfelt advice about life’s big and small questions. They bring their personal passions to each episode by sharing the week’s news from Mars (the planet) and AFC Wimbledon (the third-tier English football club).”
Fish CannonThis week, guest host Roman Mars joins the show to discuss things like: Are roaches a moral failing? How do they do surgery on a fish? Why do only old people like stinky cheese?
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Every week, one in eight Americans places a bet on the dream of a life-changing lottery jackpot. Americans spend more on lottery tickets annually than on video streaming services, concert tickets, books, and movie tickets combined. The story of lotteries in the United States may seem straightforward: tickets are bought predominately by poor people driven by the wishful belief that they will overcome infinitesimal odds and secure lives of luxury. The reality is more complicated. For a Dollar and a Dream shows how, in an era of surging inequality and stagnant upward mobility, millions of Americans turned to the lottery as their only chance at achieving the American Dream.
In his new book, For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America, Jonathan D. Cohen presents comprehensive study of the American lottery industry. Gamblers, he notes, were not the only ones who bet on betting. As voters revolted against higher taxes in the late twentieth century, states saw legalized gambling as a panacea, a way of generating a new source of revenue without cutting public services or raising taxes. Even as evidence emerged that lotteries only provided a small percentage of state revenue, states kept passing them, desperate for their longshot gamble to pay off.
Alongside stories of lottery winners and losers, For a Dollar and a Dream shows how gamblers have used prayer to help them win a jackpot, how states tried to pay for schools with scratch-off tickets, and how lottery advertising has targeted lower income and nonwhite communities.
Cohen takes all of these pieces and puts the history of lotteries in the context of late twentieth and early twenty-first century American political, economic, religious, social, and cultural life. Using archives from seventeen states, presents never-before-told elements of lottery history, including the inner-workings of lottery commissions, true stories about lottery winners, and the operations of lottery companies bent on increasing ticket sales no matter the cost. If you’re interested in learning more, click here to grab a copy of the book.
El GordoThe post For a Dollar and a Dream appeared first on 99% Invisible.
Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure.
But none of that was inevitable. It wasn’t something that magically emerged from Dutch culture.
In fact, in the 1960s and 70s, it looked like the Netherlands would follow the same path as the United States. The Dutch had fallen in love with cars and they were rebuilding their cities to make room for them. It was only because of a multi-decade pro-cycling movement that cars didn’t take over the country entirely.
The First Golden AgeThe Netherlands is an amazing place to ride a bike. The country is as flat as a pancake and temperatures are mild for a good part of the year. And so when bicycles first started getting popular in Europe in the 1920s, they really took off in the Netherlands, launching the country’s first golden age of cycling.
In the 1920s and 30s, bicycles became the main form of transit for many people. Some cities even started building cycling paths. And because streets were relatively safe during these decades, a wide cross-section of people felt comfortable cycling, including elderly people and kids.
A New Kind of PlannerBut in the 1950s and 60s, things started to change. There was a new wave of urban planners on the rise and they saw bikes as a relic of the past. World War Two was over. Europe was rebuilding. People were buying lots of cars. And Dutch cities, with their narrow cobblestone streets, would need to be totally redesigned to make way for the vehicle of the future.
There were a number of plans proposed in the 1950s and 60s. In one case, the Dutch car lobby hired an American traffic engineer by the name of David Jokinen. He was supposed to revolutionize The Hague and Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam, Jokinen wanted to demolish a number of the city’s working class neighborhoods. He also wanted to fill one of the city’s iconic canals with concrete in order to build a six-lane highway into the city center. But his plans generated a lot of opposition, and helped to unite a misfit coalition of groups who rallied together to oppose his modernist vision.
Preservationists and AnarchistsFirst there were the local elites who had deep roots in Amsterdam. Like the NIMBY preservationists of today, this group of old money Amsterdammers loved the historic character of the city. And for many decades, since the country had begun to industrialize, they’d been advocating to protect historic neighborhoods and buildings.
Alongside the preservationists, a number of more radical movements began to take shape, including a group of anarchists called “Provo.” The Provos did not like the new wave of modernist urban planners. They didn’t want their cities becoming car-centric machines.
At first the Provos were mostly
protesting in the streets, but as they got more popular they moved into politics, even winning a number of seats on the Amsterdam City Council. There they proposed a number of policies to rid the city center of cars, including what was one of the first bicycle sharing programs in the world — the White Bicycles.
For the Provos, the bicycle became not just a practical transportation device, but an important symbol. If the car represented speed and capitalism, the bike represented the opposite: something slow and humble.
But even though the preservationists and the anarchists were a formidable alliance in the war on cars, in the big picture the automobile was still winning. Between 1960 and 1970, the number of cars in the country quadrupled and the rates of bicycling plummeted. Traffic casualties were way up. By the early 70s, over 3,000 people were dying in traffic collisions every year in the Netherlands, and hundreds of those people were kids.
This was true all over the world, as cars became more popular. In many places, like the U.S., people learned to just tolerate a new baseline of traffic-related injuries and deaths. But that didn’t happen in the Netherlands. The Dutch decided that losing that many children to cars was a price they were unwilling to pay.
Stop de KindermoordThe catalyzing event happened in October 1971, when a six year old girl named Simone Langenhoff was cycling to school near the city of Eindhoven. A driver speeding around a bend in the road hit and killed her.
Her father was a prominent journalist named Vic Langenhoff and he eventually wrote an article about his experience that ran on the front page of the newspaper where he worked. He called for concerned parents to form a group that would advocate for the rights of kids to travel safely through their communities. That group — led in its early years by Maartje van Putten — would come to be known as “Stop the Kindermoord” (Stop Child Murder).
Chapters of Stop de Kindermoord engaged in direct action protests across the country, blocking roadways and demanding safer streets. Like all good protest movements, they were good at highlighting the madness of the status quo. The parents involved would show up at protests, carrying images hand-drawn by their kids, showing scenes of traffic violence.
A Big ShiftExperts, too, were starting to question the economics of converting the country to be more car-centric. In 1972, a Dutch research group released a study predicting it would cost billions of dollars to build out the infrastructure required for cars. The study’s political effect was huge. Pretty much everyone agreed that building that many roads wasn’t feasible, and they needed to look for alternatives, in the form of bikes and public transit.
The Safety BicycleAdding fuel to the fire: in late 1973, the oil crisis hit the Netherlands. The Dutch government wanted people to use less gas and so they created a series of “Car Free Sundays“, where they banned the use of private vehicles. Kids rode their bikes down empty freeways, and people had picnics in the middle of wide, carless roads. Bus and train use soared.
The Car Free Sundays gave everyone a chance to experience street life in a new way. Bicycle shops sold out of bikes, as people rushed to buy them again. And all this momentum helped set the stage for the next phase of the Dutch cycling revolution.
Back in 1973 during the previous oil crisis, we had car-free Sundays here in The Netherlands.
JUST LOOK HOW UNHAPPY THESE PEOPLE WERE. pic.twitter.com/i8lQ1Yf9Vo— Costas Papaikonomou (@grumpyinnovator) March 24, 2022
From Behavior to InfrastructureFor a long time in the Netherlands, the conversation around pedestrian and bike safety had focused on the behavior of pedestrians and cyclists. The emphasis was on making sure you used the correct hand signals and understood traffic laws. But there were limits to the behavioral approach. Instead of trying to change how people acted, cycling activists realized they needed to build something different.
By the mid-1970s, the Netherlands had taken steps towards making the country’s roads more friendly to cyclists. Some communities had started charging steep prices for parking in their central districts — or they’d just outright banned cars from those areas. And others had started building special residential neighborhoods called “Woonerfs” which means “living street”. Those areas required cars to move slowly, at the speed of pedestrians and cyclists.
There were also some intriguing experiments with bike paths happening in places like The Hague, Tilburg, and Delft. But still, for many cycling activists, it felt like the change was too slow and too piecemeal.
The Dutch Cyclists’ UnionThe Dutch Cyclists’ Union was established in 1975. And if Stop de Kindermoord helped to put traffic safety on the national agenda, it was the Cyclists’ Union that really pushed for the creation of better cycling infrastructure, street by street, town by town.
In the 1980s, the Union began conducting meticulous surveys of its members to understand the problems they faced when bicycling. They compiled detailed data revealing that, in many places, roads were too narrow, streetlights weren’t adjusted to the needs of cyclists, road crossings were dangerous, and speeds were too high.
The Union developed a lot of expertise in bicycle-friendly road design and they eventually assembled a design manual with guidelines, written in a style that would be familiar to traffic engineers.
The Union approached the Ministry of Transport about lending assistance with further development and, in 1993, the government released its own version, which codified all kinds of bicycle-friendly road designs. The manual is still in use across the country today.
A Perfect StormThe Dutch turn away from cars and toward cycling resulted from a perfect storm of historical factors. You had the historic preservationists fighting against the destruction of the old cities; and then the anarchists imbuing the bicycle with symbolic meaning and political importance; and then Stop de Kindermoord making traffic safety a moral issue for the entire country; and then the Cyclists’ Union becoming engineering nerds and actually changing infrastructure across the country.
But there have been trade-offs. The cycling movement was so successful that, in many ways, it disappeared into the government bureaucracy. Activists from the Cyclists’ Union moved into jobs within the Ministry of Transport. And Stop de Kindermoord eventually merged with Safe Traffic Netherlands, a mainstream traffic safety group that emphasized the behavioral approach over infrastructure change. Today, there’s less of a cycling movement in the Netherlands, trying to push things further still.
Of course, to people in other parts of the world, the Netherlands remains a beacon of progress — a far better place to use public transit, walk around, or ride a bicycle than many other places.
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In the Netherlands, about an hour and a half south of Amsterdam, there’s a city called Breda. Like many Dutch towns, it has cozy narrow streets, canals and plenty of bicycles. But there’s one historic building – right in the middle of town that really stands out from the rest.
It’s a big, cylindrical structure, four stories tall, capped with this massive greenish-gray dome nearly a hundred twenty five feet up.
Inside the building, there’s a wide-open circular hall the size of half a football field with the sprawling dome overhead. Along the curved brick walls, there are hundreds of heavy orange doors spread out evenly across the four floors. And behind most of these doors are small rooms that were once prison cells. When this place was first built in 1886, it was a penitentiary. But not a typical one. This was a panopticon.
The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. In the original design, all the cells are built around a central guard tower, designed to maintain order just by making prisoners believe that they are constantly being watched. The panopticon design is more than 200 years old, and it still shows up in popular culture, in productions like Star Wars and Guardians Of The Galaxy.
Over time, the panopticon has turned into something way bigger than just a blueprint for penitentiaries. It’s become the metaphor for the surveillance state. Philosopher Michel Foucault had probably the most popular take on the panopticon concept. He used it to warn society that what actually keeps all of us in check isn’t necessarily that someone is watching you. It’s just the feeling that someone might be watching you. But very few actual prisons were built around this idea.
Prison-Go-Round: Rotary Jails Spin on Axis to Let Inmates Enter and ExitAs the prison system evolved, it became increasingly clear that grouping people together could be problematic, leading to all kinds of strife and helping to spread diseases. So in the 1800s, a new idea took hold: solitary confinement got really popular, which led to a major design change: the rise of “cellular prisons”. There wasn’t enough space in the existing prisons to retrofit them with individual cells, so they’d have to build something completely new. In 1870, the Dutch government turned to one of its most experienced architects to help realize this vision. His name was Johan Frederik Metzelaar.
The idea that we’re under constant surveillance seems familiar to many of us now. We just kind of accept that there are cameras and CCTV everywhere, and that we’re always being tracked on our computers at work. But back in the late 1700s, a design for watching so many people all at once in a way that Bentham hoped would be productive. He believed that isolating inmates was key to a functioning panopticon prison. Individual cells kept prisoners from fighting, or conspiring to escape. It was easier for guards to keep an eye on inmates who were alone, making sure they did nothing but repent for their crimes. For Jeremy Bentham, isolation and centralized surveillance worked hand in hand. He said that inside a well-watched, cellular panopticon, jailors would see the inmates as “a multitude, though not a crowd.” And the prisoners would be, he wrote, “solitary and sequestered individuals.”
Several decades later, Dutch architect Johan Metzelaar picked up Bentham’s ideas. He was drawn to the panopticon because it solved several practical concerns. One of the things Metzelaar liked most was the emphasis on individual cells – an ideal design for solitary confinement. Since the cells were arranged in circles, inmates would have minimal interaction. Also, the panopticon was a cost-saving design. It would require less construction than the typical prison, because there’d be no need for a separate church. The priest could just deliver his sermons from a central structure, without the inmates ever leaving their cells. Plus, the prison was designed so it would take fewer people to run it. You wouldn’t need as many guards because just the specter of constant surveillance would do a lot to maintain order.
The Dutch believed that this form of punishment was the best way to make criminals more fit for a god-fearing society. The Netherlands enthusiastically used solitary confinement to both discipline criminals and prevent crime. But by the early 1930s — about four decades after the Breda dome prison first opened — people were realizing that this whole theory of rehabilitation was nonsense. The expensive, groundbreaking panopticon experiment in the Netherlands was actually a tortuous disaster. Isolation wasn’t rehabilitating anyone. Instead, it was causing severe mental illness and death among prisoners. Although this was a panopticon building, the main issue wasn’t surveillance. It was solitary confinement.
Then, when the Nazis occupied the Netherlands in 1940, they turned many Dutch penitentiaries into prisons for those who resisted the occupation. State officials, judges, and lawmakers were all put behind bars. Obviously a pretty unusual situation. But those Dutch elite got to experience firsthand the sheer awfulness of prison. After the war, Dutch leaders once again called for a transformation of the nation’s prisons. This time, criminal law reformers pushed for alternatives to incarceration. he Dutch were also again rewriting their laws to emphasize rehabilitation. This time, not by trying out a new and untested design theory, but instead by reducing the number of penitentiaries around the country. Starting in the early 1950s, the Dutch also began decreasing their use of solitary confinement. Inside of Breda, they got rid of strict isolation. They built spaces where inmates could interact, including a library, a gym and several workshops.
Prison de #Breda
Johan Metzelaar
1886
Pays-Bas #Panopticon #Netherlands #Koepelgevangenis pic.twitter.com/IHRctf2TJo— loOuisfernandes (@loouisfernandes) September 10, 2018
Today, the closed prison is home to Ukrainian refugees. But the panopticon building has preserved some questionable elements from the past. There are still bars on the windows. And the doors to the rooms where the refugees sleep cannot be locked from inside. There’s a dining hall in the center. Sun pours in through the dome skylights and falls on cozy armchairs. There’s a gym in the basement where refugees get together for yoga lessons and volleyball. Despite the cell doors and the old iron bars and gates, Breda’s panopticon has finally managed to become a truly humane place. But only after it stopped being a prison.
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Imagine one of those old-timey lumberjack photos. The kind where two men in plaid are working away at a tree, holding opposite ends of a huge, human-length saw. That is a vintage crosscut saw. Some avid crosscut seekers spend hours mining websites like eBay and Craigslist. But they also search in person on saw hunting road trips — driving up and down Highway 49 to stop by yard sales, antique stores, and even places where the saws aren’t technically for sale, like: the walls of local restaurants where they are displayed as decor.
On its face, it may seem a little intense to care about old saws so much that you end up trying to barter with your Cracker Barrel server because they have a wall decoration you just really want to take home. But the vintage crosscuts that backcountry stewards go hunting for aren’t just for show. Often, the plan is to put the saw back to use. After the paint has been scrubbed clean and the teeth have been sharpened, many return to the woods, bucking and felling trees in the American outdoors. In fact, thousands of trail workers use these vintage crosscuts today, to make trails and clear trees.
Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly 112 million acres of protected land. That’s ahead of chain saws and newly made crosscuts. And the reason this old tool has stuck around so long — even in an age when there’s a newer, better gadget coming out every year — it goes way beyond the physical saw itself. The rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is also the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness.
European settlers defined themselves in opposition to indigenous people. So the idea was, starting in the 17th century, white people lived in civilization, and indigenous people lived in the hostile wilderness. And for 200 years, that’s how it went: wilderness didn’t have the greatest reviews. Industrialization created the conditions for certain things to grow chaotically and exponentially – things like cities, factories, pollution, a working class. It shattered the old patterns of rural life and brought on new ways of relating to land. And it sparked the beginning of a reorientation of what un-industrialized spaces could do for people.
As steam and coal power came on the scene, cities got bigger, noisier, and more polluted. “Wilderness” became more and more appealing as a contrast to the pressures of industrial capitalism. Wild spaces were now being described as pure, instead of scary. Safe instead of savage. No longer an unfarmed wasteland, but more of a temple – something of value to humans that needed to be protected from humans.
By the Romantic Era, American writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau believed that wilderness was a creation of God that provided important space for intellectual stimulation; a place where ‘good’ men could become ‘great’ men. A famous photographer named Ansel Adams became known for his landscape photos of the American West, particularly Yosemite National Park. Adams helped propel the idea that America’s great wilderness was a point of pride and national identity.
But at the time, the idea of wilderness was still mostly an intellectual and artistic concept discourse. Actual wild places weren’t accessible to the masses yet, or even associated as a place to go on a family vacation. That started to change in the early 1900s when Teddy Roosevelt was inaugurated as President. Roosevelt established the Forest Service and Park Service, and America’s wild spaces started to gain national attention. An outdoor recreation movement took off that would only grow and grow and grow as Americans hiked, canoed and camped their way into the first decades of the 20th century. Wilderness became a place where not just wealthy artists, but everyday Americans could find the promise of health, relaxation, and moral regeneration.
In order to get as many tourists as possible into these Parks, the government went hard on building roads. And all this development meant that the crosscut saw was in extremely high demand. These saws were being churned out in huge numbers by manufacturers who were selling newer models every year. By the Great Depression, tens of thousands of Americans were put to work, many of them wielding the crosscut to clear trails and lay down miles and miles of pavement.
By this time, about a million cars were being sold in the country each year, many of their owners eager to drive down the newly constructed Yellowstone Highway which connected 13 National Parks by road. From Yellowstone you could drive North to Glacier, West to the Cascades, South through the Sierras, and east past the Grand Canyon.
But the success of these efforts troubled some of those early celebrators of the wild. With all these roads and tourism, it seemed to them that wilderness was at risk of losing its moral character, its purity. The unique quality of wilderness was that it existed outside of human life. So if all these pristine landscapes would one day be rolled over by hundreds of cars a day, was that wilderness at all?
Meanwhile, World War II and the urgent need for efficiency pushed the chainsaw into the hands of loggers. And since most loggers at the time were paid per tree cut, chainsaws were pretty appealing. Picture hundreds of crates of crosscut saws being pushed to the back of warehouses because no one wanted them anymore. Eventually, these tools found their way to antique stores or someone’s basement eBay business. Others found new purpose as wall decoration.
In 1964, Congress passed The Wilderness Act, and America did something no other country had ever done: it passed a law to protect land and preserve it in its natural state. The act brought about some major changes because of the way it defined wilderness. On top of being untrammeled, capital W wilderness was now an area without mechanization and the presence of motors. So in a federally designated wilderness area, there are no snowmobiles, motorboats, bicycles, or cars allowed. And for the hundreds of people who work in the American wilderness today, this means they can’t use jackhammers, powered rock drills, or chainsaws. Crosscuts first made a comeback because they had to, but now they’re increasingly desirable even in non-wilderness areas where chainsaws are technically allowed.
Ever since the crosscut revival, the vintage saw has become harder to find, especially as some are being snatched up by collectors or competitive lumberjacks. Many others are kept as family heirlooms. These days, new crosscut saws are being manufactured again. There’s at least one manufacturer in the US churning out new, modern-day crosscuts, available for purchase online. And yet, trail workers often find they strongly prefer the antique crosscut saw.
In 2005, The Forest Service even published a study comparing the quality of vintage and modern saws, favoring the older ones. These old saws are made from a higher quality steel and the teeth are set in a crescent-shaped arc. So there are practical arguments that they do cut better. But there’s also clearly an element of nostalgia in play.
There’s a certain romantic idea to using a vintage crosscut saw that feels really similar to the romance Aldo Leopold and others felt about wilderness in the 19th century. The pursuit of something untouched, unsullied by contact with humans and industry.
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In the 1800s, whaling was a vast and brutal industry–sometimes as deadly for the sailors involved as it was for the whales. And the global epicenter of whaling could be found in New Bedford, MA. All this slaughter wasn’t to feed hungry people with whale meat. It was about all the things people could make out of whale blubber, including soap and of course: lantern fuel. It burned bright and smoke-free.
Whale oil rendered in landed in New Bedford was sold to light street lamps, homes and businesses all over the world. The city even adopted the Latin motto Lucem diffundo which means “I spread light”. The phrase can still be seen stamped on the sidewalks outside of city hall. And then, too, there were all of the ways oil could be used as a lubricant, including but not limited to use on: bicycles, bolts, cameras, carriages, cash registers, tapped hands, chisels clippers, cutlery, doors, dentists’ tools, fans, firearms floors, fishing reels, flutes, furniture, golf clubs, harnesses, horses, hoofs, freezers, and locks.
In the 1800’s, whaling transformed New Bedford from a sleepy fishing town into one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Fruitful whaling voyages built vast fortunes for the merchants and financiers that ran the industry. Society men and women strutted through town sporting the latest trends in European fashion. And colorful Victorian mansions sprang up by the dozens. All built with that sweet sweet whale money.
The whaling industry pulled in anyone looking to make a quick buck. And one of those people was a local, New Bedford businessman named William F. Nye. Nye was something of a serial entrepreneur. He had dabbled in everything from selling fruit to building church organs. And, like just about everyone in town, he looked to whales for his next big score. Nye realized there were already plenty of people hawking New Bedford whale oil for lamps and soap. Those markets were saturated. But in 1865, he found a new way to sell whales to the world.
For most of history, machines were lubricated with whatever local material was lying around — animal fat, vegetable oil, sometimes just water or mud. But the industrial revolution brought an explosion of new kinds of machinery. Factories sprung up, brimming with steam engines and spinning machines and looms. Everything newer, bigger, and faster…and in need of lubrication. And suddenly, whatever peanut oil was lying around was no longer good enough to keep the modern mechanical world moving at top speed. The 1800s saw a wave of patents for new kinds of lubricant. These were not materials just plucked out of nature, but refined and mixed together. There were blends of graphite and lard, olive oil with rock dust.
It was a world full of friction. Scientists and engineers were racing to design quality lubrication for it. And William F. Nye realized there was something special about the oil from those giant marine mammals landing in the port of New Bedford. by the half-million. Among other things, whale blubber stays slippery and it doesn’t congeal in the cold like other oils. Whale oil is also non-corrosive. It doesn’t wear down metals. A vital quality given the proliferation of metal machinery at the time. Oil from sperm whales was a particularly good all-temperature lubricant — and sperm whales live everywhere from the equator all the way to the edge of the sea ice in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
Many of his first customers were whalers themselves. He sold the refined oil from sperm whales and some other species as a lubricant for timepieces, including chronometers. Those machines helped ships navigate at sea, often for years on end. Nye’s business grew, and he moved his refining operation from his kitchen, into a store front and eventually into an entire factory where he could make lubrication for all the new fangled machines coming to the American home.
Nye wasn’t the only one refining whale oil into lubricant. But it was Nye who had the idea to specialize — to engineer a unique refining process for each application of lubricant. He made a super-fine lubricant just for music boxes. And thicker one just for firearms. For every machine, he had a lubricant. Nye led the charge of oil refiners who applied the principles of chemistry, physics and engineering to the problem of friction.
By 1900, Nye had started experimenting with lubricant from different sources, like olive oil and neat’s-foot oil made from cattle bones. His specialty, though, remained his high-end whale oil, which he was shipping to eager customers all over the world. Nye had accomplished what he set out to do: open up a whole new market for whale-based products, and make a lot of money doing it. But the early decades of the 20th century brought what we know today as: supply chain issues.
Through decades of overfishing, New Bedford’s whalers had harpooned themselves in the foot. Whales grew scarce. And ships had to chase their remaining prey further and further out to sea. The last whaling ship from New Bedford Harbor sailed in 1927. The city’s once-colorful mansions fell into drab disrepair. And Nye’s supply of raw materials largely dried up. The market for lubricants was taken over by cheaper, petroleum-based products.
Petroleum products were terrible for the climate and toxic to people living near refineries. But as lubricants, they had a lot going for them. They were cheap and they could be mass-produced by oil companies. And they didn’t require death-defying years-long voyages in pursuit of an elusive white whale.: But just because oil companies could make lubricants on a massive scale, doesn’t mean those lubricants worked perfectly. In 1966, a British engineer named Peter Jost published a paper that would become the constitution for the small-but-growing field of research he dubbed: tribology. The study of friction, wear, and lubrication. It found that unnecessary wear and tear on machinery–caused by bad lubrication–was dragging down the nation’s productivity by more than 1 percent of GDP, the equivalent of billions of dollars.
Around the time of the Jost report, Nye’s few remaining employees began tinkering with a new type of lubricant. Not whale oil, not petroleum, but synthetic lubricant–made with new kinds of chemicals cooked up in the lab. Synthetics meant the company could turbocharge their designing of specialty lubricants for particular applications. Because now there were so many different chemicals to try out.
As the computer era dawned, Nye spent the late 20th century crafting custom lubricants that were just right for keeping keyboards clacking, printers printing, and hard drives spinning at thousands of rotations per minute. With a focus on synthetics, the company built itself back up. Today they make more than 1000 different lubricants, each designed to enable the most important technologies of our time. Including the Perseverance Rover currently exploring the surface of Mars — not to mention Xbox controllers.
Good grease doesn’t happen by accident. It’s taken centuries of careful design and development to keep our machines running, from the seafaring age to the digital age. Even though William Nye was chasing a fad when he got into the whale business, he stumbled upon selling a solution to a problem that would need solving until the end of time.
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If we’ve learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo and Myspace, it’s that internet darlings rise and fall — and there’s something darkly fascinating about watching it happen in real time.
The Lost Cities of GeoWe may now be seeing it all again with Twitter and Meta (the corp formerly known as Facebook). Some of us will mourn the loss of the communities and connections that we’ve created in the virtual spaces owned by these billion dollar companies, while others of us will enjoy chuckling over the graves of these once unstoppable behemoths.
Game OverWhatever your thoughts and feelings may be, the values and trends and hopes and ambitions that go into the architecture of the virtual world say as much about us as the architecture of the real world, hence this two-story episode reprising tales of two now-defunct virtual worlds.
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In the major leagues, there are four umpires on the field — one behind each base, and one behind home plate, who has arguably the most important job, calling balls and strikes. A strike is basically any hittable pitch — something over the plate, between the batter’s chest and his knees. And a ball is everything else. But one study from 2018 found that umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a difference.
A blown strike call can decide a win or a loss, a championship or six months at home, wondering what could have been. And while umpires are about 97% accurate in calling balls and strikes, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic. Something to take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.
The “robots” – a series of HD cameras connected to AI – are going to be used at the highest level of minor league baseball this coming season. Some games will use a full robot umpire system, while others will use the robot umpire as an appeal system if a player doesn’t like a call. The expectation is that robot umps will be in the major leagues in the next few years. But while robot umpires are more accurate than their human counterparts, baseball purists have asked if “accuracy” is truly what we want, in a game marked by human quirks and inconsistencies.
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In the months following the invasion of Ukraine, cryptic anti-war graffiti began popping up across Russia. People started writing out the phrase “no war” using asterisks instead of the various letters in order to disguise the meaning of the message. Then back in September, a woman in Russia wrote out the Russian word for “no” in chalk in the street. But then instead of writing out the Russian word for “war” – Войнa – she wrote just the first and last letters of the Russian word, with asterisks in between. Russian authorities had caught on to this trick with asterisks by this point, so the woman was detained by police and tried in court. In her defense, she claimed the missing letters were not actually from the word war, but rather a type fish that is spelled similarly. She was released by the judge, and now fish have become anti-war symbols!
This kind of cunning protest art makes for a good story. It shows how creative and resilient people can be in the face of political repression. But it can be hard to gauge its real-world impact. Painting a fish on the side of a wall probably isn’t going to bring down the regime. But there is an example from Soviet history of a time when art and humor made a massive difference in the trajectory of a different country: Poland. In the 1980s a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative also used a seemingly random symbol to spread its message: a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat. And that innocent image amplified a powerful political message to the world, which ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union.
In the 1980s, Poland was one of many Eastern European countries aligned with the communist Soviet Union, which was in the throes of economic crisis. A labor movement took off named Solidarity. It was led by shipyard workers and it was the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. And millions of Polish people supported it. But the communist regime responded swiftly, placing the whole country under Martial Law in 1981. The media became heavily censored, curfews were put into place, and everyday movement was restricted.
Supporters of Solidarity started painting anti-communist messages all over Polish cities. But they would always get painted over by authorities, which left these paint spots everywhere.
Drawing by Major Waldemar FydrychA man named Waldemar “Major” Fydrych, grew fascinated with these paint spots. He was an undergraduate art history student at the time. Major was really into surrealism—which is all about using your irrational, unconscious mind and liberating yourselves from the boundaries of reality. One day he smoked a joint and fell asleep next to a children’s theater, and when he woke up, he saw a man in costume—a dwarf holding a bottle of beer. So he took that as a piece of surrealist inspiration, and decided to paint a stick figure dwarf with a little pointed hat in the middle of one of the white paint spots. Instead of the beer, he put a flower in it’s hand.
Dwarf graffiti in the Old Town district of Warsaw by Krzysztof WojciechowskiAround this time, Major helped found an a political art movement called the Orange Alternative. He and his fellow artists took a surrealist approach to protesting the government. They started paint hundreds of these dwarves in cities across Poland, as a way to point to the absurdity of everyday life under communism. And the silly images resonated with Polish people, in part because they broke through the monotony of martial law.
Protest banner photo by Mieczyslaw MichalakAfter about a year and a half of Martial Law, the Polish government had regained some control over the country. Thousands of Solidarity activists had been arrested, and many remained in jail. Meanwhile, outside of Poland, international pressure was mounting. Sanctions put in place by the United States were hurting the Polish economy. And in July of 1983, Martial law was officially lifted.
But the artists in the Orange Alternative remained anti-authoritarian advocates for free expression. They published a satirical political magazine and began staging ridiculous demonstrations that they called “happenings.” They took the dwarf graffiti, which by then had popped up all over Poland, and brought it to life in the real world.
Revolution of the Dwarfs protest in 1988, photo by Mieczyslaw MichalakThe Orange Alternative provided more than just comic relief, they also started handing out basic goods that were in short supply in Poland. At their happenings they would give out things like toilet paper and tampons. The police didn’t treat the Orange Alternative lightly. There were many arrests. But the cops also didn’t really know what to make of these artists in costumes handing out tampons.
“Dwarfs” surrounding a militia truck in 1988, photo by Mieczyslaw MichalakBy 1988, Poland was alive with revolution. The Solidarity labor movement was holding mass demonstrations. And the Orange Alternative’s happenings spread to cities across Poland, including Warsaw and Lodz. Thousands of people would gather to chant dwarves, dwarves, dwarves!
Crowds of dwarves in Warsaw, photo by Mieczyslaw MichalakBy the late 1980s, people all over central and Eastern Europe were taking to the streets and demanding freedom and democratic reforms. The Soviet Union was losing its grip on the people. In 1989, facing pressure from the public, Poland’s government agreed to hold parliamentary elections. When the votes were counted, leaders of the Solidarity labor movement won out over the communists. Communism fell in Poland, and it led to a domino effect that ended up taking down the entire Soviet Union. It’s hard to say exactly how important the artists of the Orange Alternative were to Poland peacefully winning its independence, but there’s a strong case to be made that they played a role, particularly in reducing bloodshed during tumultuous times.
Today, there’s a protest movement happening in Russia, which some people have compared to the Orange Alternative. It’s called The Little Picketers. The little picketers are small, clay figurines, about the size of the palm of your hand that are placed throughout Russian cities. Some of them hold peace signs, or Ukrainian flags, or anti-war messages. One of them is pictured holding a fish. It’s easy for anyone to get some clay and make a Little Picketer, and then discreetly drop it off in a public space without anyone else noticing. They usually get thrown away pretty quickly by Russian authorities — but before that happens, a photo is taken and submitted to an Instagram account, where they persist.
These Little Picketers are one of a number of ways that some people inside Russia are using play and humor to express their dissent, against a very serious, brutal war — a war that’s already killed tens of thousands of people. If nothing else, these small actions offer self-preservation, like a way to save your own soul. And you never know: sometimes a silly little symbol catches on.
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The most recognizable feature of LA’s Chinatown is its Central Plaza. It’s an outdoor pedestrian mall that is almost overwhelmingly colorful. Brightly painted buildings are topped with sweeping pagoda style roofs, and then accented with fluorescent neon lacing. For decades Central Plaza was a thriving tourist area, but by the late 1970s, Chinatown had fallen on hard times. The neighborhood’s neon lights still glowed over the shops and restaurants – but there was no one there to take it all in. Then, in 1978, the area captured the interest of Paul Greenstein, a music promoter and aspiring club owner — in particular: a restaurant named Madame Wong’s, overflowing with the sounds of music and people. Except it was empty. The sounds of party-goers were just that: sounds, recorded and replayed.
Like a lot of business in Chinatown, the restaurant wasn’t doing well. Madame Wong’s would be lucky to get a few dozen people in during the evenings. An enterprising promoter, Paul wanted to turn Madame Wong’s into a new, hot music venue: a venue that he would book and promote. At the time, there was a rising musical genre just screaming for a new venue: punk.
But the issue was that almost no one — not the biggest arena or the smallest clubs — wanted to host these local bands because they had a reputation for rowdiness and destruction. So punks had to make do. They’d try sliding in through the backdoor of alternative, unsuspecting venues. Some bands would book shows in abandoned synagogues, or Ukrainian cultural centers, or the performance hall of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. But as soon as the establishment figured out what was happening, they’d pull the plug or call the cops.
Paul Greenstein was not a punk, but was able to spot an opportunity when it was right in front of his face. Paul was seeing that day after day, night after night, Madame Wong’s was sitting empty, and that there were tons of bands who would kill to play their tiki-themed stage. So he asked George and Esther Wong, if they’d be willing to open up their doors to local bands. The Wongs weren’t exactly thrilled with the idea, but agreed to give him Tuesday nights for a trial run.
Aside from the cool vibe and a convenient location, there were intangible qualities that lured young punks to Madame Wong’s. : Chinatown was safer than a lot of the other punk hangouts in Los Angeles and a big part of the appeal for punks coming to Chinatown was the “edgy” aesthetic; and Chinatown seemed edgy, mainly, because it wasn’t rich, and it wasn’t white. “I would feel that what was going on in the punk scene is kind of similar to what happened in Chinatown for four decades beforehand,” says William Gow, assistant professor of ethnic studies at Sacramento State University. He says that Central Plaza was built in the 1930s for the local Chinese American community, but it was also built by Chinese American business leaders in a way to attract outside tourists to the area to spend money.
So in the late 1970s when Chinatown again had fallen on hard times, Esther And George Wong were using the same strategy again. Namely, catering to tourists. “If you have Chinese-American businesses who are trying to attract, whose lifeblood is are people outside of the community,” says Gow, “the punk scene is just going to be another kind of aspect of that.”
Madame Wong’s flyer courtesy of Paul GreensteinThis sticky symbiosis between Paul and the Wongs was not without its tensions. Paul and Esther had different ideas for the club, so just a few months after Madam Wong’s became a punk haven, Paul was out and Esther was charting her club’s destiny. Within a year of opening Esther had turned Madame Wong’s into a prestige gig. They started booking not just local, unsigned LA acts, but big musicians from all over the world. It went from being a place that you played because there was nowhere else to go, to being the place that you had to play. Still, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. There’s actually a story that Esther pulled two members of the Ramones off the stage to make them clean up graffiti they had left on the bathroom walls.
But success spoke for itself, and Esther and George doubled down and opened up a second, even larger location in Santa Monica called Madame Wong’s West. The Wongs were savvy business owners who were strategic about how they ran their clubs. Since Madame Wong’s made most of its money through sales at the bar, George Wong would keep all sorts of detailed notes on the types of audiences that certain bands would bring in. Around the time that Esther discovered rock in the late 1970s, punk music was changing and a new style was splintering out into its own separate genre: new wave.
Although punk music put Madame Wong’s and Chinatown on the map, the crowds were rowdy and wrecked her beautiful restaurant. So as business began picking up, Esther pivoted and focused on booking new wave over punk. The new wavers tended to act a little more professionally and draw in slightly tamer audiences. Traditional punk fans were in the market for a new venue.
Hong Kong Low was a large, two-story building. On the ground floor was the main dining area, and on the second floor was a private banquet room that was booked out for buffets and special events. The banquet room was mostly unused, and represented a prime opportunity for someone with a vision.
Original Hong Kong Cafe flyer Courtesy of Kim TurnerBarry Seidel, like Esther Wong, did not originally set out to be a champion for punk music. But he had overheard the angry grumblings of punk bands who had been booted out of Madame Wong’s and they saw an opportunity for a business model. Every choice that Madame Wong’s made, the guys at the Hong Kong purposefully went the other direction. Esther made Madame Wong’s 21 and up, so the Hong Kong was all ages. If Madame Wong’s was going to cast out the unruly punk bands, the Hong Kong would would take them in.
Original Hong Kong Cafe Calendar Courtesy of Kim TurnerThe shows took a toll on the Hong Kong Cafe but the owners and organizers eventually worked out a deal that any damage done to the club would be taken out of the band’s cut of the night. The shows and audiences could get chaotic, but it was all worth it to draw bigger crowds into Central Plaza. Bigger crowds meant more money spent at the bar and in the restaurant. And although it was mainly a business decision for owner Bill Hong, the Hong Kong Cafe ended up becoming hugely important to the punk scene. The blood-soaked shows were working — kids who had to be turned away at the door were scaling the roof and breaking in through the air conditioning ducts.
One person who was not a fan of the Hong Kong’s chaotic, punk-loving vibe was Esther Wong. In the beginning, Esther was actually quoted in the LA Times welcoming the competition in Chinatown, but that attitude changed very quickly. Tensions grew. On one side of the courtyard was Esther Wong and her skinny-tie-wearing new wave bands, and on the other was the Hong Kong and the punks. The LA press got wind of this tension in Chinatown and stoked the flames of the feud. The local media gave the whole clash a nickname that was probably intended to be snappy, but exposed the underlying racism lurking below the surface: the Wonton Wars.
Punk music in Chinatown burned bright, but it burned fast. Within a few years, the genre had evolved and by 1981 bands like the Bags, The Alley Cats, and the Dils who helped define the sound of first wave LA punk had drifted out of the scene. Punk wasn’t dying, but it was changing. The music was being overtaken by hardcore bands and audiences. It was faster, harder, more aggressive, and tended to bring in a very different crowd. Madame Wong’s managed to survive punk and the introduction of MTV in the early 80s, but the bottom line is that even if you were successful, there wasn’t a lot of money in running rock clubs. After a while, the hassle just wasn’t worth it anymore.
The improbable alliance that Esther formed with her rock-seeking customers in Chinatown had come apart. In 1986 she told the LA Times, “The kids that come here now, they drive me crazy. They come here and act like spoiled brats. Some of them plugged up my toilets, and one band set fire to some paper towels and set off our sprinkler system, flooding the whole basement… It’s got me pretty discouraged.” After that fire in 1986, Esther announced she was closing Madame Wong’s East in Chinatown. And in 1991, after featuring bands like Oingo Boingo, REM, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers… Madame Wong’s West closed its doors as well. By this time, Esther was well into her 70s and the music landscape was a completely different place.
Esther Wong died from emphysema in 2005 at the age of 88. Even though her legacy was disputed by many over the years, the LA Times eulogized her as “The Godmother of Punk.” Chinatown is the kind of neighborhood that changes so quickly that if you blink, it could look like a completely different place. Punk ended up just being a phase that like so many people.. Chinatown eventually grew out of.
Chinatown Central Plaza (Photo by Vivian Le)The post The Chinatown Punk Wars appeared first on 99% Invisible.
On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they refused to record until they got their fair share. Evan Chung explores one of the most consequential labor actions of the 20th century, and how it coincided with an underground revolution in music led by artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
One Year is produced by Evan Chung, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, and Josh Levin. Derek John is senior supervising producer of narrative podcasts and Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Show host Josh Levin is Slate’s national editor.
About the show: The people and struggles that changed America—one year at a time. In each episode, host Josh Levin explores a story you may have forgotten, or one you’ve never heard of before.
What were the moments that transformed politics, culture, science, religion, and more? And how does the nation’s past shape our present?
The fourth season of One Year covers 1942, a year when inflation threatened to sink America, disinformation was rampant, and a worker revolt changed music forever.
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When producer Ellie Gordon-Moershel was growing up, she played baseball, tennis, soccer, ice hockey, field hockey, flag football, volleyball, field lacrosse, box lacrosse — basically whatever she could find. If there was a team and a moving object, she was down for it. Ellie’s mom, in her day, had played basketball, but not the 5-on-5 basketball we know today. She played 6-on-6 Iowa girls’ basketball.
In 6-on-6 basketball the three forwards only play offense. And the three guards only play defense. No one is allowed to leave their assigned half of the court. 6-on-6 still uses the full length of a basketball court, but in a different way than 5-on-5. In 6-player, three forwards from one team and three guards from the opposing team play at one end of the court. Meanwhile their teammates wait at the half court line. This 6-on-6 form of basketball was extremely popular all across Iowa.
For a long time Ellie didn’t take 6-on-6 seriously. It didn’t seem like it was “real” basketball. Real basketball — real sports — were what the boys played. Learned childhood experience made it really easy to assume that feminism is just about getting what the boys get. Learning about 6-on-6 illustrated how contrived these sports hierarchies really are. Small town Iowa girls didn’t yearn to play the boys rules, because they already had a culture where girls basketball was valued.
In some places, people saw potential in girls’ basketball and chose to care about it, and chose to put money and maintenance into it. They didn’t expect it to erupt from the soil fully formed. Our sports culture, how inclusive it is, how prestigious, is a collective choice. A choice that Iowa can remind us is all of ours to make.
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Most years, more than 15,000 people run the Comrades – way more than run any other ultra-marathon in the world. For reference, about 25,000 people ran the last Boston marathon. But at 56 miles, the Comrades is more than twice as long. It’s a slog by any standard.
Over the course of the day, runners follow a route that weaves through what feels like all of South Africa. The race passes through wealthy suburbs full of cafes and craft breweries and sleepy, rundown little farming towns. It cuts across the sugar cane plantations that first brought British colonizers to this region in the 1800s. There are shack settlements and rich private schools.
Around the world, ultra-marathons are having a moment. These are races that are any distance longer than a standard 26.2 mile marathon. The number of people running them more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2020. There are now thousands of these races annually.
Ponte City TowerAnd you only have to eyeball the start line of an ultra-marathon in North America or Europe to see that this is still an overwhelmingly white sport. But in South Africa, it’s a different story — one brought to you this week by reporter Ryan Lenora Brown.
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Back in 2017 we ran an episode about the history of Brazil’s iconic, yellow national soccer jersey. We were reminded of that story during the recent world cup, and then again on January 8th as a mob of right wing rioters attacked the Brazilian capital, many of them wearing those iconic yellow shirts. Needless to say, the story of the yellow jersey has taken some real twists and turns in recent years, so we’re rerunning the original episode about the jersey’s origins, after which producer Emmett Fitzgerald provides on everything that has happened since.
Soccer came to Brazil in the late 19th century. It was first a game of the elites but then over time became a game of the poor and working class. In this sense, says BBC journalist Fernando Duarte, soccer was the country’s true revolution.
And if soccer is Brazil’s revolution, the Brazilian soccer shirt is its flag.
Brazilians in their soccer jerseys by Danilo Borges (CC BY 3.0)The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. Compared with other soccer jerseys, the uniform is joyful and bold and seems to capture something essential about Brazil.
Official poster of the 1950 World CupBut it was not always this way. Brazil used to play in plain, unremarkable white shirts. The story of how the uniform changed goes back to the World Cup of 1950, held that year in Brazil for the first time.
David Goldblatt, soccer writer and historian, sees the 1950 World Cup as a transforming event in the world’s perception of Brazil — from a view of the country as an agricultural plantation economy to a new, urban industrialized power in the world.
The soccer stadium built for the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro (the Maracanã), symbolized this transformation. It was like a stadium from outer space, a fabulous, flat white concrete oval with flying buttresses. The stadium looked like a huge flying saucer dropped into the center of the city.
Original configuration of the Maracanã from 1950 to 2010, image by Arthur Boppré (CC BY 2.0)A lot of optimism about the country and its future surrounded the World Cup that year, and it made the expectations of success for the Brazilian soccer team extremely high. As the tournament began, they did not disappoint — beating Sweden, then Spain, then Mexico and Yugoslavia. The final game would be with Uruguay, and because of the tournament’s structure, Brazil only had to tie the game to win the World Cup.
Historically, Uruguay had been a strong team, but they were now a waning power. The former Brazilian province was now playing as the underdog and its captain used this status to urge his players on.
On the day of the World Cup final, all of Rio was focused on the game, and a good fraction of the city was actually there. Some estimates for the final game put the crowd in the Maracanã at more than 250,000 screaming fans. As players emerged they were hit with a wall of noise.
In the first half of the game, Brazil failed to get a goal and the crowd grew nervous. Then, Brazil scored and there was a giant sigh of relief from the crowd. Even the journalists ran onto the field and embraced the players. It seemed like the game was won for Brazil.
But halfway through the second half, Uruguay scored, tying the game. Everything would have been fine for the team had Brazil been able to hold at a tie. But then came the turning point. Uruguayan winger Alcides Ghiggia dribbled down the right side looking to pass. Anticipating his pass, the goalkeeper moved out of position. Ghiggia noticed this and instead of passing he shot and scored. There was utter silence from the Brazilian crowd.
Alcides Ghiggia once said that there were only three people who silenced the crowd at the Maracanã – Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II, and himself.
Brazil lost that game, and Brazilians were absolutely crushed. People left the stadium in tears, and some of their tears transformed into racist grudges. Recriminations came in quickly, and many focused on the goalkeeper, Barbosa, who was black. Barbosa and two other black players become the scapegoats. Later in life, Barbosa told the story of hearing a woman whispering to a child, “this is the man who made Brazil cry.” It was more than 50 years before the Brazilian team picked another black goalkeeper.
But Barbosa wasn’t the only focus for blame. Everything was scrutinized, including those plain white jerseys the players had worn in the game. Brazilians thought they were cursed and the soccer authorities decided to hold a competition to design a new uniform.
Four-color flag of BrazilThe contest had one key stipulation: the colors of the uniform had to include all the colors of the Brazilian flag (green, blue, yellow, and white). Hundreds of people entered the contest including Aldyr Garcia Schlee, a nineteen year-old illustrator from a small town on the border between Brazil and Uruguay.
Working four colors into just the shirt would be difficult, but Schlee soon realized that he could use the whole uniform to incorporate the colors of the national flag. The result was a uniform of blue shorts, white socks, and a yellow shirt with green trim around the neck and sleeves. This design won and went on to become an iconic symbol of Brazil, full of sun and life.
In 1962, the Brazilians won the World Cup in Chile in Schlee’s uniform. Players like Pele wore the yellow shirt and dazzled the world with their extraordinary skill and beauty. After color T.V. arrived, the world watched Brazil in their shimmering yellow shirts win the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2PJnLgOPyo
Aldyr Garcia Schlee had created a national symbol which was as visible and loved as the country’s flag itself.
But reality wasn’t living up to the image of Brazil that Schlee had created. Schlee had gone on to establish an academic career, but in 1964, a brutal U.S. backed military dictatorship took power in a coup. Schlee, among many others, was considered subversive and arrested. He suffered mental and physical torture, and when released lost his teaching job and was banned from leaving the country.
The dictatorship lasted twenty years. But despite the difficulties of living under the watchful eye of the military police, Schlee became a successful writer and academic. In novels, short stories and his academic work, his specialty became life on the border between Brazil and Uruguay.
Brazil/Uruguay border bridge in Jaguarão, image by Ana Raquel S. Hernandes (CC BY-SA 2.0)Schlee was born in Brazil, but less than a mile from the border with Uruguay. Growing up in this border town as well as his experiences under military rule, shaped his feeling about Brazilian nationalism and made him wary of patriotism. Schlee envisioned a better world “without limits or borders.”
Of course, the soccer fan in Schlee can’t help but be proud of the Brazilian team. But Schlee has a secret, or at least something he never shared with those who knew he was the designer of the famous yellow shirt back in the day. Schlee roots for Uruguay.
Brazil & Chile match at World Cup 2010, image via Agência Brasil (CC BY 3.0 BR)These days when Brazil plays Uruguay, Schlee, like other soccer fans, suits up in his favorite jersey — but not the yellow one that he designed — a sky-blue one, the color used by Uruguay’s team. Then he crosses the border and finds a quiet bar to watch the game.
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We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersection of a street and a road; the most unlikely of theme parks; and the evolution of ancient alleyways in Beijing, China.
Mini-Stories: Volume 15There are also many more minis where those came from — check out additional short 99pi stories above and below!
99% Succinct: 10 Multi-Story 99pi Episodes Collecting Dozens of Shorter TalesThe post Mini-Stories: Volume 16 appeared first on 99% Invisible.
This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there’s a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all around the world, with which reporter Gabrielle Berbey is intimately familiar.
A Balikbayan box is a huge cardboard box (usually weighing over 100 pounds) that Filipinos living all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines. The word Balikbayan literally means homecoming in Tagalog.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA400,000 thousand of these Balikbayan boxes arrive in the Philippines from around the world per month. But the holiday season is the busiest, with mothers sending to sons, brothers to sisters, and hundreds of thousands waiting in the Philippines for their box.
There is a bittersweet beauty to this box-sending phenomenon. On the one hand, it creates an incredible sense of connection across vast distances, but it’s also a reminder of how many Filipino people have had to leave friends and family behind to venture out into the world.
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The whole conceit of this show is that if look at the world in the right way, you’ll see stories everywhere. Some of the stories are epic power struggles chronicling the construction of a famous skyscraper or the founding of a city; but other stories are more modest, smaller in scope and scale. We call those mini-stories and they’re part of an ongoing, end-of-the-year tradition in which 99pi producers and friends of the show talk to host Roman Mars about something cool and fun that you can tell your friends or family about during a holiday get together.
Resounding Cities with Leigh MarsOne way to get a sense of the ambient baseline noisiness of a city is to measure changes in emergency sirens. After all, for a siren to work, it has to cut through the noisiest sounds around it. Leigh Marz, Roman’s sister, wrote a book titled Golden in which she explores this phenomena and other virtues of silence in an increasingly noisy world. In 1912, sirens were reaching 96 decibels at a 100 foot distance; by 1973, that number had climbed to 114; now it’s around 123 decibels. That might sound like a big increase, but that’s on a logarithmic scale — effectively, sirens have become 6 times louder than a century ago, and by extension, so has the ambient sound of the industrialized city.
Right Royal by Chris BerubeYears ago, Chris Berube was working for the CBC in Toronto while the station geared up for a visit from the Queen of England. Rooms were rearranged, bathrooms were built, all in preparation for an eight-to-twelve-minute stop-in by Her Majesty. But the strangest thing of all: everything the staff was going to say to her had to be scripted out and that dialogue had to be sent to Buckingham Palace. It makes one wonder: does she live in a Truman Show-style bubble?
Digging into the story further, however, Berube learned that not every visit is so scripted, and that it was most likely the CBC calling the shots on scripting what would be said. As a public institution, they try not to rock too many boats — and with a building full of journalists, it is entirely possible someone would ask something inappropriate in the context (a question better suited for an interview than a drop in). In the end, the twelve minutes were indeed scripted, and they even did a rehearsal with the writer playing the role of the queen.
Resonant Nation by Martín H GonzalezA few months back, a story went around the Internet about a bizarre computer issue from the mid 2000s. It was from a blog post by Microsoft developer Raymond Chen, who explains: “a laptop manufacturer came to the Windows team, and reported a serious problem. It turns out when they played a song by one specific artist, and in fact it was one specific song, the laptop crashed.” The song? Janet Jackson’s smash hit Rhythm Nation.
Today, solid state drives are increasingly the norm, but for decades the main hard drives found in computers involved a spinning platter with the data, and an arm over it that reads and writes the data — like a really tiny little record player inside of a box. And it’s spinning fast enough to actually hit a musical note. The pitch it makes depends on the speed of the hard drive, and that pitch is the hard drive’s resonant frequency. So if you played that exact same pitch loud enough, it would physically break the hard drive. When the laptop manufacturer was trying to pinpoint the problem, they figured out that Rhythm Nation had a frequency in it that was breaking these hard drives that way. And they even narrowed it down to one particular model of hard drive that was used in a bunch of different companies’ laptops.
There are a few reasons why other songs don’t break hard drives the way this one does — and why only Janet Jackson’s song has this particular frequency. The song is sped up very slightly to make it a little more exciting. And since it was is recorded in the era of tape machines, when you speed the tape up, it also goes up in pitch. So the notes in Rhythm Nation fall between the ones you’d normally hear in a pop hit.
Our engineer Martín was curious about which frequency caused this problem. Most of the theories on the internet suggested that it was a bass note in the song. But when he examined the song in spectral analysis software, he noticed one prominent 2000hz synthesizer note that lines up with a different hard drive resonant frequency.
The Roman Mars Mazda VirusIn his blog post, Raymond Chen wrote that there actually was a fairly simple solution on these motherboards. They just programmed a really steep EQ cut right at those exact frequencies. Still, it’s entirely possible that there are laptops still out there that never got fixed or updated, just waiting to break if someone puts on Rhythm Nation.
Beaver Droppings by Kurt KohlstedtBack in 2015, an historian working for Idaho Fish and Game came across an old archived video from 1948. The film had been mislabeled and remained misfiled for over half a century. It was titled Fur for the Future — and it’s all about Idaho’s practice of relocating specific mammal species for conservation purposes – including muskrats, martens, and beavers. It starts off simply enough, explaining conventional relocation projects. But then it takes a strange turn into a particularly strange and ambitious program that involved dropping beavers out of airplanes in boxes with parachutes attached.
By this point, it had become really clear that beavers were hugely important to ecosystems – establishing and maintaining wetlands, reducing erosion, creating habitats, and so on. But since the arrival of colonists, the American beaver population had dropped from hundreds of millions to around 100,000 at the turn of the 20th century. So building their numbers back up was both challenging but increasingly seen as a vital effort, worthy of some serious endeavors like this one.
This was the Postwar Era, so the project designers found they could secure some World War II parachutes for cheap. With those in hand, they had to design a beaver delivery box that would open once it landed. They considered using an easy-to-chew wood, so that beavers could chomp their own way out… but realized that could pose a problem if they got out before being dropped (or while in midair!). In the end, they used a simpler mechanism to pop the lid open upon a (gentle) impact.
But before dropping dozens of beavers into the wilderness, they tested their setup a number of times with this beaver aptly named Geronimo. Apparently, Geronimo got so used to these flights he started just waiting for the crew to come pick him back up after each landing. Thanks in part to these tests, they determined that the optimal altitude for a drop was between 500 and 800 feet, ideally in low-wind conditions and set about implementing the plan. In pairs, they dropped a total of 76 beavers, all but one of which landed safely and went on to repopulate the area and reshape the landscape around them.
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If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed something. First of all, “Don’t Stop Believing” still gets a shocking amount of air time. Great song but maybe culture should evolve. But also, when it comes to talk radio, a lot of it sounds kind of the same — right wing radio talk is everywhere.
As of this fall, 17 of the country’s 20 biggest radio talk show hosts were conservative, only one was progressive. And that matters. Because broadcast radio is still a really important medium. It has a higher reach than television. It’s nearly neck in neck with social media for how Americans get their news. And in studies it often ranks as the media format that Americans trust the most.
But the airwaves weren’t always so dominated by such a narrow range of voices. Reporter and friend of the show Katie Thornton has the story of how talk radio has evolved (and perhaps devolved at times) over the past century, and what all of it means for the airwaves today.
Hear the rest of the the series from On the Media
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Mountain lions are classified as a “specially protected species”—not quite endangered, but close. There are somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 of them spread across the foothills and mountains of California. One exceptional specimen in particular miraculously survived a trek across LA’s busiest highways. Researchers say it’s the first documented case of a cougar making it
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It all started when a woman in a white Jeep pulled up to the traffic light to make a right turn onto Sunset Boulevard. Now, it’s perfectly legal to make a right turn on red in California. What you’re not supposed to do is block the crosswalk while you wait to turn. And that’s exactly
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Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one — except we didn’t actually talk about that one during the show. It’s a cable car from Wellington, and as it turns out it’s one of hundreds of funiculars in this city. Roman and Kurt are back with another
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Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one — except we didn’t actually talk about that one during the show. It’s a cable car from Wellington, and as it turns out it’s one of hundreds of funiculars in this city. Roman and Kurt are back with another
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Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer Avery Trufelman investigates our collectively held beliefs about fashion and explores topics like the intellectual property law behind knockoffs, creation of tartan and the history of plaid, and how a dolls in a rural museum in Washington state saved French haute couture.
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The basic mechanics of the bike are pretty simple — it’s basically a triangle with wheels and a chain drive to propel it forward. No batteries or engines. It seems obvious in hindsight …. And that’s why most people guess the bike was invented a long time ago. Yet the ‘running machine,’ a kind of
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Even if you haven’t made the pilgrimage to Southern California, you can probably already picture what the Walk of Fame looks like. It’s a 1.3 mile walkway lined with terrazzo and brass squares. Each slab spotlights a salmon-pink star, and the name of a different famous celebrity deemed worthy enough to become a permanent part
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South Africa wanted to be the first African nation to host the World Cup. They also wanted the tournament to be the start of a new chapter. During apartheid, the country was banned from the international sporting community. But in 2004, they were on the precipice of hosting soccer’s biggest event. South Africans gathered in
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When Herbie Miller was growing up in East Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s, he and his friends would put on their best outfits and head into the city. From blocks away, they could hear music pumping out through giant, powerful speakers set up at dance halls, bars and social clubs all over downtown.
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When Herbie Miller was growing up in East Kingston, Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s, he and his friends would put on their best outfits and head into the city. From blocks away, they could hear music pumping out through giant, powerful speakers set up at dance halls, bars and social clubs all over downtown.
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And a few months ago, while driving across the wide, stretching grasslands of South Dakota, reporter Fil Corbitt turned off the freeway and followed the signs to the ultimate roadside stop: Wall Drug. What was once simple, small-town pharmacy during the Great Depression has been expanded to take up an entire city block. And in
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Adam Rogers is a senior tech correspondent at Insider – and he’s been thinking and writing about what’s known in the industry simply as “search.” For the last decade, people have been grumbling about not being able to find things online, both in our private data and on the public web, despite ever-evolving algorithms. Ever
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In downtown Windhoek, Namibia — at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue — there’s an imposing gold building with an affectionate nickname: the Coffee Maker. This notable structure was built to commemorate Namibia’s fight for independence from apartheid South Africa, which it achieved in 1990. And for many of the visitors,
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Back in March, Netflix picked up a long running Japanese TV program based on a children’s book from the 1970s. The show is called Old Enough, but the name of the original Japanese program translates to My First Errand. Because in each episode, a child runs an errand for the very first time. Episodes are
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Note: This episode contains references to adult language, and might not be suitable for younger listeners. You’ll likely know within the first fifteen seconds if this episode is appropriate for your children. There’s a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are other
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When you own a home, water is your greatest enemy. So much work is put into keeping water from coming in– and so much engineering is built into getting whatever water that inevitably seeps in, back out again before it pools and causes rot. 99% Vernacular: Volume 1 When the 99pi staff met up in
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Chicago has an extensive alleyway network, populated with distinctively utilitarian wooden fire escapes bolted onto the backs of low- and mid-rise buildings. Though to call them fire escapes is almost a misnomer; they usually have a substantial landing at each floor, so they serve as a kind of de facto porch – a place to
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For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived — and even some regional vernacular we love from places we haven’t lived, but just admire. 99% Invisible is all about who we are through the lens of the things we
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Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Instagram accounts like House Plant Club have a million followers. Over the past decade there has been a steady stream of think pieces offering explanations for the
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99 Percent Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an unusually shaped old building on the west side of the Bay. As it turns out, this peculiar octagonal home isn’t unique — there was a whole architectural fad of building these back
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Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia’s mainland. Winters can get very cold and snowy there. Not many people outside of Russia know much about Sakhalin. Apparently it used to be home to a Tsarist penal colony and Anton Chekov once described it as “hell” but Tatyana Kim swears it’s a beautiful place
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The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the only grain indigenous to North America, and while it might be called rice, it’s actually not closely related to brown or white rice at all. It has long played an important role in
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Like it or not, no teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra Lange. In her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain, Lange writes about how malls were conceptually born out of a lack of space for people to convene in American suburbs. Despite
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