99% Invisible

Ian Kelly is a historian, screenwriter and playwright. He's also, by the way, an accomplished actor. And yes, I do play Hermione's father in the Harry Potter movies.

This muggle wrote the definitive biography of Beau Brummel, who was bopping around London at the turn of the 19th century.

Arguably the most important single figure in the whole history of fashion.

What Adam Smith was to economics, what Charles Darwin was to biology, Beau Brummel was to fashion.

I like to describe what I did in this book was sniff my way through the 20th century.

In 2009, Sorkin published a book called 20 Minutes in Manhattan which traces the walk from his home to his studio in New York.

Sorkin wrote about paying special close attention to the little details of his neighborhood and how those small details taught him so much about history and community.

It's the kind of book that 99% of visible listeners would love and it feels especially relevant right now.

One of the pieces that has made the rounds a couple of times on the internet was a provocative meditative list called 250 Things An Architect Should Know.

Those are selections from 250 Things An Architect Should Know by Michael Sorkin.

It's a history of rear end hygiene.

And Blumer actually told me he got his hands on an original box of it.

And it feels a bit like what we would call tissue paper.

Ron Blumer, our expert on the history of rear end cleaning, wrote the book Wiped, which is full of interesting details about toilet culture that we didn't get to include in this episode.

And it eventually became a book that is out today as I record this and it is brilliant and beautiful

More about Jeannie Chance and John's new book, This is Chance, after this

John Muellem expanded the story you just heard into a beautiful and important new book called This is Chance

Get it seriously get it for yourself for a friend for the sake of the world Get it today

You must get it You must must get it that link is at 99 pi org

I want to play the song exit without saving by the band Beauty Pill from their album Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are which is where I got the name for this episode

Exit without saving from Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are it's available on band camps You can buy it right now without leaving your house. I think it's a masterpiece, but don't just take my word for it.

Time magazine named it one of the best albums of the decade in amongst Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar, which is pretty amazing.

His basic equations, which are now kind of known in meteorology as the primitive equations, which I kind of love.

He neither had enough observations, especially at different levels of altitude and high up into the atmosphere, nor could he solve the differential equations required to sort of, you know, solve his own equations.

He was convinced that if he had better observations, and if he had a greater ability to actually make these calculations, you could have a useful forecast.

And it wasn't until the postwar era when you have the beginnings of spaceflight and the beginnings of real computing that the idea of actually functionally creating a weather forecast based on mathematical analysis of the atmosphere becomes possible again.

The most important thing is you have this kind of love affair with the Earth, you know, with the Earth as a planet.

Stephen Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called Better Buses, Better Cities.

If the way to get more people to ride the bus is to make the bus service better, then city planners would do well to read Stephen's book.

It's basically a manual for how to improve bus systems, drawing from examples from cities around the country where design decisions made riding the bus better for everyone.

Stephen says that one of the most fundamental things you can do to improve bus service is just to make the bus run more frequently.

Stephen Higashide's book is called Better Buses, Better Cities.

Okay so if you pick up this book to your right go to the flag page. This is a book Geert and a colleague edited called The Origin of Value which is about various financial instruments throughout the ages and there's a chapter all about this bond and so you can see the front and the back of it here.

Wow well it's like it's just a bunch of script like it doesn't look like designed the way I think of a bond looking with all the filigree and cool stuff about a bond. It's really basic.

in 1963 an American writer named Sterling North released a memoir about his childhood called Rascal a memoir of a better era

And this took place in rural Wisconsin and he came from kind of like a frontiersman type family and he spent a lot like a lot of time in the wilderness But the book was mostly about him and his best friend, which was a spunky baby raccoon named Rascal

So in 1977 when this anime debuts in Japan It's a sensation

So kids loved this show and Rascal so cute that it makes raccoons look like really fun companions So Japanese families started importing baby raccoons from North America to Japan to keep as pets in their homes

So if you read the end of Sterling North's autobiography he comes to the conclusion that raccoons are Not good pets because they're wild animals and they become aggressive and as they get older they will destroy your house for sure

Don Raffel is the author of a new book about the unexpected origins of modern incubation.

The wise old sociologist Charles Perrault's most famous book is called Normal Accidents.

It's about how certain kinds of system are vulnerable to catastrophic failure, so vulnerable, in fact, that we should view accidents in those systems as inevitable.

I expand on some of the ideas in this episode in my book Adapt. You might like it.

I like I talked to this historian of the Peace symbol. His name is Ken Colespun, and he wrote a great book detailing all this history.

He wrote a great book. It's called Peace, the Biography of a Symbol, which you can find a link to on our website.

This is Cath Sanker, author of Stranded in the Six-Day War.

If you want to read more about the Great Bitter Lake Association, you can find Kath Sinker's book Stranded in the Six Day War at kathsinker.co.uk or you can get a digital download on Amazon.