99% Invisible

When Rob Buckman wrote the book on how to give bad news, it was from his experience as an oncologist having to give it several times a week.

The rise and dramatic fall of Britain's last great airship is the primary subject of Bill Hammack's new book called Fatal Flight.

An expanded text version of this interview will be included in a new book about the firm that will be published by Standards Manual in May of 2018.

Scott's book, Understanding Comics, which is 25 years old this year, is a seminal deconstruction of comics as an art form and mode of communication.

A little cartoon Scott jumps between panels of the 215-page book, explaining how pictures and words in combination create a new language for telling stories and describing the world.

The book was the culmination of a bunch of ideas that had been swirling around Scott's head for years.

Probably best known for non-fiction comics, especially a book called Understanding Comics, where I explain how comics work in comics form, but I've also done fiction work, and I have a lot of different interests.

If I just had a few, I would probably start with Chris Ware's Building Stories, which is a giant box like a Milton Bradley game box, which has comics in a million different shapes because that definitely sets the mind going.

I would throw in a couple of crazy web comics where you can go in any direction. I would have at least one silent comic from Jim Woodring. I would include Persepolis because I think Persepolis really was a tuning fork for a lot that came after.

They just feel so credible, so personal, and they open a door to another experience.

In fact, the best-selling cartoonist in America now is Raina Telgemeier who does comics for kids. And those comics don't have any superheroes in them. Her biggest one was Smile which was just about when she was a kid and she lost two of her front teeth and had to have reconstructive surgery. That's all it is.

The MUTCD, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, quote, to provide for uniform standards and specifications for all official traffic control devices in California. It's not a beach read. I have it. It's more of a lazy Sunday afternoon read.

And he had read Unsafe At Any Speed.

Unsafe At Any Speed was an unlikely bestseller by a car safety obsessed young lawyer named Ralph Nader.

The book took research by people like Hugh de Haven and turned it into a scorching indictment of the auto industry.

It showed car companies had actually patented safety technology, including the collapsible steering column.

They just weren't using it.

My plan was to stay on the train listen to the ball game and read The Amazing Spider-Man number 38.

When I was working on The Grand Budapest Hotel, I had to make a little notebook for Ralph Fiennes' character Gustav.

And Gustav is a very precise character. And when Ralph Fiennes came in for his costume fitting, he had his notebook and all the other props that he needed for his character. He just noticed that there were no lines in the notebook, which made him a notebook with blank pages.

So we took the prop back up to the studio and we remade the notebook and we sent it back down again with lines and that was fine.

But then after the film came out and I started doing some magazine interviews about designing graphic props, I used this as an example because I thought it was quite interesting and quite a good example of the level of detail that we actually go into.

But of course, all the journalists heard was that I was saying that Ralph Fiennes is some kind of diva.

His most recent book is called American Catch.

In his book, American Catch, he documents several different groups who are working really hard to try and bring back the New York oyster.

She's a landscape architect and founder of the firm Scape, based in Manhattan. And she's the author of the new book Towards an Urban Ecology.

For more detail on everything you heard today, check out Guy's Van Hensbergen's new book, The Sagrada Familia, Gaud's Heaven on Earth.

I'm Cathy O'Neil. I'm a mathematician, data scientist, activist, and author. I wrote the book, Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

And they're characterized by three properties, that they're very widespread and important. So like they make important decisions about a lot of people. Number two, that they're secret, that the people don't understand how they're being scored. And number three, that they're destructive.

She calls them Weapons of Math Destruction.

We're shifting the blame, if you will, from the society, which is the one that should own these problems to the individual and punishing them for it.

O'Neill gets that different jobs require people with different personality types, but she says a hiring algorithm is a blunt and unregulated tool that ends up disqualifying big categories of people, which makes it a classic weapon of math destruction.