99% Invisible

Eden Medina's book Cybernetic Revolutionaries technology and politics and Allende's Chile has so many more details about Cybersyn find a link to it and see the one glorious color photograph of cybersyn's operations room at our website

Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society at Newcastle University and author of the book Vertical, the city from satellites to bunkers.

Also Stephen Graham's new book Vertical is coming out this fall.

The name of the book is The Road Taken, The History and Future of America's Infrastructure.

That is Mary Roach, author of a bunch of great books. Her latest one is called Grunt. It's about the science of humans at war.

This episode was based off a chapter of Mary Roach's excellent best-selling book, Grunt, The Curious Science of Humans at War.

I cannot recommend her books enough.

They are the best time you can have learning weird things about science.

In 1883, Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, published his memoir, Life on the Mississippi.

Twain would have heard this call many times.

The Face of the Water became a wonderful book. There never was so wonderful a book.

I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.

You know, did you ever read Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi? I did. So you remember that whole like maybe 100 pages near the beginning where he's talking about the Mississippi for him was like this magical, mystical thing imbued with mystery and that once he learned the river, that was lost to him forever.

In 1977 all of O'Neill's research was published in a very readable book called The High Frontier and he appeared on 60 minutes with Dan Rather to talk about space colonization

To learn more about Gerard O'Neill and his plans for colonizing space Check out Patrick McCrae's book The Visioneers how a group of elite scientists pursued space colonies nanotechnologies and a limitless future

But in Nathaniel Johnson's new book, Unseen City, he implores us to slow down and notice the beauty and resilience of the life that thrives within our urban landscape.

He writes about all the gross stuff they do too. They're no grosser than us humans, but let's just say that every time you admire the green iridescent shimmer of the neck feathers on a pigeon, you will also be reminded of a thing called pigeon milk and it will haunt your nightmares.

And so I had this terrible choice between like saying tree, tree, tree over and over again or or listening to her scream for the entire time.

And you have this corollary that I love that's sort of the equivalent in the natural wonders of the cityscape, always eat the weed.

It says, ginkgo toxin is similar in structure to vitamin B6 and eating too much of it interferes with our ability to synthesize the vitamin that can provoke a biochemical cascade that, especially in children, may lead to seizures and even death.

Special thanks this week to Dave Tompkins, author of How to Wreck a Nice Beach, the vocoder from World War II to hip-hop.

Thanks also to Ben and Yvette Sennack of Nucleus, David Kahn, author of The Codebreakers, and Steven Jackson.

Doc has a book coming out about all this called Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth.

you'll connect to a conference line where you can talk to people from around the world. If no one's on the conference line, it plays a recording of the book Exploding the Phone, which is a really great book. You should listen to it.

I was spending a year in England and I got so frustrated with my inability to use the light switches and the water taps and the doors even that I wrote this book.

If I continually get a door wrong, is it my fault? No. In fact, if you continually get it wrong, it's a good... And if other people continually get it wrong, it's a good sign that it's a really bad door.

And one of my most successful books was called The Frozen Water Trade.

One edition of the book is actually titled The Frozen Water Trade, A True Story.

Maybe because even Gavin's publishers thought the prospect of cutting frozen water out of American lakes and shipping it overseas sounded made up.

I'm a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. And I'm the author of the book, The King Of Fish, The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon.

That's Joe, a columnist for the New York Times and author of "A Piece of the Action", how the middle class joined the money class.

In 1977 the New York State Consumer Protection Board published a booklet called Blind Dates. How to break the codes on the foods you buy.

The board distributed more than 10,000 copies and posted the booklet in supermarkets.

Christoph Ribot is the author of Flickering Light, A History of Neon.