99% Invisible

A Christmas Carol wasn't his first Christmas story but it was such a hit that like Mariah Carey re-releasing All I Want for Christmas Is You, each year afterwards there was pressure for Dickens to keep supplying festive material.

His other Christmas stories, The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, The Haunted Man and The Ghosts' Bargain.

How many other books have been adapted hundreds of times for film and TV?

It was published on the 19th of December 1843 and by Christmas Eve it was already sold out.

Dickens did public readings of the book in Britain and the US until his death in 1870.

She is perhaps best known as the creator of The 1619 Project, which posits that every aspect of America was shaped in some way by slavery and its legacy.

Nicole wrote about the preamble in her opening essay for The 1619 Project, and so we thought her perspective would make for a great discussion.

Brian has a new book out about the Luddites with a very metal title. It's called Blood in the Machine.

It's called Blood in the Machine. And it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods.

If the Luddites didn't exist, then the tech industry would have to invent them.

It's that saying no that just resonates so deeply with what Luddism is all about.

If you're using automated machinery then some portion of that cloth that you would not otherwise be able to produce, you should tax that and then use that to fund worker programs.

Oh, there it is! We're looking at the longest burning, longest continuously burning light bulb in the world. It's in the Guinness Book of World Records and it was installed in 1901.

This is Mark Kurlansky, author of many books, including an environmental history of New York City called The Big Oyster.

Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, was published.

I had been covering climate change for 20 years and didn't give heat much thought, as strange as that may seem.

It was like walking into a kind of solid wall of this invisible force that just surrounds you and envelops you and kind of suffocates you and makes your body, I mean the only word I can use to kind of describe it is freak out.

And I realized, oh my gosh, heat is dangerous.

We've become dependent upon this machine, this cooling machine.

Starts to kind of panic and think, OK, I need to cool off. We're not cooling off fast enough. I need to push more blood and more blood.

I whenever I need advice or I need to something I turn to a page in Robinson Crusoe

If you've read Alan Moore's Watchmen, you may remember that detail about how some of the superheroes are wary of capes because one time their caped crusader colleague dollar bill Got his cape caught in a revolving door and was thus immobilized as a bank robber Approached him and shot him in the head point-blank

He was appealing to Williams' pride.

I've read this book. I've also listened to this book and read this book That's how much I loved this book

Jacob Goldstein's book is called Money the true story of a made-up thing. It's fantastic

Back in 1997, she wrote the book that coined the term Biomimicry.

It told the story of the innovations in computing, energy, and health that were inspired by structures in the natural world.

Stick like a gecko, compute like a cell, even run a business like a redwood forest.

It's the mask worn by the protagonist in the graphic novel and then movie V for Vendetta.

He means the V for Vendetta mask.

There's a line in my first novel, Looking For Alaska, that something like, I hate sports and I hate people who play or support or participate in any way in the sports industrial complex.

So you had Indiana Jones and Star Wars and all these movies coming out and some of those tie-ins were actually bestsellers like they made the bestseller chart.