99% Invisible

Andrew Leland has a book out today named after HG Wells's story We're going to talk to him a little bit about the book later in the show

So Andrew, I remember you were reporting the story and sometime early in the process You learned that you might not be going blind as quickly as you once thought and it made you question whether or not You should do the story and we assured you that we thought you were the right person for the story and that you should produce it and it was lovely and years later, I'm reading this book and That anxiety of whether or not you are Blind enough for the right kind of blind it kind of pervades the memoir in fascinating ways And it's not just you like other people that you interviewed express this Can you talk a little bit about that and what it says about our societal conception of blindness?

It's called The Country of the Blind and it's out today

Again, Andrew's book is called The Country of the Blind. It's out today. I highly recommend it is fantastic. You should check it out

Andrew Leland has always loved to read as a fifth grader

Sam is working on a book about the politics of shade and how shade coverage in LA has become one of the city's biggest hot-button issues.

Sam Block is working on a book about shade and he's looking for stories about how shade is changing people's lives.

It was called Power from on High and it was written by a man named Charles Finney, a 19th century minister who was a huge Christian reformer.

A Demon's Nightmare was the first of what Jack Chick called his soul winning tracks, books meant to be purchased at Christian bookstores and handed out to bring non-believers into the faith.

When Kurt Vonnegut wrote his first novel about a dystopian America run by engineers and their automatic machinery, he called it Player Piano.

He called it Player Piano.

Two years before Raymond Scott was born, John Philip Sousa, the famous composer, wrote an essay called The Menace of Mechanical Music.

Carlos says the Mexican state does not have the capacity to create the conditions for economic growth and jobs, but it does have the responsibility to serve those who work in the informal economy.

This is Thomas Doherty, author of a book called "Little Lindy Is Kidnapped"

Special thanks this week to Hedy Nisheri whose book "Crime and Justice in the Age of Court TV" was really helpful to this story

Roma recently wrote a book that's actually called Nuts and Bolts, Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World in a Big Way.

So the Renaissance scientists, engineers, maybe even artists, you could call them, came up with a list of six simple machines, which were the lever, the wheel and axle, the pulley, the inclined plane, the wedge and the screw.

And I started to think about, you know, even within the very complex technology that we now have, very different from the Renaissance era, what are the little fundamental pieces that I think make up the modern world?

But I mean, fundamentally, and I never heard this described before until I read your book, is that a spring is this device for storing energy and being released when we need it to, which really broke open my mind of what all the things that could be a spring.

So even though he invented this incredible device specifically, which was called a Kohira, which did a very difficult job of receiving and interpreting electromagnetic signals of the sort that he was passing through rooms and people, you know, the radio, Marconi's invention wouldn't have existed without that.

dirty, lazy and uncivilized

Lee showed up on a mini story episode of 99 PI a few months back talking about the ever increasing loudness of sirens as a way of measuring how loud our world has become. But the story 20,000 Hertz produced tackles the main thesis of Golden more head on. And I love this episode. I love how it turned out. And I'm so proud of everyone involved that I just wanted to share it with you as a bonus episode.

That book is called Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise.

Lee spent a lot of time interviewing Jarvis for the book Golden.

The two stories you just heard came from the book Golden, The Power of Silence in a World of Noise.

Take a moment to go buy it wherever you get your books. It's also available as an audiobook.

And the name of the book was Life in Relationship to Death. And I sat there and read it for almost a week while the jury's in deliberation.

You know, Life in Relationship to Death, it was where I was. And I just thought, hey, you know, let me try this.

And the name of the book was Life in Relationship to Death.

You know, Life in Relationship to Death, it was where I was.

This is James Crawford the author of Fallen Glory the lives and deaths of history's greatest buildings

Geo cities was not a physical place But he included it in his book because the way he sees it it was inhabited like one that was something that I think Geo cities was really providing was was creating these communities and then Conceptualizing them as places as places you could go as neighborhoods on the net

James, crawford's book is called Fallen Glory the lives and deaths of history's greatest buildings Geocities is just one small section of that book. There are a ton of other fascinating stories about lost and ruined buildings We'll have a link to that as well

I mean It's not necessarily art, but it's absolutely Culture james crawford again, you know, this is what we've always done as humans

We spray-painted it on our hummers and body armor and on our helmets and all our guns. We spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know, we're here and we want to f*** with you.

Samin wrote the book Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and she also has a Netflix show by the same name.

Jason wrote about the Rosen brothers in his book, The Swamp Peddlers.