99% Invisible - 346- Palaces for the People

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it's often harder to see. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we reap all kinds of benefits. We become more likely to interact with people around us, and connected to the broader public. If we neglect social infrastructure, we tend to grow more isolated, which can have serious consequences. Palaces for the People Articles of Interest, Avery Trufelman’s acclaimed podcast mini-series about what we wear, now has its own feed. Subscribe to AOI on Apple Podcasts and RadioPublic. Please leave a review and spread the word. Thanks!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Sometimes when I'm driving or walking around the Bay Area, I'm astounded by every park I see. In a place where each parcel of land could be worth millions of dollars, there are these shared green spaces that are at least theoretically meant for everyone. I feel the same about libraries. They're like miracles. Take a kid to a library for the first time and you'll see. It is a temple dedicated to the concept of sharing,

you know, books, sure, but also just sharing space. Eric Kleinenberg is a sociologist and bestselling author who makes a convincing case that a healthy community is not simply held together by shared values, but by shared spaces. Physical, real-world locations where people across all strata and ages and races and creeds bump into each other and form connections.

He also makes a convincing case that we are neglecting our shared spaces, what he calls our social infrastructure. And this is a shame because our social infrastructure could help solve or at least mitigate some of our most pressing challenges, like isolation, polarization, education, crime, and even climate change. He lays out his manifesto in a great book he wrote

called Palaces for the People. I think it's just brilliant So I asked him to chat with me My name is Eric Kleinanberg. I'm a professor of sociology at New York University And I'm also the author of a book called Palaces for the People How social infrastructure can help fight inequality polarization and the decline of civic life. So where does the phrase palaces for the people come from? It comes from Andrew Carnegie, and I have to tell you that I was a little nervous about

using that title because Carnegie, as you might know, has a pretty mixed record when it comes to human decency. He was really a pretty ruthless capitalist, you know, Titan of the Gilded Age among the wealthiest people in the world when he lived famous for breaking strikes in a pretty vicious way and doing things that probably promoted inequality in many parts of the world. But Carnegie was also an immigrant. He was born in Scotland and came to the United States.

And he believed that one of the amazing things about the U.S. is that it created institutions where people could get ahead in life and achieve something greater than they could have achieved in their home countries. And he wanted to help build a social institution that would do that even better. And so over the course of his life, he helped to fund more than 2,500 libraries around the world, about 1,700 of which were in the United States. And he called the greatest of them, palaces for the people. The library, as Carnegie saw it, was a place where a person who worked in a factory or

lived in a tenement building and experienced life as crowded and uncomfortable and rushed. Most of the time could go and escape all of that. And so the great Carnegie libraries have high ceilings and big windows and spacious rooms where a person can go and read and think and achieve something that they feel proud of. And I just thought that was a beautiful phrase when I heard it, and it became a title for the book. You talk about libraries as being the perfect example of what you call social infrastructure.

So what is social infrastructure more broadly? Yeah, well, it's a pretty new concept, especially in the United States. But when I use social infrastructure, what I mean to say is that there is a set of physical places and institutions that shape our social life. And social infrastructure is just as real as the infrastructure for water or for power or for communications. But we haven't been able to see it because we don't have a concept for it. And what I've learned over the course of my work as a social scientist is that when we

live in places where we invest in social infrastructure, places like libraries or parks, schools, athletic fields, we reap all kinds of benefits. We become far more likely to interact with people around us, whether they are friends and family or neighbors who we haven't gotten to know. And when we don't invest in social infrastructure, if we neglect it, if we let it fall apart, we tend to grow more isolated.

You mentioned that social infrastructure is more invisible than hard infrastructure. How was it that you were able to see it for the first time? Yeah, well, the first time I thought about social infrastructure was when I was a graduate student, doing a research project on a heat wave in Chicago that was the city I grew up in. And I was puzzled by something very strange in this heatwave. It was a

disaster in 1995 that killed more than 700 people. And as a social scientist, I was interested in understanding the patterns. The first pattern I observed was the most predictable thing that could happen in a disaster. And that's that the poor neighborhoods, the segregated neighborhoods on the south sides and the west sides of Chicago had the highest death rate by far. And that's not interesting. It's kind of politically important because it's a story about where resources go and where vulnerability is, but scientifically it's what you would expect. But when I looked even more closely at the patterns, something really puzzling did emerge.

And that is that there were a bunch of neighborhoods that demographically looked like they should have fared very badly in the disaster, but in fact proved to be strikingly resilient. They were safer even than the most affluent neighborhoods on the north side. And even more interestingly, there were these pairs of neighborhoods where the demographics were identical,

like the same proportion of old people and poor people and African-American people. And they were separated by justice street. They literally neighboring neighborhoods. And one neighborhood would have an astronomically high death rate and the other would be one of the safest places in Chicago. And the numbers alone couldn't tell the story of what was going on. So in kind of classic, you know, ethnographer style, I started traveling around and spending time in the neighborhoods. And

what I observed is that the places that had low death rates turned out to have a robust social infrastructure. They had sidewalks and streets that were well taken care of. They had neighborhood libraries. They had community organizations. They had grocery stores and shops and cafes that drew people out of their home and into public life. What that meant is that on a daily basis, people got to know each other pretty well.

They used the social infrastructure to socialize. And so when this crisis happened in Chicago, they knew who was likely to be sick, who should have been outside but wasn't. And that meant they knew who's doored and not gone and who to help. Meanwhile, in the neighborhoods that had really high death rates, the social infrastructure was depleted. There were a lot of abandoned properties, empty lots, abandoned

houses. Sidewalks were often cracked and broken, very little commercial life, not a lot of institutions there. And that meant that people were likely to stay home. And unfortunately, during the heat wave, this was a deadly thing to do. And I realized at the end of that project, actually it was social infrastructure, not the traditional hard infrastructures that we normally think of that explained who lived and who died that we can Chicago.

The Chicago heat wave convinced Eric that social infrastructure was vital to public health and safety in cities. And so years later, when Superstorm Sandy hit the New York area, he wanted to make sure people knew that it was going to take more than just seawalls to make New York safer and more resilience in the face of climate change. He got involved in a competition sponsored by the federal government called Rebuild by Design. And again and again, he emphasized to the various design teams the importance of building infrastructure that brings people together. But one day, I was taking one team around a neighborhood in Brooklyn and they came up to me and they said, you know, Eric, we've been listening to talk about social infrastructure

and how important it is. We realize that the design that we're going to propose for this competition is going to be right in line with that. We have this idea for something we're calling a resilient center. I said, wow, that sounds amazing. Who wouldn't want a resilient center? Can you tell me about it? They said, okay, so this resilient center is going to be a nice building that will put in a vulnerable neighborhood

in the town in Connecticut. And we see it as a prototype that we could build in cities all over the country. And it will be open as much as possible. It will be spacious. It will have flexible uses, it will be staffed by personnel who are aggressively welcoming, let's say. Their job is really to make everyone feel like they're welcome all the time.

We know that very young people and very old people are most at risk and most need kind of resilience at home because they might not be as mobile as other parts of the population. So, we're going to have all kinds of special programming for kids, like things like story time in the morning. And since we know the kids come with caretakers, you know, parents or grandparents or sitters, we'll do something for them too. Maybe we'll give them, you know know access to Wi-Fi and computers and we really see this this resilient center as an amazing new institution

that could strengthen people who live in every vulnerable part of the country. And I said to them, wow you know that's an amazing idea because I'm a professor and I'm used to telling people first that their ideas are amazing. And then I said, have you ever heard of a library? Because clearly they had just redesigned the wheel. And at first I thought it was a little crazy, but, I realized that it was completely predictable and forgivable because we live in a moment where so many people think of the library as an obsolete institution right? We think it's a relic from another part of our history and that it's not used history and that it's not used much by anyone, even though it turns out that nothing could be further from the truth.

And so I realized that I really needed to spend more time in libraries myself and to write something that reminded people just all of the extraordinary things that libraries do as social infrastructure, because they're such valuable institutions for us, and yet they are taken for granted and in many parts of the world and the country on the chopping block. And so Eric started visiting libraries all over the country. He went to small town libraries and suburban libraries, big city libraries designed by famous architects and small neighborhood libraries in little brick buildings. And he's time he found lots of people using the library and many of them using it in some pretty surprising ways.

One of my favorite programs came from the Brooklyn Library where they created the library lanes virtual bowling league, which meets weekly in the basements and kind of community centers inside libraries, the kind of common rooms. And the context for understanding why these things are so amazing is that about 20 years ago, a great social scientist named Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone. The complaint was like people used to do things together collectively in formal groups and now everyone like in Putnam's nightmare from 1999, everybody was just watching television at home together in the living room, you know, which I now think of, now that I have kids

who have like their own mobile devices, that's like a socialist utopian fantasy to me. Like, oh my God, if only we could have a night together watching the same screen, it would be amazing. But what happened in Brooklyn is that these kind of brilliant people realize there's all these older people who live alone in neighborhoods around New York City, and they're exactly the people who would have been most likely to die in the heatwave in Chicago.

And they have to do special programming for them. And some older people are bookish and want to do arts things, but some actually want to be physical and exercise and be social that way, and they need to be. So they created this program called Library Lanes and once a week this group of older people come together and they put on actual bowling jerseys with their library name on it and a librarian connects an Xbox to a television

and they compete against other library teams. And I'll tell you, like, I'm a sports junkie, I spend my weekends following my son around to his soccer games, I like to go to professional and college games. I'm not lying, Roman, when I tell you that, like, I haven't been to a sporting event as exciting and collectively effervescent

at the sociological praise as this incredible match in East New York, where where this group of older bowlers came back and crushed it in the final frames to win their match. It was amazing. Oh, that's so great. We boldly intern him this is not exactly what people think of when they think of a library. And probably isn't, certainly wasn't what Andrew Carnegie

thought of when he thought of the library. So what are some other examples of how a library is being used today outside of the conventional like you get a library card, you get books and stuff. Yeah, my goodness. I was just thinking about Andrew Carnegie, you know, being told about all the things that these palaces for the people have turned into. I hope you would like them. I mean, let me tell you about some of the things that I saw.

I mean, first of all, the library's remain places where lots of early literacy development happens. And every morning, often before the library would open, the librarians would open the doors for groups of preschoolers or kids from day camp who would come in with teachers and get exposed to books and be told stories. And there are so many people who just can't afford books and don't have books at home or have parents who speak another language. And they come to the library to learn to read and to learn to love books. And that's amazing. Probably Carnegie anticipated that.

But he probably would not have seen that, you know, libraries have now become the places where people who used to be incarcerated come more than any other institution to search for a job, to get help putting a resume together. He probably would not have anticipated that libraries have become the places where there's more instruction for English as a second language, more citizenship classes than any other public institution. He probably didn't anticipate that libraries would do

things like, you know, karaoke hours for immigrant communities that want a good place to sing together. I don't know that he would have seen all the teenagers who come to the library at the end of the school day because it's the safest and warmest or if you're in a hot place, coolest place where you can study, apply for college, or just kind of mess around and play video games in a social way. I'll tell you, I saw so many kids come to libraries to play games

and like when they played games together, they did it in a way that was very collective and very social. It was not the kind of stereotypical image of a kid in a hole in their, you know, in their own basement being on their own. They were socializing in this very new way. Library is just doing an enormous number of things.

And I really think that we fail to recognize how lucky we are to have inherited this institution. I don't know if you saw this, but about a year ago, there was an article that came out in Forbes magazine where an economist argued that libraries are in fact obsolete and said, you know, if you don't show me the cost-benefit analysis that cashes out the value of the library, I think we should stop all the public contributions to them, knock them down and replace them with Amazon stores. And, you know, it was amazing. Like, at first I thought my friends were just trying to troll me

by planting this article in Forbes. I was writing about the library, but then it turned out it was real. And this amazing thing happened. The librarians of the world united and got on Twitter and wrote the most eloquent testimony to the ongoing power of libraries to convene people. And they wrote such amazing things that Forbes literally took the article down the next day. One of the few good things that Twitter has ever done for the world. When I tried to think of what a great social infrastructure is, it's not that libraries

are the only social infrastructure, hardly, but they're just about the most effective social infrastructure that I can imagine. And it is a shame that we don't make more of them by maintaining them or updating them in the way that they deserve. I mean, because they're still radical and innovative today. That's what's so amazing about them. They've reinvented themselves. And one of the things that's so striking about libraries is that the local staff has the capacity and agency to develop programming that works for the community that they're in. Right. There's no strong hard rule that says a library has to do X, Y, or Z things.

So a library can be, it can lend tools, it can lend seeds, it can lend clothes to people who need better clothes for a job interview. It can do programming in all kinds of languages. I'm sure listeners can think of 50 things that happen in their libraries that I don't even know about. Has the design of these spaces shifted as they've started to accommodate all these other activities besides books and magazines and newspapers? Very much so. Although not as much as it could, if libraries had more resources to play with.

And one of the things that I've seen is certain municipalities have recognized the value of libraries and have invested in new facilities that can do other things. Most libraries need to have a special room or set of rooms for teenagers now because so many of them come in in the afternoon that they can quite easily take over the place Right and make it difficult for other people so so you see a lot of teen rooms Unfortunately Libraries have become these institutions of last resort for people who slip through the cracks in our safety net and and so like you will find homeless people and people with mental illnesses

And and people who are really struggling to homeless people and people with mental illnesses and people who are really struggling to get by, oftentimes people with drug addiction, who come into libraries and need a special kind of protection or assistance. And some libraries, including in San Francisco, have really been aggressively experimenting with ways to provide more supportive environments like that. Other countries have made massive new investments in national library buildings that do extraordinary things. The new library in Helsinki is amazing. There's a new library in Calgary that's amazing.

And some American cities are beginning to invest in libraries as well. But generally speaking, when that happens, we invest in the bright, shiny, central library. That patrons are likely to feel proud of, rather than in the branch libraries, which are really the lifeblood of the system. So in the book, you also talk about crime as an infrastructure issue,

which was a really kind of subtle nuance on the broken windows theory that I found really intriguing. Yeah, I don't know how much people know about the broken windows theory of policing and crime, but this kind of classic essay at this point from James Q. Wilson and George Kelly. That said that when there were broken windows in a neighborhood, people perceive the broken windows as a sign that no one is organizing the neighborhood, that no one has social control.

And the notion is that criminals realized that they could get away with anything in a place like that. And so did. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And, and intriguingly, when the original broken windows article came out, it was used as a justification for bringing lots more police into poor neighborhoods, right? It broke in

windows theory got us the stop and frisk policing and zero tolerance policing, because the notion was, if you've got disorder, you need to make sure that there's a lot of extra help to keep criminals from doing their thing. And that was a big reason that we have this kind of system of mass incarceration that's really transformed the United States and especially poor neighborhoods. And having spent a lot of time thinking about the power of social infrastructure and physical places,

I found myself asking this question, like what would have happened if we had responded to broken windows, not by sending in so many police officers, but by fixing the damn windows, right? Like, how did nobody ever think of that? And I went back, and it's really weird. Like I went back to the original article when I had that thought.

And I found that if you read it closely, the chain of events that leads to this idea that we should send in more police and do zero tolerance policing is, you know, a neighborhood gets abandoned, you know, property gets abandoned. Graffiti goes up, a window is broken, and then it thinks kind of spiral out of control. The neighborhood gets abandoned. Property gets abandoned. Graffiti goes up, a window is broken, and then it thinks kind of spiral out of control.

So why is it that the theory wasn't called the abandoned property theory? It's a horrible title. Broken Windows is an awesome title. We have bowling alone and broken windows. It's great, like catchy phrases that turn out to justify really terrible social policies. And in the case of the broken windows thing, it didn't even work.

So we forgot all about the abandoned property part. So I started asking, like, what would happen if we had fixed the windows? If we did fix up that property. And when I asked it turns out that someone else had thought about it much more than I had, there was this team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania that had been asking a similar question, and they wound up teaming up with the city of Philadelphia, which has tens of thousands of abandoned properties and empty lots, and also the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society,

which sounds like an old person's gardening club, but turns out to be this powerhouse operation that helps to control all this vacant land in Philadelphia. And they started one of the most exciting social science experiments that I know of happening right now. And for more than a decade, they've been doing this thing, which is they kind of randomly select blocks where they will make simple interventions. So if there was an abandoned house, they would board up the building and prevent squatters or, you know, potential drug dealers or criminals from from using the the property and if it was an empty lot that would have weeds and debris and

All kinds of garbage that would make it a public health hazard they would clean it up Moat down and put in a little pocket park maybe plant a tree put in a bench put a wooden fence there and a little pocket park, maybe plant a tree, put in a bench, put a wooden fence there. And they wanted to see what happened in the places where they made the intervention and what happened in the places that they left alone. And the results were staggering. They achieved almost a 40% decline in gun violence around the abandoned properties that they treated.

And that's a staggeringly high number, right? To get that. And that has been durable over the course of a decade. What's more, they hooked up heart rate monitors to people who live in those neighborhoods. And they found that even for a resident, when you walk by an untreated property, just in a abandoned place that was left to become a site of debris, people's heart rates really spiked dramatically. And of course, we know that stress-related diseases are especially high in poor neighborhoods that have a lot of abandonment. But when people walk by a place that's been treated

and turned into a little park, their heart rate hardly changes. And again, it's just like an amazing thing to achieve with a modest investment in social infrastructure. And did the crime just move from one place to another or did it just reduce in total? Yeah, so that's what they thought was going to happen that you fix up one block and crime

just bounces to the next one. But the amazing thing here is it didn't. It turns out that, we think of crime as being about bad individuals doing bad things and know that that's part of the story. But a lot of crime is just situational, right? Like if you create a city with lots of places where no one is in control and no one feels a sense of responsibility and people have a hard time managing things,

you create situations where crime is more likely. But if you take those situations away, the crime just doesn't happen. And so the answer's no. They did not, the crime just doesn't happen. And so the answers no. They did not get the crime bouncing elsewhere. It simply didn't happen. Wow. So I was reading your book and I think about myself

in the city and how I interact with people and how my lived experience and my idealized experience sometimes are not in complete concert. and how my lived experience and my idealized experiences sometimes are not in a complete concert. So like if I were a planner, I planned for social infrastructure if I were a mayor, I'd pay for it, but as a person's logging through life, I don't always want to encounter people.

And so, so when we build, I live in New York City, man, I get that. I told you. So when we build social infrastructure, how do we make sure we're designing for our true selves and not our idealized selves? Yeah, well, it's my take here that there's no shortage of places where people can hunker down

and get their own private space these days. We've created a whole society based on our idealization of privacy and autonomy. I mean, it used to be that families shared bedrooms together. Family shared beds together. Now, I know so many people who moved out of their cities because they felt like their kids needed to have

their own individual bedrooms. Right? I mean, it's just, so, I'm with you that we all need a space for privacy. And in fact, a library is a really amazing social infrastructure in part because it combines, you know, shared tables and programs and activities with little nooks where a person can go and anonymously be in their own head. Right. Right? And a park does the same thing. Right? A park can be a place for collective life,

and a park can be a place where we go to be like the row and have our own time and space. I think you're right. We always need to be mindful of those things. You know, we don't want to force people out into the public realm, but my sense right now is that the, it's the publicly accessible public realm that's really in short supply. I'm intrigued by this idea of a public ownership and how we convey that. I mean, I think one of the reasons why the pocket parks work and library's work is because we feel like we own them when they're done right.

You know, we feel like we belong. And that makes everyone closer connected. But also just like they treat the world better when it's ours versus a private space that we can just occupy as long as we are buying that cup of coffee. How do we make sure we make things so that everyone feels like they're really a part of it? Oh, man, that is such a tough question. I've been thinking about it a lot, especially in light of the past year where we've started to see more publicly just how restrictive and exclusive some of

our, like, you know, most valued semi-public spaces can be, like, remember that video that's circulated about the two African-American guys in Philadelphia who went into a Starbucks. And you know, they, like, they went there and tell me if this ever happened to you, like, you go to meet somebody and they're late. Yeah. Like, all the time. Have you ever experienced that? Right?

So these guys go and like, I know that I've sat in Starbucks waiting for someone who doesn't show up for 10, 20, 30 minutes an hour and no one's ever said anything to, like, you know, white professional academic guy. But, but like, these two guys, guys, they don't get asked to buy something, they don't get politely asked to leave, they get arrested for being in this shared space, this crazy thing. And so in that context, people who get in feel entitled and privileged, and there are a whole bunch of people who are left out all together. And that alerted me to the sense that like,

to the extent that our public space and our public realm, our shared spaces, are part of the commercial economy, they are really restrictive, right? Like you have to be able to pay, you have to be let in. And there are a lot of places, especially like in gentrifying neighborhoods and cities, where people just

know that they're not welcome, because it costs $7 for coffee or $9 for ice cream, or they don't take cash at all, they're only for people with credit cards. I have to say, one of the most amazing things I observed in the public libraries where I spend time is that There are places where This impossible community of people who are so different from one another come together and all kinds of people who have real struggles come too because There's just not space for them anywhere else and in the year that I spent going to the library Pretty much every day. I can count on one hand the number of times

that the police had to be called in and that there was a real security concern because people, you know, we're acting out towards one another. Most of the time when people go into libraries, they recognize that they are being respected and dignified and honored. And I think it brings out the best in us. So I think it's a great question. What kinds of public places can do that, can exalt our experience in the world in the way that a library can? And what can we do to make sure

that the places that we've built do that even better? Is there any momentum towards more social infrastructure? I mean, do we require a modern day Carnegie? Do we require our government to do more? Do we require us to just demand more? What is it going to take? And do you see the evidence that it's happening? It's an urgent question.

You know, how are we going to pay for this? And it's true that Carnegie was a philanthropist and philanthropic dollars went to build a bunch of libraries. And I closed the book by noting how strange it is that we live in a world with these kind of titans of the information age who have made billions of dollars with things like social media and computing and who haven't made contributions to social infrastructure in a way that I would like to see. In fact, one of the really off-putting things for me about Mark Zuckerberg's use of the concept social infrastructure is that he's been promoting Facebook as the social infrastructure he uses

that language for the 21st century and says, you know, Facebook is where we'll go from meaningful interactions. And yet, if you go to the Facebook campus in Manlo Park, like no one on earth has spent more money on actual physical social infrastructure than Mark Zuckerberg. Like it's a workers paradise there, right? Like the bike paths and the yoga studios and the shared spaces for serendipitous encounters and the massages for people while they're coding at their desks like it's amazing there.

And in fact, the people who work in those companies don't let their kids go on the devices because they know how dangerous a phone can be as social infrastructure. So on the one hand, I kind of want to see the big philanthropists of our time spend more on things like libraries. But I also know in my heart that philanthropic dollars are ultimately inadequate and they're kind of like randomly distributed to the places where the philanthropists tend to spend time. And that if we're ever really going to

make this work, it's going to have to be through a public commitment, like a major public works program. And I think it's just a matter of time until we do that. But clearly, we're going to have to muster up the collective will for it. And we certainly can't rally for it and call for it if we don't have a name for the thing that we want.

And that's one reason why I hope that social infrastructure is sticky, that it means something. Because we have no problem paying for infrastructure when it comes to the things that we think of as critical. The infrastructure is like one of the few things that both Trump and Clinton agreed that we needed a few years ago. I just hope we can recognize the need for social infrastructure and find some way to persuade the people who are running our government that without their support it will never happen. It's we need like a social infrastructure week. I'm thinking more like a decade. Exactly. At least.

And look like if you look at any report that comes from the World Bank, or even our own government, they recognize that we will soon be spending tens of billions of dollars, and then hundreds of billions of dollars, and trillions of dollars internationally to build new infrastructure.

Because the systems that we have to keep us in the modern world simply don't work. And we know it's true in the case of the subway and we know it's true in the case of the power grid. And it's my observation that it is also true, maybe even more true in the case of our social infrastructure. They have just been absolutely neglected.

And if we want to support the kind of social life that we all need, you know, regardless of our politics, regardless of our income, you know, regardless of where we live, that we all need to live well and be better connected with each other, you know, we're going to have to find a way to invest in it. Eric Clemmberg's book is called Palaces for the People. You will enjoy reading it and nodding vigorously along with it. You can get it at a bookstore near you or you can also get it from the library. Next, Avery Trollfman joins me in the studio for a little announcement. Stay with us. So I'm in the studio with Avery Trollfman, producer at 99% invisible and creator and host

of articles of interest, and we have an announcement. We do. Boy, this is interest and we have an announcement. We do. Boy, this is the wind up to the announcement. I recently went on a tour of the San Francisco Goodwill Processing Center, like where when you donate something to Goodwill and you're in the San Francisco area, it goes to this warehouse,

to get sorted and moved to the place to the location where it will be sold. And it was this huge kind of hanger of a building. And there was so much activity. And they are running out of space. The amount of stuff they have has increased by 30 percent because of Marie Condon. Because everyone, and also because it was the end of the year, and everyone wants to get their like donations in for taxes

but they just were running out of space to put and it was just raxon raxon raxon raxon raxon raxon raxon raxon raxon close and It's pretty overwhelming when you see it all in one place. Yeah, and it seems to me in this world of ours There has never been a better time to talk about what you wear and really take a look at what you own and think about it. Which you did in your groundbreaking podcast within a podcast called Articles of Interest, which is now not just a podcast within a podcast, it has its own feed. That's our announcement. So, you know, you can go onto iTunes or Apple

podcasts or radio public or Google Play and download all the episodes of Articles of Interest. We did this because we know that many of you heard them and if you're listening to 99PI right now means you already subscribed to 99PI, but we wanted them available, you know, almost like for archive purposes. So you can just go listen to articles of interest and you can share that. And I think that's really, really great. So we have a new feed available for that. And also on the feed is the theme song, which so many people have asked about.

It's by Sassami Ashworth. She's amazing. And she has an album out now, but this song, the theme song of Articles of Interest, which is so beautiful and has been stuck in my head for months now, it's so good. And you can only get that, well some fans have uploaded it to YouTube, but if you want to listen to it extremely conveniently on your phone, it's on the feed for Articles of Interest.

So if you go subscribe to Articles of Inter interest right now, you can get all six episodes and maybe you heard them but you should definitely hear them again. I know I heard them a bunch of times and they always reveal more and more because they're sort of densely constructed and they speak to each other in cool ways and you'll notice it more when you listen to it again. And you also on the feed you'll get Sasami'sammi's theme song, which we commissioned, like an original commission for this series, and you'll have them all right there, all like the seven episodes of something to listen to. Also, I need your help because last night when Roman told me

that the feed was up, I went and I checked it out, right away, and if you just go to the iTunes store and you search articles of interest, it'll come up. And it already had, like at the moment it was born, someone gave it a review and it's a one-star review and it just says, yo, this podcast is insufferable, which is just a great welcome to the world of podcasting. Oh, God.

So here's the deal, here's what you're in charge of now, like you, fair listener, go review articles of interest, give it five stars. I mean, the thing is that, articles of interest was called out at the end of last year as the best podcast of the year from a lot of people. And if you're one of those people that admired it as much as we did here and people did largely out in the world besides this guy who said, yo, it's unsuffable. Go give it five stars, go download it again, share it with your friends. This is an easy way to do it instead of going to, I don't know, I don't even know what episode it was, like episode 310 to 311316 or something.

It's better in the feed now. Now it's all buried, but now you can go find it on its own, subscribe it. Let's run to the top of the charts and let people find it again. I would really, really enjoy that. So go out there and spread the word people. Or it can be any number of stars you want. I just want more variety. Like one star of you. It should be five.

We need to bury this guy, this yo guy. And I'm certain it's a guy. But this is the thing. This is the thing. He rated it so quickly. Yeah. I don't know if he hates me or loves me. Like he found this somehow.

He's something. He's amazing. Go pile in a bunch of five star reviews that would make me happy and get the average up and share it with people and go listen to the episodes again because they're really, really great. So anyway, so that's our little, so that's our announcement.

Happy birthday, articles of interest. Or happy independence day. And you mentioned going to Goodwill. So that's how it ends. Happy birthday, articles of interest. Happy Independence Day. And you mentioned going to Goodwill, and so that means you're probably doing stuff. I'm doing stuff. I'm stepping around. Listen, listen, listen. To announce one's intentions is ultimately to broadcast one's failures.

I don't want to jinx anything. So just know that there's also stuff going on with articles. Anyway, you'll hear more about that over time. All right, thanks, Avery. Thanks, Roman. ["Many Days"] 99% of the visible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, music by Sean Rihall.

Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Sharifusif, Avery Trollman, Terrem Mazza, Joe Rosenberg, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco, and produced, Unradio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org.

We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if you want links to Eric's book and the articles of interest feed, book no further than 99PI dot org. From PRX.