99% Invisible - 390- Fraktur

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

If you have ever caught even one minute of the history channel, you have seen fraktur. You’ve seen the font on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi roadwork signs. Today in Germany, blackletter typefaces are frequently used by Neo-Nazi groups and for many Germans, they bring to mind the dark times of the country’s fascist past. This is ironic because fraktur has a long and strange history that includes the font actually being banned by the Nazis. Plus, we get an opinion from Kate Wagner (McMansion Hell) about “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” Fraktur

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Early one Monday this past December, Peter Dorfult started his week the way most of us do, which is to say, reluctantly. So it was a normal Monday morning, I was gonna go to work and I've only been awake for like half an hour or something, so I was still a bit woozy. Peter lives in Dresden, Germany, where he works in elder care, visiting clients at their homes.

And to do that, he usually takes the bus. But that morning, he noticed something unusual as he boarded. When I got on the bus, I see that the bus driver had put up a sign inside of the bus that said in German, Diesenbus steut Einddeutscher-Fahrler, which means this bus is driven by a German driver. A homemade sign saying this bus is driven by a German driver was not the kind of thing Peter was used to seeing on his daily commute. That's reporter Kevin Caner's.

But Peter, the driver's message was pretty clear. I can only interpret what the person who put up the sign would have said. But the application to me was, this is a good bus, you do not have to worry, you can talk to me in German because I am one of the good ones. And not a foreigner. But what really drove the message of this sign home was not just the words, but the typeface they were printed in. A typeface from a larger family of typefaces once used throughout Germany and commonly

referred to as Fracture, in which an English goes by a different name. Blackletter. Blackletter is the type of old, timey, gothic typeface that you often see used for the bold front titles of newspapers like the New York Times or Washington Post. You might also see it on Tattoos or the T-shirts of Heavy Metal bands. Put it on a page and it brings to mind the time of castles, nights, and feather quills. But for many people, especially in Europe, Black Letter is most closely associated with one thing. It's the Nazi font. You know, I'm not that good with history and stuff.

But what I know is that the font that was used by Nazi Germany really, really looks the same way as this. October 1938, Adolf Hitler made his triumph in entrance into Jefferson Revoculus, so date back. Just days earlier, the world was at the brink of war. The France and Great Britain reluctantly signed out to the Munich Act. If you've ever caught even one minute of the history channel or really any documentary about World War II, you have seen this typeface on Nazi posters, on Nazi office buildings, on Nazi road work signs, usually saying something

like verboten with a big exclamation mark. Today in Germany, black letter typefaces are frequently used by neo-Nazi groups, and for many Germans, they bring to mind the dark times of the country's fascist past, which is why it was pretty clear to Peter and the other passengers on the bus what was going on with this bus driver's sign. The message by itself is not welcoming and has this nationalist tone, but the fun choice adds to that. Floyd Hartwig is a graphic designer in Berlin and the editor of a website called Fonsenuse. And he says that in Germany, when it's not being used on a bantee or a masthead, Black Letter has a very specific set of connotations.

The Black Letter type phases, as a genre, have been associated with German nationalism for a long time, and everybody who sees them today knows that it's not a standard choice, it sends a signal emphasizing the Germaness. Even if it was like in a neutral fun, it would still have been a problematic thing, but it's kind of like the cherry on top, the one thing that really drives the point home. The sign that Peter saw that day would end up causing a big stir in Germany and get folded into an ongoing debate surrounding racism, nationalism, and culture, a debate in which the use of black letter often serves as a kind of symbolic dividing line.

Today, depending on one's perspective, black letter can either represent German cultures rich and proud heritage, or alternatively symbolize everything that's wrong with it. But to understand how people's feelings about a simple typeface got to this point, we need to go back to the moment of its birth. Because once upon a time, in that bygone era of knights and castles and feather quills, Blackletter wasn't limited to Germany. It wasn't even Germanic.

Instead, it was used all across Europe. Black Letter may seem incredibly ornate, like it was created for the sole purpose of turning letter forms into little individual flourishes of art. It definitely does not seem like a common means of communication. But back in the Middle Ages, black letter with its angular forms was actually considered practical, especially for monastic scribes copying out entire books by hand.

Black letter initially developed in the Middle Ages because forms that had these kinds of angles were easier to write more rhythmically and correctly than rounded forms. Den Reynolds is an American type designer and historian who has been living in Germany for the last two decades. And he says that today we're used to type faces with perfectly rounded curves. Think of our O's, use peas and seeds.

But while these shapes look easy enough to draw, if you're using a quill to draw out thousands of them, page after page, they're not. And then, just as now, readers valued standardization in the text. Every letter, even the rounded ones, had to look exactly the same. But it was hard for a monk copying out a long text to draw consistently perfect circles. So, black letter writing styles probably arose so that the products would be more even in their appearance and probably also faster to produce. If you were a scribe, it was a lot easier to produce all those o's and u's and c's out of a series of short straight lines.

The technique of using straight lines, instead of perfectly rounded curves, gave the letters a fragmented appearance, which is actually how Germany's most common form of black letter type would get its name, Fratour. That's the Latin term for broken, because the letter forms have these broken, angle curves. Black letter was first developed in France in the 12th century, but within a few hundred years it had become standard throughout Europe. It wasn't even really a stylistic choice. It was just what words looked like.

It went on question. That was what people thought of when they thought of writing, when they thought of a text. Susan Reed is head of Germanic studies at the British Library, and she says that Blackletter became so ingrained in the culture that even after it stops being needed, people kept using it. And so when the printing press was introduced, most of the early typefaces were some variety of black letter typeface. As with so many big leaps in technology, the printing press started off by borrowing

heavily on the design conventions that came before it, even though the new operating principles made those conventions unnecessary. Even Gutenberg, the man who developed the first popular printing presses, was no exception. He went for a textura, a narrow, very angular blackletter typeface that was also used by scribes at that time. At first, the printing press appeared to only further cement black letter status as Europe's dominant form of writing, but soon it would be challenged by a very different kind of typeface.

Roman kind of rolls off the tongue. And trust me, you've definitely seen Roman type before too. It's the style of letter that's associated with Imperial Rome. But just like the letters chiseled onto the side of an ancient marble column, Roman letters are sparer and more vertical than their black letter counterparts. You'd also probably find them a lot easier to read, and there's a reason for that. The letters are instantly recognizable, as they look like the letters that we've been reading our entire lives. Today, almost all major Western-type faces are Roman. From Times New Roman to Ariel. Every time you open up Microsoft Word or Google Docs, you're using Roman type.

It's our era's black letter. It's just what writing looks like. Yes, I mean, it's a strange thing. People have asked, you know, why why fractured became the default typeface in Germany? And I always almost want to flip the question on its head and say, why did Roman become the default everywhere else when most printing started in black letter type? Roman script might have stayed lost to history, but right around the same time Gutenberg was printing black letter Bibles in Germany, something else was happening in Italy. Renaissance scholars were rediscovering ancient Roman texts. You had this rediscovery in the Renaissance of classical literature in the classical world, and classical letter forms were being brought back.

Committed to bringing back the culture and wisdom of antiquity, Italian scholars began consciously developing their own Roman-style letters, which drew heavily on the classical forms they encountered. And so when they started printing classical texts, then they started using those as well. At first, Roman type was used strictly for texts written in Latin, the language of antiquity and the church. But pretty quickly, and for reasons that remain a little hazy, Roman type broke out of

its Latin cage and kind of took over. By the end of the 16th century, Roman type had become common in the written vernacular languages of France and Spain. England followed suit in the 17th century, the Netherlands and Sweden in the 18th. It had become the very same thing that Blackletter had been before. Eubiquitous and unquestioned. But even as Roman became the Western world's dominant form of writing, Germany and the German language stayed resolutely committed to Blackletter, an island of broken script in a sea of curves.

And it's mostly thanks to the best-selling author in the history of the German language, Martin Luther. The adventure is on! Martin Luther! Luther and the Protestant Reformation he set in motion in Germany through everything that had to do with Rome and the Catholic Church into doubt. And in the process, he gave German as a written language a big boost. Luther by writing so much and trying to write to a broad as possible audience really codified a lot of what written German was. Luther and other German Protestants were especially keen to distinguish German writing from the writing

of Catholic Italy, which they saw as corrupt, even evil. And that included the church's favorite typeface. So there was an explicit casting of Roman type as being associated with the Pope and with Catholicism and things that were not German. And this was at least by the time Luther is getting to his Bible editions. This is an explicit wish that they be set in German type and not in Roman type.

But there was one German typeface in particular, which would end up being used more than any other. Fracture. Fracture came to be seen as uniquely German, almost as if it were imbued with special Germanic values. So much so that people would eventually refer to all German black letter typefaces as Fracture. This association of Fracture with all things good and Roman with all things bad, became so

strong that in some of Luther's German Bible editions, unpleasant words like wrath, devil, and punishment were set in a Roman typeface to distinguish it from the rest of the text which stayed in Fractur. Later German texts would go even further. Applying the rule if even part of a word was borrowed from another language. And you actually get these rather wonderful things that where there's a foreign loan word that has say a Latin stem and a German suffix,

there's Latin stem within the same word, we'll be printed in Roman letters and then the ending in Fracture. So this is a clear break, typographically, on the page from Rome. And just as there wasn't going to be a reconciliation between Germany and Italy, there wasn't going to be a typographic reconciliation either. At first, Blackletter remained popular in many parts of Protestant Europe. But one by one, the other Protestant countries began to give in to the temptations of Roman type, until finally Germany was the lone holdout.

In part because unlike the people in those other Protestant countries, Germany remained a fragmented jumble of smaller states until the late 1800s. So Fractura came to be seen as one of the things holding German national identity together, especially in the 19th century, when the country was invaded by Napoleon. The Occupy in French had their Roman letters, and the Germans had Fractur. Germany, as a nation without nationhood, as a collection of small, quite fragmented states, needed these other symbols of national identity and I think this is when Fracture particularly becomes associated with Germany and the German language and German culture.

Many came to believe that where there was no Fracture, there was no Germany, including the mother of Germany's greatest writer. Gertr's mother, she actually described Roman letters as fatal, as if they're almost sort of painful for her to read. And I think that's something that's often quoted as evidence of this naturalness of Fractura of Germany's greatest writer's mother, approved of it. In 1871, when Germany finally unified, Procturer became the official government typeface. And out of on Bismarck, the first chancellor,

was such a staunch supporter that he said he would refuse to read any German book, not set in German type. But right around the time they finally got their own country, a growing contingent of Germans began to wonder if they really needed their own typeface. Liberal, cosmopolitan, and future-facing, these Germans came to feel it was silly to keep using

letterforms from the Middle Ages. They began perishing for Germany to drop its beloved fracture and move to Roman type. Now, where people sort of in the spirit of progress and modernism who thought that this is crazy, we should be a more international country we're connected with, with our neighbors, you know, we have business ties and cultural ties.

Increasingly, academic and scientific papers intended for foreign distribution were being printed in Roman type. And as the world became more international, Roman type also started seeping in. It began to be taught in schools alongside Fractur, and by 1891, about 40% of German books were being printed in Roman. But more conservative Germans pushed back. They insisted that Blackletter was and should remain a cultural staple. In 1911, the German Reichstag actually held a vote on whether the country should switch

over by having Roman replace Fractur as the official typhoon in German schools and government offices. But after a fierce debate, the legislation didn't pass. German typography had reached a stalemate with neither side willing to budge. Even by the end of the 1920s in the era of telephone, radios, refrigerators, and jazz, traditional fructour street signs could be seen hanging next to art, deco posters featuring Sansaer of Roman fonts. It was a dual thing. If you look at photographs from the cityscape in the 1880s,

in the 1980s, you would see both that of forms and maybe even more on Roman type, because that was the style associated with commerce and advertising. It was as though there were two separate typographical realities representing two different Germany's. Faktur would end up losing the struggle for Germany's soul, but it wasn't the liberal freedom-loving overeducated cosmopolitan who finally broke the impasse. Instead, it was the most ardent German nationalist of all time.

In 1933, the Nazi Party rose to power on a wave of German chauvinism. And at first, this seemed like great news for those in favor of traditional black-letter was in. Roman was out. There was a lot of push from certain areas within the government and within the party to use the moment in 1933 to random this change through to get rid of Roman type and really make everything be black letter. Directors were given in the interior ministry. That said, from now on, they would use black letter type letters for everything. Many publishers changed over. And the proportion of books and newspapers printed in Fractura type grew substantially. And you see plaque arts that tell Germans to be German, to think German, to even be German in their writing.

And of course these are in Fractura. There was just one problem. Out of Hitler, I'm going to hate it, Fractura. just one problem. Out of Hitler, he had a hated fructour. I see something like this. In 1934, he actually made a speech in which he criticized the obsession without trappings of Germanness, among which he included gothic he writing. This gothic romanticism, Hitler says, is ill-suited to our age of iron glass and steel.

It wasn't that Hitler wasn't into traditional German values. He just didn't think that should mean being old fashioned. It's hard to have everyone living in the mountains on farms with their cows and their sheep and their goats, and also working factories to build high-take airplanes and rockets. And when the Olympics came to Berlin in 1936, he insisted that a lot of the publicity and the posters and foot for that should be in Rome and rather than fracture a type because you were bringing the world to see the new Germany.

Besides, Hitler thought his fascist values shouldn't just apply to Germans. The Third Reich was supposed to span the globe. Hitler actually said that German was becoming the world language and within a hundred years everybody would be speaking German. But even Hitler's delusions of grandeur had their limits. He knew that if he wanted to rule over the world, he would have to use a typeface that the rest of the world could actually read. And so, in 1941, an edict was circulated

to all publishers and printers on behalf of the Fuhrer himself, decreeing that Roman type become the standard type throughout Germany. Effective immediately, neither a fructour, nor its cursive counterparts were to be taught in schools, used in government documents, or appear on street signs.

All magazines and newspapers were likewise expected to change over to the Roman script. Which is quite an extraordinary thing to do in the middle of a world war, because it's very expensive to just suddenly go over from one type face to another, university. And the explanation in the letter is that, you know, shock, horror, they had found out that black letter was actually a Jewish invention, and that it had to be dropped immediately. This wasn't true, but it was an unassailable argument.

It was impossible to come back from that. Fractured didn't finish everywhere overnight, but with the edict, it quickly fell out of use, and it would never fully recover. The Nazis brought in two black letters, 800-year-run, as a common form of writing. So it's ironic that the typeface Hitler banned and personally disliked, remained stubbornly associated with them.

Perhaps it's because the Nazis promoted Fractor so heavily before changing course, but it's also just because they were German nationalists, and it was a traditional German typeface. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising that they found it hard to shake the connection. Especially telling was the edict itself, the one banning Fractor. Although the memorandum was typed in a Roman font, the Nazi letterhead at the top was printed in black letter. By 1945, when Germany was finally defeated,

no one wanted anything to do with the quote-unquote Nazi font. And by the 1950s, it had pretty much died out. I think I saw some statistic that between 1951 and 1979, there was something like 34 books published in Fracture in that whole period, so that's quite astonishing. Whether or not it's okay to use block letter today is a complicated question, especially in Germany. It depends on the context, and it doesn't always make sense.

Yeah, a factor on a restaurant sign or on a beer label is invisible and you can find better-the-mastheads on newspapers like New York Times, because that's normal. That's what we used to. Consumer items and commercial ventures that want to evoke a more innocent sense of tradition and quality, often use black letter without any trouble. The same goes for heavy metal bands and other people that want to play up its medieval or gothic qualities. But there are also contexts where its use is not innocent and can't be forgiven as naive. When Peter Dürrfel, the bus writer in Dresden, saw that sign, the one that said, this bus is driven by a German driver, it was printed in black letter, and Peter knew exactly what it was meant to communicate.

Like, if I were a person that was potentially targeted by potential Nazis, I would definitely take the next bus. In fact, the side of the sign, and of the font, was so alarming that there was no way he could just let it go. So, I was thinking, I said, and of the font, was so alarming that there was no way he could just let it go. So I was thinking to myself, what should I do, should I? Like, talk to the guy, what? I didn't know what to do. But then I thought, wait, this is an official public bus.

I don't think that's even legal. When Peter got off the bus, he took a picture of the homemade sign on his phone and tweeted it at the Dresden Public Transit Authority, asking essentially, what the hell is this? And they responded like really quickly half an hour later and they were like, yeah, somebody already told us that, we don't know how that could happen, we already took the sign down and the bus driver will not be driving today anymore. So I was like, all right, thanks for the quick answer, good thing. And I thought that was it.

But a little later a journalist message Peter on Twitter. And it's like, hey, I'm with the press. Do you want to do an interview? I'm like, okay, sure. And from there on, it just kind of spiraled. The story appeared on the local news, then on the national news. When the driver was let go, some German nationalists wrote tweets in the driver's defense. Then some some right-wing politicians retreated it, then I got some hate mail.

In the end, it took a couple of weeks for everything to die down, although that doesn't mean the larger issues swirling around for a tour are anywhere near resolved. All right nationalism remains on the rise in Germany, and especially since the refugee crisis, controversy surrounding the use of the typeface seem to be happening with more frequency. No mainstream conservative politician publicly uses Fractur, but in 2017, a police anti-terror unit in the state of Saxony was sanctioned for using a logo on the interior of one of their specialized vehicles that featured a black litre font. Mostly though, the only people openly using

Fracture are neo-Nazi groups promoting their hyper-traditional version of German nationalism. Apparently, most of them still don't realize that Hitler considered their favorite typeface hopelessly tacky and provincial. And many nationalists don't even understand which typeface it is they're using. The Dresden bus driver, for example,

may have thought his sign was in Fractur, but it was actually in Old English, a black letter typeface that has no historical connection to Germany. Of course, if Peter's story about the bus driver and his black letter sign demonstrates anything, is that no matter what the real historical facts are, Fractur will never return to the mainstream.

For better or worse, it's going to keep on being the Nazi font. This long tradition of centuries of use is kind of forgotten, and all we can see now are these 12 years of Nazis. And yeah, you can't change that. It has happened, and that's the way it is, and it won't come back. But even if they don't think it's a return to everyday use, those who study Proctor don't want to see it completely forgotten either. And perhaps, no one more so than Hanoblom.

Hanoblom is a 76 year old retired teacher and is the president of the Association for German Script and Language, which is dedicated to preserving and improving people's knowledge of Fractura and other old writing styles. He says that the fact that neo-Nazis use black letter typepaces only shows that they know nothing about Germany's history. In much ofTS WISEN! Do you listen to me? In much of this historical ignorance is for a deeply ironic reason. Most Germans have trouble reading older German documents precisely because they are in Prok tour.

You could probably read something printed in Prok tour, but even then only with a bit of effort and patience. And handwritten Prok tour is much more difficult. It's basically illegible for most people today. As a consequence, many of the books and letters and diaries of the past have become harder to connect with. Which is why one of the association's main activities today and the one Hano is most passionate about

is teaching children how to read and write old German cursive. During our interview, he shows me some correspondence ... from the 19th century. Whose handwriting I can't make header tails of. And I say, that looks hard. For me, it's just that thing. See, see, they would learn that very quickly. But Hanno, that shows me I'd learn fast.

Yeah. Very fast. That I'd be amazed at myself. Yeah, they would be amazed. Hano hopes documents like this one will help people avoid making the mistakes of previous generations. After all, at 76, he is old enough to have lived through the war. When, as a small child, his city was destroyed in a bombing raid, and his family had to be evacuated.

Who would not know where he came from? So he tells me how important it is that we learn from history. He also does not know what direction he should go. About war and peace, and about how to get along, and about the Germans of the past, like Luther and Gota, who wrote about all these things, and mostly, in fact, tour. Culture wars and fights about nationalism aren't just for fonts. We have these arguments about buildings too. We're talking about making federal buildings beautiful again after this.

As we were producing the story of Fracture and its starting role in this centuries-long drama of German nationalism, a contemporary story hit the news that was also at the intersection of design and nationalism. In this case, the story was about the architecture of U.S. federal buildings. On February 4, 2020, architectural record published a story commenting on a draft of an executive order that they got a hold of that called for the White House to adopt federal guidelines to ensure that, quote, the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style when it came to new and upgraded federal buildings.

The order was authored by a group called the National Civic Art Society and it was titled Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again. In case you were at all confused as to the audience that this particular order was pandering to. Our friend, the architecture critic and celebrated McMansion skeptic, Kate Wagner, wrote a column in the New Republic about it and I called her up to talk about it. The first

thing I did was ask her what the authors of this order mean when they say that all federal buildings should be in the classical architectural style. So it's kind of funny, there idea of what classicism is is basically just anything inspired by Greek and Roman architecture, but also like 19th century Victorian catches fine too because they included the Eisenhower building which is this ridiculous Second empire building with like a million columns and I hate it so much and it's so ugly But they're like this is great architecture Well for the record I kind of like the Eisenhower building It's pretty fussy and very French

But the point is that when people extol the greatness of classical architecture, they're basically talking about columns. Yep, they're basically talking about columns. This broad advocacy for classical architecture is in opposition to more modernist or brutalist styles. They believe that modernism is degenerate and it's ruining everything and people hate it. And we need to free people from modernism because it's not the architecture of the people or whatever, which is of course ridiculous. How many people go to see falling water literally every year, I don't know.

So this proposed order is a 180-degree reversal to a seminal document written in 1962 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan called Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture that explicitly stated, quote, design must flow from the architectural profession to the government in not vice versa. Yeah, so there is basically a mandate in that document that's an official architectural style must be avoided and that federal buildings and that new buildings should be exemplary of the time in which they are built, the opposite in spirit to the proposed executive order. The architecture community reacted very strongly to this proposal and I should stress here

that this is not an official proposal from the White House. It's a draft of a proposal that one influential group hopes the White House will adopt, but people have taken it very seriously. The American Institute of Architects released this statement, quote, The AIA strongly opposes uniform-style mandates for federal architecture. Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nations' diverse places, thought, culture, and climates.

Architects are committed to honoring our past, as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy." Beyond the codification of one federal style, the architecture community objected to one aspect of the order in particular. This order would allow Trump to create a, quote, President's Committee for the Rebeautification of Federal Architecture, which is such a trolley name, and which would enforce this classical design mandate. And this panel would exclude, quote, artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture

critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization, involved in architecture. So basically anyone who works in architecture has anything to do with architecture like is not allowed to comment on architecture in this panel. So of course everyone is mad.

The AI is mad. The preservationists are mad. Kate Wagner, the, everyone is mad. The AIA is mad. The preservationists are mad. Kate Wagner, the architecture critic is mad. The objection from the architecture community, including yourself, is not an objection to classical architecture, right? No. Classical architecture is great. Ever since architecture has existed, there have been architectural revivals of past styles.

I mean, it is a debate that frames the history of architecture, and the debate is constantly, is commonly known as the ancients versus the moderns. And that debate is like a healthy debate. It's a healthy debate. It's like, it's part of architecture, it's part of culture. Yeah, exactly. Like, when do we look towards the past for architectural ideas and when do we push forward through various integrations of those ideas together in the sort of eclectic mash or like furthering like technological progress?

I mean, it's like one of the classic debates of architecture. But the thing is, is that classicism is, I mean, classical buildings are beautiful, obviously. And it's important that architects be trained in classicism. It's important that a lot of architects go on to study classicism and to practice building classical buildings, because we always need people to, for example, like make additions to historical buildings,

make restorations to historical buildings, make restorations to historical buildings, to lecture on historical buildings, to work across other fields, including anthropology and archaeology, to talk about how historical buildings may have been in the past. I mean, it's just really central and important part of architecture. That being said, time always moves forward. An architecture historically and today has always been a conversation between past and present. Not a dogmatic argument between past and present, though that has happened. That's what preservation is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be like making a mothballed museum of every building. It's how do we

reconcile historical architecture with contemporary needs, with contemporary economics, with contemporary politics? That's what preservation does. And modernism is included in that. The problem is not classical architecture. The problem is that there's a certain type of chud online who thinks that classical architecture

is proof that Western society is better than other societies and that we had a beautiful Western society that was infallible, but crumbled under globalization or immigration or whatever right wing, like cryptofascist element you think ruins columns. The One and Only, Kate Wagner. You can find her writing at the new republic and McManchinHell.com. If you want to hear more from her, she's the star of episode number 232 of 99PI. It's called McManchinHell. It's one of my favorite. 99% of his bowl was produced this week by Kevin Caner's, edited by Joe Rosenberg,

mixed in tech production by Sriviusif, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colestead, is the digital director. The rest of the team is Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Avery Truffman, Chris Barube, Vivian Lang, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of Israel is a member of Radio Topia from P.R.X. of 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 on the show at 99PI or on Instagram and read it too. But you can come yell at us about fonts and neo-classical architecture in mynipe.org. For PRX.