99% Invisible - 396- This Day in Esoteric Political History

Episode Date: April 1, 2020

In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political historian Nicole Hemmer, and special guests rescue moments from U.S. history to map our journey through a tumultuous year. On this episode of 99% Invisible, Jody talks with Roman about his new show and we play two short episodes of This Day in Esoteric Political History. Subscribe to This Day in Esoteric Political History on Apple Podcasts

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Anyone who has listened to this show knows that I love stories from history. One of the things I love the most is that a history story in and of itself has a certain value, but what's amazing is how much the current situation that you're hearing the story affects how it's understood. It's like adding a musical score to a scene in a movie, the mood of the current moment changes our interpretation of everything. This is all leading me to introduce him to a brand new history show that we have premiering today from radio topia. It's produced and hosted by the

immensely talented and recently in the stashyode Jody Avergan, who you may know from ESPN's 30-for-30 podcast and he was the host of the 538 Politics podcast for many years. I'm a huge fan of Jody. I'm so excited he's joining the team. And so on this episode, I'll talk with him in premiere two episodes of his new podcast, this day in esoteric political history. Hey, Jody.

Hello there, Roman. So for context, we're talking on Friday, March 27th. Each and our respective homes, me and California, for context, we're talking on Friday, March 27th, each in our respective homes, me in California, you in New York City, and we're going to talk about your new show on radio atopia. That's right. I'm really excited to join radio atopia. I just want to confirm, though, I'm recording in my bedroom, which has two windows.

You're recording in your bedroom, which I believe listeners learned in a previous episode, has five windows, which are for windows. It's five windows. I live on the corner, my, my, and my bedroom is on the corner of the house. And so it has five windows, which makes it very good for son, very bad for recording quite the truth. I thought, I thought both of those things. I got immediately jealous. And then I got immediately started to do the calculus of how is he making this room quiet?

It's a little brave of you to admit. It was brave of you to admit as much on the national radio show. But anyway, the task at hand, yes, I'm joining radio topil, which I'm incredibly excited about. We're doing a new show that it's called This Day in Esoteric Political History. Basically a couple times a week, I'm going to get together with a historian Nicole Hemmer, and we're going to have special guests along the way as well, and look at one item, one moment that happened on that day in political history. And the show is going to be short. It's going to be under 10 minutes each time,

and we're just going to try and kind of pick a bunch of moments big and small that are either interesting stories, but I suspect we'll also have some things to teach us about this moment that we're going through right now. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I've noticed in the conversation about coronavirus and even Trump, as we've been talking about, Trump for the past couple of years, is we've been falling back on this idea that all this is unprecedented. And I think that helps describe the enormity of everything,

but I don't think that description is very helpful beyond that. I think it's a much more useful approach to find little threads of connections that are unprecedented so that we can continue to learn and evolve and respond. And that's why I'm really excited about this day in esoteric political history. How do you see the role of the things that you will tell stories about and how they connect

with the modern world? I think it's born of the very same instinct that I think a lot of you have had. And I've had both as a journalist and just as a human being to find myself thinking long before coronavirus, you know, over the last four or five years or so, saying, man, this feels new. This feels unprecedented. It feels like we're completely new territory. And I think like a lot of people, I have found myself turning to history more and more to get some guidance and get some guardrails. And you know, I've come to think that there's basically three main ways in which history can help us understand this moment.

And one is to say, no, this isn't new. This has happened before. Look at this time, this time, and this time, when basically this exact thing happened before. And there's comfort in that. There really is. That's not to diminish the sort of seriousness of what's happening now or given incident. Then there's the second category which is, oh no, this really is new. And

there are moments like that. I don't want to dismiss that, you know, but I think understanding when you need to raise the alarm and say, oh my gosh, we are in uncharted territory. The third category is the one that I've really fascinated by. And I think I've really come around to and I think I want to try and explore in the show, which is things may be new. We may be in uncharted territory, but this moment is a product of history. The conditions that have built up in this country over the last 20, 30, 50, 100 years have led us to this moment. And that, I think, is the thing we don't talk about enough.

How what we are feeling is completely new and unprecedented and sort of out of nowhere is actually a product of what has happened in this country. And it's almost inevitable given the forces that have shaped politics in this country over the last, you know, future generations. Right. So we're gonna play a couple episodes

of this day in esoteric political history. One of the things I love about the name is when I was feeling the same need to sort of examine the world and put out a podcast by diving into history, I call it. What Trump can teach us about Khan Law? I thought of that too. Which is equally comfortable. And you throw off the tongue. Well, I also appreciate that you in Slack recently tried to like acronym,

acronymize it or whatever, T-D-I-N-O, and I saw that I was like, no, we're not going to be doing that. T-D-H. This day maybe. Yeah, so this day in esoteric political history, so we're going to play a couple episodes of this day in esoteric political history, and the first one, can you tell us about what happened on this day and sort of T-Up, the story that we're going to hear first? Yeah, so on March 31st, we're going to be talking about March 31st, 1968, which is when Lyndon B. Johnson, a sitting president, incumbent president, in an incredibly tumultuous year

in 1968, he announces that he's not seeking re-election. We're going to be visiting 1968. I suspect a lot over the course of this series, but this was obviously a big event when a president, only a second time ever, that a president says he's not going to seek re-election, and it just sort of gives us a sense for what it feels like to be in the midst of a really tumultuous year. And I think we're certainly feeling that right now. Okay, let's hear it. and I think we're certainly feeling that right now. Okay, let's hear it.

Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. This day March 31, 1968, LBJ's surprise announcement that he is not seeking re-election. We're joined as always. Well, this is the first time actually, but we're joined by Nicole Hemer of Columbia Nikki. I'm very excited to be doing this series with you and this is our first episode. Hi. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. So I know we call this show Esoteric, political history. We will hit all sorts of different types of stories, but this is obviously a big moment, a president announcing that he will not seek reelection. And I guess one thing is I can hear our more lefty listeners here in 2020,

maybe a little hopefully saying to themselves, wait a minute, I'm battle president in a moment of crisis, you can just announce that you're out that you no longer want to run. How often does this happen? Yeah, it doesn't happen very often. Don't be your hopes to. I think it happened one other time with Truman. Um, and like LBJ,

he had a little bit of extra time at the beginning of his term, because he was a vice president who inherited the presidency. So let me lay out some of the basics of this story, and then we'll come around to kind of what we think it means and some more. But LBJ made this announcement at the end of a 40 minute

address from the Oval Office. It was ostensibly an update about the Vietnam War. But then at the end of his address, he famously says, I shall not seek and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as president. He, as you mentioned, taken over for Kennedy after the assassination in 1963. He trounced goldwater in the 64 election. What else? The Civil Rights Act, his domestic agenda, but by this point, Vietnam is really the thing that is sort of swamping his presidency, right? Yeah, it's something that I think is hard to wrap our minds around when

we've been at war for 20 years now, and the wars that we're in just don't intrude in most people's daily lives. But Vietnam was a lot different. It was part of people's daily lives. They would listen to a 40 minute address from the president and it affected everything that was happening in America at the time. Well, you know, I'm having conversations with my parents these days and with this pandemic there, sort of talking about how this is the first time in a long time since Vietnam where they have felt like there's an issue that is touching every American. I mean, the story of war, I'm sure we'll track this over the course of the show,

but the story of war is that it's become more and more separated from the lives of daily American. I think that's such a good point because even something like the September 11 attacks, which I think most Americans had a really visceral reaction to were localized, right? It was Pennsylvania, New York, and DC, and the actual events were only taking place in small parts of the United States, whereas this is going to come to every city and town in America. So a little more about this announcement by Johnson. He had health issues. He had had gallbladder and kidney stone surgeries, heart issues, he actually died four years later.

He had apparently come close to making this announcement in October, December and January, and finally did it here. There's reporting that it wasn't in the advanced text, so I mean, the circle people who knew this was incredibly small and it really did come as a shock. I heard some people even thought it may have been in April Fool's joke because it happened on March 31st.

Right, I mean, I think that it was far too serious a speech for it to be an April Fool's joke. That would be a pretty messed up issue. It would be, it would be. And things were pretty dire when it came to Vietnam at that point. I mean, just a few months earlier, the TED Offensive had been launched,

which really showed Americans that the war was not going their way. And also that military and political leaders weren't telling them the truth about the war. And that had a real effect on Johnson's approval ratings. Here he is starting up his bid for reelection and his approval ratings at the time of the speech were something like 30% of people approved of him. It was really low. But then what happens when he announces that he's not going to seek reelection? All of a sudden people love him.

Once they know they don't have to put up with him anymore, Americans flip. They go from 57% disapproving of him to 57% of them approving of him. Yes, that would not happen today. I mean, you look at approval rating. And they're so steady and they're so dictated by polarization and partisanship. That I don't think we will see swings like that that inherently mean people are crossing party lines in their approval. Yeah, I mean, that's been the remarkable thing about the Trump presidency is how stable approval ratings have been throughout.

If you go back earlier in the mid-20th century, you saw wide ranges of approval and you saw presidents like Dwight Eisenhower, who was a Republican, pretty regularly getting 70% public approval. So it was a very, very different time then. Yeah. So in his remarks, he kind of hints at this thing that got me thinking about the fact that he has to focus on all of the challenges before him. And then he is also being asked to run for reelection. And he basically says, I can't do both of these things. So I am going to try and do my job until the end of this year. And someone else can decide to campaign. What does it mean that

we ask these presidents to campaign in their last year in this way? You know, the crises of the world don't care that it's an election year. They just show up and they can show up in the last year for presidency as easily as they can show up in the first year. It's an extreme challenge to both juggle the presidency, which in the right hands is a full-time job, and then layer over campaigning on top of it. It's hard to do both really well and to not confuse the two. I mean, I think that's where people often get in trouble is when you have to deal with a major crisis,

but now you also have to go speak to deep pocketed donors at a $5,000 fundraisers somewhere. Certainly, I think we have a president now who thinks he's at his best when he's in campaigning mode and I think thinks of everything basically as a campaign. Has anyone ever tried to like split these two? A little bit. So if we think about the Obama reelection campaign in 2012, he took his entire sort of reelection campaign and he sent all of his people to Chicago and they were going to run the reelection from there and he was going to be governing in DC. And I think that that kind of splitting, there's only so much that you can do, right? It's ultimately a fiction, but that's one attempt to do it.

I want to wrap up with a kind of big question about 1968 and these other moments in history that feel incredibly tumultuous. So you look at 1968 and you say, goodness, you know, wars, riots, assassinations, presidents not running for re-election. Some of these are obviously linked to each other, but I guess I'm trying to figure out whether there are just these errors of overall instability, where it's just one of those years in which big messy epic things are going to happen, maybe even if they aren't directly tied to each other. Do these things kind of tend to group? So that's a good question. The answer is sort of yes and no. I'm not sure that the assassination of Martin Luther King led to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy But if we take a kind of bigger picture look at things instead of looking just at 68 like look at the 60s as a whole

There had been a lot of fractures forming for The whole decade right you had the Cuban Missile Crisis which had the whole world on the brink of nuclear apocalypse. You had the assassination of John Kennedy. You had the Civil Rights Movement and racist murders and violence that were happening pretty regularly, urban uprisings. So by the time 1968 rolls around, a lot of the things that happen are kind of over-determined because of all of these fractures that had been caused earlier. I remember in 2016, we had a few conversations on the 538 politics podcast, which I did during that election, that were basically, is this 1968?

And I think what I'm realizing in retrospect was that, you know, 2016 was not our 1968. It was the beginning of the sort of process that you just described, and maybe now, four years later, we're having our 1968. Yeah, if you think about all of the things people have pointed to as weaknesses in the American system revealed by 2016, we're now in a moment with a pandemic where all of those weaknesses are starting to cause even bigger and more catastrophic problems. Well, on that cheery note, we will end our first episode. That is it for today, Nicole. Thank you very much.

Thanks so much, Jodie. This was fun. Now, how can you get in touch with us and be part of this show? You just need to remember one thing, this day pod. I'm quite proud of myself over the last couple of weeks. I have secured this day pod on every possible medium. So that is our website, thisdaypod.com.

You can email us this day pod at gmail.com and our social handles on Twitter possible medium. So that is our website, thisdaypod.com. You can email us, this day pod at gmail.com and our social handles on Twitter and Instagram. You can find those, this day pod. If you have any suggestions for future topics or dates or comments at all, do get in touch with us. This day in esoteric political history is a proud member of radio topia from PRX. This was our first first episode so we want to thank everyone at PRX, including Executive Producer Julie Shapiro for bringing us on board. This is a moment when I think we're all realizing the power and the need for community, so we just feel really honored to be on board and part of that community. Our researcher and producer is Jacob Feldman.

Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions, remixed by Jameson Isaac aka Teen Days. Our artwork is by Kate LaRue. Next episode we'll discuss something that's probably on your mind, pandemics, and the time 100 years ago when a president got hit with the flu on negotiating the end of a world war. My name is Jody Evergan, thanks again for listening, and we'll see you soon. My name is Jody Evergan, thanks again for listening, and we'll see you soon. With American sons in the field far away, with America's future under challenge right here at home, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.

We have the world premiere of another full episode of this day in esoteric political history and more conversation with Jody Havvergan after this. So could you describe the second episode, which is really relevant to the time we're in right now? Yeah, so our second episode, which is coming out on Thursday, April 2nd, we'll play it for people here now, is about when Woodrow Wilson got the flu in 1918 as part of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Actually, he got it in 1919 on April 2nd. This is where I should confess that we are originally planning this show to be about

just elections. We thought this was going to be a tumultuous election year and we thought we'd do stories from previous elections. And then we did sort of change a little bit when the coronavirus pandemic began to feel like, you know, what we want to make space for other stories in politics, other moments of crisis, other moments when this country has faced things like this. And so we've brought in the scope a little bit, and this is an example of a kind of thing that wasn't necessarily an election year, but obviously a moment when our politics had to react to a pandemic. And, you know, I think one simple reminder is that Wilson got the flu, the president of the United States got the flu basically full year after

the pandemic had started. And it's a simple reminder that these things come in waves and these things go for a while. Yeah, let's hear it. come in waves and these things go for a while. Yeah, let's see. Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan. This day, April 2, 1919, Woodrow Wilson has the flu. The influenza pandemic is sometimes called the

1918 flu pandemic. It started in spring 1918, but it was the second wave, as we are all learning. In the fall of 1918, there was the most devastating, with the disease spreading into 1919. That is when President Wilson reportedly caught the flu either right before or right after he arrived in Paris for another round of talks to try and bring an end to the first world war. We're joined as always by Nicole Hammer of Columbia University. I'll lay out what we know and don't know about this moment in a second.

But we should say right off the bat, Nikki, that there's a little bit of controversy about whether he actually had the flu or there were some other things going on. Yeah, so one of the things that people know about Wilson and his health is that he suffers a pretty serious stroke near the end of his presidency. So for a long time, historians talked about this illness as a mini-stroke that he had had. But if you actually look at the set of symptoms that he had, including a really high fever, none of them really fit a stroke, and they all sound a whole lot like this pandemic that was ravaging the world at the time.

Yeah, I mean, by all counts, and we'll talk a little bit about what the revocations of this were, but he was very out of it. He was fever-struck. He was sort of deteriorating rapidly over the course of these negotiations. In Paris, one thing that's interesting is that it was underplayed at the time, I guess. You know, there was these questions about whether it was actually flu, but did they try and cover this up, or was it just that sort of reports were murky? Like, what did people know at the time? Yeah, so when this was first reported, it was just reported that he had a cold. And this probably isn't surprising.

I mean, was it a cover-up? You know, they didn't often tell in detail the kinds of illnesses that presidents had at the time. There's a much bigger cover-up that will happen later in his presidency about his health conditions. But in this case, not wanting to scare people in the midst of both a war and a pandemic, they decided to just say, hey, it's a cold, he'll be fine. So I want to get to some of the sort of bigger questions around this because for one, I mean, it's really kind of stunning how precarious of a situation this is.

We have a leader at a meeting with all of the what is known as the big four who were negotiating the end of World War One. Wilson's doctor says quote, the whole of civilization seemed to hang in the balance. Is that a doctor being a little traumatic when he's writing his memoirs or I mean it's just one of really one of those moments? This is really one of those moments. I mean, here it is after the most devastating war that the world really had ever seen. And now they're trying to figure out how to bring it to a close. And somebody like Wilson, what have been the perfect person to have at that table?

This is something he had been thinking about how to win the peace for a really long time. And now he shows up at the peace table and he's kind of a mess. Yeah. And I mean, it's like, it comes down to the fact that he just can't concentrate as well as he normally would. He just doesn't bring it and it's a reminder that we elect these people and we're electing real people who have to go into real meetings with other real people and what they say and how they behave in those actual meetings is just as important as you know all the policies and all the track record and all that stuff. It comes down to the sort of behavior in that moment. And I mean there are there are sort of theories about the fact that

what we're one may have ended very differently had Wilson been on his a game in particular with regards to what happened to to Germans. Yeah, mean, one of the things that Wilson really wanted was a gentle piece with Germany. He was really worried about a vindictive piece that would be about score settling, because he knew that they needed to rebuild a peaceful functioning cooperative Europe after this, if they were going to maintain peace

beyond the end of this. functioning cooperative Europe after this, if they were going to maintain peace beyond the end of this. And you know, it was something that normally he would have pushed for. I mean, the flu is part of it. He also gets delivered a pretty devastating blow in the midterm elections of 1918, where Republicans sweep, and so there's a sense the country doesn't necessarily want everything that Wilson wants. But I mean, Jody, you've had the flu before.

Can you imagine going to this table with the three other leaders of these countries and barely being able to sit up much less, you know, argue forcefully for the thing that you believe in? So one big question, I mean, this is sort of stating the obvious, but I kind of want to end on this note, but like, you don't get to choose when pandemic's hit, right? And I think it gets to this larger theme that, you know, so much of a presidency is defined by things you can't plan for. And it's really about how do you react in that moment. And I mean, this seems like a perfect example of that. Yeah. I mean, the tendency at the time was the right thing to do is to downplay what's happening

because people have just come through this horrifying war. The last thing that they need is to be told that there's this other invisible enemy that's going to kill millions of them. But of course, what we learn from it is when you don't have a handle on it, when you don't tell people what's happening, it actually just leads to even worse outcomes. And that's what happened. I mean, the press at the time was censoring news of this pandemic. And that's not the only reason that millions and millions of people died, but it was a

contributing factor. So, I guess one more question on the flu itself. I mean, if the public had somehow known, I guess this happens relatively late that he gets it, but I'm trying to imagine, you know, do these moments where like, oh my gosh, a president got this. Do those break through? I mean, do those make a difference? I think they do make a difference in the sense that you see that no one has the power or the money to avoid it, right? Like, it's one of those things that you can't negotiate your way out of. Like, we're all vulnerable to it. I do think it's fair at the same time though that like seeing a president

Stricken with something like this can scare people Particularly at a time when they're already pretty scared. It can be destabilizing There's this little meme or whatever you want to call it floating around around like people use this term Like we must protect so and so and I think it was pre- like people use this term, like we must protect so and so and I think it was pre-pandemic, but now people are saying, you know, we must protect, pick, you know, Beyonce or whoever, but also, you know, politicians, like,

we have to keep these people healthy so that they can do their jobs because their jobs have massive ramifications. Yeah, I mean, let's just put it out there. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, if somebody people have been trying to wrap in bubble wraps since three years ago, and again, like it's been a powerful meme to say like, do you want to be the person who gave this to a person who gave it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Oh, wow, I hadn't really heard that framing, but yeah, I guess that's something to think

about. Okay, we're going to wrap it up there. But first, a few other things that happened on this day, April 2nd, in other years. In 1870, the first female candidate for president, Victoria Woodhall, announced her candidacy by writing a letter to the editor of the New York Herald. 1917, Janet Rankin was sworn in as the first female congressman, and in 1964, on April 2nd, Malcolm X gave his ballot or the bullet speech. So every once in a while, we'll give you a taste of other things that happened on this day.

By the way, this is what we're doing on our social feeds as well posting a few times a day about other things that happened. So make sure you check those out. Alright Nicole, himmer. Thank you as always. This was great. Thanks, Judy. This day in esoteric political history is a proud member of radio topia from PRX. Our researcher and producer is Jacob Feldman. If you have any ideas for an upcoming topic or a date, get in touch. You can let us know a specific date or just a rough topic that you want us to talk about and we can find a peg for it. You can email us this day pod at gmail.com. There's also a contact form at thisdaypod.com. Next episode we're jumping to the more recent past 2008 Barack Obama and a comment he made about rural voters that may have said a lot about where politics was going over the next decade. You know, we've been talking about this for a couple of months and this was just going

to be about the election and just use historical precedent to help describe the moment that we're in in terms of the election. And then coronavirus pandemic started and we decided to move up the launch date a week. And so how are you thinking about the stories you will be selecting over this season while this is going on? I mean you know I do want to make space for stories not just oh we're gonna find stories of health crises or pandemics but stories of just moments of national crisis. I mean I think we are we are in a moment clearly of national crisis. I think, I think we are in a moment clearly of national

crisis. I think we are going to enter a moment of, you know, what I've been thinking of as sort of civic creativity or civic rear range room. We're really going to have to think through how our society is ordered and what our norms are. And politics is a space in which, you know, we do that. And we've had to do that for better or worse. And so I think making space to talk about moments where we've done that, not just necessarily linked to an election year. That said, I will say that my co-host, Nikki Hammer, who's a political historian,

when we were talking about making this change and expanding the scope a little bit, she pointed out, and she was like, elections have never really been normal. Most elections are huge. Most elections are kind of feel like they have crisis and so forth. And so even if we had stuck to just the election lens, we would have had plenty of big huge moments where it felt like, oh my gosh, our country is tearing itself apart or or tarot being torn apart. So, you know, I also do want

to say though, it's very important to me to also just find small moments and moments that just are interesting. And I think we can find lessons in those, even if we don't go out of our way to find big moments or big lessons and so forth, just telling a good small story from our political past, I think we'll still resonate and I want to make space for the esoteric. It's not just going to be meltdowns and influenza and so forth. And we're going to find some quote unquote fun and interesting stories as we go as well. And you're going to do some of that on your social media accounts and stuff like that,

rather than just the podcast. Yeah. So on social media, we're going to be posting a few times a day actually about all the stuff that we don't get to. We only get to do one topic per day, but we research to tons. So just throughout the day and throughout the week on social media, on Twitter and Instagram, we're just posting about so and so happened this day, so and so happened that day. And I will say, we've already got that going, and I have found it really interesting, and some of the stuff is

posted, I didn't post our producer posts in, sort of caught me off guard, and I said, oh my gosh, you know, on this day, we announced that we had a polio vaccine, or on this day, the Navy SEALs were formed, and just little tidbits that make you stop and think and try your own little lessons or whatever. And so I'm actually pretty excited about the social media stuff we've got going on as well. Yeah. You know, you were involved, you were in the Brian Lair show, and you were on 538. You often react to things in real time and are the producer and host of these discussions. Have you missed that role during this period of time when things are happening or have you been happy to not be part of it in the direct conversation?

I mean, I think both. I mean, I think anyone who is a journalist when there's a big story and someone who believes in, the journalism has a role, it's been tough to for me to feel a little bit like I'm sitting on the sidelines. But I also think that stories like these, looking to history, stories that kind of talk to a moment, but not necessarily about a moment, are really important. And so I do feel like this is my chance to

engage in my chance to contribute something. Going into this year, I sort of thought, well, do I want to cover this election again in the sort of day-to-day way I did for in 2016 and the three elections before that and I basically decided no I mean I like to sleep. I have a kid now. It was like 2016 you know took a few years off my life and and so this feels like a good balance. This day in esoteric political history is produced by Jody Evergan and Jacob Feldman. It's new from Radio Topia. A new episode comes out every Tuesday and Thursday we'll have links to subscribe

in the show notes in our website. So I have one kind of self-serving public service announcement because people are not commuting as much, podcasts, listenership is down, not by much, like 5% or so. But the thing is, this is part of the economy that you can support without spending a dime. If you go through the 99pi catalog and download or stream, just one extra episode this week, that 5% decrease will be eliminated and will maybe even see an overall

increase. Or you know, you can go download and listen the whole omnipos and pick one episode to send to friends. People seem to really like that at home episode I did a couple weeks ago, so maybe send that one around. The point is, this is the thing where a free and joyful task could do a lot of good and keep the show healthy and strong. So thanks. If you do heed the call and listen extra and spread the word, you know tag me on Twitter and I'll thank you personally. 99% invisible is a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is physically distributed in multiple locations but in our heart it's still in beautiful, downtown,

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