99% Invisible - 407- The Dolphin that Roared

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

When Emily Oberman found a flag of the island nation of Anguilla her father had helped design in her attic, she had no idea it was connected to one of the strangest political revolutions in history. The Dolphin that Roared Plus, we are so excited to announce the first 99pi book! The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt comes out October 6 and you should pre-order it right now!

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In the heart of the Caribbean, there is a tiny little island called Anguilla, and I mean tiny. At its widest point, it's only about 16 miles across. But while it's small, its white sandy beaches and crystal blue waters have made it one of the most desirable tourist destinations in the Caribbean. It's got all-inclusive resorts, and you can swim with dolphins. The island is like the ideal place to film an episode of the Bachelor. In fact, they did, season 15,

week 7. But back in the 1960s, Engrilla didn't have any of the beach side villas or luxury spots or golf courses that it has today. It had dirt roads, no electricity, one stoplight in the middle of town. That's Emily Oberman, she used to visit the island on family vacations as a kid. When you wanted to get a message to someone, you pinned it to this very specific Mahogany tree in the center of town in the valley. Emily's parents were successful graphic designers from New York City,

and they liked to travel off the beaten path. This was particularly true for her father, Marvin. Um, my father was incredibly gregarious and charming and smart and quick-witted and a total wise-ass and he always was ready to take someone in his arms and dance with them. You can tell Emily loves her dad a lot. Both her parents really. She is an extremely successful graphic designer in her own right, but she gives her parents the credit. Absa, friggin' lootly! I am a graphic designer because of my parents.

After her dad passed away in 2018, it was actually a graphic that he helped design that got Emily thinking about Inguilla again. My father had recently passed and so I had gone through a bunch of his stuff and came across, you know, a small flag. The flag was all white with a thin strip of brilliant turquoise blue at the bottom, and three orange dolphins arranged in a continuous circle in the center, almost like a recycling sign. But you know, with dolphins. Emily knew that her father had gotten involved with the design on one of their trips to

Angula, and that it actually flown there for a couple of years. So four decades later, inspired by this keepsake, she decided to take a trip back to Angula to honor her father and show her own family, this place that had been so important to her childhood. I hadn't been there in 40 years, so it was going to be an adventure and an experience for me, but I thought probably an emotional one because it had been so meaningful to my family. In April of 2019, Emily packed up her husband and sons and they slept through the cold to New

York Airport, hopped on a plane to St. Martin where they boarded a ferry. And as we were approaching, there was a big sign welcoming you to Anguilla, and it was on a white building with orange and turquoise typography, and I looked at it and thought, ah, that's cool. I recognize those colors. They were the same colors as her father's flag, orange, white, and blue. And she noticed them a lot. I suddenly began to see the color scheme was everywhere.

The pylons along the highway had those three colors painted on them. And the color theme was just everywhere, so it was a little bit of a surprise and a delight. Emily's father was an amateur writer, so when Emily returned home from her trip, she looked through his folder of stories to see if she could find out more about this flag. We looked through his stories and sure enough, there was the story of the Angulian flag. It turns out that her father's dolphin flag was a bigger deal than Emily had realized, and that her parents, a couple of graphic designers from New York City, had played a very

small but not insignificant role in a key moment in the island's history, because this flag that had been collecting dust in the fanlatic was a symbol of one of history's strangest political revolutions. So when I was born there were dirt roads, no running water, no telephone. This is Timothy Hodg, former president of the Angola Archaeological and Historical Society. Like Emily Obramon, he was a kid in the 1960s, and he remembers the island a lot like she does. None of the comforts that we have today, very little commerce, very little employment. Angola had been one of Great Britain's many overseas colonies since the 1650s.

But unlike many of Britain's other territories, Angola was missing a lot of essential services, like electricity, paved roads, proper schools, mostly because the British neglected it. Basically, if you read the historical records, it was not recognized as having any value to the British Crown. So nobody paid any attention to it. Even though the island has a history of slavery, Angola's soil wasn't fertile enough for large-scale agriculture. And according to Hodge, if the British couldn't establish widespread slave plantations on Angola,

then they didn't have much use for it. And so for decades, centuries even, they basically ignored the island, which meant Angula got very little funding for development. It was just the island that was unto itself, existed unto itself, and this is the Angula that existed up until from 1650, when it was settled initially, to 1825. But in 1825, Britain decided just to throw some of the smaller islands together to form a single colony. Angula would be treated as one part of a multi-Island colony along with St. Kits, which is also known

as St. Christopher, and eventually with Neves, with St. Kits in the Ministry of Control of the Union. Suddenly Angula went from, essentially, independent self-governance to having to answer to St. Kits in the Ministry of Control of the Union. Suddenly, Angula went from essentially independent self-governance to having to answer to St. Kits for everything. Without consulting the people of Angula, Britain decided to lump it with St. Kits and Nevis. This is Don Wallachek, he studies Caribbean history at the University of Puerto Rico. He says this was a common move for the British and the Caribbean.

Just like it lumped together other countries like Trinidad and Tobago, Antiga and Barbuda, Carriacou and Grenada. So there were other examples of this. But there was one huge problem with lumping Angula with St. Kits. The Angulians didn't like the conditions. It's just a match that was never made in heaven. St. Kitts and Angula were two very, very different islands with very different relationships with Great Britain. One of the gripes that the Angulians people had was that the aid that came to the colony always ended up in St. Kitts

so that St. Kitts had electricity and running water, and telephonesphones and the things that we spoke about that Angola didn't have. And at the time Angola's leaders were calling for things like peers and, you know, a better port. There was a story going around at the time that the leader of St. Kitts had been given money by Britain to build a much-needed Angolian peer, but instead of building it on Anguilla, he actually built the pier in St. Kits, and called it the Anguilla pier.

Attention between the two islands simmered for over a century, until 1967, when Britain made a decision that would turn their feud into an open conflict. Rather than separating the two islands as Ang Inglians wanted, the British government decided that St. Kitts, Nevis and Inglis wouldn't be a single colony anymore, but an official self-governing associated state with St. Kitts in charge, which I know basically sounds like the same thing, but Hodge says this arrangement was much worse. At least with the colonized status, they could complain to somebody, they could complain to Britain, but after that

they would have nobody to complain to. Angulians were now entirely at the mercy of St. Kitts and they started protesting immediately. The entire police force on Angula was made up of 17 conditions and they became the symbol of condition authority. So in February of 1967, Angueleon rebels rounded up all 17 officers and booted them off the island. They took the police, they took their weapons and they put them on to vessels and shipped them

after sickids and said, well, we are forever free of you and we are separate and independent from you. This was the first act in the Anguillian Revolution, one of many revolutions that were happening throughout the British Empire at the time. Jamaica becomes the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to gain independence. The 15th, 1947 Independence Day for India

These are among the last pictures to be taken in the capital of the Gold Coast. For when this day is over, a crowd of the people have gone down and in their hands. And now, Angola 2 was declaring their independence. Kind of. The Angola Revolution in 1967 caused a lot of historians and others to scratch their heads. Because Angulot was calling for independence from St. Kits and dependence on Great Britain. The island wanted to go back to being ruled directly by the British. The reality of Angulot had asked for was to be ruled directly from Britain.

They figured it was better to be loosely ruled by a country half a world away than tightly policed by your next-door neighbor. As all this was going on, a young Emily Overman and her family were on one of their trips to Anguilla. Emily's father, Marvin, learned about the conflict over breakfast when he overheard two men recounting a raid on the police station. They said that there was an attack on the police station, and one of the guys apparently was very proud that he had shot two bullets, but the police station was closed at the time,

so there was... he was just shooting two bullets at an empty building. Curious, Marvin Oberman started asking around. What were these guys talking about? Why would there be a raid on the police station? What's going on? He was eventually introduced to a man named Jeremiah Gums, who was able to explain the revolution because he was involved.

I mean Jeremiah Gums, I say Jeremiah Gums was a colossus. This is Alan Gums, son of Jeremiah Gums. He was as strong as any man I've known. And physically, his closest thing in physical stature was the American athlete Jim Brown. But I mean, he was like solid steel and he could run and he could do everything in the world. Jeremiah had moved away to the U.S. in his 20s, but it come back to Anguolo with his wife Lydia to open up a hotel. He didn't have any official role in the government, but he became deeply involved in the politics of the island. They even gave him the nickname, the Roving Ambassador.

He was very involved in where the revolution was going and how it was going to be handled. And I think he had a better eye for even publicity. Jeremiah and Lydia knew that if this revolution was going to capture people's imagination, they needed a good flag. The original idea was throwing Wallah to, was going to away, and so they had to have a flag. It isn't entirely clear whether the gums reached out to Marvin or if Marvin reached out to them, but one way or another, Emily's father helped create a whole new flag for a whole new political future.

The idea behind the flag was that he wanted it to be incredibly simple. As any good flag should be, Marvin drew inspiration from the colors of the island itself. Pretty much wherever you are on Inqually, you can see this beautiful turquoise water. And the idea of there being a long band across the bottom certainly felt like what a flag should have. Like in the vocabulary of flags,

there should be a big wide band of something and an iconic image of something else. Lydia Gums and Marvin settled on three colors, white, blue, and orange, white for peace and tranquility, the blue base representing the surrounding sea and also faith and hope, and the three orange dolphins at the center, which symbolized endurance, strength, and unity in a perpetual circle, you know, the recycling circle. Marvin coordinated with Lydia from his office in New York and mocked at the prototype, but since he was technically working for a government in revolt, he had some concerns. He had some concerns. My father was so nervous about designing this flag.

He was petrified that he was being followed by the FBI, because he was working for a foreign government in revolt. So he was sure that MI5 was following him or the FBI and he would keep the shades drawn in his office and it was actually hilariously charming. It turns out that the FBI had very little interest in Marvin's flag project and he was able to get the prototype printed without issue. And they made the flag which my father then wrapped in something wrapped in something and brought to it without issue. The flag was raised over the administrative office, along with the Union Jack, a clear on and it has remained loved and beloved by the Angerian people. The flag was raised over the administrative office along with the Union Jack, a clear

declaration of independence and dependence at the same time. As a graphic designer, my father had been really proud of the work that he had done for the island. But Alan Gums remembers it a different way. It was my mother was the art, you know, the imagination. And then she was the one that came up with the three dolphins. And there was somebody who helped her to draw it. And that was it.

Gums is positive that his mother Lydia was actually the designer of the famous dolphin flag of Anguilla. If she might have been working with Mr. Overnon, you know, I thought impossible. Most Anguillians who know the revolutionary history will probably tell you that Lydia designed the flag. While flag nerds, who read the September 1991 issue of the flag bulletin, will probably tell you that Marvin was the designer. The truth may actually lie somewhere in between, but as a successful graphic designer herself,

Emily has a healthy perspective on the debate. I have always believed, and I usually think about this in terms of my team, but I can say this in terms of clients as well. To me, a project that is successful is one where everyone who worked on the project thinks that they were 100% responsible for it. Regardless of who designed it, the Angulians had a flag and a revolutionary spirit, but they were still stuck in this confusing tangle of colonial bureaucracy, since they were fighting for independence from St. Kitts, but not from Great Britain. Revolutionary leaders tried to negotiate a

direct relationship with Britain, but Britain refused to deal with Angula without going through St. Kitts first. Angula did not want to do that, and so the tension just continued to escalate. But even with this tension, it remained a bloodless conflict. Angula did not want to do that, and so the tension just continued to escalate. But even with this tension, it remained a bloodless conflict. The man who eventually became known as the father of the nation in Angula, Ronald Webster, said, oh, the revolution was really a war of words. Here's Don Wallachak again. He meant that he won a lot of battles with words, with threats,

with conversations with reporters. The media was captivated by the story of this tiny island in a territorial dispute with one of the most powerful nations in the world. One can only die once. He can only die once and we are prepared to die for our freedom. This is the voice of revolutionary leader Ronald Webster, who along with Jeremiah Gums petitioned the United Nations to back the anguillion cause. They failed to convince the UN, but their story was in papers all over the world.

The press were now following my father, because the anguilla had become the mouse that roared and they were on the in the New York Times every day for months. The mouse that roared was a satirical novel by Leonard Wiberley about a tiny nation that declares war on the US. The reporters couldn't help but see an ironic similarity between the two situations. Angula was the surprisingly ferocious island that refused to back down. Anguilla was this small place lurking in the corner that no one thought could produce such a giant, powerful political movement, and it surprised everybody. You know, the movement was heard all over the world.

More than anything, the Revolution marked a huge shift in what it really meant to be an Anguillian, and it united Anguillians behind a single purpose under a single flag. But despite this new unity, St. Kitts still had the power, and they were withholding everything from postcards to pensions. The leader of St. Kitts, Robert Bratchaw, even reportedly said, quote, �I must get Anguola back on their knees and quote, Britain had no intention of separating the two islands and Angulians were losing their patience.

They realized they were being strong along and they realized that Britain wasn't particularly invested in allowing them to determine their own destiny. So in February of 1969, two years after Anquila declared independence from the Associated State, it took a more drastic step and declared independence again. But this time, it was from the British. As a tiny nation with no diplomatic recognition, this was an incredibly risky move, but Angulians voted 1,739 to 4 to hand all ties with Great Britain. The Union Jack that had flowed alongside the Dolphin Flags since the start of the revolution

was taken down because they decided they would rather try to make it entirely on their own than to have any connection with St. Kitts. They would never negotiate that. They said they will never be part of the associated state in the discussion. But Britain wasn't ready to let go, and they attempted a last-ditch effort to save the associated state. They sent a British representative to Angola, named William Whitlock, to try to negotiate with the Angolians.

You don't have to understand you're dealing with the Anguelians. The accounts of what happened next tended to vary depending on whether you're asking an Anguelian or a British person, but according to Wallachek, the Anguelians welcomed Whitlock at the airport with a stirring rendition of God Save the Queen, and as a sign of respect to Whitlock, Ronald Webster, the Anguelian leader, came dressed to the Nines. He was actually wearing a dinner coat, a very formal, I'm not British, right? This thing that British people know what it is, right?

He's dressed in this, like, it had a tail, but the courtesy wasn't returned. Apparently Whitlock blew off an invitation to have lunch with Webster and instead ate with another British official stationed on the island. Feeling disrespected, the Angolians asked Whitlock to leave the island. When he says, well, you know, you can't throw out representing the crown, so you can't throw me, you can't tell me to leave. But the Angolians were having none of it. I believe they fired some guns into the air to signal that they were serious. Whitlock jumped on a plane with his tail between his legs and headed straight back to Britain.

Whitlock was humiliated. He shared his humiliation with his peers and his superiors. It's not really clear if he exaggerated what happened by he really portrayed the islanders as villains who were extremely violent and about to kill him. Britain decided the only way to respond was by mounting a full-scale invasion

to restore order. So the British invasion, that's such as you want to call it, actually occurred. They send a frigate down there. Two Royal Navy frigates arrived and 330 paratroopers. People talk about seeing geeks coming out of the sky. British forces parachuted onto the island

and stormed the beaches, probably expecting armed resistance. But all they found were reporters snapping photos and some very confused angolians. Because the Declaration of Independence from Britain had been so recent, a lot of islanders thought that maybe the British were there to make angola a direct colony again, like they had originally wanted. There were also locals who thought that the troops were actually there to help them. They thought to themselves,

oh, they finally came to like set all this ridiculous controversy. We finally have direct colonial relations. There's stories that some women were taking food out, right? To the soldiers, like a sign of solidarity, and then they realized it was an aggressive invasion. Angulians didn't put up any resistance. There was very little violence and certainly no casualties. Once word got out about the so-called invasion of Anguela, the British became a punchline.

The foreign press, the press, in the national press, all over the world were basically making fun of the British invasion. The official name of the invasion was Operation Sheepskin, but it later became known by a different name. On the call of the Bay of Piglets. The Anguelians allowed British troops to search their homes for weapons and watch as they replaced the dolphin flag

that flew over the administrative office with the Union Jack. Angula had been taken without a fight, but in a way, Angula won the war. Angula won the war because it had essentially achieved what it wants to achieve in the first instance. It came at the hands of an unnecessary and aggressive invasion, but Angula was technically under colonial rule again, and more importantly, they were no longer under the thumb of St. Kits, which was exactly what they had been originally fighting for, and because the British had gotten themselves into a PR nightmare, they had a lot of damage control to take care of. They started development programs to pay roads all over the island and a new runway for

the airport. They also trained a new police force made up of locals. They didn't just have to make up for a disastrous military move, but for centuries, a colonial neglect. Angola received more support than it ever received, you know, in all of the hundreds of years of British colonization. Britain established Angola as a colony in 1650, right? This is 1750, 1850, 1950, 300 years, more than 300 years.

So in a matter of a couple of years, it began to, you know, have infrastructure, schools, there was a mobile library built, health professionals were stationed there. And Willa was given the support that it needed to develop an economy and create a thriving tourism industry. It took over a decade to negotiate the terms, but by 1980, and Gula had achieved full separation from St. Kits and was officially a direct territory of Cray Britain. It isn't technically correct to say that Gula has achieved independence, but today, the country has its own constitution and government.

Anguelian's describing Anguelia today as independent. And when I first started going there, I kind of thought it was an independent nation. And then finally I started checking things out. And then I would go to my Anguelian friends and I'd be like, you know, Anguel is not technically independent. And they would sort of flare up on me. They're like, we had a revolution. We were invaded, we had two declarations of independence.

There's this parallel, very powerful and convincing narrative. And maybe, you know, a small place with such a different history, maybe they should be allowed to have sort of their own understanding of what independence is. Even though you can still see its presence all over the island today, the dolphin flag of the Republic of Angola was only officially flown for about two years. Once Britain invaded, it reverted back to the Union Jack and then got a completely new flag in 1990. The current design is a blue field with a union jack in the upper left canton, with a clashing orange dolphin coat of arms on the right hand side. Most British overseas territories adhere to this particular style guide, and to be honest, it's not so good. Those union jacks need to go. It's really only appropriate on the UK flag, but anyway, I digress. The current and global flag is certainly less fun than the dolphin

flag created by Marvin Oberman and Lydia Gums. But in a way, the design of the current flag is an appropriate, if complicated symbol, of what the country said and I are going to talk about the first 99% invisible book. It's called the 99% invisible city. It comes out October 6th. We're going to talk about it and tell you how you can get a coffee or 10. You can get 10 coffees. We will not stop you after this. So we have a huge announcement. The first 99% Invisible Book is coming out October 6th, 2020.

It's called the 99% Invisible City, a field guide to the hidden world of everyday design. It is written by Kirk Holstead, our digital director, and me. It's available for pre-order right now. So if you go to 99mpi.org slash book, you can find all the places you can pre-order. And pre-ordering is extremely important to new books, especially by new authors. We'll talk a little bit more about that later. But first, I want to tell you about the book itself. It is both a culmination of the 10 years of stories and the unique worldview of the podcast, and it's this huge leap forward with brand new stories and insights. Literally, everything we cover was researched and written

from the ground up. So even if you know, know the show backwards and forwards, you listen to every single episode, you might recognize a reference to Busta Rhymes Island, for example, but there are whole parts of that section about the process of naming things that were not in the episode. And then there's all the stuff that we've never covered on the show,

and we're just extremely proud of it. It's designed to be a reading book, like read it, cover to cover, but also it has the look and feel of a field guide where you can flip through, find entries for the city artifact that's maybe sitting right in front of you, and read a cool story about why that thing is the way it is. It's beautifully illustrated by Patrick Veil and designed by Rafael Geroni, so it's both this functional object I want you to use

and read and carry around with you, but also a precious object that you will like to hold in your hands and look at. So to give you a sense of the stories that we tell in the book, the co-author Kurt Colstead is here. And I wanted us to cover one of the stories that actually used to pitch the book to publishers in New York when I was out there. And as I was describing it, I said, well, it'll be like this travel guide, but it'll be to all the mundane boring things that are in every city, not any one city in particular, but every city. And it'll have these entries like a field guide.

But in the entry for a traffic light, for example, it won't necessarily be the origin story of the traffic light. Well, because the origin isn't always the most interesting story about a traffic light or anything else in New York City, right? Exactly. So we want to focus on the ones that are like not just the best example of, but the coolest story about. The most interesting traffic light in the world as far as I'm concerned happens to be in Syracuse,

New York. So what is so strange about the traffic light in the corner of Tompkins Street in Milton Avenue in Syracuse, New York? Well, really, simply, it's upside down. Right. So the order of lights is reversed. Right. So the green is above the red, which is unusual.

You always see traffic lights the same way. I mean, sometimes there's sideways, right? But it's always, green goes up to yellow, goes up to red. Like, that's the stack. It's just how we do things. But if you think about it, that had to start sometime, right? And so when that started being deployed around the country,

it wasn't like this is the way things have always been, because there was no precedent. Yeah, it was brand new. So they landed in this one neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, that happened to be very Irish. And Irish Americans there saw this as an affront to their culture. You know, this was a new phenomenon.

Traffic lights were new to the area, and they were like, well, why is the union red on top of the Irish green? Right. They're like, that's not the order of things. Green is above red. That's how things should be. Exactly. And so they did what you know, anybody would do, I guess, and they just smashed it. They broke it.

And then, you know, and you'd think, well, that would be the end of the story. They're going to fix this thing and and everything will go back to normal. But no, like they keep preparing the light. And people keep throwing stones at it and breaking it. And it kind of moves all the way up to the state level. There's all this back and forth. There are these alderman that come in and say, okay, we'll come in and negotiate with the city to get this thing to be permanently, you know, upside down. And in the end, kind of remarkably to me me they won. And so to this day, that traffic light is still upside down. But then, you know, it's one of those stories where as you dig it into it, you find all these fun details. And I love it. Like if you go there to the spot today, you don't just see the upside down traffic like there's an entire memorial park on the

corner and it's got you know an Irish flag. It's got this sort of shamrock embedded fence. It's got these bricks which you can kind of picture representing like the bricks that maybe were thrown at the light with the members of you know community donors who helped make the park. And then there's this statue, and it's a statue of family. And the father is pointing at the light. And the sun, if you look closely in its back pocket, there's a slingshot. And it's kind of this memorial to this very strange, seemingly low stakes little battle, but that ended up bringing this community

together and got everybody really enthusiastic about a traffic light of all things. Yeah, so that is indicative of the type of story that we're telling in the book in addition to stories about, you know, manhole covers and towers and the grid system and cities, and a bunch of things that you may know a little bit about as a regular listener at the show, but a bunch of stuff that I guarantee you do not because when we did the research as a bunch of stuff that was new to me and so I'll put together in the new way. One of the things I love about the sort of challenge of the book and opportunity of the book was to say, well, we have all these stories, but we want to tell a larger story. We want to make this into chapters. We want to tell this overarching story of the city.

So the existing episodes that we wanted to include became the kind of framework around which we infilled all these other stories to tell larger stories. So we have a section, for example, on heritage. And it contains certain things that are topics we've covered in episodes, but we do it in a kind of heritage. And it contains certain things that are topics we've covered in episodes, but we do it in a kind of order. And we bring you through it so that it tells this larger story about how we think of heritage and old buildings in our built environments. Right. Like, what is all

of thinking behind preserving things and keeping things the way they are, restoring them to a certain state and not others or tearing them down even and how that relates to preservation and heritage. And then the whole book is organized around bigger concepts on the design of cities. But it also functions as a field guide that you can just kind of flip through. If you see something, you can open up the entry on, I don't know, utility graffiti, the those spray paint markings on the street. We'll tell you what the different colors mean and what that means for what tubes and cables and piping is underneath the street in front of you.

We'll also tell you the big story of the explosion in Culver City which codified all of these markings to make sure that the streets were safe when workers were digging underneath the ground. So the book really has all these ways that you can use it and enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the beauty of it, is that we made it so that each story really is independent. Each entry can be read by itself. But if you are interested in that kind of thing, you might go to the next entry and the next, and the next because a lot of cases, you'll find that the story keeps going.

Yeah, I'm the sort of thing that you're looking at at the moment while you're looking at that entry. Totally. The joke of it is, it's a field guide to the city. So it's a field guide to all cities in this way, because it has stories from all over the world. But there's probably some analog in the city that you're in to the thing that we're talking about. But we do travel the globe with the book. And one of the things that's kind of interesting about releasing it in this time period where travel is limited is that if you're looking to be engaged in the world and you can't

travel, this is actually a beautiful travel guide to the place where you are. You know, you can go outside and find the depth and the history of a thing that is on your corner that maybe you've, you know, just ignored before. You've never thought about before, but there's this rich history there. And this book will be your guide to your own city. When you can't travel right now, you can find all this joy and pleasure and curiosity in the city that you're in. And that's, I think, it's sort of a beautiful moment to have this book. Yeah, I completely agree. And I've been telling people that for a while now too. It's just like, you know, you can use this book both to think back to places you've been, but even just within a few blocks of your home,

you'll find things that we talk about in this book. I mean, that's the kind of crazy thing, right? It's like, you think this is sort of specific to a place and our stories are anchored in places. But at the same time, they're kind of placeless. Yeah, they're real stories that take place in a place. So like we take you to Syracuse, New York, we take you to Old Town, Warsaw.

We take you to Barcelona. Like there's all these stories in there, but most of these stories lead to big lessons about why. The grid is the way it is in your city, even if you're 10,000 miles away from the one that we're talking about. And that's the nature of the show. It's very much the nature of the book.

And I just am just really proud of how it all came together. And I think it's this, um, and it's also just like lovely. It is really beautiful. And we're very lucky to be paired with a really talented designer and a really talented and just very hard working illustrator who, uh, went above and beyond in a lot of cases to just bring stories to life. And that's something kind of unique and amazing about the book too is, normally we can't show you these things. We have to walk you through what they look like or

or you know, and sometimes that's an advantage to storytelling, but sometimes it's really helpful if you could just immediately see on the page, okay, this is what we're talking about, we don't really have to describe it any further, we can just jump right into what it means. Right. So, Nielis is, say, we want you to buy the book, and right now you can pre-order it, you can go to 99pi.org slash book to find all the relevant links we also have a link in the show notes. I've learned so much about the book publishing industry, and as we've been going through this process, and one of the keys to our success is a large number of pre-orders. So all the pre-orders of the book and the first week sales are all collapsed into one number, and that determines if the book premieres on the New York Times bestseller list, for example. And that, of course, is a big deal.

But also, the pre-orders determine if big stores will stock the book and how many copies booksellers will order for their shelves. So you pre-order rain now greatly increases the chances that a person who has never heard of the show will see a copy randomly and flip through it and fall in love with it and buy one. So you, the current 9.9 PI fan who orders right now are the fuel for that whole engine. Yeah, and once you buy one, I mean, you might as well buy two, and if you're buying two, you could just buy three. I mean, you'd have family and friends and I mean nerds and it comes out October 6th. You could buy ten and your shopping could be done for Christmas or

Hanukkah or whatever you celebrate or like birthdays. It is a very good gift for all kinds of people who are just curious about the world and especially curious about the world that they live in every day. And so we think this is a lovely evolution of the show. And if the book does well, we might get the opportunity to do more. So 9i9pi.org slash book is the place to go to get your copy. The day it comes out on October 6th, do not wait, get it today. Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, Roman.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Vivian Le, mixed in tech production by Kevin Ramsay and Shereef Usif, music by Sean Riel. Kurt Coles said is the digital director, the rest of the team, is senior editor Delaney Hall, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Baroube, Katie Mingle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Morris. Special thanks to Michael Beirut and Nisha DuPuy. Our technical producer, Shereef Usif, is leaving us this week to go on new adventures. We want to thank him for all of his hard work on the show, making things sound so beautiful for us, and so beautiful for you, the listener.

He's a true artist and will be missed. We are a project of 91.7K, LW in San Francisco, and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations around North America, but in our hearts, logs B. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listeners supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. You can donate to the collective at radiotopia.fm, just like these fine people did, David Ohtaguru, who's some Hodge, Brian

Chesney, Eugene Gilbert Park, and Mike Garrett. Thank you so much. You can tweet me at Roman Mars in the show at 999PIorg, or on Instagram and write it too. We have links to the 99PI book and pictures of the 99pi book and how to preorder the 99pi book and 99pi.org. Slashbook. Radio to P.R.X. you