99% Invisible - 565- Mini-Stories: Volume 18

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire that has been burning for decades.Check out Lizzie No's latest album Halfsies on Band Camp.  She's on tour in 2024. Go see her and say hi for me!Mini-Stories 18

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Happy New Year, beautiful nerds. It's 2024 and it is many stories volume 18. To ease this into the New Year, we have stories of buildings constructed from the sky to the ground, the little filler words that convey nothing and everything at the same time, and a song about a fire that never goes on. Let's do it.

So I'm here with Colestead, Digital Director and co-author of the 99% Invisible City, and you are here to tell us about the newest, most unlikely craze in skyscraper construction. What do you got? Yeah, well, we've already covered a lot of different ways of putting up and taking down buildings on the show and in our book. And you know, there's bottom up construction and there's both top down and bottom up demolition, which are pretty fascinating. But now there's actually something in that fourth quadrant of building that I don't think we've ever talked about before and that's top down construction

Okay, you're gonna have to break this down for me because I can't imagine how you build a skyscraper from the top Yeah, yeah, good question. So there's this new tower in Detroit, which is a great example. This is called Exchange, and its levels were built in reverse order. The top floor first and the ground floor last. Here's a photo that kind of shows you how this is working, like midway through the construction process. Okay, I see. So it kind of looks like the top half of a skyscraper, but with legs on it. So I gather that these thick concrete pillars are kind of holding up to top half of a skyscraper, but with legs on it. So I gather that these thick concrete pillars are kind of holding up the top half of the skyscraper.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And part of what I find so fascinating about this is that that it's a clients, it looks really uncanny. Like we're not used to seeing skyscrapers being held up primarily on a couple of spindly legs, but that's not a reflection of a really big structural difference in how this works versus other skyscrapers. It really is a function of what we normally see and don't see in the construction process. So underneath it all, this actually works much more

like a normal skyscraper than you might imagine. Okay. What do you mean? Right. So the big difference in construction technology is like framing cladding versus masonry. And masonry is how we've built for most of our history. And when you're building with masonry units like bricks or stones, you start at the ground level and you stack upward, right? Masonry walls end up supporting their own weight and the weight of whatever's above them. Sky scrapers work fundamentally differently. In those, the exterior walls clearly aren't structural, right? Like you don't hold things up with glass. Instead, what's holding up the building are internal elements, like steel reinforced concrete columns, or in the case of this top-down tower, a steel reinforced pair of concrete

circulation cores. And each floor is built around these vertical supports. And in the end, the whole exterior is just a wrapping of metal and glass that make up these walls that shield us from the elements. They're not holding up things. Right. So even though the process of building this particular top-down building reveals its legs, so to speak, every skyscraper has those legs. That's really what holds

us a skyscraper up. However, you built it. Pretty much, yeah, like most skyscrapers have cores of some kind that work like these still legs. Like they offer structural support in the house circulation, meaning staircases and elevator shafts. But in the typical skyscraper, of some kind that work like these still legs, like they offer structural support and they have circulation, meaning staircases and elevator shafts, but in a typical skyscraper, you might also have smaller columns spread out across each floor, helping further distribute loads. And if you're building floor by floor, that's a pretty easy way to do things, right? You build one floor, you add an array of columns to support the next and so on and so forth. But in this top down case where you're lifting each floor up, that would be a huge pain

because each built on the ground level has to be raised around any vertical supports that go all the way up, right? And it's easier to just have these two big pant holes for those two legs in each level than have tons of smaller holes for each and every little support. Huh. And so in the end, it really does look like a normal tower. Like when it's done, you wouldn't know how it was constructed.

Yeah. Yeah. So then why? I guess it's cool. Yeah. But why? Well, safety is like one of their big arguments for this because instead of sending people up onto these high floors, which you know start without walls, the walls are already there when the floors get lifted into place. So there's no way for like a worker on a high floor to fall off the building. Right.

Similarly, you've got all these odds and ends and processes that go on typically up high, like, cranes lifting stuff into place, and all of that can now happen on the ground, which means, again, it's like, you're not gonna have something dropped from a crane on your head. But there must be some kind of complication with lifting an entire done floor up the line. Like, what are we talking about? Like, how much are they even way?

Well, about a million pounds each. So yeah, it's not an easy task, right? Like it's very tricky. And what they did is they used these things called strand jacks. Now I could nerd out about this technology for a while, but suffice it to say a strand jack is a hydraulic lift system that gets used

when nothing else will do. And they have enough power to pull and lift things like oil rigs, which weigh tens of thousands of tons each. So like if it gets built on shore, they can drag it off shore with strand jacks. And so you would hook up the strand jacks to these sort of concrete stilt legs and they just kind of pull up each for. Yeah. And that highlights another advantage of this approach too, because by raising things straight

up, you reduce the need for the construction site to spread horizontally. Like normally you'd have a lot of stuff going on around the building, right? You'd have cranes and they'd have to be like across the street possibly and all of that stuff takes up space and in this particular case space was really at a premium and they couldn't build it that way. So this was really in part a site specific solution. And there are elements of this that are not new like lifting pre-fabricated elements into place is something we've done for a while. This is just no pun intended, taking things to the next level. So, you know, lifting not just wall panels and boxes and things, but like entire completed floors. I'm pretty sure that pun was intended, so but I'm going to allow it.

Okay, it might have been. So you mentioned the site specific one in Detroit, to solve the problem, not being able to spread out. But is this really going to be like the next big thing? Like are we going to be hearing about this? Like I hear about mass timber or something like that? I am not sure. I personally love all of this, but it's one of those like all tools have specific uses

thing. So I would expect to see this happen more on tight urban sites. I would imagine this will be used more and more over time. That makes sense. So I have one final question. I imagine the advantage of building things from the ground up is you're starting where the ground is. So you don't have to calculate where the building meets the ground. It just happens naturally. You know, but how big of a pain is it to do that final step of putting the last floor on, which is the first floor, and, you know, making it flush with the ground? I mean, well, with any tower or construction projects, you're going to be re-grading the land

anyway. So you're going to be taking away soil or adding soil and moving around, making sure that building sits flush. And I don't think it's fundamentally that different in this case. But it does bring up a good point in general about construction in this building in particular, because you look at this facade and it's got this kind of offset grid pattern, which I found kind of visually interesting. The windows don't exactly line up like you might expect, and that's clearly an intentional part of the design aesthetically, but I'm also convinced

it gives them this, you know, a little bit of wiggle room, a little bit of leeway so that things don't have to line up. And in fact, aren't supposed to line up exactly. And that's to me a really big part of any big project is like there are going to be mistakes made along the way. And there's going to be like little measurement errors that add up. And so part of the art is covering up those small mistakes and making it look like they're not there in the first place.

Totally. Yeah. And construction. If you've ever seen construction, you'd be amazed at how much they're solving in the moment as it's being put together. It's so cool. Well, this is awesome. I love this stuff and I can't wait to see a top-down

construction building with little legs on it sometime in my future. Yeah, it is adorable. Thank you so much, Kurt. This is. Hey, Joe. Hey, Roman. How's it going? It's going well. You know, many has always make me happy. So what do you have for us? Well, for this mini, the first thing I want to do is play a clip for you. OK. It's of Amelia Clark. She's a British actress, perhaps best known from Game of Thrones. And this is a clip of her on Jimmy Kimmel doing a voice, doing a bit. I'd love to hear your American accent. Well, it was late. So my American accent kind of changed a little bit into Callie

from the Valley. It's like this whole situation. And the thing I want to focus on about this clip is not the Valley Girl Akset, which we should probably do a whole other story. Yeah. But it's about the likes, all of the likes she's peppering into her speech.

Yeah, we have a really good time. I got so close to getting jotted by me like a $700 air conditioning unit Did you base that on someone you know? I like love Clueless Yeah, she's good at that. Yeah, she is uncannily good and as a person who grew up, you know Maybe a mile and a half from the valley. I think she has my number Because the thing is like is my weakness. I am a hardcore likeer.

And to be clear, I don't just like pepper in the occasional like, because when I get tired, I do like the multiple machine gun likes. You know what I mean? Like, like, like, like, like, like, you know, but it turns out the word like as well as the phrase, you know, which I also just used, when used in this way are actually a very specific thing called filler words. I am intrigued. So tell me more about these filler words. Well, filler words or fillers, as they're often called in linguistics, are things like

like kind of, you know, basically, I mean, and of course, the classic non-word fillers, your basic ums and us. And when we hear someone else use them, we tend to think of the person as somehow just not having it together or being dumb or vapid. But that's why I wanted to share this many with you, because it turns out filler words are not, in fact, something to be ashamed of. When we use them, we're not being idiots or at least not entirely. Instead, filler words actually serve a really important function.

So, the kind of first big thing I'd want to point out about filler words is that they're informative. They carry information that is useful to people. This is Nick Enfield. He is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney and author of the book How We Talk. And he says the reason fillers and filler words are so important is that most of the time when you're talking, you're talking with another person, you're having a conversation, it's this kind of creative act that you're participating in together. And so times moving fast, and in a way you need to do your part to cooperate with that person, don't waste the time too much. And at the same time, you know, you've

got your own sort of selfish interests, you might want to continue to be the person talking. And so it's important to kind of have what we call traffic signals in the use of language. And by traffic signals, he means that we constantly have to send each other signs, letting the other person know where the conversation might be going, who should be talking when, all these little things that kind of regulate the flow of the pattern. And so there's a whole level of language, which is really about structuring language itself. That's interesting, because he's talking about filler words, almost like their body language, but unlike with body language, where I feel like I'm often aware that I'm doing it, and

I could rattle off, you know, kind of the rules of what each little movement means, I'm not so sure I could do that with filler words. Like it's maybe just a little more subconscious. No, yeah, totally. And once I tell you the rules of how filler words work and the different things you use them for, you're going to be like, Oh, God. Of course, that's how I use them. Okay.

So let's help me break this down. What are some of the rules that I don't know that I know? So just take something like um and for example, the classics, which of course are serving the practical function of giving you a moment to think of what to say next, which is something that is inevitable. All people in all cultures have a version of this because none of us are perfect. But there's all these other things that um, and uh, do for us. For example, it's also letting the other person know that you are going to pause so they

don't jump in. And it turns out the length of the pause you're requesting is actually different depending on whether you say um or uh, uh, uh, precedes a shorter pause. And if you think about it, um, precedes a pause that is just a little bit longer. Huh. That makes sense to me. Another thing is you might have noticed that you're more likely to use, uh, or, um, if you want to signal to the other person that you're about to abruptly change the subject.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I've done that before. It's sort of like, um, how's your partner doing? Right. And, uh, your, um, gives me just enough buffer so the change isn't too jargain. And similarly, um, and, uh, also to bad news, so you're not too shocked. So I might deploy a well placed before I tell you, um, we broke up.

Yeah, okay. I'm starting to see how these are, um, kind of useful traffic signals, you know, but what about the filler words that are also ordinary words, like kind of and like and you know. Well, so a lot of those are what Nick would call demonstratives. And demonstratives can work like a manate. They can serve a similar function, but you can also use them to help you listen or kind of put together what it is you're trying to convey, especially when what you're conveying has a lot of moving parts.

And perhaps my favorite example of a demonstrative providing this kind of structural support is one that isn't really used anymore, but it's a word found in that kind of old-fashioned tough guy gangster talk, which if you've ever seen like a James Cagney movie, you know this word. And not surprisingly, it's also been highly parodied as in this clip here. Wait a second, I'm not true. Understand? That one should be resurrected. That's pretty good. Definitely, definitely should be reintroduced. And in that case, you can kind of hear how the demonstrative word understand is underscoring

each separate element of this kind of complex scene so that you can kind of piece it all together. But also, like a lot of demonstrators understand, when used in this way, also still retains some of its original meaning. So you can sort of tell where those words have come from, and there's an argument that they kind of carry that meaning into the interaction, but that meaning is what we call bleached. Because once you start to use a word over and over, then more frequently you use it,

the less meaning it tends to carry. Yeah, that makes sense to me. I'm trying to think, what is my kids' filler word? There's the one that they use all of it. Oh, there's the phrase to be honest. And I am sure that when they say to be honest, they do not have meaning associated with it. Like, I feel like they've said it so much

that it doesn't even, they don't even register it to themselves or that it has any meaning with, you know, at all. Like, it's just, it's used so frequently, it's kind of amazing. Right, so it's been bleached. Absolutely, bleached that of existence. But it makes me wonder, I mean, like, is it common in other languages

to have these like really complex filler words, and filler phrases even? Oh my yes. Allow me to direct your attention to the comparative language filler word Wikipedia. Oh, goodness gracious, okay, there we go. Oh my God. And so you can see there's all kinds of sounds

and words and phrases that are used as filler. All languages have them, but each language, this is the fun part, kind of does it in its own way. Okay, so I see like in Arabic, there's one for like by God, you know, like Wala. There's like, what's its name? As a filler phrase, That's kind of amazing. I love it. Oh, in Urdu, there's kind of a blah, blah, blah, or yada, yada, kind of thing.

That's a good one. And then Argentinian Spanish has a Che, like, hey, which they, which became the nickname of Ernesto Che Guevara. Wow. Because he used it so much. Well, that's a, that's a tidbit right there. That is the final fact of this of this mini. I love this. This American sign language. That there's a symbol for um, you know, just to, you know, like it says, it can be signed with an open eight held at the chin palm and eyebrows down. Um, it's really kind of amazing that they have that built into sign language as well.

Yeah, and I did have to look that up what the open aid is and how that works. Without making our audience try to visualize anything to specific, it's very, very similar to holding your finger to your chin and just kind of looking down and pondering. Yeah, so I get that the ums and us have some regional specificity, but they're pretty much universal and so are many of the filler words. But in my lifetime, I saw the ascendancy of like, and how does that happen? How does a new one crop up and an old one like understand, go away? That to me is kind of amazing. Yeah, that actually turns out to be a really hard question to answer. First off, because for millennia, obviously there were no recordings, only written records.

And just like today, no one writes down the fillers. That's not how the language usually works, right? So you can maybe see some more ears and arms, you know, kind of in older texts, if you think about it, from the 19th century. So maybe people use those more, but Nick says there's not actually a lot of clues. But here's where things kind of get interesting and connect back up to this intense stigma we have against filler words, which is that there's another scholar, Michael Erard, who's been looking through the written records. And it seems to be the is that there's another scholar, Michael Aeroard, who's been looking through the written records.

And it seems to be the case that it's only with the advent of recorded sound that lots of people start to complain about fillers in the first place. Yeah, yeah, once we hear ourselves saying these words over and over again, we get so conscious about them, but we don't even notice them when they're happening in real time and not being recorded. Right. Exactly. And I actually spoke with Nick about this.

And he kind of explained it this way. One thing that's worth pointing out about radio and sound recording and podcasts and all of that is that it's a way of experiencing language where you're not involved in the conversation. You're not a participant. You're just sitting back and hearing it. Now, if you think about village life, in some sense, you're not a participant, you're just sitting back and hearing it. Now, if you think about a village life, in some sense, you're always part of that social situation, those are going to be your neighbors, they're going to be your family members, and you're going to potentially jump into that conversation at any point. But when you start listening to sound

recordings on radio and that kind of thing, that connection is completely severed. So you have this kind of weird luxury of being able to just study the language you're listening to because you don't have to track what you're going to maybe say next. And this sort of explains why it's a little more tedious to listen to a recording of lots of ums and likes because you're not there in a conversation waiting to jump in or know when you're supposed to say anything. Like, it's not providing that structure.

It is being presented to you as a recording. And it makes them a little more tedious. Right. And so suddenly, if you're the listener, you're going to be kind of impatient. You're going to say, why are you saying all these ums and us and sort ofs? That's of no use to me. Like, get to the point. Yeah. And so it is with the advent of recorded sound and the radio and the phonograph, right?

And things like that, that you start to see lots of books and articles about avoiding filler words in quote unquote, proper speech. But it really also ties into what we do here on the show, and pretty much on any radio podcast program, which is to take out lots of filler words from interviews. Yeah. And I've never kind of consciously thought about it this way before, but I think it's in part because part of our contract with the audience is that we are preparing something a little polished for them. Yeah, but also like if the whole point of the filler word is to provide that conversational structure and it's not really a conversation, then maybe there's a good, sort of base reason rather than just being annoyed or, you know, find them tedious.

Like, there's a good reason to take them out. I mean, I get rid of a ton of them. I think of it as just a thing that we're doing, you know, out of generosity to the interview we to make it sound as polished as they probably sound in their head. Yeah. And that is, in fact, I mean, you know, just to pull the curtain back a little bit, the phrase, don't worry, we'll make you sound really good. It is.

It has, has booked me half my interviews in my time as a radio producer. So when you take this conversation and you cut it down into your mini story, I'm going to trust that you're going to make me sound okay. No promises. No, that's all right. I'm going to trust that you're going to make me sound okay. No promises. No, that's alright, I'm just kidding. Of course, as always, we will make you sound really good. Joe, thank you so much for this. This was super fascinating.

You're welcome Roman, it was my pleasure. Coming up an underground fire that has burned and will burn for decades and imagining what it would be like to live next to it. A musical mini story. After this. So I'm here with singer-songwriter Lizzie. No, hey Lizzie. Hey Roman.

I'm a huge fan of your work as you know And I've seen you play lots of times and one of times I saw you play you play the song called Centrelia which I love and it has a very fast name back story very 99 PI back story So I was hoping you could tell us that story my song centrelia is a fictional song based on a true story about a coal fire that broke out in Centralia, Pennsylvania in 1962. We don't know for sure what caused the fire. Some people say that the city government was responsible because they were burning trash to clean up the town in preparation for Memorial Day. Some people think it was an act of God or a mystery. But whatever the cause was, the fire started on May 27th

and connected with the miles and miles of coal mining tunnels that were underneath the town. There is a lot of compressed carbon down there because of the coal, so the fire was never able to be extinguished. And scientists think that it could continue to burn for another 250 years. This is the fire started in 1962,

it's still burning, and will we burning henceforth for another 200 years. This is the fire started in 1962. It's still burning, and we'll be burning henceforth for another 200 years, I think. Wildly enough, yes. The fire is still burning over 50 years later, and it has caused sinkholes to appear throughout the city and made it totally uninhabitable. There are stories of people's pets falling into a sinkhole and disappearing, kids falling in. So the town was naturally evacuated because there was this minefield of sinkholes underneath the city. And the population quickly went from about 1,500 to only about five residents that are

left. And so how did you hear about this story? I have a good friend from Pennsylvania who also writes songs and is also kind of a weird history nut. So she read about this fire and said, I need to call Lizzie because she knew I would be bizarrely fascinated by it. So I immediately went down to Wikipedia rabbit hole and found everything I could possibly get my hands on from first hand accounts to environmental reports on the situation in Centralia 50 years later.

environmental reports on the situation in Centralia 50 years later. It's actually a really fascinating scientific environment. Even though the experiment wasn't intentional, it's basically like a demilitarized zone where wildlife has reclaimed this whole city and nature has just taken it back over. So the whole thing is fascinating from a number of angles.

What I couldn't stop thinking about and what wasn't in any of the reports was a description of what it actually would be like and feel like to be one of those five people that refuse to evacuate and is still basically living in a ghost town. So the song that I ended up writing was basically just me imagining the state of mind that someone would be in years and years later, after your entire city has been destroyed, your community has been evacuated. And you've watched the absolute worst thing that could possibly happen, happen to you. And the song is called Centrelia and I want to play it for everybody because I love it,

and here it is. Do you want to watch the sun come up? Sitting in the weeds behind my house? Keep our eyes on the plains that fly too low like they're aiming for the ground Aiming for the ground And do you want to meet me in the middle? A centrelia where the fire can't go out We'll find our things exactly where we left them Burning underground, burning underground

We'll make it out somehow And the things that scared us have to death They can't hurt us now They can't hurt us now They can't hurt us now Ten years I've been standing in the driveway Watching the grapefines eating up the road And I made up my mind to pull the stakes up about a month ago, about a month ago. I push it close your eyes and everything starts sinking.

Listen to the crackle of the cold. And by the time you make it out your front door, the highway's just a hole, the highway's just a hole But you only made it out somehow And the things that scared you have to death, they can't hurt you now. They can't hurt you now. Ever they told me I was gonna know when it was time to run I had cold feet in the cool of the morning And I saw the black smoke rising up And we'll make it out somehow

And the things that scared us have to death, they can't hurt us now. They can't hurt us now. Do you want to meet me in the middle? I send trail you where the fire can't go out? We'll find our things exactly where we left them Burning underground them burning underground Burning underground burning underground Burning underground So that was a song centralia by my guest Lizzy now that was off your first album right? Correct my first album hard one. I love that album. Thank you What I'm most excited though is not your old albums although I love that album. Thank you. And what I'm most excited, though, is not your old albums, although I love and listened

to your old albums regularly. You're one of my top artists of the year, according to one notable streaming service, along with the National and Taylor Swift and every project featuring Phoebe Bridgers. Make sure you keep that scream in. Oh, oh, I will. But I'm not just excited about your old music. I'm excited that you have a new album, which is coming out imminently. January 19th, Mark your calendar.

I have a new album coming out. It's called Half Seas, coming out on 30 Tigers and my own label, Miss Freedom Land. I am so pumped. You're going to be touring with it. I already have tickets to see you in Marin and I'm so excited. So tell me a little bit about the album and what is going on with your album. This new album is a concept album that I like to imagine as a video game. The character is an avatar of me or maybe you or maybe anyone who's listening,

trying to get free in America. And there's 11 stories of like self-discovery, fighting for your life, finding your allies, sharpening your knives, and heading for freedom. That's amazing, I can't wait for it. And we're gonna play a song from the new album and let people enjoy that. And then they will rush over to where to go buy it.

30 Tigers or Rough Trade, if you want a vinyl record, I'm also gonna be touring all over the US and Europe. So, LizzyNo.com slash tour dates. Awesome. It was so great to have you here. Thank you, Lizzy. Thank you so much for having me. This is the song, Any Oakley. If I'm my guest, Lizzy No. A new album, Half Seas.

There's a ringing in my ear and it's hot as hell here at the annual cleat. Feel dirt between the sheets, perforated by the end of a cigarette. There's nothing on TV, and I'm thinking to myself Maybe I should get some sleep I should get some sleep I've got half a bottle left Oh come on inside Sit in my feet

I sit in my feet Won't you tell me when it's time to kill the dream? We drove up to the edge At least it felt like the end of the world We were outside Kansas City Loosen on the radio I'm counting out my tears Is it enough for half a tank? Cause the black girls that are moving along

When the sun goes down in this part of the country Waiting by the side of the highway The artist is Lizzie Know, the new album is called Half Seas. She is the best. We should all make her the next modern country superstar. We'll have links to everything about her on our website and in the show. 99% of the Vizbo was produced this week by Kurt Colestay, Jacob Moltenano Medina, Chris Barube, Joe Rosenberg, and Sarah Beak. Mixed by Martin Gonzales, music by Swan Rihall. Kathy too is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is the senior editor. The rest of the team includes Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Jason Dillion, Washington, Madonna, Kelly Prime, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of his below goat was created by Stefan Lawrence.

We are part of the Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California. If your New Year's resolution is to spend less time doom scrolling on a social media site, why don't you replace that impulse with some positive scrolling on our website. It's 99PI.org.