99% Invisible - What We're Reading

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people were asking us what other books we’d been reading. A group of us got together and presented some of our recent favorites, and the choices were so good and surprising and charming, we're now sharing it widely.Here are the books covered in this episode:Lasha's book: Usha's Pickle Digest by Usha R PrabakaranChris's books: What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (and The Power Broker by Robert Caro 😁)Vivian's books:  Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and How to End a Love Story by Yulin KuangJayson's books: Hoppity Frog by Emma Parrish (for the kids),  Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems by Carl Philips, and Blackouts by Justin TorresJoe's book: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by George Washington PlunkittRoman's book: The Pine Barrens by John McPheeTo hear new 99PI episodes ad-free (and the occasional bonus content), subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+.What We're Reading Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Last year, SiriusXM launched a podcast subscription that gets you ad-free listening to 99PI, plus special bonus episodes. These bonus episodes have featured extended cuts, Q&As, peeks behind the scenes of making 99PI, and some more informal chats with the crew here. Those are my favorites. After we finished up the Power Broker, a bunch of people on the Discord were asking us what other books we've been reading. So a group of us got together on Zoom and presented some of our recent favorites.

And the choices were so good and surprising and everyone was so charming. I felt like sharing this bonus episode with the wider 99PI audience. Enjoy. Hello to SiriusXM Podcast plus subscribers. This is Roman Mars here with a fun bonus episode for you. The 99PI team reads a lot. We read for research, we read for story ideas,

and of course we read for fun. So we thought that this month it'd be fun to talk about the books that we're currently reading, and maybe we'll give you some gift ideas for the beautiful nerds in your life. So we have a whole mix of producers on the Zoom call with me, and I'm gonna start with Lash Madan.

Lash, what are you reading right now? Hello, Roman. So I, at any given moment, am always reading three to seven books at the same time. Every morning I like to sit down with my coffee in my reading chair and sit down for 15, 20 minutes and pick a book from my stack of books in progress at random. That stack right now has short fiction, poetry, a memoir, it has communist speculative oral history, all sorts of things. But I got

decision fatigue and struggled with picking one book from the stack, so I decided to, instead of telling you about books in progress, I want to talk to you about a book that's been sitting on my shelf for the last four years, I've actually never read it fully cover to cover, but I keep revisiting it every couple months. And my relationship to this book is actually really connected to my work on this show. Okay. So one thing I love about being a producer is that there's so many different phases of a production process, right? There's the pitching, the researching, interviewing, writing, scoring.

The hardest phase for me is that brief window of time when I've submitted a first draft to an editor and it's in their hands, they're reading it, tearing it up with notes. And in this window of time, I cannot look at my laptop or my phone. You know, when someone's editing the Google Doc and you get all the notifications? Right, right, right. That's horrible. So ever since my first story on the show, I started doing something that has sort of, it kind of unintentionally became a ritual in this very particular timeframe.

I'll hand in a script, close my laptop, and I'll pickle something. Pete Slauson Like literally? Anna Slauson Literally, I will pickle anything I find in my house. It's like a distraction mechanism to stop getting anxious about how my editor is reacting to my script. Pete Slauson Okay. Anna Slauson And maybe it's because my first story was during peak pandemic and everyone was talking about fermentation. But I just needed something to do with my hands.

And so the book that I'm constantly revisiting every time I work on a story for the show is called Usha's Pickle Digest, the Perfect Pickle Recipe Book. And I want to tell you about this woman, Usha. This woman is known on the internet as the Pickle Queen of India. In 1998, she self-published this Pickling Encyclopedia. It's not a modern cookbook. You can tell it was published on Microsoft Word. The foreword to the book was faxed to the publisher

and just tacked into the book. There are over 1,000 pickle recipes in there and it reads like a textbook, like there's only text and no images. I don't know if you'll be able to see, but I'm just going to hold the cover up for you just so you can see how old school it looks. It has real self-published vibes for sure. Yeah. So this book, it actually has a cult following, but Usha never meant to publish a pickle book.

And I find that whole story really charming. She's a retired lawyer now in her 70s. And it started for her as a collection of 25 or so pickle recipes that she scribbled into a notebook to pass on to her friends and family. And over time, the number of recipes grew and grew and a book started to make logical sense. But even then, the purpose of the book to her was to conveniently share all her recipes with friends and family.

Which is why when she published this book in 1998, she only printed 1,000 copies and gave them all out for free. And for years, finding a hard copy of this book was a real challenge because Usha just wasn't printing them. The only way to get one was to email her herself. But for years, shortly after the book was published, Usha suffered a health condition and she would respond to the email saying, I promise to get you a copy soon. Some cooks and fans couldn't wait. They started self photocopying pages and passing them around.

And Usha was supposedly like, great. And eventually when she got healthier, she'd email people back with a free PDF of her book whenever they asked. So it kind of passed around the world in this way as an email attachment. And I love the book because it has the essence of an extremely comprehensive Google doc passed around by an auntie who just wants you to know how to make things taste good. And I think that's why I love it. It's amazing. I love this story.

Like I think this should almost be a story for the show. Although what would you do when the script was being edited? It's like- I know, right? Yeah. I don't want to cannibalize your safe haven that you go to when you're not thinking about stories.

But this is such a great idea. Usha's Pickle Digest, the perfect pickle recipe book. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. I love this. Yeah, and I should say that even though historically this book has been hard to get ahold of because there's been so few copies going around, it did four or five years ago come online. So you actually can buy this now as a gift for someone you love, and I would highly recommend that.

Could I just read, like, rattle off a couple different possible pickles you could possibly make? Absolutely. Okay. I recently made a sweet and sour orange peel pickle, watermelon rind pickle. There's jackfruit pickle. You could pickle gooseberries or lotus stems or banana flowers. Like really anything. I think that yeah, nothing escapes pickling for Usha.

Yeah, I mean, I guess not. Yeah, I just love that so much. I love it. I love it. I think this is the perfect gift for anybody, just because it's like, in and of itself, the book is this amazing story, which is so cool. Well, anyway, well, that's awesome. Thank you so much.

Everyone has a lot to live up to, because that's almost a story in and of itself. So thank you, Lasha. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Okay. Up next is Chris Berube. Chris, what book do you have for the Nine MPI audience? Well, Roman, this year I've been reading a book that I think our audience will get a lot out of. It's called The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Really interesting book about urbanism and history. I read it this year for the second time, because we were doing it, and have had a great time reading it all over again.

But may I recommend another huge book I've been reading if you need another thousand page plus nonfiction piece to fill that void in your heart. It's called What It Takes? The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Kramer. Have you ever read this book, Roman? I have not. No.

Okay. Do you know what it's about? No. No. So, yeah, please tell me more. Yes. This book is another gigantic tome, another one that looms large for people who are politics nerds.

It's about the 1988 presidential race. So the book follows all of the candidates running in the primaries. So it's like Dukakis, Joe Biden, and on the Republican side, Bush and Bob Dole. And it gives you very interesting histories of all these people. Basically, I think the takeaway is that all of these people are kind of monomaniacal. Like anyone who wants to be the president has to have something that's a little deficient in their personality is kind of the take of the book. It's very interesting to have read this during the election this year. Obviously to read a contemporary history, it is interesting to compare all the ways that things are different and the way things are the same.

For this one, it's a lot of stuff is very different, especially reading about the Republican Party in the late 80s, because their two candidates are like George HW Bush, who's this kind of country club, patrician Republican. And on the other side, Bob Dole, who is just obsessed with the deficit and is like, we just have to cut, you know, as much as we can to get the debt under control. And neither of those types of Republicans is like relevant at all right now. Yeah. So that's super interesting.

One thing I really took away from this book, when Republicans talk about Ronald Reagan, and they did it during this election too, they always talk about Ronald Reagan as like the greatest figure in their party. It's like Lincoln and Reagan, those are the two great Republicans ever. Reading this book from 1988,

it is very clear that at the time, Republicans did not like Ronald Reagan. They really hated Ronald Reagan. So I have a quote that I wrote down. This is from Bob Dole, who was at the time the leader of the Republican conference in the Senate. And this is what he said about the president from his own party. Bob Dole used to tell a joke to the people that he worked with. He said, boys, there was good news last night, a bus full of supply siders, such supply side economics people like the people in Reagan's camp, a bus full of supply siders went off a cliff last night and everyone died. There's bad news. There were three empty

seats on the bus. So this is within his own party at this point, he has so thoroughly lost his own conference that people are like, we got to get past Reagan. Like there's sections in the book about how campaigning for the Senate in 1986, people were like, don't send Reagan, don't send Reagan to campaign for us. We don't want him here. So it's really interesting to read these contemporary histories to sort of see how they've been tweaked and revised over time. And yeah, even within the Republican Party at that time, next time you hear Ronald Reagan,

the great Republican president, just remember what Bob Dole said about supply-siders going over a cliff in a bus. So, What It Takes by Richard Ben Kramer, really a very readable, compelling book if you need just a gigantic non-fiction thing to fill the place that the power broker was holding for you this year. I love it.

This is kind of perfect. I'm surprised I haven't heard of this more. I don't know why I haven't, but I just, I don't, I haven't heard of this more. I don't know why I haven't, but I just, but I really, um, this is a, this is amazing. I would be, I'm going to pick this one up for sure. Totally. I, you know, I think is it probably because the 88 election doesn't really feel important anymore, right? Like it's like Bush was a one-term president, right? And like we don't really think about his presidency as an era the way that we do with Reagan or Clinton or Obama

or Trump now. Yeah. I think that's right. I mean, like when I'm looking like on Amazon where this book is like paired with this books like Game Change and things that I'm a little bit more familiar with, it's also possible that it's just because it came out in the early 90s,

which I was in college then. And so therefore I have a kind of a cultural black hole familiar with. It's also possible that it's just because it came out in the early 90s, which I was in college then, and so therefore I have a kind of a cultural black hole during the periods of 1990 to 94 that if it was really, really, you know, if it was really, really big at that moment, I didn't, I was not paying attention at that moment. So, but this looks amazing. I'm super excited to check it out. Well, thank you. Well, enjoy. Absolutely, Roman. I'm super excited to check it out. Well, thank you. Well, enjoy. Absolutely, Roman. I hope you have some great fun reading time ahead

over the holidays for you and your family. I appreciate that. Thanks. Okay, so up next is our producer, Vivian Ley. Hey, Vivian. Roman Mars, how are you doing? I'm great. So what book are you reading right now?

Okay, so I am a not very literate person. I do not like to read. When I do, it is usually like a really smutty romance book. You just happened to catch me at a time that I actually am reading books. I'm not embarrassed to say on the air. And I'm reading actually three books right now, which I will probably never finish because I'm reading three and I have a short attention span and I keep rotating them. I might finish them in like three years. But so in the mornings, I have been reading a book called Orbital by Samantha Harvey. It's a book that takes place over 24 hours. And it's the life of a group of astronauts on an international

space station. And yeah, and there's there's no plot. It's kind of like the Martian, but without all the stuff like there's no science and stuff. It's got the science and it's got meditations on life and it's got, you know, it's very poetic. And it's just about like nature and yeah, it's really beautiful and it's very meditative. So it's something that I've been reading in the morning, kind of like scene set my day. I am not someone who's very interested in Mars. That's kind of a red flag for me. If you say that you want to go to Mars, I'm like, no, sorry, talk to somebody else. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or just please go and don't talk to me. Yes, exactly. Yeah. But there's something about like reading about space in this way that makes you feel very big and very small at the same time. So it's just a nice way to set my morning. Yeah, before bed, I've been reading a book called Martyr by Kava Akbar. You probably heard about this one. This one has been a big one this year. This is one that's on that's on my shelf that I want to read because it's the it's the type

of book I like a lot when I'm not reading non-fiction. Yes, I read a lot of fiction. I love fiction. But yeah, it's it's incredible. It's a really fun read. It doesn't sound like it's a fun read. It is about an angsty Iranian American writer who you know is recently sober and he seeks out this artist who's terminally ill and her last artwork is essentially dying in a museum. And it doesn't sound upbeat, but it's weirdly upbeat. It's from the perspective of multiple characters who are kind of like searching for the meaning of life. But yeah, it's really fun and really funny in odd ways and it just, it feels very fresh. So I really

recommend that for people who are looking for like a page turner this year. Awesome. Well, I'll put that more to the top of for like a page turn this year. Awesome. I'll put that more to the top of my queue because it's been one that's been sitting there that I've been excited about. That's awesome. Yeah, that one holds up. In light of the election, I have been revisiting Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. This is the last book that I'm kind of listening to right now.

I'm listening to the audiobook. And this is an old one from like 1985. People have probably heard of it before. It's about the effects of television and electronic media on politics and how it's turning news into entertainment and that's ruining discourse forever. You can probably imagine why I'm revisiting it at this moment.

Totally. I think of this title all the time. Yeah. So yeah, I've been listening to the audiobook when I cook. And the experience is kind of like if you gave Joe Rosenberg like three shots of whiskey and you just asked him what's wrong with discourse and you just kind of talked at you for like three and a half hours, that's what it's like.

So if you want that experience, check that out. I'm right here Vivian. Oh, I know. I know. And you know this is true, Joe. No comment. No comment. So great. But I do have one bonus recommendation for a smutty romance if people are looking for one. Oh, yeah. Sure. Lay it on us. Yeah.

Yeah. I read this year and really enjoyed How to End a Love Story by Yuen Quang. So yeah, it's about trauma a little bit. So just a little bit of a warning there But it's it's so it feels a little bit heavier, but it's a really nice read and it has one of the most accurate representations of what it's like to fight with your Asian parents and then Make up from that fight. So if you're an Asian American person, just you know, I go into that with with that in mind great Well, this is these are fantastic recommendations. For someone who says they don't read, you're reading a lot of good quality things.

This is a complete coincidence. Honestly, yeah. Otherwise, I'd be watching Gilmore Girls again in the other room. That's awesome. I'm going to do a proper summary just so people are taking notes. So it's Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Martyr by Keve Akbar, Amusing Ourselves to Death

by Neil Postman, and How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang. You got it. Thanks. Awesome. Thank you, Vivian. We have recommendations from Jason and Joe and me after the break. So up next is producer Jason DeLeon. Hey Jason. Roman Mars, what's going on?

I don't know. I'm just like really excited about all these books. Like I wasn't expecting that I would learn from this. I thought we were just going to do this for the audience and the listeners out there. But like now I'm really into all these books that people are suggesting. Well, I'm going to take it down a notch here. Okay. Because as people on this team know,

I had a kid this past year. That's right, that's right. She just turned a year old. And so I'm here to talk about a fantastic book that I'm reading that I read three times in a row, every night, very slowly to her. It's called Hoppity Frog. Okay.

And so this Hoppity Frog, where is hoppity frog? Is he in the coral? Not here, but this is a tiny tadpole. So I do this over and over and over again. That's awesome. I remember those days very, very, very much. When you get into the age of them liking more complex narratives, it is like the most refreshing and amazing thing

in the world. I can see it washing over you. Yeah, it is just like, it's all of a sudden I would, you know, when you start reading Roald Dahl or like I would, I, Terry Pratchett, like the, the We Free Men and stuff like this were, were just like, when that, when that happened with the kids, I was just like so excited.

Like I wanted, I was excited about reading Time Versus, like that's, you know, like you're happened with the kids, I was just like so excited. Like I wanted, I was excited about reading time versus like that's, you know, like you're mostly excited about it, but you read the same thing again and again, it does sort of like get into your brain. It's like an incantation. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, but on a more serious note,

I've been struggling to find time to read in the past year, as you can imagine. And so despite the fact that I've read something like 200 children's books, I've been trying to find a grownup book to read. And basically to institute time for myself to create this time to read, I've do a novel in the morning where I have like 15 minutes and I just try to get through a novel little by little. And I do poetry at night because by 8.30 or 9 o'clock, if I'm in repose, I'm out. You're falling asleep.

Totally. I'm going to bed. Same, same, same, same. And so I just finished this book. It's called Scattered Snow to the North. It's the most recent collection of poems by my favorite poet, Carl Phillips. Are you much of a poetry person, Roman? I'm not, I mean, it's, but it's because of lack of exposure

and sort of knowledge. I would love to be a person who loved poetry more, so. Yeah, well, let's see if I could tell you a little bit at least on this specific poet. Let's see if I can do it. Because for me, I don't know, I just like, I love poems because they just require my full attention and my attention is so pulled in so many directions right now.

And I'm like also like a former athlete and I feel like reading poetry is like doing sports while sitting still. You have to like almost wrestle this dynamic in your head and read the words very carefully. You have to read letter by letter, word by word, line break by line break, and then you do it all over again and you can like interpret different meanings from it. I don't know, to me it feels very sport-like in that way. And so- That is an amazing metaphor.

I've never heard that before, and it makes reading poetry all of a sudden make sense to me in a new kind of way. That's, oh, you might've already told me. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go. It's like working out. All right, well maybe now I'm not, maybe I'm not selling it now, but- Well, yeah, no, you might've already told me. Yeah, there we go. It's like, it's like working out. All right. Well, maybe now I'm not, maybe I'm not selling it now, but, um. Well, yeah, no, but I get what you mean. I get what you mean.

I, I, my problem with poetry and for a lot of things like graphic novels and stuff too, or whatever is like, I tend to read for plot and information and I'm not a real, like I love people put together interesting and cool and beautiful words, but my habit is just like, give me the information as fast as possible. And so the idea of it being an exercise would put me in the right mindset for it, I think.

Yeah, that's really what it is. And like for me, I also, I read that way too. I love a good plot, I love good, all that stuff. But sometimes I find myself just going through, I'm just not reading, I'm just like, vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom. And this makes me read. Anyway, so Carl Philipp's latest book,

I mean, he's written a lot of poetry works. I've read his full collection now by this point. He started publishing in the 90s. I don't know which book number this is, but it's his latest book. He just won the Pulitzer last year, two years ago, for this book called Then the War, which was an incredible book. It is so, so, so very good. And that is another recommendation for people. And that book was about like power, I guess, capital P power, lowercase P power, all kinds of power. A nice, you know, addendum to the power broker about power. Yeah. And like, and the thing that I. And the thing that I like the most about his work is that it feels like a conversation

that he's having that I'm following along, like the way he's thinking in that moment. And I just kind of keep following along the way he's thinking. And so that last collection was about power. This one that I just finished reading, it's a lot more about questioning knowledge, I guess. It's a little bit more like, what is our obsession with the past? Is it a worthy endeavor? And so, like in the title poem to the book, it's called Scatterstone to the North, and he is a scholar of the Roman Empire. And so in this poem, he's questioning the utility of that knowledge. So I'm going to read just a little bit of it just so you can get a taste of it.

Doesn't matter that the Roman Empire was still early and it's slow unwinding into never again. Then as now didn't people burst into tears in front of other people or in private for no reason that they were willing to give or they weren't yet able to. So, I don't know. I just kind of, he tries to find the like, the human at the center of the thing and trying to strip it of the power of all the other stuff that's around it. Yeah. I love that. That's so good. Yeah. Yeah. And then I guess one last thing I'll say about like Carl Phillips's work and just kind of the work of poets that I admire in general, is that sometimes I love their stuff so much that I refuse to hear their voice.

Like I get all these things in my feed of being like, here's the poet that obviously you've been looking up their work and stuff. Like do you want to hear them read a poem? And I never ever want to hear them read a poem? And I never, ever want to hear them read the poem. Interesting, interesting. I'm just afraid that if I hear the human voice to the words, that the thing will lose its magic. And so he's like one of those people for me. My best friend, one of my best friends lives very close

to where he lives on Cape Cod. And whenever I go visit, I'm always like, am I gonna run into Carl Fowler today? And would that be a good thing or a bad thing? In the grand scheme of things, it would be lovely to meet him. But I don't think I want to. That's so interesting.

Well, that's a great recommendation. I love this window into your mind and how you think I want to. That's so interesting. Well, that's a great recommendation. I love this window into your mind and how you think and process things. That's so cool. So you mentioned reading a novel in the other part of the day. What's your novel? Oh, yeah. My novel that I'm reading right now

is this book called Blackouts by Justin Torres. And that book is like an amazing piece of work. I don't wanna talk too much about it because I'm only like a third of the way through it. But it reminds me of my actual, my true favorite book, which is Pedro Paramo by Juan Rufo. And that is like this book that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write 100 years of solitude

and all that stuff. And so it's very short, actually, Petra Parama. It's only like 110 pages or something, but it is just perfect. Every sentence is perfect, perfect, perfect, perfect. And they actually just made a Netflix movie about it that I am horrified to watch. But it is Rodrigo Prieta, the director of photography for a lot of great things. So I imagine it looks beautiful.

I'm just afraid of what they did with the story. Yeah, I mean, especially if so much of the magic for you is the perfect sentences. There's no way to convey perfect sentences in a Netflix movie. Yeah, unfortunately. But that's awesome. Well, these are two very interesting. So it's Black Outs by Justin Torres.

Justin Torres. And Scattered Snows to the North, poems by Carl Phillips. Thank you, Jason. Yep, of course. Oh yeah, and Hoppity Frog. And then Hoppity Frog, of course. Sorry, not to forget, not to leave Hoppity Frog out of this,

but Hoppity Frog sounds delightful. All right, well, so our last contributor that's going to talk about books that he's reading is Joe Rosenberg. Hey, Joe. Hey, Roman, how's it going? I'm good. I'm really excited by everyone's, like, we were going to all come on and then people are going to drop off and go on with their day of production.

And I've noticed that everyone is still on the Zoom because they are so, like, entranced by people talking about the books that they like, which is amazing. So what book are you sort of occupied with right now? So I was coming across this article about Eric Adams and, you know, the corruption scandal. And I was always fascinated and have always been fascinated by the way corruptrupt figures particularly more corrupt politicians in more corrupt parts of the political system are so casually corrupt Do you know what I mean? And like it's just it's just taken for granted that this is the way the world works And so they were they they work their way in the world like this, too

But then they get a little too high profile And so the things that work for them when they were low profile like don't work for them anymore, right? Totally. And they kind of get caught by surprise being like, what do you mean I can't use this Turkish airline? But this article I found recommended a book from 1905 called Plunket of Tammany Hall. And I don't know if this has come up at all, like, you know, in your own kind of maneuvering through 99PI or the power broker stuff. But Tammany Hall, of course, was like

the great big political machine that ran democratic politics and Irish American politics and therefore a lot of New York City politics around the turn of the last century. So late 19th century, early 20th century, and even extended kind of its tentacles into the mid 20th century before it finally kind of FDR and a few other people kind of finally put the nails in its coffin. And Plunkett, George Washington Plunkett was this big machine politician in Tammany Hall.

He had every single thing. So he was like, I'm looking at his Wikipedia page here. So like, you know, member of the New York Senate for the 17th district, member of the New York Senate for the 11th district, member of the New York State Assembly for the 17th district again, and like all these other local and state offices, you know, whether he was good at any of these jobs is totally unclear.

The point is that- It was not required of Tammany Hall for sure that you were good at the job. No, exactly. And the, you know, he didn't, he had a sixth grade education. He was born to Irish American parents on a hill in what was would become Central Park.

You know, he's buried in that, I forget what it's called, but I only lived in New York for two years, so apologies. But that famous cemetery in Queens that you always see in the movies where you see the tombstones in the foreground and Manhattan in the background. So, New York born and bred and died. And unlike a lot of Tammany men,

he was very open about the way things worked. He liked, he was a talker, he liked to talk. And he would kind of hold court at this shoeshine stand at the local courthouse and kind of just have these kind of soliloquies prepared about just different aspects of politics and his thoughts and insights and wisdoms on politics and this reporter named William Reardon finally just decided that he put all of this guy's talks together in a book and he just called it Plunket of Tammany Hall. And it's just kind of his thoughts about this and that, about like, you know, why a politician

should not drink, why a politician should never, his clothes should never be too fancy, you know, things like that. But also a lot about his defense of the Tammany system and kind of his defense of what we would think of as corruption. But he just saw as in some ways, like, what do you mean? This is the way the world works. How else will anything get done? Right?

And so there's this one chapter called the curse of civil service reform. He hates civil service reform. And throughout this little book, he just takes every moment to talk about how awful it is and how it's ruining New York, right? And civil service reform being, of course, that you can't use the spoil system. In order to become a civil servant, you can't just be plunked into the office as a sinecure. You have to take a test and stuff like that.

Take a test and yeah, earn it. It's supposed to be a meritocracy, for sure. Right, and so you have to imagine Plunket sitting at his shoeshine stand and just kind of holding forth on this. It's an outrage. What did the people mean when they voted for Tammany? What is representative government anyhow?

Is it all fake that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people? If it isn't fake, then why isn't the people's voice obeyed and Tammany men put in all the offices? You know, when the people elected Tammany, they knew just what they were doing. We didn't put up any false pretenses. We didn't go in for humbug civil service and all that rot. We stood as we have always stood for rewarding the men that won the victory. They call that the spoil system.

All right, Tammany is the spoil system. And when we go in, we fire every anti-Tammany man from office that can be fired under the law. It's an elastic sort of law, and you can bet it will be stretched to the limit. Right? And, you know, it's just kind of just law, and you can bet it will be stretched to the limit. Right? And, you know, it's just,

and he kind of just like goes on like that for different things. Well, this is really fascinating. I picked this up, this, it's a short little book that I picked up on your recommendation. I have not cracked it open yet, so now I'm really intrigued to start on it. So thank you so much, Joe, I appreciate it.

Wait, so Roman, you've gotten all of our recommendations, but like, what are you reading right now, besides The Power Broker, of course? So I read a lot for the show, so I don't have a lot of time. I'm reading a lot of books, like I have to blur books for folks, and it's very nice thing that people care about my opinion

and wanna put it on the cover of a book to be sold, so I read a lot of those. But the one I've been reading kind of for myself recently is John McPhee's Pine Barrens, which John McPhee, if you don't know him, he's sort of this master of creative nonfiction. I mostly read nonfiction. I just can't, there's something about a block in my head that makes it so I can't read a lot of stories about made-up people because in the end I just feel the authorship too much and I just like to learn about history and use the time to learn about history. But the Pine Barrens is a very, it's from 1968, it's a very sort of essayistic, somewhat

poetic but full of facts, just tale about this area of New Jersey, which is extremely confusing. Like, it's this very kind of harsh and barren land in the most densely populated state in the Union. And it has a poetry to the place and then therefore it allows for a certain kind of poetry in the writing of it. And it's extremely nonlinear. I just think that he's kind of a master of a certain type of creative nonfiction, which

I don't read a lot of. And so I've been trying to dig into John McPhee and sort of get myself a little more versed in his library, which I think it's kind of like not really a blind spot for me because I've read plenty, but he's written so much that I have not read that I've been trying to attack it. So I would recommend picking up The Pie and Perence by John McPhee. It's really working for me. And that's it for all of us. So thank you everyone for listening to this and I hope you got a lot of good book recommendations. I mean, I'm super into the books that people

suggested. And so thanks. I really appreciate it. Become a SiriusXM Podcast plus subscriber to get ad free listening and more bonus episodes. We really enjoyed doing this one and we're looking forward to more in 2025. Get in touch if you have any suggestions or things you want to hear from us. This episode was mixed by Martin Gonzalez music by Swan Real. Cathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstad is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Jason DeLeon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lasha Madone, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The

99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful. Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. There's a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.