99% Invisible

This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.  This week, Roman and Elliott also sit down with Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News who covers misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the internet. Brandy recently finished [https://twitter.com/BrandyZadrozny/status/1777823831438024798] The Power Broker, and she’s got a great perspective on what the book says about the press and its relationship to power, what has changed in journalism, and what has remained the same. On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the last section of Part 4 of the book (Chapters 21 through Chapter 24), discussing the major story beats and themes. The Power Broker #5: Brandy Zadrozny [https://99percentinvisible.org/?post_type=episode&p=42315] Join the discussion on Discord [https://discord.gg/99pi] and our Subreddit [https://www.reddit.com/r/99percentinvisible/]

In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder... why did they fall off the radar?  582- Rocket Man [https://99percentinvisible.org/?p=42295&post_type=episode]

The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 5pm, kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents’ tiny televisions and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick Howdy Doody. The show was disproportionately important in the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world of television was strange. In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild-west days of early TV. A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along. Starting with what to put on television in the first place. 581- It's Howdy Doody Time! [https://99percentinvisible.org/?post_type=episode&p=42275]

Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/towers-of-silence/]. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lasha Madan and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good.  On the one hand, it's a very specific story, it's about a unique set of circumstances that happened to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant. Because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there’s a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something we are on track to see more of in these times. Lasha Madan collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in their reporting but it didn't quite fit into the original story that we wanted to tell but it's so vital and interesting that we're releasing this bonus episode to cover it all.

Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It's the face you make when you taste something disgusting. He's the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck. Aptly enough: he was designed to be the symbol for hazardous substances, aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. The idea what that if you saw a Mr. Yuk sticker on something around the house, it meant that that something was poison. Friend of the show, Gillian Jacobs, is a BIG FAN of Mr Yuk, who turns out to be a hometown hero of her beloved Pittsburgh, and talked Roman through the origins of the mean, green face that was meant to save children from their worst impulses. Plus, we revisit another story about warning symbols from our archive: the quest to find a symbol that would warn future humans of dangerous radiation 10,000 years in the future. Mr Yuk [https://99percentinvisible.org/?p=42242&post_type=episode]