The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green rates different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. This week 99% Invisible is featuring two episodes of The Anthropocene Reviewed in which John Green dissects: pennies, the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, a 17,000-year-old cave painting, and the Taco Bell breakfast menu. Plus, Roman talks with John about the show, sports, and all the things we love now, but hated as teenagers.

The Anthropocene Reviewed

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Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s where Andrew edited essays and interviews, laid out articles, and was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the words as he did with the expression of the ideas in the text. But as much as Andrew loves print, he has a condition that will eventually change his relationship to it pretty radically. He’s going blind. And this fact has made him deeply curious about how blind people experience literature and the long history of designing a tactile language that sometimes suffered from trying to be too universal.

The Universal Page

This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern California and landscape architecture in Northern California, and then the world. A documentary in three parts with a brand new update about how this episode resulted in a brand new skate park in a very special city.

The Pool and the Stream Redux

There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.”  Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.”  Informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn’t through city planning or some kind of official process. If you’ve put up a homemade sign warning people not to sit on a broken bench, that’s DIY urbanism. If you’ve used cones or a chair to reserve your own parking spot on a public street, that’s also DIY urbanism.

Gordon Douglas has written a whole book about this idea called “The Help Yourself City.” It looks at all the ways people are taking matters into their own hands. Both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones.

The Help-Yourself City

Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ago they weren't seen as scary at all. Many of them were built part of a treatment regimen developed by a singular Philadelphia doctor named Thomas Story Kirkbride. Kirkbride was obsessed with architecture and how it could be harnessed therapeutically to cure people suffering from mental illness.

The Kirkbride Plan

To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim Museum, you probably recognize it. From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and from the inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling. We’re going to take the greatness of this building as a given. What we’re going to focus on are the oddities, the accretions, the interventions that reveal a different kind of genius. Not just the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his bold, original vision, but the genius of all the people that made this building function, adapt, and grow over the decades.

Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece

“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and amusement parks rather than hospitals,” explains Lauren Rabinowitz, an amusement park historian. If you wanted your at-risk premature baby to survive, you pretty much had to bring them to an amusement park. These incubator shows cropped up all over America. And they were a main source of healthcare for premature babies for over forty years.

The Infantorium

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Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It was a simple chatbot named ELIZA that could interact with users in a typed conversation. As he enlisted people to try it out, Weizenbaum saw similar reactions again and again -- people were entranced by the program. They would reveal very intimate details about their lives. It was as if they’d just been waiting for someone (or something) to ask. ELIZA was one of the first computer programs that could convincingly simulate human conversation, which Weizenbaum found frankly a bit disturbing.

The ELIZA Effect

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Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a hole cut out of the universe. If it looks unreal because Vantablack isn’t actually a color, it’s a form of nanotechnology. It was created by the tech industry for the tech industry, but this strange dark material would also go on to turn the art world on its head.

Their Dark Materials

Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of all time.” The game is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and it was so bad that not even the might of Steven Spielberg could save it. It was so loathsome that all remaining copies were buried deep in the desert. And it was so horrible that it’s blamed for the collapse of the American home video game industry in the early 1980s.

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The Worst Video Game Ever

If you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve climate change, you might think about driverless cars, or hyperloops or any of the other new transportation technologies that get lots of hype these days. But there is a much older, much less sexy piece of machinery that could be the key to making our cities more sustainable, more liveable, and more fair: the humble bus. Steve Higashide is a transit expert, bus champion, and author of a new book called Better Busses Better Cities. And the central thesis of the book is that buses have the power to remake our cities for the better.

Missing the Bus

The story of how “Who Let The Dogs Out” ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. About ten years ago, Ben Sisto was reading the Wikipedia entry for the song when he noticed something strange. A hairdresser in England named “Keith” was credited with giving the song to the Baha Men, but Keith had no last name and the fact had no citation. This mystery sent Ben down a rabbit hole to uncover the true story.

Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out

At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and exchange stories, tips and gripes. One thing unites most in attendance this year: concerns about the steady march of technology, especially the recently imposed, mandatory electronic logging device, or ELD, which records every detail of a driver’s working hours.

Over the Road is an eight-part series that gives voice to the trials and triumphs of America’s long haul truckers. Host “Long Haul Paul” Marhoefer, a musician, storyteller and trucker for nearly 40 years, takes you behind the wheel to explore a devoted community and a world that’s changing amidst new technologies and regulations.

Listen to more episodes at OvertheRoad.fm.

The weather can be a simple word or loaded with meaning depending on the context -- a humdrum subject of everyday small talk or a stark climactic reality full of existential associations with serious disasters. In his book The Weather Machine, author Andrew Blum discusses these extremes and much in between, taking readers back in time to early weather-predicting aspirations and forward with speculation about the future of forecasting, including potentially dark clouds on the horizon.

The Weather Machine

On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects

Buy Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are and all Beauty Pill records on Bandcamp or wherever you can find it.

Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are

There have been over 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. All have been tragic, but there are two people in particular we’ve lost due to COVID that were part of the world of architecture and design that we want to honor with a couple of stories today. First, we are mourning the loss of architect Michael McKinnell. Along with Gerhard Kallman, McKinnell designed the unforgettable Boston City Hall, completed in 1968. They won the commission for Boston City Hall after submitting their brutalist, heroic monument in a contest when Michael McKinnell was just 26 years old. It was always a controversial structure, much of the public found it ugly and too unconventional, but architects and critics tend to love it. This is the often the case with Brutalism in general and that is the subject of our first story starring Boston City Hall.

Another voice who is gone too early was Michael Sorkin. Sorkin was a designer and the Village Voice architecture critic in the 80s. He brought a totally new kind of approach to writing about buildings, one that focused on people and politics. We spoke with design critic at Curbed, Alexandra Lange, about Sorkin's work, and Roman Mars reads excerpts from one of his pieces called Two Hundred and Fifty Things an Architect Should Know.

The Smell of Concrete After Rain

In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running experiments have been interrupted. But there are some researchers for whom the shutdowns have provided a unique opportunity—a whole new data set, a chance to gather new information, or to look at information in a new way. And so, this week, we’re bringing you stories very different academic fields, about researchers who are using this bizarre, tragic moment to learn something new about the world.

The Natural Experiment

What does returning to business look like in a post COVID-19 world? Join us on Thursday, May 14 at 10:00am CDT for a webinar discussing the state of the world after we reach the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. You’ll learn about: Economic impact from COVID-19 Best practices for moving your business forward How to...

The post WEBINAR – The Great Viral Recession: Light at the End of the Tunnel? appeared first on Anders CPA.

Take Action: Tell the Senate to Vote on NECA-Supported Cadillac Tax Repeal!

Funding for the federal government runs out in 28 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 361 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), Rep. Dan Lipinksi (D-Ill.) and Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.). 

Funding for the federal government runs out in 21 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 354 days.

Funding for the federal government runs out in 14 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 347 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), Rep. Xochitl Torres Small (D-N.M.), Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-S.C.), Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.).

Funding for the federal government runs out in 7 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 340 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Rep. Paul Cook (R-Calif), Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn), Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Rep. Rodney David (R-Ill.), Rep. Abby Finkenauer (D-Iowa), Rep. Donald Norcross (D-N.J.), Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.).

Funding for the federal government runs out in 285 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 333 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) and Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.). 

On December 19, 2019, Peter Butler of NECA’s Northern California Chapter met with Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) in the district.

Funding for the federal government runs out in 278 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 326 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), and Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.).

Funding for the federal government runs out in 278 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 326 days.

 This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.), Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Rep. Paul Cook (R-Calif.), Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.), Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Rep. Rodney David (R-Ill.), and Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.)

Jessica traveled to the North Florida Chapter to present at their chapter meeting.

On December 11, 2020, members of NECA’s Northern California Chapter met with Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.)

NECA's legislative top three for the week of January 17, 2020

Funding for the federal government runs out in 250 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 284 days.

This week in NECA Government Affairs we spotlight infrastructure legislation, the new SBA Administrator and the newly signed US/China Trade Agreement.

Funding for the federal government runs out in 243 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 277 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.), Rep. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), and Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.).

James Farrell gave a Government Affairs update at the District I, II, and IV council meetings in Florida.

On January 23, 2020, members of NECA’s Northern California Chapter met with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.)

Funding for the federal government runs out in 236 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 270 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.).  

Funding for the federal government runs out in 229 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 263 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX) , Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), and Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.)

District 7 Vice President and Government Affairs Committee Chair Greg Rick came to Washington, D.C., for a strategic planning meeting with the government affairs team. He is also met with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.Dak.), Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.), and Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.). 

Funding for the federal government runs out in 222 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 256 days.

This week, James Farrell attended Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s leadership meeting and The National Republican Campaign Committee Winter Meeting in Miami, Florida. There he met with Rep. Jody Arrington (R-Texas), Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), Rep. Mike Bost (R-Ill.), Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas), Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), Rep. Ron Estes (R-Kan.), Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.), Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.), Rep. Anthony Gonzalez (R-Ohio), Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas), Rep. Richard Hudson (R-N.C.), Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio), Rep. John Joyce (R-Pa.), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Rep. John Katko (R-N.Y.), Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.), Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Rep. Dan Mesuer (R-Pa.), Rep. Carol Miller (R-W.Va.), Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.), Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.), Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas), Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), Rep. John Rose (R-Tenn.), Rep. David Rouzer (R-N.C.), Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.), Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.), Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.), Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), Rep. William Timmons (R-S.C.), Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), and Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.).

Funding for the federal government runs out in 215 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 249 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.), Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Rep Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nev.), Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), Rep. Fred Keller (R-Pa.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas).

Funding for the federal government runs out in 208 days.

The 2020 Presidential election is in 242 days.

This week, NECA’s government affairs team met with Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), Rep. Anthony Brindisi (D-N.Y.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.), Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-Ind.), Rep. Rodeny Davis (R-Ill.), Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), Rep. Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.), and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.).