If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it’s easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago — when an activist named Ed Roberts was young — most urban corners featured a sharp drop-off, making it difficult for him and other wheelchair users to get between blocks without assistance.

Roberts was central to a movement that demanded society see disabled people in a new way. He’d grown up in Burlingame, near San Francisco, the oldest of four boys. He was athletic and loved to play baseball. But then, one day when he was 14 years old, he got really sick.

He had polio, which damaged his respiratory muscles so much that he needed an iron lung to stay alive. The polio left Roberts paralyzed below the neck, only able to move two fingers on his left hand.

In order to escape his iron lung once in a while, Roberts taught himself a technique called “frog breathing,” a deep sea divers’ trick of gulping oxygen into the lungs, the way a frog does. For polio survivors, whose weakened breathing muscles weren’t strong enough to inhale that needed oxygen, “frog breathing” meant a person could get out of the iron lung for short stretches of time. Roberts was told it was bad for his health, but he kept doing it, determined to live on his own terms.

Roberts was tenacious, but everything was hard. He needed the iron lung while he was asleep, but during the day he stayed in school, going to campus once a week. When Ed left the house, his family would run the maneuvers, helping him navigate a world that wasn’t built for a person in a wheelchair. They’d lift him over curbs, and up and down stairs. When his mother, Zona Roberts, went out with him alone, she would enlist strangers to assist.

Roberts graduated from high school, then from a local community college, but in 1962, when he wanted to go on to U.C. Berkeley, the university initially turned him down. Among other things, administrators weren’t sure where he could safely live — his iron lung wouldn’t fit into a dorm room. Eventually, someone suggested housing Roberts in the campus hospital, inside a patient room remade into a living space.

On campus, an attendant would wheel Roberts to each class, where he would recruit a classmate to help him take notes — they would use a piece of carbon paper to create a copy for him. “It’s such a simple way to take notes,” Roberts recalled, “and of course to meet people and get them involved with you. So there were all these little gimmicks.” Roberts did so much studying and reading that the mouth wand he used to turn the pages of books started to push his teeth out of shape.

His story began to make newspaper headlines. Soon, a second quadriplegic student moved into Roberts’ makeshift hospital dorm— a young man who’d been paralyzed in a diving accident and was initially told he should just get used to life as a shut-in. Then a few more arrived, both to live in the hospital and to find lodgings off campus. The word started to spread: something unusual was going on at Berkeley.

These students had profound and visible disabilities. The state paid special attendants to heft their wheelchairs up staircases and into lecture halls. It was hard miss the new presence on campus.

And all of this was happening during the 1960s, “a time of lots of protests, and lots of reform, and lots of change,” explains Steve Brown, cofounder of the Institute on Disability Culture. On the Berkeley campus, the hospital housing students also became the headquarters for an exuberant and irreverent group of organizers. This group called themselves the Rolling Quads and it included Roberts as well as Hale Zukas, an assertive guy with cerebral palsy who communicated with a word board and a pointer strapped to his head.

Like other coalitions of disabled young people around the country, the Rolling Quads started using a new kind of language to talk about their needs and rights. They were advocating for what was then a radical idea: that people with disabilities had civil rights, too. The right to education, to jobs, to respect, to real inclusion in public life. This all fit right into the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s and early 70s.

One member of the Rolling Quads, Deborah Kaplan, explains the widespread cultural stereotypes the group was trying to take apart:  “That having a disability is a fate worse than death. That we should be pitied. That if we do anything we are brave, and yet [we’re] really not real people.” These kinds of views were reinforced by events like the annual Jerry Lewis Telethon. The telethon was the late comedian’s annual marathon fundraiser for muscular dystrophy. He mugged for the camera, and brought in celebrity singers, and spent a lot of time smiling down at cute, well-dressed children in wheelchairs. The rising generation of disability rights activists hated it.

“We would just cringe every Memorial Day weekend, knowing that all these people were watching Jerry Lewis squeezing money out of people by dramatically playing up the most horrid stereotypes about disability that we had to combat,” Kaplan explains.

Back at Berkeley, the Rolling Quads — and Ed Roberts in particular — were one big antidote to the Jerry Lewis telethon. Roberts flirted with women, got arrested in college for peeing outside a bar, and told dark jokes about quadraplegia. A testing counselor once pronounced Roberts to be “very aggressive” — he liked recounting his response: “Well, if you were paralyzed from the neck down, don’t you think aggressiveness would be an asset?”

“The nature of access, of being included, meant that you had to in some ways force yourself upon the world,” says Lawrence Carter Long, of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.

“Because the tendency, the programming, for the rest of the country — even here in Berkeley at first — was to say, ‘We don’t want to see that. You’re going to make those normal people uncomfortable!'”

But by the time Ed Roberts was in graduate school at Berkeley, the disabled students were noticeably and unmistakably part of the community. Even more so because some were zipping around in power chairs, which had been invented to help wounded veterans and were starting to be more available to the general public.

Roberts got interested in power chairs when he first watched another quadriplegic try one out. And he now had a new portable ventilator that attached to his wheelchair. So even though he still used the iron lung at night, he could stay away from it a lot longer. And… there was a girl. Which, he remembers, made it “ridiculously inconvenient for me to have my attendant pushing me around in my wheelchair with my girlfriend. It was an extra person that I didn’t need to be more intimate.”

But think about this. For more than a decade you’ve been able to get around because somebody’s behind you pushing your chair, and now you’re under your own power. You get to leave that wheelchair attendant behind, but still you have to contend with… curbs.

“If you’re trying to get across the street and there are no curb cuts, six inches might as well be Mount Everest,” says Lawrence Carter Long. “Six inches makes all the difference in the world if you can’t get over that curb.”

The power chair riders — actually all the wheelchair riders — needed what we now call “curb cuts” —  those slopes at the corners that make it easy to roll between sidewalk and street.

The Early History of Curb Cuts

Back in the 1940s and 50s, there were a few communities across the country where people had tried to make elements of the built environment more accessible. For example, there was a coach in Illinois working with disabled soldiers who badgered reluctant officials at the University of Illinois — until finally the school set up a rehab and education program with wheelchair sports and wood ramps into buildings.

Historian Steve Brown discovered another example in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Kalamazoo had extra high curbs. After WWII, a retired veteran got so fed up watching other disabled vets struggling to cross the street that he persuaded city officials to cut ramps into the sidewalks at four downtown corners.

But by the late 1960s and 70s, the new wave of young disabled activists weren’t going to wait around for the occasional enlightened college coach. They demanded. They were insistent. They didn’t wait for permission.

To this day, stories circulate about the Rolling Quads riding out at night with attendants and using sledgehammers to bust up curbs and build their own ramps, forcing the city into action. But Eric Dibner, who was an attendant for disabled students at Berkeley in the 1970s, says “the story that there were midnight commandos is a little bit exaggerated, I think. We got a bag or two of concrete,” he elaborates, “and mixed it up and took it to the corners that would most ease the route.” While it did happen at night, they only hacked a few curbs.

In reality, most of the progress made by the Rolling Quads was a little more bureaucratic. One day in 1971, the group showed up at the Berkeley City Council. Ed Roberts, by then a political science graduate student, was there. And so was Hale Zukas, who was learning Russian and finishing a math degree. So were a lot of their friends, both disabled and not. Together, they insisted the city build curb cuts on every street corner in Berkeley. And their call to action sparked the world’s first widespread curb cuts program. From the city council minutes on September 28, 1971: “Declaring it to be the policy of the city that streets and sidewalks be designed and constructed to facilitate circulation by handicapped persons within major commercial areas … That curb cuts be made immediately at fifteen specified corners …. The motion carried unanimously.”

Beyond Berkeley

By the mid-1970s, the disability rights movement was growing and spreading, with groups around the world advocating for changes in the built environment to enable more independence. This didn’t just mean curb cuts, but also wheelchair lifts on buses, ramps alongside staircases, elevators with reachable buttons in public buildings, accessible bathrooms, and service counters low enough to let a person in a wheelchair be attended to face-to-face, and more.

In 1977, disability rights protesters hit federal office buildings in eleven cities at once. They were pushing the government to act on long-neglected rules protecting the disabled in all facilities taking federal money. The protest in San Francisco turned into a month-long sit in, with steady news coverage of people in wheelchairs, taking care of each other and refusing to leave until action was taken.

In 1980, disabled people in Denver staged a protest demanding curb cuts. They’d already blocked traffic until city transit officials promised to put wheelchair lifts on all the buses. Demonstrators in wheelchairs leaned over, for the photographers, to whack at concrete curbs with sledgehammers.

And in 1990, when the sweeping Americans with Disabilities Act was hung up in the House of Representatives, disabled demonstrators left their wheelchairs and crawled up the marble steps of the Capitol building to make sure the bill went through.

The ADA wasn’t the first federal legislation designed to remove barriers for disabled people, but its reach was unprecedented. It mandated access and accommodation for the disabled in all places open to the public — businesses, lodgings, transportation, employment. It had qualifiers, to be sure — the ADA required only what was “reasonable,” for employers and builders and so on. There was a lot of argument about that word. But at the bill’s signing ceremony in 1990, President George H. W. Bush spoke with emotion about the recent fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided communist East Germany from the West:

“And now I sign legislation, which takes a sledgehammer to another wall, one which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse but not grasp. And once again we rejoice as this barrier falls, proclaiming together, we will not accept … excuse [or] tolerate, discrimination in America.”

The Legacy of Ed Roberts

Ed Roberts, who U.C. Berkeley officials once thought was too crippled for their university, finished his masters degree, taught on campus, and co-founded the Center for Independent Living, a disability service organization that became a model for hundreds of others around the world. He also married, fathered a son, divorced, won a MacArthur genius grant, and for nearly a decade ran the whole California state Department of Rehabilitation Services. He was 56, an international name in independence for the disabled, when a heart attack killed him.

A special memorial was scheduled for him at the annual march and meeting of the National Council on Independent Living in Washington, D.C. Marchers followed Roberts’ empty wheelchair which was being dragged along by his attendant, until they reached the Senate office building. Once inside, speakers got up to honor Roberts’ life and legacy. Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa gave a eulogy, noting that when Martin Luther King Jr. died, they built statues to honor him. But Harkin said there was an even better way to honor Ed Roberts, a warrior for another kind of civil rights. Barriers would be torn down in his name. Every curb cut would become a memorial for Roberts.

Today, Roberts’ wheelchair is stored at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and remains on permanent display on their website. But the struggle continues — curb cuts are common now, but they’re not at every intersection, even in Berkeley. And a lot of assumptions persist about what people with disabilities can do, achieve, and enjoy.

“We’ve not yet accomplished full inclusion,” says Lawrence Carter Long. “We have managed to make it easier, by and large, for people to get into the building. But have we done the work that’s going to make it easier for them to get the education? For them not only to have a job, but have a career? Those things still don’t exist for many people, even in Berkeley.” The work remains.

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The United States remains one of the few places on the planet not to have adopted the metric system. Instead of looking to remedy that particular disconnect, the country seems to be doubling down by standardizing something most would assume already was: the foot.

Remarkable as it may seem, there are two “feet” of different lengths used in different contexts. The “international foot” and “US survey foot” are close enough in most cases, but a .0000002% difference is enough to make measurements problematic over long distances. Why this slight difference? It’s a bit silly, but simple: one unit is measured as a fraction with a repeating decimal while the other is rounded off.

To its credit, the US also keeps count of most things in meters — problems arise, however, when surveyors convert those meters to feet, a process which is not standardized currently across all states.

Ultimately, most surveyors and engineers would probably be best served by the country going fully metric, but for now that push still lacks requisite momentum. Instead, impacted parties will have to settle for a plan to standardize the measure of a single foot starting in 2023.

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On the show this week, we’re bringing you an episode of a new podcast called, La Brega. And to tell us all about the series is Alana Cassanova-Burgess. Casanova-Burgess traces back the story of the boom and bust of Levittown, a massive suburb that was founded on the idea of bringing the American middle-class lifestyle to Puerto Rico during a time of great change on the island. Casanova-Burgess (herself the granddaughter of an early Levittown resident) explores what the presence of a Levittown in Puerto Rico tells us about the promises of the American Dream in Puerto Rico.

La Brega is a co-production of WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios. This episode is available in Spanish as well, and you can listen to that on whatever platform you hear your podcasts, through La Brega’s podcast feed.

Created by a team of Puerto Rican journalists, producers, musicians, and artists from the island and diaspora; hosted by On the Media’s Alana Casanova-Burgess. La Brega is a co-production from WNYC Studios and Futuro Studios.

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In 2015, the owners of a Dutch cycling company began shipping bicycles across the Atlantic to the United States, but time and time again these deliveries were damaged in transit. VanMoof tried various solutions — “Tougher boxes? Better packaging? Different shipping partners? Nothing worked. Bikes obviously didn’t have the kind of priority flat-screen TVs have, for example” … and then it clicked.

The company began printing images of big, expensive television sets on the sides of boxes as a visual cue to handlers, a tacit message that the contents were fragile. They reported this “small tweak had an outsized impact,” with shipment damage dropping by 70 to 80% overnight.  Since most of their sales are online, this strategy has helped them better protect tens of thousands of orders to date. A Brooklyn workshop (previously dedicated entirely to fixing up bikes broken in various ways on their journey overseas) was suddenly freed up, too.

Meanwhile, other cycling companies have taken to using similar tactics, likely inspired by VanMoof’s example. The boxes aren’t entirely disguised — a close look reveals what’s really going on — but the image of the big screen dominates, and is apparently much more effective than the ordinary symbols and words used to indicate fragile contents.

At this point, the idea has spread beyond cycling. Companies like Uplift, which makes variable-height desks, have also shifted away from printing images of desks and taken instead to putting depictions of electronics on their boxes. Of course, like any camouflage, the wider it spreads the less effective it may ultimately be — if every box shows a television, shippers and handlers will certainly catch on.

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At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will never see how these animals lived with our own eyes. There are no photos or videos, of course, which means that if we want to picture how they look someone has to draw them.

Bob Bakker became obsessed with dinosaurs at an early age and went on to become one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. He also happens to be a very skilled paleoartist, and over the years his writing and his illustrations have had a huge impact on how we think about and picture these prehistoric animals.

Slow and Stupid

In the middle of the 20th century, when Bakker first started college, American dinosaur science was in a bit of a rut. Dinosaurs were considered big, dumb, cold-blooded reptiles. They were thought of as evolutionary failures destined for extinction. And that view of dinosaurs affected how they were drawn. In most paintings of dinosaurs, the creatures were not moving or interacting with each other — there was no spark of intelligent social life. And their bodies were these hulking masses of flesh.

“The way brontosaurus and diplodocus (the biggest dinosaurs) were illustrated they were like giant, gray vacuum cleaners with very very short legs,” explains Bakker. “They were depicted slowly pulling themselves across the landscape or sitting neck deep in a fetid swamp. And that’s where we were in the early 1960s — dinosaurs were sad, cold-blooded, dead ends in the history of life.”

But paleontology was about to go through a spectacular shift.

The Superiority of Dinosaurs

During Bakker’s freshman year at Yale, the geology department took him and some of the other students out on a dig. The trip was led by one of Bob’s professors, a paleontologist named Jon Ostrom. On the dig, they dug up a new species of raptor named Deinonychus.

After studying the fossils back at Yale, Professor Ostrom began to argue that if you really looked at the anatomy of deinonychus and other dinosaurs they looked less like lumbering lizards and more like super athletic birds.

Bakker was fascinated by this idea. As an undergraduate, he dissected modern animals in an effort to better understand dinosaur musculature. He concluded that the old stereotypes about sluggish, stupid dinosaurs just didn’t hold up.

Bakker and Ostrom weren’t the first people to come to this conclusion. As early as the mid-19th century there had been scientists and religious thinkers who believed that dinosaurs were intelligent, active, and bird-like. But those ideas weren’t in the textbooks.

Bakker decided to publish a paper in a Yale journal, and his editor suggested he call it The Superiority of Dinosaurs. He loved that title idea.  It embodied the idea that dinosaurs “weren’t evolutionary has-beens. They were top-of-the-line! They beat everybody!”

But convincing people that dinosaurs were actually totally different than they had been depicted for the past sixty years was going to require more than a few good academic papers. To really change people’s minds, sometimes you gotta show instead of tell. Bob Bakker was a skilled illustrator as well as a scientist. So when Jon Ostrom wrote his definitive paper on Deinonychus, he asked Bakker to do the illustration. In the picture, the raptor is nearly parallel with the ground, its left leg springing forward, its right leg curled tightly against its torso, preparing for the next stride — it’s beautiful and terrifying.

Bakker’s Deinonychus became an iconic drawing. No one had ever seen anything like it. Bakker went on to write academic and popular articles about how impressive dinosaurs had been, and he illustrated them all himself. He drew dinosaurs bounding across the prehistoric landscape like track and field stars with lithe, muscular bodies. And Bakker’s athletic dinosaurs became a model for other paleoartists like Gregory Paul.

Dinosaur Renaissance

Throughout the 1970s, more and more paleontologists got on board with Ostrom and Bakker’s theories — they found new fossils and footprint evidence suggesting that dinosaurs had been warm-blooded, intelligent, and bird-like. This period has become known as the Dinosaur Renaissance, a moment when we totally rethought all of our assumptions about these incredible prehistoric animals. Paleontologists like Darren Naish think art was a huge part of its success: “I think that part of the reason that the dinosaurs of Dinosaur Renaissance the dinosaurs of Ostrom and Bakker … drew in so many scientists in the 60s and 70s was because [the era was] accompanied by brilliant visuals.”

If anyone missed out on this scientific revolution and still thought that dinosaurs were slow and stupid, that ended in 1993 with the release of the film Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are very… active.

When that movie came out the whole world got to see these fierce, athletic creatures running through kitchens and eating lawyers off of toilets. Once you’ve seen the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, you can’t unsee them.

John Conway draws dinosaurs for a living, and he believes the film Jurassic Park cemented people’s idea of what a dinosaur is supposed to look like. Conway became interested in paleoart after reading Bob Bakker’s book The Dinosaur Heresies.

In the early part of his career, he drew dinosaurs that looked a lot like Bakker’s — lean and muscular. After a while, however, he says that all of his dinosaurs looked they had been shrink-wrapped. “You know those suction packs … you pack your clothes and you put the vacuum cleaner on it and you suck all the air out? That’s sort of what we’re doing with dinosaurs — we’re sort of putting skin on them and then vacuuming out anything that was in between that skin and the muscles.”

Now paleoartists weren’t just doing that to make their dinosaurs look all cool and buff. They were trying to be accurate. Accurate dinosaur art has to be rooted in real scientific evidence — and the main piece of evidence is often a skeleton. Paleoartists would base the shape of their dinosaurs on an accurate skeleton and then layer on muscles in appropriate places. Soft tissues like fat, however, often don’t survive for millions of years like bone, and so artists tended to be pretty conservative about how much fat they gave their dinosaurs. The result was that all of these dinosaurs looked like they went to the gym three times a day and drank protein shakes for every meal. John Conway says it began to feel as though paleoartists had replaced one orthodoxy with another.

But just because fat didn’t survive for millions of years doesn’t mean that a dinosaur didn’t have it. Animals have fat and they have it all over the place and in some places they have really big fat reserves which changes their shape fairly drastically.

To illustrate this point, think about trying to draw a modern animal, like a whale or a camel, just from their fossilized skeleton. It ends up looking really weird. If you draw a bowhead whale just from the skeleton, without a lot of fat or blubber, it looks kind of like a giant tadpole with a bulbous head and long snake-like tail. It looks weird because a whale’s shape is defined by fat.

Dinosaurs also had fat, and Conway argues that it would have changed their shape pretty dramatically. “A dinosaur could have camel humps and we wouldn’t know because you can’t tell from a camel’s skeleton that it has humps,” says Conway. “Brontosaurus could have had humps we don’t know!”

Scientists do sometimes find dinosaur fossils with the soft tissues intact, and when they do it can completely change our image of the animal. The dinosaur psittacosaurus, for example, used to be depicted in a standard, shrink-wrapped kind of way, until paleontologists found this amazing full body fossil where lots of the fat and the skin and the different soft tissues had been perfectly preserved.

It turns out it was a kind of chubby creature with lots of striping, and long curving quills growing off the top of its tail.

In recent years fossils have been found with fat, and frills, and thick coats of feathers — way more than anyone had predicted. And this made John Conway wonder: if so many of the soft tissues we’ve discovered have been really strange, what about all the dinosaurs that we haven’t found any soft tissues for yet? “There are bizarre possibilities out there that no one’s looking at, and I thought well I’m going to start drawing some of these things.”

Conway began to try something new with his art — he started to speculate. He began drawing pudgy dinosaurs, and dinosaurs with weird skin flaps, and so many feathers they looked like birds. There was always a standard conservative dinosaur at the center of his drawings, but then he would cover it with more speculative elements.

He wasn’t claiming that every dinosaur he was drawing was perfectly accurate, but he wanted to show people that dinosaurs as a group probably had a lot more weird variety than we tend to think. “In order to get the overall picture of dinosaurs right I think you need a healthy dose of speculation in there,” Conway says. That doesn’t mean anything goes. Conway is careful to say that dinosaur art should reflect the latest science—what we know for sure—but we’ll never know everything.

All Yesterdays

John Conway eventually decided to give the world a dose of speculation in the form of a book. He teamed up with Darren Naish and another paleoartist named Memo Koseman, and published a slim little paperback titled All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals.

The book is filled with dinosaurs that look very different from what most people imagine. There’s a triceratops that’s covered in spines, a Majungasaurus with skin that camouflages it against the forest floor, and a Therizinosaurus that is so covered in feathers it looks like a haystack. And next to each image the artist describes why they drew it that way. The camouflaged dinosaur is drawn that way because the artists reasoned that its oddly-proportioned body might have made it vulnerable to predators and in need of a defense strategy.

All Yesterdays also tried to expand our understanding of dinosaur behavior. Usually, when we see a fierce tyrannosaurus rex it’s attacking another dinosaur. But the dinosaur probably spent most of its time sleeping, and so that’s how John Conway drew it.

All Yesterdays was a real hit and helped spark a little speculative movement within the paleoart community. Darren Naish says it’s more acceptable now to draw a dinosaur based on a hypothesis. For example, horned dinosaurs like triceratops have these large nostrils that have confused paleontologists for years. There have been a few different hypotheses put forward by scientists — one of them is that the dinosaur may have had inflatable nose balloons, almost like a hooded seal.

Twenty years ago, if someone were to draw a triceratops with nose balloons, they would have been laughed at. But Naish says that it’s now quite reasonable for an artist to depict the dinosaur that way as long they explain that choice. Of course, that doesn’t mean triceratops definitely had nose balloons!

But by drawing it that way, it’s like the artist is asking us to keep an open mind. Because even though we know a lot about the prehistoric world, the science is always changing. The past is always a moving target.

The post Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux appeared first on 99% Invisible.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book.

But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book… was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. It was a self-published book created without permission from music publishers or songwriters. It was duplicated at photocopy shops and sold on street corners, out of the trunks of cars, and under the table at music stores where people used secret code words to make the exchange. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The History of Fake Books

Barry Kernfeld is a musicologist who has written a lot about the history of Jazz and music piracy. Kernfeld says that long before the Real Book ever came out, Jazz musicians were relying on collections of music they called fake books. Kernfeld says that the story of the first fake book began in the 1940s. “A man named George Goodwin in New York City, involved in radio in the early 1940s was getting a little frustrated with all the intricacies of tracking licensing. And so he invented this thing that he called the Tune-Dex,” explains Kernfeld.

The Tune-Dex was an index card catalog designed for radio station employees to keep track of the songs they were playing on air. On one side the cards had information about a particular song, such as the composer, the publisher, and anything that one would need to know for payment rights. On the other side of the card were a few lines of bite-sized sheet music—just the song’s melody, lyrics, and chords so that radio station employees could glance at it and quickly recall the song. This abbreviated musical notation also made the cards useful to another group of people: working jazz musicians.

As a Black art form, jazz had developed out of a mix of other Black music traditions including spirituals and the blues. By the 1940s, a lot of “jazz” was popular dance music, and many jazz musicians were making their money playing live gigs in small clubs and bars. The standard jazz repertoire was mostly well-known pop songs from Broadway, or New York’s songwriting factory: “Tin Pan Alley.”

Jazz musicians would riff and freestyle over these songs. The art of improvisation has always been a key art form of jazz music. But what made the average gigging trumpeter or sax player truly valuable was their ability to play any one of hundreds of songs right there on the spot.

To be prepared for any request, musicians would bring stacks and stacks of sheet music to every gig. But lugging around a giant pile of paper could be really cumbersome—this is where the Tune-Dex came in. Someone figured out that you could gather together a bunch of Tune-Dex cards, print copies of them on sheets of paper, add a table of contents and a simple binding, and then sell the finished product directly to musicians in the form of a book. They called them “fake books” because they helped musicians fake their way through unfamiliar songs. These first fake books were cheaper than regular sheet music, and a lot more organized. they became an essential tool for this entire class of working musicians.

Bootleggers

Musicians loved these new fake books, but the music publishers hated them. They wanted musicians to buy legal sheet music, and so the publishing companies started cracking down on fake book bootleggers. That, of course, didn’t stop the bootleggers and by the 1950s, there were countless illegal fake books in existence, which were being used in nightclubs all across the country.

As helpful as fake books were, they had a lot of problems. They were notoriously illegible and confusingly laid out. The other big problem with these fake books at this point was that the music inside felt really out of date. The fake books hadn’t changed since the mid-40s, but jazz had. Disillusioned by commercial jazz that appealed to mainstream white audiences, a new generation of Black musicians took jazz improvisation to a new level. They experimented with more angular harmonies, technically demanding melodies and blindingly fast tempos. Their new style was called bebop.

Bebop was just the beginning. Over several decades, Jazz exploded into this constellation of different styles. Meanwhile, the economics of jazz shifted too. There were fewer clubs, smaller paychecks, and more university jazz programs with steady teaching gigs. The ivory tower, not the nightclub, increasingly became a place for young musicians to learn, and for established musicians to earn a living. And if you’re going to jazz school, you need jazz books.

The fake books at the time hadn’t kept up with the music. They still contained the same old-fashioned collection of standards with the same old-fashioned collection of chord changes. If a young jazz musician wanted to try and play like Charles Mingus or Sonny Rollins, They weren’t going to learn from a book. That is… until two college kids invented the Real Book.

The Two Guys

In the mid-70s, Steve Swallow began teaching at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, an elite private music school that boasted one of the first jazz performance programs in the country. Swallow had only been teaching at Berklee for a few months when two students approached him about a secret project. “I keep referring them to them as ‘the two guys who wrote the book,’ because…they swore me to secrecy. They made me agree that I would not divulge their names,” explains Swallow. The “two guys” wanted to make a new fake book, one that actually catered to the needs of contemporary jazz musicians and reflected the current state of jazz. And they needed Swallow’s help.

From the very beginning, the students envisioned the Real Book as a cooler and more contemporary fake book than the stodgy, outdated ones they’d grown up with. They wanted it to include new songs from jazz fusion artists like Herbie Hancock, and free jazz pioneers like Ornette Coleman who were pushing the boundaries of the genre. They also wanted to include the old jazz standards from Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, but they wanted to update those classics with alternate chord changes that reflected the way modern musicians, like Miles Davis, were actually playing them.

Modern Jazz musicians had altered a lot of classic standards over the years, with new harmonies and more complex chord changes. And to capture these new sounds, the students spent hours listening to recordings and transcribing what they heard, as best they could. It was a huge undertaking because most of these chord changes had never actually been written down. They weren’t necessarily thinking about it like this at the time, but the students were effectively establishing a new set of standardized harmonies for a handful of classic songs.

The music wasn’t the only part of their new fake book that the students wanted to improve. They also wanted to fix the aesthetic problems with the old fake books, and make something that was nice to look at and easy to read. One of “the two guys” notated all of the music by hand in this very distinctive and expressive script. He also designed and silk-screened the logo on the front cover: “The Real Book,” written in chunky, SchoolHouse Rock-style block letters.

By the summer of 1975, the book was done, and the students took it to local photocopying shops where they cranked out hundreds of copies to sell directly to other students and a few local businesses near Berklee. Overnight, almost everyone had to have one. As the Real Book’s notoriety grew, so did the demand. The two students hadn’t printed enough copies to keep up, but it turns out, they didn’t need to. Not long after they created a few hundred copies of the book, bootleg versions began popping up all over the world. The Real Book had taken on a life of its own, and the students ironically found themselves in the same position as the music publishers and songwriters they’d originally cut out of the process, as they watched unlicensed copies of their work get duplicated and sold. After they released the first edition of the Real Book, the students put out two more editions to correct mistakes, and then their work was done. But the Real Book lived on, copied over and over again by new generations of bootleggers. And as the number of students in elite conservatory jazz programs continued to swell over the next few decades, the Real Book, with its modern repertoire, reharmonized standards, and beautiful handwriting, became the de-facto textbook for this new legion of jazz students. The unofficial official handbook of jazz.

The Real Real Book

Just like with old fake books, the success of the Real Book was a major problem for music publishers. Some companies released their own fake books, but they never managed to compete with the Real Book. The popularity of the Real Book meant that lots of people weren’t getting paid for their work. But in the mid-2000s, music executive Jeff Schroedl and the publisher Hal Leonard decided, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. They went through the Real Book page by page, secured the rights to almost every song, and published a completely legal version. You don’t need to buy the Real Book out of the back of someone’s car anymore. It’s available at your local music shop. They even wanted the same handwriting. Hal Leonard actually hired a copyist to mimic the old Real Book’s iconic script and turn it into a digital font, which means a digital copy of a physical copy of one anonymous Berklee student’s handwriting from the mid-70s will continue to live on for as long as new editions of the book are published.

When Hal Leonard finally published the legal version of the Real Book in 2004, it was great news if you were a composer with a song in there. You’d finally be getting royalties from the sale of the most popular Jazz fake book of all time. But that didn’t totally solve the intellectual property problems with the Real Book. While the legalization of the Real Book did resolve most of its flagrant copyright violations, it didn’t clear up authorship disputes that go back to the early days of jazz. Many jazz songs arise out of collective tinkering and improvising in jam sessions. It’s sometimes quite hard to say who exactly wrote a given song, and power dynamics often impacted whose name actually got listed as an official songwriter. And so there are likely many musicians whose names will never appear on the songs they helped write, even if those songs appear in the legal Real Book.

Useful Tool, or Reductive Cheat Sheet?

Even if we put the intellectual property questions aside for a second, fake books like the Real Book still have plenty of critics. Nicholas Payton is a musician and record label owner, and he compares the Real Book to a study guide or a cheat sheet—a way to distill this complicated art form into a manageable packet of digestible information. To Payton, jazz isn’t just information to be learned. It’s a way of thinking and a form of expression. And it’s fundamentally a Black cultural phenomenon that can’t be taken out of its historical context. Payton says that reading books like the Real Book, even going to music school, can really only get you so far. If you want to learn to play, at some point you’re going to have to immerse yourself in the culture of the music. For Payton (and many musicians) learning directly from elders, in person, is a crucial part of what it means to really know the art form.

There’s also the question of codification, and whether it’s useful to have one songbook filled with definitive versions of all these jazz tunes. Carolyn Wilkins has taught ensembles at Berklee College of Music, and she says that the chords that are written down in the Real Book sometimes get treated like the right way to play a particular song. But even though Jazz has all of these “standards,” they’re not supposed to be played in one standard way. As you listen to different recordings of the same song by different jazz artists, it becomes obvious that there’s no one right way to play it. Wilkins says that the Real Book does have its place in Jazz education. Over her years at Berklee, she’s seen how it can be a useful starting place as a tool to bring young jazz musicians together. The key, she says, is to treat the Real Book as a starting place. From there you need to go out and explore all the other ways people have played a particular song. “And then ultimately you must find your own way.”

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Years ago on a trip to Newfoundland, retired traveler Jackie Jansen began documenting a strangely persistent phenomenon: front doors raised high above the ground. Odder still: these elevated entries had no stairs to speak of, leaving her to wonder why. It turns out there are competing theories about these unusual portals. Locals told Jansen and her husband (presumably tongue in cheek) that such “mother-in-law doors” were for ushering out unwanted in-laws, but that’s not the only tall tale going around about these quirky designs.

Some have speculated that these seemingly useless secondary doors are a product of building regulations — when Newfoundland joined Canada in the late 1940s, they suddenly had to match new fire regulations that required two modes of egress for houses. Following the letter of the law, the theory goes, a door was added, but no stairs, since technically that was not included in the legal requirement.

A similarly legalistic theory posits that leaving off the staircase allows a building to remain technically “unfinished,” yielding some sort of tax break. Or perhaps these higher doors deter would-be thieves. Clearly, the uncanny positioning of these features invites much speculation, particularly since such raised doors are often found on front facades.

The consensus opinion in comments on Jensen’s article, however, suggest a more simple, climate-driven answer: snowfall. In a place where snow can pile up many feet high and completely obscure ground-level doors, having a higher point for ingress and egress makes sense. Why stairs aren’t added, though, still seems like a bit of a mystery — an elevated door without steps is an all-or-nothing proposition, as snow levels will rarely match a threshold precisely. Then again, one can always wade through snow at the normal-height door.

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Pete Bethune is a conservationist, ripped right out of an action movie. He’s stopped whalers out in the Pacific Ocean. He rescued a dolphin held captive in an Indonesian resort. And he’s been stabbed not once, but twice. Recently, this work brought Pete to Costa Rica where his luck almost ran out. Pete was deep in the rainforest with his team, and they were looking for evidence of illegal logging and hunting. While Pete was walking very carefully, he was bit on the back of the leg by a fer-de-lance, or spearhead, snake. It’s the most deadly snake in Central America. He knew that if he didn’t receive medical attention within six hours… he would die.

After trudging through the thick brush, Pete was able to make it to a hospital, where he was given snake antivenom. It raced through his body neutralizing the toxins, and within a few hours, it was clear that it had worked, and that Pete was going to survive. Pete was incredibly lucky, but many people around the world are not. More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites.

Getting Digested… Alive

Christina Zdenek studies snake venom at the University of Queensland in Australia. And she says that snake venom can kill you in a number of horrible ways. Sometimes, it feels like you’re getting digested alive from the inside. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a different horrible effect to your body. Some attack your muscles, while others attack your nerves. And sometimes two different toxins can work together to form an even more sinister combination.

Part of the reason people are dying is because they’re not getting antivenom – the medicine required to fight these horrible toxins – fast enough. The system we have to create snake antivenom is a time-consuming and inefficient process that basically hasn’t changed for more than 100 years.

In order to make snake antivenom, first, the venom has to be “milked” out of a snake’s fangs, and usually, a snake can only give about a teaspoon of venom. This needs to be done for every type of snake, since antivenom is often snake-specific. Antivenom for a fer-de-lance snake, for example, probably won’t be effective against a bite from a black mamba.

After the venom has been milked, it has to be put inside a horse, or another large animal. José María Gutiérrez is a professor at the Clodomiro Picado Research Institute in Costa Rica, and he says that snake venom has to be injected into a living horse little by little over the course of months, which causes the horse to build up antibodies. After those injections, six liters of blood are taken from the horse, and from that blood, the horse antibodies are purified, freeze-dried and put into a vial. This is the stuff that gets injected into humans. Each bag of horse blood provides enough antivenom to treat around 15 people. Once these horse antibodies get into a human’s bloodstream, they find the toxins and then block their action.

The horse-drawn antivenom is very effective at blocking toxins and saving lives. But the obvious question is this: after 100 years later, why are we still things in such an expensive, inefficient way? For starters, making a universal antivenom requires lots of time and lots of money, and nobody has thrown the appropriate resources at this problem. Snakebites kill 100,000 people every year, but most of those deaths are in rural areas in Africa and Asia. For years, drug companies haven’t put a lot of money into antivenom research because it isn’t profitable. But recently, things have started to change.

Goodbye Horses

The WHO gave snakebites a special designation in 2017, listing them as the most important kind of Neglected Tropical Disease. This has unlocked money and resources for new research in this space, with promising results.

Recently, researchers have taken a new approach to battling snake venom. They have begun to group toxins into families, which allows them to focus on the most dangerous ones. So far the research has been going well and studies in mice have shown promising results for a drug that can work against multiple different venoms by blocking the toxins’ access to zinc. But any major breakthrough is likely still years away.

After seeing a series of COVID vaccines go from design to trial to approval in under a year, this process might sound slow. But the experience of COVID shows that with the right resources and focus, problems like a universal antivenom might not be so daunting after all.

Science Vs, a production of Gimlet, a Spotify company

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The Chicago River used to be completely filthy, because Chicagoans used it as an open sewer. It was teeming with both human and animal waste, and it was said to have been so thick that “a chicken could walk across it without getting her feet wet.”

To fix this problem, the city of Chicago carried out a massive project. In 1887, the city decided to reverse the flow of the river and send the sewage into the Mississippi River. It was one of the biggest construction projects of its era and a huge success, giving Chicagoans a reliable supply of clean drinking water.

But like many large-scale human interventions, there were unintended consequences. The reversal meant two unconnected drainage systems were suddenly linked up and that invasive species could move from one to the other, most notably the Asian carp. If the carp made it to the Great Lakes, they had the potential to devastate populations of endangered mollusks and even threaten the safety of human beings, because of their tendency to jump out of the water at high speeds.

Faced with this epidemic of fish jumping out of the water and smacking people in the face, the Army Corps of Engineers were told they had to fix the problem. They came up with a series of plans to stop the carp from migrating through the Chicago River and eventually arrived at setting up an electric barrier in the water.

This is something humans do a lot. We meddle with nature. And years later, we discover a bunch of unintended consequences, which means we have to meddle with nature all over again.

These kinds of interventions are the subject of Elizbeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. In it, she writes about how in the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature. But now that we’ve seen consequences like species extinction and climate change, humans are focused on the control of the control of nature. In this episode, Roman and Kolbert talk about everything from the introduction of poisonous toads in Australia to the launch of diamond dust into the stratosphere.

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For decades, Seattle planners have been exploring a radical overhaul where the city meets the Puget Sound, much of which has now been implemented. For humans, the surface experience has changed dramatically, but below, too, other species are benefiting from attention paid to the ecology of this important shoreline. Material decisions like transparent glass bricks might seem like a way to help people to observe fish below, but really: they are designed to serve salmon, lighting their way as they migrate through the water.

University of Washington reporter Michelle Ma describes this overall endeavor as “arguably the largest, most ambitious urban seawall project in the world that prioritizes habitat for young fish and the invertebrates they feed on.” The overarching key, in part, was to facilitate all of the desired human activities above while also paying close attention to the ecosystem below. Walls, steps, and other structures along the edge help provide scaffolding, creating habitats for the invertebrate animals and algae on which migrating salmon subsist. Mesh bags filled with rocks help foster biodiversity, allowing different species to find or make homes on or between them. Even the main seawall itself is cobbled to foster vertical growth.

In the grand scheme, this project has to accommodate various creatures, plus rising water levels, all while protecting infrastructure from storm surges. Scientists at the UW, meanwhile, will be studying the efficacy of the endeavor and the specific strategies used within it in part to help other cities also looking to rethink their shorelines.

“Seattle’s downtown waterfront is an unprecedented attempt to improve fish habitat along an urban shoreline, so it’s a great opportunity to learn from and apply around the world,” Stuart Munsch, a fishery biologist at NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center, told Ma. Like the Living Breakwaters project in New York City, this project took lessons learned from nature about how to foster growth, replicating useful elements of natural ecosystems in artificial ways.

Special thinks to Brittany (@brrosenau) for the story tip!

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