Cure alien

We check in with a few of our TOE regulars: Peter Choyce has is one of my oldest friends and a listener favorite, but he has a secret we've never addressed <em>until now</em>. We also check in with our D.C. correspondent "Chris" who tells us about the NSA's desire to install backdoors in Podcasts. Also, I tell you the story about what happens when I wander into @ psychic for a late night reading. PLUS: a few extracts from 'Brand New World' <a href="https://www.scrollkit.com/s/vGdoLcX">Click for more info</a> or visit toe.prx.org

Admissions Of Defeat

Programmer David Heinemeier Hansson tells us about his Out Of Office experience, David is a partner at 37signals and a co-author (with Jason Fried) of REMOTE: Office Not Required. We also meet Ignacio Uriarte, he left his cubicle for a career in Office Art. And Ravenna Koenig, TOE's newest correspondent, explains the difference between Facebook-Work & Work-Work. <a href="https://www.scrollkit.com/s/2uiFYP7">Click for more info</a> or VISIT toe.prx.org

Out Of The Office

About a year ago I travelled across America for the BBC. I visited Airports, Amusement parks, Highways and Community Colleges in order to understand how the priority queue is changing the American experience of waiting in line. ***A version of this piece aired on the BBC World Service, part of their “Real America” series.  <a href="https://www.scrollkit.com/s/aUGM5mO" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Click for more info</a> or VISIT toe.prx.org

Waiting In Line

This week your host tries to break through to the other side using the art of John Singer Sargent as a... jumping off point. Also we get an update from our corespondent Peter Choyce. When we last heard from Peter (in "admissions of defeat") he was heading to rehab, he is now free and living in the woods in North Carolina.


Not Soon Enough

Photographer Robert Burley takes pictures of the end of Analog for his book The disappearance of darkness. Christine Frohnert explains how conservators must care for Art with a Plug. Curator Christiane Paul tells us how the Whitney Museum of American Art restored the digital artwork "The world's first collaborative sentence" by Douglas Davis. And TOE's Washington D.C. corespondent 'Chris' tells us the truth about Edward Snowden and Snapchat. 

Artifacts (1 of 2)

Nathan Jurgenson wants us to understand what is truly revolutionary about ephemeral photographs and platforms like Snapchat, Fred Ritchin says we are going to get our minds blown "After Photography" and Finn Bruntun explains why we need to preserve this transition from Analog to Digital. 

Artifacts (2 of 2)

To Bot or Not? That's the big question for Data Scientist Gilad Lotan. His research suggests we may be damaging our online reputations if we choose not to play the fake follower game. Jason Q Ng, author of the book Blocked On Weibo, tells us why the Chinese government hates fake bots and why they targeted Black PR companies last summer. And your host imagines a future were humans are forced to shower their new Bot overlords with unwavering attention.

F is for Fake

Writer Olivia Laing didn’t plan on moving to New York alone, but after a few lonely months in the city she discovered the truth about loneliness. She says it is a gift. Laing wrote an essay on loneliness for Aeon magazine. She is also the author of The Trip to Echo Spring, which is one of the best books of the year — no contest.

Eric Klinenberg says more and more people are choosing to live alone and that cities like New York must invest in housing stock that single people not only can afford but actually want to live in, the type of housing they have in Scandinavian countries. He is a sociologist at New York University and the author of Going Solo, a book about the extraordinary rise and surprising appeal of living alone.

In Denmark when someone dies alone, and no-one claims the body, the authorities put an ad in the newspaper calling for Possible Relatives. This is also the title of a photo-book by Danish photographer Tina Enghoff. She took pictures of some of these apartments after the bodies were removed, often the bodies go undiscovered for weeks. My friend Pejk Malinovski, who is also a Dane (and a radio producer) met up with Tina on a recent trip home to Copenhagen.

When you're lonely, life is very long

This week we freak out about the future of wearable technology! (http://bit.ly/1hg4h7Q)

Technology consultant Sarah Slocum loves social media and her Google Glass, she wears them everywhere. But when she walked into Molotov's, a bar on Haight Street in San Francisco, she discovered that not everyone shares her love for wearable tech.

Also, your host makes his annual pilgrimage to SXSWi and ends up designing wearables at a surreal Hack Day. We also hear from Shingy, AOL's Digital Prophet. He believes wearables will allow us to have it both ways: we can be both digital and human.
 
**This episode features elements that were recorded binaurally. If you listen with a pair of headphones or a LiveAudio enabled device, you will experience three dimensional sound - it will be like you are there.** 


Music from this episode:

"Billy (Starsky Instrumental)" — Tha Silent Partner (http://bit.ly/1fUCZTA) 

"big" "big (2)" "big (5)" — klimperei, from the album "big & bang" (http://klimperei.bandcamp.com) You really should buy some records from this genius! 

"Food of the Range" — Electric Sound of Joy, from the "Food of the Range EP" 

Prêt-à-Portable

Jeff gets his car towed, and a whole lot more. Performed by Andrew Yurman-Glaser, Sebastian Conelli, and Phoebe Tyers. Written by Elana Fishbein, and produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Jeff Gets Towed

New version with 25% more audio diary!  In 1984 your host was twelve years old and like George Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith, he kept a diary for the citizens of the future. For this special installment of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything we travel back in time and give this diary a soundtrack. TV commercials, radio spots, movie clips -  all sound from 1984 (the year not the book).  Along with personal memories of making the transition to middle school, the show focuses on four of the most important people of year:  Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Steve Jobs and Clara Peller. Find out what totalitarianism really sounds like.
Sponsors: Zady.com + souverain.com

1984 (the year not the book)EXPANDED VERSION

Andrew Rubin opens up his Archives of Authority to tell us the story of how George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 became global phenomenons. Melissa Gira Grant tells us about her new book Playing the Whore and the complicated relationship between sex workers, Feminists, Journalists, and the Police. And your host turns to ToE correspondent Peter Choyce for advice on how to fight his bike ticket in traffic court.


The Bootlickers

It will always be hard

At least you know where they're coming from. Performed by Rosie Whalen, Chris Dwane, and Louis Kornfeld. Written by Rosie Whalen. Directed by Louis Kornfeld & Jonathan Mitchell. Produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Sketchballs

An elf gets a new job in the Naughty or Nice division of Santa's workshop. This story was commissioned by NPR's All Things Considered. It was written by Jonathan Mitchell and Seth Lind, and directed & produced by Jonathan Mitchell.

Naughty or Nice

As you probably know, 99% Invisible is a show about the built world, about things manufactured by humans. We don't tend to do stories about animals or nature. But our friend Jon Mooallem writes stories about the weird interactions between animals and humans, interactions that are becoming ever weirder and more designed. Mooallem is a writer with the New York Times Magazine and for Pop -Up Magazine, the live magazine in San Francisco, which is where we first heard these two stories. You might remember them as episodes #40 and #91 respectively, but now we present them together in a radio special we're calling Mooallempalooza.

99% Invisible-146- Mooallempalooza

The Theory of Everything debuts with a three part expedition to the center of the cloud.  In part one Twitter employee number 7 Britt Selvitelle tells us what happened when Justin Bieber joined Twitter in 2009 and how everything had changed by the time the Bieb joined Instagram in 2011.  Harper Reed, CTO for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, explains why cloud infrastructure is awesome,  Matt Wood, Amazon’s principal data scientist, explains how the cloud is changing our relationship with technology, and Parse’s Charity Majors shows us what it is like to work in the Cloud. But when your host attempts to get inside the cloud itself he runs into difficulties…


The Clouds (1 of 3)

Recently I decided to watch these torture scenes from Zero Dark Thirty with Joshua Phillips, a journalist who spent years researching the effects of torture on detainees and interrogators. He is the author of None of Us Were Like this Before: American Soldiers and Torture.  At Joshua's apartment we recorded a torture commentary track for our imaginary Criterion edition of the film. 
We will probably never learn the truth about how we found Osama Bin Laden. But there is one thing I know for certain. We didn’t get the information from Umarov Muhibullah.
Journalist McKenzie Funk ran into Umarov, one of the first men to be released from Guantanamo, while hiking in Tajikistan in 2004. 


Red, White, Blue & Orange

Anyone seriously interested in hacking today eventually finds their way to Gabriella Coleman. As an anthropologist, Gabriella has been researching Anonymous and Hacking culture for years now but she started out studying Free Software in the Bay Area. This work is the basis of her book Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. Gabriella showed up right at the moment the Free Software movement rebranded itself as "Open Source" It turns out that there are too many meanings of the word free in the English language: free beer, free speech. But when the government started using the DMCA to crack down on coding, Hackers bonded together around a very specific definition of the word. 
This episode also marks the debut of someone I have been recording for years: my friend "Chris" He is always up to something, sometimes I fear he may be pulling our collective ear-leg but his tales are always fascinating. In this installment he tells us the truth about the Chinese Hackers and the New York Times. 
Also, since yours truly is sick and tired of waiting for the next installment in George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire saga (this is the basis for the Game of Thrones TV show) I ask a hacker named $poiler to see if he can hack into Martin's server and get me the next book. <a href="https://www.scrollkit.com/s/wh0gjJO">Click for more info</a>

Hacked

Take what it takes to make your day
don't take my picture
enter my stage, but however it frames you
don't take my picture

let's take a walk along the rusty tracks 
let's share a pack of fags 
and throw our bodies onto the sleepers holding hands 
and whatever we do
don't take my picture

'cause it makes me sad to become another friend of someone I don't know

don't take my picture

Cure alien

Sebastian Frank