#469/Christopher Hawthorne + Internet Archive's Chris Freeland + Kitty Kallen via Jonathan Granoff

Modernism as an affordable design

0:00Hi, this is Veronica Swift. My new album is called Home, and you're listening to U.S. Modernist Radio. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Oh, I don't care what mama don't allow, gonna draw my modern anyhow. Mama don't allow no architecture around here. Welcome to U.S. Modernist Radio, where we talk and laugh with people who enjoy, own, create, dream about, preserve, love, and hate modernist architecture, the most exciting and controversial buildings in the world.

0:37I'm Tom Geild. Christopher Hawthorne spent 14 years as the L.A. Times architecture critic before becoming Los Angeles' first ever chief design officer. He's coming up on today's show. So is Chris Freeland. He runs library services at the Internet Archive, leading the charge to keep our digital past from fading away. Finally, we'll channel the musical spirit of the great vocalist Kitty Callen via her son Jonathan Granoff. Kitty's 1954 hit Little Things Mean a Lot topped the charts for nine straight weeks and made her one of the defining voices of the era.

1:14And now, here's your host, defining the mid-century era, Mr. Modernism, George Smart. Thanks, Tom. There's a widespread belief that modernist design is exclusively for people who say things like, we summer in the Hamptons and own at least one chair that no one is allowed to sit in. But here's the thing. Modernism was invented to be affordable. The founders of the movement looked at overstuffed Victorian parlors, rooms crowded with tassels and mahogany,

1:45and realized, as the saying goes, that less is a whole lot more. The Bauhaus crew wanted good design for the masses, less stuff, less ornament, less money. Consider the Lustron House, a prefab steel home from the late 1940s that arrived on a truck ready to build. Porcelain-enameled steel panels and no painting required ever. You just cleaned the exterior with a hose. Thousands of ordinary families lived in these gleaming little machines, and not one of them owned a yacht that we know of.

2:18And what about the mid-century developers who built entire neighborhoods of flat-roofed, glass-walled houses for regular people with regular jobs? Modernism spent decades happily housing schoolteachers and accountants. It only became a luxury brand later, when real estate agents discovered that the word iconic adds a zero to the listing price. But let's be honest. Some of those wonderful architecture magazines featuring wonderful modernist houses changed over time just to feature the most ornate and expensive.

2:50Case in point, Architectural Digest used to be just about architecture. Then in the 80s, a talented editor named Paige Rents realized the magazine wasn't competing well against Architectural Record and Progressive Architecture, the leading publications. So, she shifted the focus to interior design and celebrity houses. And for the next 40 years, Architectural Digest was wildly successful, sharing what carpets Martha Stewart prefers and the motivations behind all of Jennifer Aniston's design choices.

3:22This catapulted Digest to great financial success, but it didn't do much for affordability. So, what do you do today? The gateway drug to your own modernist house is furniture. And I will get trolled for this, but you do not need originals. Knockoffs are everywhere, and they are 80% as good, certainly good enough to get your living room looking better. Thrift stores, estate sales, Facebook Marketplace, and good old Craigslist are drowning in mid-century furniture, originals, and knockoffs.

3:54But the most modernist thing you can do is getting rid of stuff. Your decorative geese, your college textbooks, your mom's National Geographics. Every object you remove from a room brings you closer to meese and further from storage unit addiction. A real problem. Modernism doesn't have to be a luxury. It's a discount disguised as sophistication. It's the only design movement where the flex is owning fewer things. Yes, you can spend a fortune on modernism, the same way you can spend a fortune on a sandwich

4:26if you insist that the bread be flown in from Italy. But the philosophy itself, clean lines, honest materials, light, air, and the radical absence of clutter is one of the cheapest aesthetics ever devised. Less is more. And more importantly, less is less money. That was always the point.

Christopher Hawthorne on growing up

4:47U.S. Modernist Radio is underwritten by the Brent R. Harris Charitable Trust, restorer of Richard Neutra's Kauffman Desert House in Palm Springs, and six other houses in California. By the E. Fay Jones Conservancy, preserving the legacy of modernist architecture in northwest Arkansas. E. Fay Jones Conservancy dot org. And by Diane Bald and the Budman family, restoring significant architecture in Toronto, Los Angeles, Malibu, and Palm Springs. Here's something you don't see every day. A critic who got so good at his job,

5:18the city hired him to fix the thing he was criticizing. Our first guest spent 14 years as the LA Times architecture critic before becoming Los Angeles' first ever chief design officer, the first person to hold that title in any American city. Along the way, he's made an Emmy-winning documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright, launched a citywide push for backyard housing, and now teaches criticism and writing at Yale.

5:48Here is George's conversation with Christopher Hawthorne. Christopher, let me take you back in time a little bit. Tell me about the significance of 1962 Yosemite Road. That's the house, George, in North Berkeley, where I grew up, where my parents still live, as a matter of fact. Hi, Mom. Yeah, say hi to both of them. My parents, I hope, will be listening. Designed by Julie Morgan, built in 1920, at a time when that part of North Berkeley,

6:20overlooking San Francisco Bay, was fairly sparsely populated. It's in a neighborhood called the Thousand Oaks Neighborhood, which was an early streetcar subdivision of the city of Berkeley, and just a couple of miles from the UC Berkeley campus. And this part of Berkeley was really an emerging neighborhood for that time. I mean, there are beautiful houses all up and down the street. And it was, at least in a minor way, a hotbed for certain experiments in residential architecture,

6:51including work not just by Julie Morgan, but also Bernard Maybach and a number of others. And continuing through the modern period, the house that I grew up in was designed largely to take advantage of a view of the bay. So, as I have written in a couple of places, it's not an especially grand house from the street, but it's on a hill facing west, facing the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco and San Francisco Bay. And the house is designed so when you enter, at least on the ground floor,

7:22the whole house is designed to direct you to one of two picture windows overlooking the bay, one in the living room and one in the dining room. And that's really the whole conceit of the ground floor architecture. And then the house sort of opens up to the hill on the backside. It's much taller on its western elevation than on the side that faces east, which is the main entrance. Now, you must have been what, like two or three when you moved in? Yes. I was just a couple of years old when I moved in.

7:52My sister, who's three and a half years older than I am, was a bit older. And as I said, my parents still live there. I can't envision any scenario in which, especially my mom, would ever leave that house. Now, since you were there from a very, very young age, and this was an important house, I understand that people came by all the time to want to see it. They did. The first inkling I got was hearing people outside talking about it, looking at it, maybe pointing at it. So my bedroom, although it had a little sort of corner

8:26that did bend around toward the view, face the street. And I was, mine was the only bedroom in the house that faced that direction. So I could very clearly overhear the conversations of anybody out front. And periodically, I would hear people talking about the architecture, pointing at the house. And then sometimes they'd be bold enough to ring the doorbell and ask about it. And my parents would, depending on their mood, sometimes invite them in and sometimes not. And my mom also, at that point, was helping to found the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association.

8:57This is in the middle 70s, in a period when, as your listeners will know, historic preservation organizations, advocacy groups were springing up all over the country. And the one in Berkeley was called Baja, Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. And because my mom was one of the founders, she was also leading walking tours of different Berkeley neighborhoods. So not just because I was in the house, but also because of that, I had a sense from a pretty early age that architecture was a profession,

9:28that the house that one grew up in was, you know, designed by somebody. And that person was called an architect. And you pretty much became a docent for your own house. I did. I think we were all, my sister and I were probably both enlisted in these tours from a pretty early age, which I always got a kick out of. Now, when did you realize that the house you lived in wasn't normal, that other houses were not like this? Probably when I started going to school and started visiting other friends' houses.

10:03And, you know, many of them actually lived in very interesting houses architecturally in their own right. But some were plainer, more typical, I suppose. And I guess around that time, I got an inkling that our house was a little bit different. And at some point, I assume you started wanting to see more houses, get inside more projects. When did that happen? Was that high school or later?

Early museum architecture and Maybeck

10:30It was before that. Actually, I was, I've been writing a lot about museum architecture of late because so many of the projects that architecture critics write about are new wings of museums or museum buildings. Yeah. And I was thinking about my own experience and reflecting on the fact, the remarkable fact, that the two museum buildings that I spent the most time in as a kid and probably the first works of architecture that I went on a field trip to as a student, I heard a teacher say,

11:03we're going to go see a building that's designed by an architect. Those two were the original Berkeley Art Museum from the early 70s by an architect named Mario Ciampi, C-I-A-N-P-I, and then the Oakland Museum by Kevin Roach with the fantastic rooftop garden by Dan Kiley. So the two buildings that first impressed on me what it meant to design a museum building were these incredibly muscular, brutalist, and I think fantastic works of architecture

11:36instead of going to see, you know, a neoclassical or Bozar museum building. So I think that also had a real impact. Those are the first two buildings aside from my own house that I remember quite clearly spending time in and thinking about, even if I wasn't calling it architecture, thinking about in terms of design. Now, I've got to think that at some point you wandered into the Weston Havens house by Harwell Hamilton Harris. I walked by, I did not go in as a kid, and I certainly had seen the, it's a Man Ray photograph, right?

12:10If I'm remembering correctly, famous photograph by Man Ray. I was familiar with that photograph. I knew where the house was and is in Berkeley, not so far from my own house, but I did not go in as a kid. But I did go into a number of Maybeck buildings, houses, churches, and a number of other Julian Morgan buildings, houses, and so forth. And particularly the Maybeck houses, which are beautifully strange, had a real impact on me as well.

12:41He was such an iconoclastic, idiosyncratic architect. And I ended up, I'm jumping ahead here, George, but when I got married in Berkeley in 2000, I married a pianist and an arts administrator. So we had a musical theme, all Bach, and we had an architectural theme, which was all Maybeck. Perhaps to the chagrin of my Julian Morgan loving parents, but we had the reception at the faculty club on the UC Berkeley campus designed by Maybeck. And then the ceremony was at the Christian Science Church near the UC Berkeley campus.

13:14Now, neither my wife nor I were not UC graduates and were not Christian scientists, but we wanted to have these celebrations in Maybeck buildings. And we even had the rehearsal dinner at something called the Town and Gown Club in Berkeley, where my mom and my mother-in-law were members, long-time members, and that's also a Maybeck design. So all the music was Bach, all the architecture was Maybeck. So you're really a more extreme example of architecture fans who design their vacations around buildings they want to see.

13:50Oh, yes. And we, our poor wedding guests, had to read, I'm sure, insufferably ambitious program notes in our wedding program, an essay by my wife on the music we were listening to, which was mostly the Bach and A Company cello suites, and the building that they were in, this Christian Science Church by Maybeck, which has this amazing railway truss as a ceiling. And he often mixed industrial materials and higher-end materials in his houses and his other buildings.

14:25So, yes, we subjected our guests to some architectural history written by yours truly.

Studying at Yale and discovering criticism

14:31So, going back to your youth, you left California, you went to Yale, and you pursued political science. That was a twist. I didn't see that coming. Yeah, mostly because the architecture degree in those days was not what it is now. Okay. And I should backtrack a little bit to say that in high school, the other thing that happened in terms of my future career trajectory was that, you know, I mentioned how early in my life I had a sense that architecture was a profession

15:03and that houses that, you know, we as kids grew up in were sometimes designed by architects. I also had a sense pretty early on that architecture critic was a profession that you could pursue. And that was because I was reading Alan Temko, a critic in the San Francisco Chronicle, who's now sadly overlooked. He won a Pulitzer Prize in criticism. And he was writing quite regularly in the 70s and 80s when I was reading the Chronicle as a kid. And then also, the New York Times began national distribution of its print edition in the 1980s.

15:37And so, my parents were among the first subscribers to a daily print edition. So, I was also reading Adelise Huxtable and Paul Goldberger in the New York Times in the 1980s, which was then connected to my own interest in journalism. I edited the high school paper at Berkeley High School, The Jacket, which was a great experience. So, I arrived at Yale in the fall of 1989 with an interest in architectural history and theory, but also specifically in criticism. But I found that the architecture, there was no urban studies major as there is now.

16:10And to be an architecture major, you really just had to do studio. You had to want to become an architect rather than an architecture critic, as I did. So, an architecture major meant entirely doing studios. And I knew that if I had any talent related to architecture, it was not on the design side. There are architecture critics who have been either practicing architects or aspiring practitioners, as you know. I was not among them. My interest was really squarely in architectural history, theory, criticism. So, I studied a lot of that.

16:40I took a lot of courses with Vincent Scully, the great architectural historian at Yale, although he was not a mentor directly for me the way he was for somebody like Paul Goldberger, who had preceded me as a Yale undergraduate. And I then tried to squeeze as much architectural history and theory, which in those days was in the art history department, it's also important to say. So, I could have done architectural history or theory as a major, but that would have meant being an art history major, which I wasn't especially interested in doing. So, I wrote a senior essay in political science, political philosophy,

17:12that looked at spaces of political protest and the architecture and urban design of those spaces. So, I had an advisor in political science, but I also begged somebody in architecture to be my advisor. And I sort of cobbled together, by other means, a combination of architectural theory and political science. But you were living in a Sarnan dorm. I was, yes. So, my father and my sister, both Yale graduates and both members of Sabrick College,

17:46which is one of the James Gamble Rogers Neo-Gothic, right in the center of campus, sort of the classic Yale residential college. My minor act of rebellion in following my sister across the country to Yale, she was a senior when I was a freshman, was to not be in Saybrook and throw my hat into the ring and just allow Yale to assign me to a college. And typically, when Yale does that, your chances were relatively good of getting assigned to either Morse or Stiles, because those were still relatively new colleges.

18:17They opened in the 60s, and they didn't have as deep an alumni pool as the other residential colleges did and do. And therefore, they didn't have as many legacy students who would be automatically assigned to them. So, I wound up in Morse, designed, as you mentioned, by our Sarnan. And it was great, as I've written, great training for a future architecture critic, because I was a Sarnan fan. I was a fan of modernist architecture when I arrived at Yale. But I had several years to think about both the strengths and the weaknesses of Sarnan's design,

18:51some of the ways that the project had been value engineered, as we would now put it. Some corners had been cut. It was finished posthumously. He died quite young, as you know. So, I had a lot of time to kind of ruminate on what worked about Morse and what didn't. Now, after Yale, you went to Seattle. So, I have to ask, did you live in an architect design house there, like a Paul Kirk or a Jim Olson? Oh, certainly not. I moved to Seattle because it's funny. My daughter, who's an undergraduate at Yale, studying architecture and music, by the way.

19:24Surprise, surprise. She has not rebelled so much. She's followed her parents' footsteps, at least to a degree. But she's graduating into what is a pretty tough job market. And I also did. And when I finished in the middle 90s, it was not a great job market. I had a friend from Berkeley, from high school, who was living in Seattle, going to the University of Washington. He had a very cheap room for me to rent in a big house in the Central District. I don't know who the architect was. And then I moved in fairly short order to a newly built apartment building just up the hill from Pike and Pine.

20:02And this is 1993, 1994 in Seattle, which was just an amazing time to be there, even though where we were living was not particularly architecturally significant. The explosion of Microsoft and Amazon and Nirvana. You know, I saw one of the last shows that Nirvana gave in, I think, December of 1993. Kurt Cobain died just a few months after that. So it was an incredibly, incredible time to be there. And that's when I wrote my first paid piece of architecture criticism.

20:34I got a job. Well, first I got a job at Walden Books. That was the only job I could get, selling romance novels. And then I got a job at Seattle Weekly, an alternative weekly. And I reviewed a book by Peter Blake, who I think is an underappreciated writer on architecture. His memoir, which was called No Place Like Utopia, published in 93 or early 94. And I reviewed that book for Seattle Week. I think that was my first published and paid piece on architecture. And I didn't live in Seattle for long.

21:04I just lived there long enough to save some money to travel. But it was a great time to be there. Well, let's fast forward now to 2018 in Los Angeles.

Chief design officer for Los Angeles

21:14You've been there quite a while. You've done a number of articles for the newspaper and different magazines. And now you are appointed as the chief design officer for Los Angeles, which I think is one of the best titles ever. But I think, like many people, we didn't quite know what you did there. So what was that role all about? Yes. So I was the architecture critic at the LA Times for 13 or 14 years, from 2004 through 2018.

21:46In the latter few years of that position, I was really concentrating on Los Angeles, writing about the city, writing about the city's, let's say, fitful evolution toward a kind of post-suburban identity, trying to put behind it for good all of those tropes about Los Angeles that the world is familiar with. And it's the city of cars and freeways and celebrity and swimming pools. Movie stars. Jed Clampett. That's right. Yeah, exactly. Everybody, because of Hollywood, understands those tropes. And the truth is that Los Angeles had been making some pretty significant strides in to

22:20try, you know, efforts to establish a kind of post-suburban identity, building denser housing, investing in mass transit, building more effective public spaces. So for all those reasons, I was writing increasingly about Los Angeles as my chief subject, the urbanism, civic evolution, civic identity of the city, housing policy, transportation policy. And in that capacity, and also in my capacity as a faculty member at Occidental College, where I was teaching and running a public event series, I got to know Eric Garcetti, who was the mayor

22:53of Los Angeles and was quite interested and well-versed in architecture, urban design. So he had been looking at this position as it existed in just a small handful of other cities. Mexico City had a very interesting kind of urban innovations lab at that moment, which I believe was based in city government. So I began having conversations with Mayor Garcetti about the potential of creating a position like that in L.A. He asked me ultimately to take it on.

23:26I also shared some of that sense of mystery about what the job would entail. Well, really, I was acting as an advisor to the mayor on urban design policy, architecture, housing-related topics, and with an emphasis on the design of public spaces and infrastructure at a moment when Los Angeles was investing heavily in all of those things. So my remit was really to try to promote design excellence in a range of ways. In part, that was improving or thinking about the city's approach to procurement, the architects

24:04it was hiring, the designers it was hiring for public buildings, public spaces, the interaction between the city and the county government, which runs the transit system and was responsible for that transit expansion that I was talking about, as well as state and federal projects, and then promoting good design in all kinds of other ways. It ended up, roughly speaking, being about half digging into the kind of design work that the city was already doing and thinking about the design standards as part of city procurement.

24:39And then the other half was launching initiatives of my own, which were sometimes design competitions, sometimes projects related to urban design and public design. And the latter included a lot of work on housing and a project, I think, of which I'm particularly proud, which was an early attempt to rethink how the city of Los Angeles produces memorials and monuments, and also what to do with existing memorials and monuments and other public spaces

25:09that are fraught or painful for certain parts of the community. That led to something called the Civic Memory Working Group, where we brought together about three dozen historians, artists, curators, Indigenous leaders to really think through that set of questions, which was particularly tailored to Los Angeles. Lots of cities, as I mentioned, were going through this set of debates about what to do with, for example, Confederate monuments. Los Angeles required a different strategy. Los Angeles is a city that has thought of itself

25:39and been proud of its reputation as a city of the future, hasn't paused, you know, to think too often about its history compared to other cities. There's a fantastic series of paintings by Ed Ruscha called Don't Want No Retrospective. It's just canvases that have those words on them, which kind of suggests the prevailing attitude in Los Angeles. So I was working across a range of projects collaborating with not only colleagues within the mayor's office, but lots of colleagues across city and county government on all of those kinds of initiatives.

26:14At one time, when monuments that were problematic were coming down, it seemed like the template that was most publicized was, hey, okay, we're going to take these down from these public places, but we're going to build a museum somewhere and put them in their historical context. Did that ever happen in any cities? I never heard of it actually coming to fruition. It did happen, at least to a degree, in New Haven. The Christopher Columbus statue was taken down from Worcester Square here, actually taken down by the city directly, not by activists, as was the

26:48case in other cities, like Los Angeles, where the Unipero Serra statue was taken down by protesters. The Columbus statue was rescued by a new outfit kind of museum by another name called Lost in New Haven, and that oversized Columbus statue is now on view there. The main recommendation that we came away with was that where possible, it makes more sense to add context to a fraught monument or memorial rather than taking it down. Although I think there are circumstances where it does make sense to remove

27:21a statue in full. But we were arguing more for the kind of approach that you might see in Berlin, for example, where there have been lots of efforts to add additional context to elements of Nazi architecture, urban design, or memorials, for example. It also gave rise to some new model for producing, designing, commissioning new memorials. So one example of that in Los Angeles is the 1871 Chinese Massacre Memorial. So it's still the deadliest single day in Los Angeles history.

27:53Between 20 and 25 Chinese, all men, Chinese and Chinese American men, laborers, were killed in 1871. And that episode, which killed 10% of the Chinese population of Los Angeles at that time, had never been properly marked in the public sphere. So we worked with leaders in the Chinese, Chinese American community and diaspora in Southern California to produce a process for memorial that I'm happy to say has been supported by the Mellon Foundation as now moving forward.

28:24Now, you're the only chief design officer I've ever met. You know, there are not that many of them, as you said earlier. Last fall, Donald Trump appointed Joe Gebbia to be chief design officer of America. Did you ever get to talk with him or understand what he is supposed to be doing for us? I have not spoken with him. And the use of the title there is more connected to the way that the CDO job exists in the tech world. So often you'll hear of a tech company that has a chief design

28:59officer. And often in those cases, they're working on web design, on digital interfaces between the public and a company. So I think he is concentrating on that aspect of the job, redesigning the websites and other design interfaces that the federal government produces. To answer your question, no, I've not had any contact or conversations with him. Because I really haven't heard much from him in the news since he was appointed. So I was wondering.

29:29When they introduced a new food pyramid, you may recall, connected to some of the work that Bobby Kennedy is doing as part of the so-called Maha effort, New America Healthy again. I put all of those words in quotes. They introduced a new design for the food pyramid. So not only did they put new foods in it, they also redesigned the sort of visual presentation of that. And I think Joe was involved in that effort.

Hotel Marcel and Apple Park

29:56Now you are in New Haven, Connecticut. I assume that you've been to the Hotel Marcel and visited that building? I have. In fact, I gave a talk there not long ago to the Connecticut branch of the AIA. And I'm very happy that that building designed by Marcel Breuer was saved and has been salvaged and turned into a hotel. It's a hotel, though, that overlooks an Ikea parking lot largely. That's no fault of the folks who oversaw that renovation saved the building. And I've had a chance to stay there a couple of times.

30:29It's remarkable. Anyone who knows the 95 corridor running north-south will know the view of that building, which was originally the Armstrong Tire, then Pirelli Tire Headquarters, and is now the Hotel Marcel, with the skyline of New Haven and the buildings of Yale behind it, all of which you can see on a clear day from 95. Big shout out to Bruce Becker, who's the architect and developer who put that whole hotel project together? Because when he found it, the building was basically a billboard for Ikea. They had a big

31:03banner hanging off the side of it. It's an amazing design that, like a tire, it's sort of a loose abstraction of a tire with a hole in the center. Let's say not a tire that would roll especially well. But it does have a big hole in the middle, which opens up some of the views that I was just talking about. And even though after Ikea bought it, some of the backside of the building was truncated, you still have a very clear sense of what Breuer was hoping to do with the building. Yes, so absolutely. Shout out to Bruce for that rescue and preservation effort.

31:37Now, most recently, you wrote about a building in California. I believe this building cost something like $500 million by Norman Foster. This is the new Apple headquarters. And you pointed out in your article, which I didn't know, that they've never let the media in there. That seems strange. Never let an architecture critic in. This is a piece that I wrote for a newsletter that I launched last year covering contemporary architecture called Punch List. I wrote about Apple because last week was

32:12the 50th anniversary of Apple. We're recording this in April. Apple was founded on April 1st, 1976. And as I wrote in the piece, if you grew up in the Bay Area of the 70s and 80s, as I did, there was a real cachet, sort of cool factor connected to Apple. And that continued through one of Steve Jobs' final consequential decisions for Apple to hire Norman Foster to build a new headquarters in Cupertino. When the building was finished, we, of course, as architecture critics, had all been following it

32:43very closely and looked forward to writing about it. And in fact, we were a group of us in conversation with Apple's PR staff in the run-up to the opening of the building in 2017. This is almost a decade ago now. And as I pointed out in the piece that I wrote last week, there's often some negotiation about access to a building like that. And this is especially true in Silicon Valley. I wrote about the new Facebook headquarters, which was designed by Frank Gehry and Gehry Partners. I went through

33:14weeks of back and forth negotiating with Facebook about when and how I'd be able to visit and when I'd be able to publish a piece. And this is not so unusual even outside of Silicon Valley. A prominent new museum is opening. You know, the museum is making decisions about which architecture critics and which publications it wants to give access to first and so on. But in every other case, I have been able to get access to a building. I should add that Olympics, FIFA, you know, World Cup buildings, these also can be very complicated, at least from a bureaucratic point of view in terms of securing

33:45access. I've never had the experience that I had with Apple, which is that ultimately they just never gave any of us access. They opened the doors to one handpicked Wired magazine journalist, a very well-regarded, experienced writer named Stephen Levy, who was very much a known quantity to Apple. But they strung the critics along for weeks and then never opened the doors to us. I always sort of fantasized and I got some nice notes back after my piece came out about doing a sort of guerrilla, you know, sort of gonzo journalism review, figuring out a way to sneak in,

34:19making an appointment with somebody. I have a few friends and have had friends over the years who work at Apple, getting myself into the building and writing sort of a guerrilla review. Instead, I did what we call in journalism a write-around and I was inspired by a piece that's famous, at least in journalism circles, that Gay Talese wrote for Esquire called Frank Sinatra Has a Cold in 1966, which he wrote because he was assigned by Esquire to write a profile of Frank Sinatra, who's about to turn 50, maybe was the most famous man in America at that point or close to it.

34:51And Sinatra declined to be interviewed and Talese had to execute what we now call the write-around, talking to as many people in Sinatra's orbit as he could. So I wrote sort of an equivalent, a write-around of what's called Apple Park. And memo to Apple, I will still happily come at any point and write about it if an invitation is going to be forthcoming. But, you know, I'm not holding my breath. And 20 years later about Sinatra, Kitty Kelly famously wrote a biography

35:22without Sinatra's participation at all. In fact, I think he sued her over that book at one point. I remember that. That was the beginning of the unauthorized biography era. That's right. The Gay Talese profile, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, great title. You can find easily online. I recommend it. It's a beautifully written piece. And it was really Sinatra, you know, he was leery of the press. He was particularly wary of questions about his, you know, purported mob ties at that moment in the middle 60s. That was one of the reasons that he declined to participate. He

35:57probably also thought, as many celebrities do, you know, he had about as much fame by that point as he needed or maybe wanted. It's interesting about the mob and entertainment. Before he passed away, I listened to Gilbert Gottfried's podcast for years. And besides being a comedian, he was also quite the student and scholar of old Hollywood. And he would have people on the show who would talk about what it was like to work gigs in the 40s and 50s and early 60s. Because basically,

36:31the mob owned all the venues. So you were going to work for the mob if you wanted to work. Right. That was just the basic bottom line, particularly in places like California and New York and Florida, which were the major markets. Yeah. And Las Vegas. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Before all that. So it's a great piece. Gay Talese, he even interviewed the woman who carried Frank Sinatra's toupees and mentioned that in the piece. And also got Frank Sinatra's mom on the record, which I'm sure wasn't easy. So it's a great piece of writing. Part of the movement that's

37:08known as the new journalism, which was emerging in those days. Well, I hope that Apple gives you a call and invites you over for a long awaited visit. Let's hope so. I've tried with Norman Foster's office too. And they were at least very generous in sharing photographs of the project, which I used to accompany my run around of Apple Park last week. Just as an aside of purient curiosity, in a $500 million building, what does somebody like Norman Foster get to charge? Is it 10% like

37:41normal? Does he make $50 million off of designing a building like that? Do you have any sense of that? I've been thinking about the same in connection to an even pricier building, which is Peter Zumptor's LACMA wing, officially the David Geffen galleries. That building has a price tag of $720 million, which actually may be underselling it. I think all told, if you include all everything they spent on demolishing the old campus and building the new one, it may be closer to a billion dollars. My guess is that when you're at that level, I'm just speculating here, there's

38:14probably a cap in the fees that's below what a typical percentage that an architect would negotiate on a single family house, let's say it would be. So my guess would be it's going to be a flat fee capped at a certain number rather than a percentage. But that would be a good question for me to ask Lord Norman or Peter Zumptor the next time I see them. Christopher, thank you so much for talking with me. It's been such a pleasure. And I hope that we'll get to meet in person at some point. Thank you, George. I really enjoyed it. This has been terrifically fun. Thanks so much.

Chris Freeland and the Internet Archive

38:47George was speaking with Christopher Hawthorne. Chris Freeland has spent his career making sure knowledge doesn't stay locked away. He built the world's largest botanical database at the Missouri Botanical Garden. He then founded the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which now offers free access to 64 million pages of natural history literature worldwide. Today, Chris leads library services at the Internet Archive, the world's backup of the entire Internet. Yes, it's the backup to be all

39:21backups. Here's our conversation with Chris Freeland. Chris, you worked for a long time at the Missouri Botanical Garden, which is famous, among other things, for a dome. Tell us about that. So the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden was designed by Buckminster Fuller. It's his geodesic dome. And it was this idea of, can we create an ecosphere, a self-contained tropical rainforest

39:52here in St. Louis. And it's a centerpiece of the architecture at the garden, certainly one of the central buildings that people, you know, take pictures in front of and inside. And it really is an identifiable part of the landscape, not only at the Botanical Garden, but for St. Louis as a whole. And this building has been around a long time. It opened, I think, in 1960. Yeah, it's been around for a while. And I'll tell you, so I used to work on the ground at the Botanical Garden. When I was finishing up grad school, I did an internship in horticulture at

40:27the Botanical Garden. And for like one summer, I worked in all the different areas of the Botanical Garden. And the Climatron was a really interesting place to work because it's tropical rainforest or planted as such. And you can imagine St. Louis in the summer is very, very hot. Yes. The Climatron, the temperature was quite even. And so though it was incredibly hot and horrible outside, like you could walk into the Climatron, you could walk into this geodesic dome that sort of escaped the environment outside. It was kind of magical. So it was actually sort of refreshing to

41:01step in there away from the heat and humidity into something milder? Yeah, it's crazy to think that it's better working inside a tropical rainforest than outside in St. Louis in the summer, but it was true. Yep. I've been to St. Louis in the summer. It was sweltering. It is. It's miserable. Yeah. That's why we want to be in a rainforest. So let's say that somebody had an interest in domes and Buckminster Fuller, and that leads us to what you're doing now, working with the Internet Archive.

41:34How would they go about finding more information about these topics on the Internet Archive? Yeah. So the Internet Archive is a nonprofit research library. You can find us online at archive.org. We're freely available. There's no VIP line. You can come in and do searches and find out basically anything about your personal passions. And so we have a big search box right at the top of the homepage and you can put in your search inquiry. So Buckminster Fuller or Climatron or Geodesic Dome,

42:05and then return back all of the media that the Internet Archive has preserved and that our community has uploaded to preserve on archive.org that fit your search criteria. I'm a recovering biologist and a librarian. And so my research interest are a couple of librarians who were located in St. Louis. There's this one guy. His name is Frederick Morgan Crundin. And so I regularly go to archive.org and put in Frederick Morgan Crundin into that search to find out what new has been

42:36digitized that where he might turn up or if there are other materials that the community has uploaded about him and his life. So it's a very powerful search to search across media types. You can do one single search and get back text. You can get back videos. You can get back images, sound recordings, all the media that we might have at the Internet Archive related to whatever your search inquiry is. How much storage do you have there? So the Internet Archive has more than 210 unique petabytes of data. That's 210 million gigabytes of

43:11data. It's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. What's between giga and peta? There's... Terra? Terra. Terabytes and then what? Yep. Terabytes and then petabytes. Then petabytes. Okay. Yeah. And you don't want to pet them because they might bite. That's right. I just thought of that joke. That's right. It's a good one. And the stats on this thing are incredible. I'm on the homepage right now. And it is referencing that you have over a trillion webpages, 50 million texts, 15 million videos,

43:4313 million audio, 3.4 million TV shows, 1.3 million copies of different software, 5.4 million images, 288,000 concerts, all of this in 3.3 million collections. It's just staggering. It's a lot. You know, it's more than you could listen to in a day. That's for sure. So, my first question I want to ask you, Chris, is, okay, you've got this and it's incredible and

44:14unbelievably useful. So, how do you guys back up this thing? Does the backup have a backup? It does. Yeah. So, there are spinning disks in San Francisco. The Internet Archive is headquartered in San Francisco and there are other data repositories in the Bay Area and elsewhere around the world. So, the data are backed up online and are preserved in a couple of different ways in a couple of different places. Okay. Well, that's good because I would hate for it to be all lost because somebody forgot to do that. No risk of data loss because we forgot to, like, pay the light

44:50bills or something. Yeah. What kind of space does it take to do 200-some petabytes of hard drives? In physical space? Yeah. Yeah. So, the Internet Archive is an interesting place. So, the headquarters is in an old Christian scientist church in San Francisco and the assembly room, like, with the altar, the congregation room, at the back of that room, in the alcoves, there are servers. And in other parts of the building, there are servers. And then in buildings

45:21across the Bay, there are servers. So, there's just a very large physical infrastructure to keep all of the digital infrastructure running. Okay. Now, you're not worried about an earthquake or anything like that? Always. Yes. We say this jokingly and then seriously. Yes, of course, you know, being located in a place like San Francisco is a concern. And so, that's part of the reason for having relationships with other libraries that can also help us preserve the data at global scale and other places around the United States where the data is stored as well.

45:55So, it really is a distributed network. It is. There's a number of organizations that are working together to help protect this large digital repository. So, you don't have to have all the hard drives in one building. It's spread around. Correct. It is decentralized. Okay. It is distributed. Because I was wondering, you know, since they're building these giant data centers now for different purposes and filling them with hard drives and graphics cards by the, you know, millions. And then you guys are backing up all of

46:27this, right? We are. And we are also running our own infrastructure. And that's an important point for the, to consider for the Internet Archive. When you're going to archive.org and you're looking at, you know, a text or you're looking at something, a preserved webpage in the Wayback Machine, that infrastructure is not like a cloud service. We're not running on Amazon. We're not running somewhere else. The Internet Archive runs its own infrastructure. We have our network engineers, our infrastructure engineers, our DevOps, our ops people are managing our own physical infrastructure.

47:00We can like go and look at the lights blinking in servers that we maintain. Well, that's good because, you know, Amazon's cloud service has been known to go down. A lot. From time to time. Yeah. Yeah. The cloud is just someone else's server. It's part of the ethos of the organization. The

The Wayback Machine and AI scraping

47:19Internet Archive, you know, was started by Brewster Kale in 1996. He was a dreamer, a creator, a builder. And, you know, he moved to San Francisco in the, I think it was 69 or 1970 because he wanted to dance in the streets. That's what everybody, you know, who was in their twenties were like drawn to San Francisco for the culture. And it's, it is definitely in the DNA of the, of the organization. It is a weird, wacky place in the best possible way. Basically like the old web, the spirit of the

47:491990s and the 1990s era web is very much alive at the Internet Archive. Like Craigslist. Yes. Yes. We love Craigslist. That's amazing. It worked, right? It was still does. Don't need to improve on it because it works. And I think actually a serious point, what you're hearing from people today, I don't know if you've read Corey Doctorow's latest book, you know, Corey Doctorow is a genre writer, science fiction writer, and also dips into a lot of technology and policy. And his latest book is called In-s***-ification. And it was about the web that

48:24we haven't inherited is not the web that we set out that we built. It has been taken over by corporate control and people who try to monetize and monitor our every action online. But if you think back to the early web, if you think back to that, like mid to late nineties era of the web and its development, it was a free and open place where you could do information exchange. You could meet interesting people online and you didn't have all of this crap around you of ads popping up and sweeping over and popping into your face as you're trying to

48:59just do something simple, like read an article. Yeah, right. I want to go back to that. Now, speaking of the kind of Wild West, what has emerged over the last, I guess, five or six years are these things called rogue libraries, like Anna's Archive. So how does that relate to the Internet Archive? So the Internet Archive is a library. And so we've been designated as a federal depository library last year. So our collections are based on a couple of different

49:30things. It's either content that we, the Internet Archive own. So like physical books that have been acquired and digitized or that have been contributed by the community. And part of the community guidelines are, if you don't have the right to reproduce this thing or to, or to share it, don't. And that's very clear right there in our, in the upload documentation. So you don't want to have having lawyers going after you over copyright violations. No, we've been there, done that. We've been through that ringer a couple of different times. And I can

50:02tell you from my own direct experience, that's not fun. I'll bet. And Anna's Archive is different how? I can't speak to Anna's Archive. I don't know anything about the way that it's organized or the way that it's run. There are what are known as like shadow libraries is another rogue library, shadow libraries. These are collections of book-like materials that have been organized outside of a library and are often, you know, made for redistribution. Okay. Now, the most famous feature, I guess, of the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine.

50:35What is that useful for? So the Wayback Machine is our index of the web dating back to 1996. So the Internet Archive was founded by Brewster Kahle. And what Brewster and his engineers saw was that the early web was vanishing before our very eyes that, you know, in that, that mid nineties era, no one was thinking, oh my gosh, we need to start saving this. No one thought anything much about the web at that time, other than it was an interesting experiment, you know, and it was certainly something that was happening in the military space and also in the academic and research space. But Brewster and his

51:11engineer said, you know, we should try to save this stuff before it, before it vanishes. And so they, they wrote some scripts to record the web, to, to cache the webpage and to preserve it. And so the Wayback Machine has been doing that, running out across the web, grabbing, caching web pages, and now more than 1 trillion web pages have been preserved by the Internet Archive and are available for users to access via the Wayback Machine. So you can see what a website looked like 20,

51:4125 years ago, in which case often a lot less impressive, but you know, HTML in the early days. Yeah. So it's interesting, you know, it's a time machine. The Wayback Machine is a, is a time machine for the web. And so you can step into that and travel back to 1996. If you were interested in what the CNN website looked like in the late nineties versus in 2026, and it's a nostalgia machine, you know, it can take us back to our memories of that time. And it, we can look at

52:13like with the Craigslist example, like the Craigslist homepage probably hasn't changed a whole lot in terms of its design or layout in the past 30 years. And I think that's kind of awesome. Whether you think that that is good design or not, at least you have a tool like the Wayback Machine, where you can make that analysis, where you can go and look at the, what's it look like now? What did it look like then? There's also some fun things like Space Jam, the, the Michael Jordan movie with Warner Brothers, like many tunes, cartoons, that website never changed. So there was a Space Jam too, but like

52:46the original website was kind of untouched, legendarily untouched. So you can still go to the Wayback Machine and see that, that original Space Jam preserved website, which I think is pretty cool. Now in the news recently, there's been a lot of stories about publishers who are trying to fight AI incursions onto their site. And the internet archives been caught in some of that crossfire. What's happening there? Yeah, we are collateral damage in the AI wars. So there are

53:19publishers, this has come out in a couple of different news articles, that publishers like the New York Times, the Guardian, even media organizations like Reddit are blocking the Wayback machine so that we can't index the content. And there are also efforts afoot to block access to the content that has already been recorded over this period of time from individual publishers and rights holders. Now the internet archive goes along with the wishes of the rights holders. And so if

53:49someone reaches out, an organization reaches out to us or an individual reaches out and says, I don't want my website in there for whatever reason, we will go with their wishes and no longer make that content available. But we've really tried, especially with media organizations, we try to talk with them and say, like, think about this. Are you sure that you want to remove your content from the record? We've heard, and it has been printed in these articles, that the reasons for the publishers withdrawing from the Wayback machine is that they're worried about the Wayback machine being a backdoor

54:22to AI scraping. But that is completely unfounded. No one has been able to produce evidence that suggests that the AI companies are in fact coming to the Wayback machine. And it's ludicrous to think about that, because there's a couple of reasons why. One, I just told you about the infrastructure that we maintain. To get at any content at the internet archive in mass would be like drinking through a straw. It is so hard to get at a volume of information and the kind of volume that AI companies need.

54:54And in fact, that's why they went and built their own web scraping bots. So we, the internet archive and the Wayback machine are not the threat. It's the AI companies directly, not indirectly. And again, it is completely unfounded that the Wayback machine is a backdoor to AI scraping. We just don't believe it. It sounds like you guys are better designed to serve up a little taste of what was out there as opposed to a giant bucket full. That's right. The Wayback machine has always been like a skinny

55:25subset. You can think about like the bots of the internet archive of the Wayback machine sort of skipping along the surface of the web. And in some cases going down, but it's not the deep dive. And it's certainly not, we're not capturing the whole pond. We're not capturing everything. And I think what's also very helpful is that, you know, for the most part, particularly for the older stuff in the nineties and the two thousands, a surprising number of the links are still intact in the backup. Whereas if you were trying to find it today, the site would be gone,

55:59all the links would have rotted or something like that. So when we're doing architectural research on a site that existed in 2003, in fact, we did this recently. We were reassembled 13 years of a publication because it was on the internet archive. That's an amazing story. I love hearing that. What you can imagine with what the publishers are doing today. It's possible that we will have a better record of what the web was like in the nineties and

56:31the two thousands than in 2030. If we keep going in this direction with the publishers and think about this too, George, I know from your own work and I know from my own work in doing historical research, when you're looking at an article, in some cases, not only are you looking at the article itself, the information within it, but you're also looking at the context around it. Like it can be important to know what was the illustration that was published alongside the article, or what was the ad that was on the page before, or the ad that was in the middle as you were turning the pages.

57:07Now take that to the web. The Wayback Machine preserves all of the elements on the page, not just the text of the page, but also all of the graphics and all of the ads and all of the other materials around. So it's not just the information that we have in the Wayback Machine. We have that information in context. And that's incredibly important when you're trying to think of like, how does the web look? How did the web look in 1999 versus in 2026? You need all of that stuff around the page to really understand it in context. And that's what I'm afraid is going to be

57:40missing if the publishers keep going in this direction. What's really useful for us and for others is to go into something like an architecture magazine and see a photo of a house from 1954. But you also get to see, you know, what ovens were popular, what roofing materials, what doorknobs, what windows. You can see the ads. You can see the ads. You can see other houses like that and what they were getting built out of. And this is valuable because if you're renovating the house in 2026 and you're trying to find,

58:17do those companies even exist anymore? Or who bought them? Or where can I find them used? Or any of that, you can use this as a starting point. As a researcher, are you seeking out information or are you seeking out information plus context, which is culture, right? And so you're just describing, you're looking at culture. You're looking at everything that's around the page. It's the way that a person reading this book would have interacted with it in the 1950s. I think we need that same kind of preservation for the web today. Does AI have access to the Internet Archive? Like if I'm working on something with Claude,

58:54can it consult the Internet Archive to give me an answer? So the Internet Archive has a number of public data sets that we have specifically told AI companies like come index this stuff. There's lots of data at the Internet Archive that is completely in the public domain. Lots of government information, government reports, even then materials that have been published and are now have fallen into the public domain because of the march of time. And so we have made sure that those public data are as

59:25available as possible because they are public and they have no restrictions for being indexed and reproduced. They should be. We want these tools that we are love them or hate them. We're increasingly relying on them for lots of different little things. We want to make sure that they have as good information as possible. And so we've talked about it quite publicly on our blog of like, hey, AI companies, don't take us down, like index the content, but don't overwhelm us.

59:55That's actually an issue that you can read about in the library community around cultural heritage that when we have open data, sometimes the AI companies can be either. I don't think that they're intentionally bad actors. I think that they just overwhelm some of the smaller sites to index the content that, you know, that they have access to. So how would that look? I mean, if an AI site is indexing another site, that's just like one user coming through, isn't it? Or is it different?

1:00:26They can fire off a whole bunch of bots that are all working at the same time. We can get what looks like a DDoS attack, a distributed denial of service attack. Yeah. Yeah. From one company who's trying to just, you know, cover up the public data. So it's not just one user. It's all of these bots imitating users. Yeah. It's not just like me looking up something. Correct. It's like me and a thousand more me's. Exactly. It's a thousand you's all firing at the same millisecond.

1:00:58That's exhausting. It is, but that's what we do. Like that's the work that libraries, especially libraries with a large digital component are facing these days. This is what it takes to be a digital library in the age of AI. One of the things that the Internet Archive is great at is preserving things that probably wouldn't get preserved anywhere else. You have done extensive work with old TV shows, radio programs, music, albums that are long gone. I mean, it is a incredible repository of all that

1:01:34kind of thing you can go in and find. And not just the content, but also the data about it, the metadata about it. We like to help people find what's been missing. You know, it never fails to amaze me as a librarian and as a researcher. When I go and do my special queries for my research topics, new stuff just keeps showing up. It's because two things are happening at the same time. The Internet Archive has

Recovering historical library materials

1:02:00relationships with libraries where we're scanning their collections in collaboration with them. We're also scanning materials that have been donated to the Internet Archive that libraries no longer need in their physical collections, like lots of microfilm and microform. Those have been donated to the Internet Archive for digitization. At the same time, then, that individuals, people who do their own passion projects, are also uploading their own materials. So, for example, I mentioned Frederick Morgan Crundin is a librarian that I like to study. I went and gathered up his archives in all of the different libraries in the

1:02:35St. Louis area, and I contributed those. I added those to the Internet Archive so that they didn't just live in my research notes. They are now online. I uncovered them from the archive where they were. They might not ever have been digitized if I'd waited for that library, because I'm sure there would never be a priority for digitization from the institution, but they're a priority for me, because I was writing a research paper. So, I've taken that stuff that I found in the archive that I took photos of in the moment, that I took notes of in the moment, and I've uploaded those to

1:03:09archive.org so that the next person who's interested in Frederick Morgan Crundin doesn't have to go through all that same physical research that I did. Well, Chris, thank you and Brewster and all the staff of the Internet Archive for this unbelievable contribution to humanity that you're making. Thank you very much. Please use us. That's what we're here for. You know, we are a library. We love it when people come through the virtual doors, and we love to see people find the information that they're looking for. And what's that URL one more time? That's archive.org.

Jonathan Granoff on Stanislav Petrov

1:03:40That was our conversation with Chris Freeland. Jonathan Granoff's mom was Kitty Callen, the swing-era singer whose 1954 hit song, Little Things Mean a Lot, sat at number one for nine street weeks and sold over two million copies. Now, Jonathan Granoff is a lawyer as well as a nuclear disarmament advocate who now leads the Global Security Institute and was even nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But today, it's all about his mom. Here's Jonathan Granoff's conversation

1:04:14with George Smart. Jonathan, before we start talking about music and jazz and your mom, tell me about Stanislav Petrov and why he was important. Well, Stanislav Petrov saved the world. That would make anybody important. Many people believe Jesus saved the world. Maybe. I tend to think he provided a path to salvation. Yeah. But Stanislav Petrov was a broken vessel.

1:04:44He was a colonel in the Soviet military. In 1983, September, shortly after the Korean airliner was shot down, the tensions of the Cold War were at their peak. He was monitoring the computers that were monitoring the United States nuclear arsenal. The computers all showed first 200 nuclear missiles from the United States on their way to Moscow. And then 2000. It looked like a full-scale

1:05:15launch of our arsenal. And he had a few minutes to decide what to do before they landed, according to the computers, according to the monitors. But he didn't pass this information up the command and control. Because he knew that the nature of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union would have occasioned 11,000 nuclear warheads landing on North America, obliterating humanity, throwing tons of radioactive soot into the stratosphere, and basically killing the human race. He didn't do it. He saved the

1:05:51world. I interviewed him for a documentary that was being made by Norwegians. And I said, Colonel Petrov, what gave you the courage and humility to save the world? I was a computer engineer. I knew computers make mistakes. And God told me he didn't want the world to end. My superiors, and I'll drop the accent, didn't know whether to reward me for saving the world, or punish me for violating my protocols.

1:06:24But what bothered them more than anything was that I believed in God. So this one man, by violating his protocols, saved all of us. It was a unique cloud formation that the computers were not programmed to discern that when the sun hit these clouds, it sparkled and looked like, it looked like nuclear missiles. Wow. We had a similar situation with the United States. We had a computer chip in one of our satellites that wasn't programmed to discern a sunrise from a Soviet launch. And if it wasn't for

1:07:01an officer intervening with the human element, an officer intervening with the human element and calling the radar facilities in Alaska and Greenland, are you seeing anything? No, we're not seeing anything. The computer chip was just a simple human technical error. And so we sit at the verge of annihilation and it's the goodwill and conscience of individuals intervening. And that's why I'm running around saying, don't put artificial intelligence in these systems. Oh my God. Yeah. Because they speed

1:07:34things up and they privilege people who think too fast, who are too arrogant and trust machines too much. So my motto in all of these events is love people, use things. Don't love and trust things and use people. I like that. I like that a lot. I got that from my mom. Let's talk about your mom,

Kitty Callen and the big band era

1:07:56Kitty Callen. She lived to be what, 95, I think? 94. 94. Her career was just incredible. She was with so many important big bands from the 30s to what, the 50s? She was in the big bands when the big bands were cooking in the 40s. And then she had a solo career as a singular woman performer without the band. But yeah, she began her career when she was 12 in a talent show in Philadelphia. And she had her

1:08:28own radio show at 12. Wow. Horn and Hard Art Children's Hour. And when she was 16, she bought a car, drove across America because there was a band that she heard that just blew her away. It was Jack Teagarden's band. And anybody who knows that period, he had a band that just took it to another level. They really rocked. She was very slight, very short, very small, very cute, even looked younger than her age. Just think of how bold that was. She drives across the country, shows up at this band's

1:09:02rehearsal and says to Jack Teagarden, I'm going to be your lead singer. That's book. Yeah. Oh yeah. Right. He gives her an audition and goes, you got it. So she began with Jack Teagarden and loved the man. The man gave her deep confidence in her gift. She had perfect pitch and she owned the songs that she sang. She knew the secret of communication, which is to be in the meaning that you're conveying so that it resonates in the listener. And she went from that to Jimmy Dorsey and then Tommy Dorsey

1:09:37and then the Harry James band. And she's most remembered for songs in that period, like Besame Mucho or Kiss Me Once, Kiss Me Twice, Kiss Me Once Again. It's been a long, long time. And the guys are coming home from the war. And you see that iconic kiss in Times Square of the soldier, right? And whenever you see that, you hear my mother singing. So I grew up around celebrities,

1:10:10but these were the people that were normal people. It didn't mean anything to me, really. I recently found a memo that my dad made me write when I was 12. He had put together a campaign rally in Teaneck, New Jersey. And I write, I don't want to do this. I'd rather play Little League Baseball. I'm on the Little League Baseball all-star team. We have a practice today. My dad's making me do this. He's making me say who I sat next to in between Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. Wow. I wanted to play

1:10:42baseball. I didn't understand that. So my dad was in the epicenter of the mid-century culture. When he got out of the army, he got a job in a public relations firm. And he found a small operation. George Evans was the guy, was his mentor. And George gave him the client of the Copacabana. Oh, the famous club. The club. His job was to make it happening. And then he got Sinatra, who wasn't that big then,

1:11:14to make him a big star. And then he went down to Atlantic City and he saw these two guys, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis. He said, you guys have the stuff. So he was in the epicenter of that culture, of the Rat Pack culture, of the Copa was the place that was happening. And my mother came there to perform. She'd left the big bands and struck out on her own. My dad also had Doris Day as a client too. And Jimmy Durante, he had the touch. So my mother was performing. And I'm told by

1:11:45other people that my dad turned to people and said, I'm going to marry that woman. Little did he know that my mom was a diva, the real deal. And her deal was, you marry me, I'm your only client. And so they got married. And in 1954, she had a song, the meaning of which resonates to this day. Don't have to buy me diamonds and pearls, champagne, rubies and such,

1:12:16because honestly, honey, they just cost money. Give me your shoulder to lean on and give me your heart. Little things mean a lot. Well, let's hear that song now. Here's Kitty with Little Things Mean A Lot. Blow me a kiss from across the room. Say I look nice when I'm not. Touch my hair as you pass my chair. Little things mean a lot. Give me your arm as we cross the street. Call me at six

1:13:01a kiss on the dot. A line a day when you're far away. Little things mean a lot. Don't have to buy me diamonds and pearls, champagne, sables, or such. I never cared much for diamonds and pearls. Cause honestly, honey, they just cost money. Give me your hand when I've

1:13:43lost the way. Give me your shoulder to cry on. Whether the day is bright or gray, give me your heart to rely on. Send me the warmth of a secret smile to show me you haven't forgot. For

1:14:14always and ever. For always and ever. Now and forever. Little things mean a lot. Give me your heart when I've lost the way. Give me your shoulder to cry on. Whether the day is bright or gray, give me your heart when I've lost the way. Give me your heart to rely on. Send me the warmth of a

1:14:53secret smile to show me you haven't forgot. That always and ever. Now and forever. Little things mean a lot. Jonathan, tell our listeners why you know about Stanislaus

1:15:27Stanislaw Petrov, what you do now for the world. Cause you're doing a lot of fascinating things with public policy and the idea of trust between nations and so many interesting topics.

Nuclear disarmament and musical legacy

1:15:42Well, from my parents, I realized that individuals make society. That's a big deal when you see backstage how culture is created. And politics is just another aspect of the culture, but that deals with the space between us and how we get along or how we end up fighting each other. So when I became a lawyer, I got involved with a bunch of other young lawyers and we formed a group called lawyers Alliance for world security. And we wrote some briefs. And then all of a sudden, all of these big

1:16:15shots in Washington saw the quality of our work and joined. So we had Robert McNamara, Senator Alan Cranston, William Colby, former head of the CIA. At the height of the cold war, we brought lawyers from the then Soviet union to the United States to see jury trials where citizens administered justice. We took them to bankruptcy court. They couldn't imagine that in our system, that the rapaciousness of banks was tempered by the protection of our court system and let people get free of their debts.

1:16:49Or the idea that US attorney, this is no longer the case in the Trump administration. But until now, our US attorneys were beyond the political fray. They would prosecute without political allegiance. So if you were put in office by a Republican, you'd prosecute Republicans or Democrats the same way. That amazed them. What really amazed them was a judge, Norma Shapiro in Philadelphia, holding the city in contempt of court for overcrowding of prisons. And they couldn't get over

1:17:20the idea that a judge could hold the state to the rule of law. That was amazing to them, because where they were from, the state rules through law. And so Senator Alan Cranston was involved in it. And then he started an initiative with Mikhail Gorbachev called the State of the World Forum. And I was invited to participate in that, really to talk about spirituality and values and law. And he invited me to a lunch. And in the lunch was George Bunn, who was the main drafter of the

1:17:52Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which has saved the world from a cascade of proliferation. Richard Butler, who was head of the UN Special Commission disarming Saddam Hussein and was successful. That's why there were no weapons there when we invaded. Mikhail Gorbachev, Senator Cranston and myself. And when I sat down at that meeting, I just felt like this is where I can find real service and fulfillment in my life. And at that meeting, we decided it would be good to have a professional

1:18:24advocacy group on nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. And I think that we were helpful in advancing that cause because the lawyers that participated from the Soviet Union became the advocates of glasnost and perestroika. And we were largely the backbone to support Ronald Reagan's efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, which successfully has reduced the arsenals by 80%. Now, with the current administration, we're reversing course, of course. And all of those things are

1:18:57going a different direction. But that's an achievement. So I've stayed on that message. And when Senator Cranston passed away, I was asked by the board to give up my law practice and become a full-time advocate to stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and work to fulfill the legal obligation to get rid of them. Well, I can't think of a more noble job description than that. I mean, you're like on Star Trek, really, going to get the Federation of Planets together, in a way.

1:19:32I have an article today in Newsweek. I'm bringing it over to the UN today. It says, war won't solve Iran's nuclear threat, but this could. And I give a set of proposals. And it's a Newsweek, one of the top articles on getting us out of this bad war that we've started. Well, if I was a public affairs program, I could talk to you all day. But let's get back to the music. This is a classic song from that era. I'm beginning to see the light.

1:20:08I'm beginning to see the light. Thanks so much. ¶¶

1:20:57¶¶

1:21:27I never cared much for moonlit skies I never went back at fireflies But now that the stars are in your eyes I'm beginning to see the light I never went in for afterglow Or candlelight on the mistletoe But now when you turn the lamp down low

1:22:00I'm beginning to see the light You scramble through the porch Shadow-bopping in the dark Then you came and caused a spark That's a four-long fire now I never made love by lantern shine I never saw rainbows in my wine

1:22:31But now that your lips are burning mine I'm beginning to see the light I never saw rainbows in my light The echo-bopping in the dark what a great title i love the titles of these songs you know i'm beginning to see the light

1:23:21and then she had another song our lady of fatima and so nuns from all over the world sent my mother rosary beads really yeah she had this huge box of rosary beads because she sang it with real devotion and then at the peak of her career in the 50s she was singing for the royal family in england and her father had just died and she was traumatized and she came out opened her mouth and nothing came out she just fell apart and didn't recover

1:23:56psychologically and physically until five years later and she had a third career with some pop music in the 1960s my coloring book right yeah of course so she had like three distinct careers and my mother like all celebrities who have this persona which in greek means mask and when your mask is public and your mask is commodified you don't really know whether people love the mask or

1:24:29love you and the mask becomes kind of a burden as you get older and you're no longer the center of attention the mask isn't the same yes but when my mother was in her 80s she still had so much charisma that we go to a restaurant and people would ask who is that lady but that was a burden because you know the mask has to come off when you get older and you start realizing your mortality yeah you got to get rid of it you got to go right to the soul as we get older if you think you're the

1:24:59mask you know you're going to lose it but that's it so my mother had to journey back to her core and she did it and the last thing she said to me she she looked at me and she said i love you thank you wow that's big she followed her heart she treated the hairdresser the same way she treated the president of the united states she really really loved making people happy you know that's why she

1:25:32is a star well this has been lovely jonathan thank you so much for taking time from your busy schedule saving our world to talk about your mom no no not saving the world serving saving is that's something we can do okay serving we can do god saves we serve very good thank you sir thank you george thanks for listening u.s modernist radio is underwritten by the brent r harris charitable trust restorer of richard noitris kaufman desert house in palm springs and six

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1:26:39carolina our theme song was performed by george smart and robinson earl with guest research by bobby morris got a guest to suggest for the show write her at bobby at usmodernist.org u.s modernist radio is a production of modernist archive incorporated a non-profit educational archive for the documentation preservation preservation and promotion of modernist residential design i'm tom guile george and i'll be back soon with another less is more edition of u.s modernist radio ети.org

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