100 Objects #14: Basketball Sleeve

on a random night with my son and wife.

We do this all the time.

“She's sitting there grading papers, my son is doing his homework and at some point during”

the game, my wife looks up at the TV and asks, "Why are so many of the players wearing that sleeve on their arm?" I told her that those are compression sleeves. They're like a medical thing, but then she's like, "So all of them have medical issues, like elbow issues and that simple question kind of stopped me in my tracks."

I started counting, and eight out of the ten players in the court have them on. At this point, I'm like neurotically counting, whoever stops in, whoever's sitting on their bench, how many of these players are wearing the sleeve, and everyone's got one on. What's going on with this?

There is no way they all have elbow issues. This is Romteen Aeroblui, he's a producer and reporter.

“You might know him from the MPR show, "Throughline."”

Is it a blood flow thing? Is it something about their shooting range? Turns out, the sleeve isn't there to do anything, really. It's just a look. The sleeve is fashion.

And this fashion is also pretty new. If you go back and watch an NBA game from the 1990s, the era I grew up watching them, you won't see anyone with these sleeves on. Not one player. It seems like it came out of nowhere, and now it's everywhere.

So I looked into it, and what I found was that the story of the sleeve is really the story of Alan Iverson, an underdog player who went from a prison cell to international fame in just a few years.

“Iverson had a huge impact on the sport, and sort of the same way Michael Jordan changed”

how the game has played, Iverson changed the culture around basketball. And through the story of him and his sleeve, you can see the whole history of basketball's relationship with race, with respectability politics, and who gets to look like what on the court. From 99% invisible and BBC studios, this is a history of the United States in a hundred

objects. And Roman Mars, today the basketball sleeve, from reporter Romteen Erablui. This past season was a huge one for the NBA, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a Nick's fan. When I was sitting there watching all these players rocking their compression sleeves,

so was everyone else. NBA viewership was at the highest it's been in decades, nationally televised games had celebrities sitting courtside, the whole thing looked glamorous and big and more expensive than ever.

But it wasn't always like this.

The 1970s were the era of tiny shorts, the high socks and afros, the fashion was iconic. But not that many people were watching, viewership numbers were really low, a lot of games weren't even shown live, they were taped and then aired later, sometimes after 1130 AM, fist fights broke out on the court regularly, something you rarely see today. The game was just extremely physical, and there was this feeling, this impression many

people had about the league, that the real problem with the NBA was that it was too black and not just meaning black and demographics, but that they didn't play the right way. This is Teresa Runsteadler, she's a former NBA cheerleader turned historian, and she wrote a book about this era of the NBA, called Blackball. They were playing streetball that they were using drugs that they were uncontrollable off the

court that they were lazy, that they weren't team players.

The NBA had been segregated until 1951, and the 1970s marked the first time the league

was majority black. The media often blamed the black players for the problems with the game, sometimes accusing them of rampant drug use. I did a quick search in one of the newspaper databases, typed in cocaine, an NBA, and was shocked at the number of articles that immediately came up in the search.

Now, there was a lot of drug use, especially cocaine in a bunch of professional sports in the 1970s, no doubt. But many of these stories published about NBA players were based on rumors in Inuendo.

Saying that 40 to 75% of basketball players in the NBA were using cocaine.

“But years later, many of those sources came out and said, "Listen, we were misquoted in”

that article. We didn't even say that." So that narrative was already everywhere. The NBA was seen as dangerous and unwholesome. And then, in 1977, something else happened.

This time, on the court, that would make things much worse. It was a regular seizing game between the LA Lakers and Houston Rockets.

It was in the third quarter.

A scuffle broke out between two players underneath the basket, and it continued on as other players tried to break it up. A Lakers player named Kermit Washington, who was involved in the initial altercation, was standing at half court when he saw somebody coming out of the corner of his eye. It was Rudy Tom Johnavich.

“Kermit saw Rudy Tom Johnavich, a rocket's player, and thought he was coming after him.”

And he just punched. The injured Rudy Tom Johnavich very badly. One punch, Washington hit Tom Johnavich directly in the face.

He fell to the ground, arriving in pain.

He was hospitalized and underwent several surgeries. He was left with permanent injuries and chronic pain. Kermit Washington's life would also change, because the story became national news. Out of this came a huge outcry, calling for his punishment. He became persona nongrata.

His whole life kind of went into a spiral after that point. Tom Johnavich is white and Washington is black. So this tragic incident just further cemented the idea being portrayed in the media

“that basketball was becoming the space where you had essentially big black men who were”

criminals, who were beating up white men on the court, and then that became the kind of narrative

that mainstream Americans had for the NBA at that time. The narrative that fit perfectly into the larger issues happening in the U.S. in the late 1970s. There was terror in a lot of neighborhoods last night. Police have described the looters as animals. As the United States really entered into the worst of what they call the urban crisis.

Like a swarm of locus is the way one Harlem cop described the looters. Disinvestment from black neighborhoods. The South Bronx 500 acres littered with devastated buildings and rubble. Increasing crime and white flight to the suburbs. The Jews, the Irish and the Italians began to move out.

The South Bronx became a ghetto with a very poor, poor mainly black and Puerto Rican. The NBA became a kind of microcosm of that larger social problem. The NBA was in the dumps. But the league's fortunes would quickly shift in 1980 to generational players. One white and one black entered the league and took it by storm.

Najig Johnson and Larry Bird. They both stood six foot nine, they were both incredibly skilled and fun to watch. And they were arch rivals. For the NBA, it was like a miracle from the basketball gods. So you have these two men of different races who are on different coasts who are badly

now. Let's start with Magic Johnson. He played for the Los Angeles Lakers. Who is this very effervescent personality? He has a huge smile and he's very charming.

He's show time, he represents Hollywood. But he's also got the vibe of a friendly neighbor. He's just very aboliant, you know, fun to watch. Then there's Larry Bird. He's from rural Indiana, but plays for the Boston Celtics.

Who kind of epitomizes the Midwest, the kind of white, houser history of basketball. He was lovingly called the Hick from French lick. He rarely smiled, he talked a lot of trash on the court, and he came across as working in class in serious, almost the complete opposite of Magic Johnson.

The rivalry was the perfect sports storyline in the racially in class stratified United

States and the NBA's new commissioner. David Stern, he saw this narrative as a path to reach his radical vision for the NBA. He begins to think about the NBA as a kind of multinational corporation. A corporation that needed a makeover, a new image to move away from the struggles of the 1970s.

He looked at the NBA as being more akin to Disney than the NFL. So the NBA made their focus, games that featured Magic, verse Bird.

“I think that one of the things that our sport does is it gives you our players unadorned.”

This is David Stern from an interview explaining his approach from marketing the NBA. "They're not wearing a lot, they've got no helmets, no long sleeve uniforms, and you can see the expressions on their faces, and that expression, I think, capsulizes their personality." He didn't want to just focus on the game itself. He wanted the players and their personalities to take center stage.

This seems obvious now, but it was kind of revolutionary at the time.

"And our fans understand that we've got 300 great players, but we've got 300 different personalities." David Stern's focus on individual personalities worked. By the early 1990s, the NBA had made huge strides in terms of audience and profits. Humans were being televised live with huge viewership.

“Team owners and players were making millions of dollars.”

Then, David Stern and the NBA got lucky again with the ascension of arguably the greatest player to ever lose. Michael Jordan won six championships in the 1990s. He became an absolute legend, and he did that partly by carefully crafting a public image that was inspiring and motivational.

He was seen simultaneously as mysterious and accessible, edgy, yet inviting, but maybe most importantly of all. "Completely devoid of any political content." Michael Jordan is kind of like this blank slate upon which anyone can project whatever their values are.

Jordan was a perfect canvas for advertisers.

“He could mold his image into whatever was needed for his own brand.”

It was reported that once Jordan told his teammates that he wouldn't endorse a democratic party politician in a Senate race, because Republicans buy sneakers too. He was also meticulous about how he looked. Jordan showed up to games and did post-game interviews in perfectly tailored designer suits.

He always looked like a professional, like a business man.

This is from a TV ad called Michael Jordan CEO. He literally changes from his bulls uniform into a suit in the ad and becomes a CEO. Of course, it was tongue-in-cheek, but it also reflects reality. Today, the Jordan brand is estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He was the perfect fit for what David Stern was trying to do with the MBA.

A clean cut carefully crafted superstar for a family-friendly corporate league. Whereas, you know, in the previous generation, you know, if we're thinking of style icons from the 70s, we're thinking of somebody like, you know, Walt Clyde Frazier. Walt Frazier was a star guard for the New York Nicks in the 1970s. He's a Hall of Famer and considered one of the greatest players of all time.

He's also a style icon. Somebody who was very much of that black New York culture with the fedoras, with the fur, with the excess. You know, he was sort of like this figure of black urban cool at that time. But by the time you get to Michael Jordan, it's kind of been neutered of all of that context.

Michael Jordan was portrayed and marketed as the kind of black man that didn't offend, who was acceptable to everyone, who was helping to sell the MBA to the world and cultivate a reputation that left the problems of the 1970s behind. And other players started to emulate Jordan. It's in ties became the unofficial dress code for players who wanted to be taken seriously.

But this perfect calibration of performance and respectability was about to get disrupted

A player who was so good, many people thought he could become the heir apparent to Michael

Jordan. A player they called, the answer.

“The first pick in the 1996 NBA draft, the Philadelphia 76th of Select, Alan Iverson from”

Georgetown University. But unlike Michael Jordan, Alan Iverson wasn't going to wear suit. Coming up, Alan Iverson remakes the NBA and leaves behind a sleeve. Alan Iverson looks to answer when she was 39, just one and a crowd rising to their feet. Alan Iverson arrived in the NBA with a huge splash.

He dominated right away, becoming an instant star in the face of his team, the Philadelphia

76ers. He won the rookie of the year award. He was or a personified. He just kept getting better each season and I loved watching him play as a kid.

“He was an amazing score who could do anything on the court.”

And he did it all at six feet tall, which was tiny in a league where most players were at least 6 inches taller, he was somebody who was incredibly quick on the court. He could do his, you know, crossover dribble and make people fall while they were guarding him. Now he's got stocked and he breaks his ankles and he got it.

But Alan Iverson's road to NBA start him wasn't straightforward at all. He was born in Hampton, Rhodes, Virginia in 1975, a poor, fairly segregated part of the state. Despite his small frame, he was one of the best football and basketball players in the state and high school.

He seemed to be on a clear path to being a professional athlete until. He was involved in this ruckus that was happening.

“I think it was at a bowling alley back in the early 90s.”

He was at a bowling alley where there was a huge fight in 1993. He was accused of hitting someone in the head with a chair and injuring them badly. He denied wrongdoing, but a Virginia court found him guilty of a felony charge and sentenced him to five years in prison. He was only 18 years old.

He was this huge basketball star, but his future was very uncertain at that point. You know, when all that was taken away from me, I just tried to be as strong as I could. This is Alan Iverson in 2001, recounting that dark period in his life.

And it was tough for me when I got locked up because people would never let it go away.

I was in a paper for a month or two straight, you know, it was on a TV every day. After four months in prison, Virginia's governor granted Averson clemency saying he had doubts about the facts of his case. He got a second chance. He was given a scholarship to play basketball at Georgetown University.

He became a star there and eventually was the first pick in the NBA draft. Yet the shadow of his jail sentence followed him into the league, but he didn't shrink away from it. The core of who he was didn't change and he wanted to represent the people that he knew that, you know, we're closest to him, so he was just very unapologetic in that way.

By 2000, Alan Iverson was a full-fledged NBA superstar. He got the nickname "The Answer" as in "The Answer" to anything in basketball. It was Alan Iverson. The 76ers have been struggling. Alan Iverson was the answer.

The future of the NBA without Michael Jordan was uncertain. Alan Iverson was the answer. He had a shudial. He was in commercials. His jerseys were constantly selling out.

And it wasn't just because of his play on the court.

His brash confident attitude, his authenticity, and the way he looked. While Michael Jordan wore suits.

“He came to the games, wearing a duregg, you know, he had the baggy jeans.”

He was wearing his tims, wearing his cornrows. This was at a time where almost no players in the NBA were doing that. Most folks were like Michael Jordan. They shaved their heads or they kept, you know, they might have high tops or whatever. But it wasn't like a thing to wear your hair in such a quote-unquote black style.

And then, there were the tattoos. Iverson's arms were covered in them. I mean, if you look back to the footage of Michael Jordan and others from the late '80s into the early '90s, maybe a few tattoos here and there, but not really on the level that Alan Iverson and his generation took it to.

And this had an impact on the broader culture. Iverson helped to normalize tattoos for everyone. Because it used to be only associated with people who went to prison or people who were in the military.

“Iverson wasn't trying to hide his past or to conform.”

He was saying, I'm proud of who I am, of where I come from. And this connected him with fans of all ages.

He always looked like he was intentionally saying to all of his young fans, "Hey, I'm

representing you." He just had a way about him where he, you know, had confidence in himself. This is Lenny Courier. He was the Philadelphia '76, which was trainer when Alan Iverson played there. He saw him almost every day.

And he got to understand how intentional Iverson was about his look. He was meticulous. The shirt was half way untucked. The pants might be droopy on his hips. He didn't look like he was meticulous, but let me tell you.

“He was Lenny says a friend of his who was a high school teacher at that time.”

Told him just how much of an impact Iverson was having on his students. It was amazing how the kids, how they were just so enamored with Alan and want to look like him. So they were the same kind of hairstyle, they were the boots, they were, you know, everything that Alan was wearing, the kids at school wanted to wear.

And people followed him and he and he knew that. When everybody started looking like I look, that's when I realized that I was a trend said it. This is Alan Iverson reflecting on his impact in an interview with slam magazine in 2013. When I started seeing guys where to do rag and hats and the jerseys getting the corn

rolls and then everybody flooded themselves with tattoos, stuff like that, you know, I said that and that's cool, you know what I mean like everybody is trying to look like themselves but look like you. On the court, Alan Iverson played like he had nothing to lose. It was completely fearless, I don't know that I've ever seen an athlete, it was more

fearless than Alan. But that fearlessness came with a price, a price often paid by his body. The way he played he invited the contact, he invited the, you know, the danger that came with, you know, trying to go up against seven footers, needless to say he spent a lot of time picking himself up off the floor and I had to go out and pick him up a few times

myself.

Lenny says Iverson always played through injuries, but during the 2000-2001 season, he started

suffering with pain in his right elbow, his shooting arm. He had something called bursitis. Well, bursitis, you know, your joints have what a call bursus acts, their fluid-filled sacs that provide lubrication for the joint. Some of the joints, those bursus acts are a little bit more prominent and easier to, you

know, damage if you will, especially the elbow. So every time Iverson fearlessly drove to the basket and got knocked down by some seven footer, he constantly had, you know, his elbow compromised, hitting the floor hard. repeatedly causing trauma to the tissue, and if you've ever had this injury, you know, it sucks.

It looks weird, it's just such an unusual swelling and it's so inflamed, it's like it hurts to touch it. The normal way to fix elbow bursitis is to just rest it, don't use it, it takes weeks, but eventually the swelling will resolve. But Alan Averson didn't have weeks.

He was in the middle of a high-stakes season, a pivot point.

After years of individual accolades, he was getting criticism for never bringing his team

He had tension with his old school coach. There were rumors that 76ers were considering trading him. Averson couldn't sit. He needed something that would allow him to play with his injury.

“I think he was just looking for relief and I was looking for a solution.”

Lenny needed an answer for the answer. In the entire season, an Iverson's reputation was resting on it, no pressure. So first Lenny thinks we could try elbow pads.

He never really wanted to wear padding.

Think like your old gym teacher who coached volleyball, big bulky pads, very uncle. He didn't really want to do that. And honestly, Lenny didn't have that many options. Padding was the standard move. Yeah, I guess it was a little bit of a challenge.

So then he tried something he'd never really considered putting on an elbow. Compression stuck in it. Yes, those things pregnant women or old folks put on to prevent blood clots. He thought theoretically it should help to compress and protect the elbow while not messing with range of motion.

It would allow Alan Averson to still be Alan Averson. I just introduced the idea of putting that compression stuck in on it one night and kind of sold him on it. So Lenny cut a custom size of the stockinette that would fit onto Averson's arm. It was all white, made of cotton, breathable, but it definitely looked homemade.

He liked the feel of it.

So on January 21st, 2001, Alan Averson played his first game wearing the janky white compression

stockinette on his arm. Here's Iverson against Mark Jackson, the double team comes, and he folds in and Alan Averson's first buck. Iverson came out on fire. And Lenny is watching this from the sidelines locked in on Iverson's elbow.

I was just thinking, I hope this works. Iverson off the screen, got her open up. He's in his first ring. Iverson hit his first few shots and then just kept making them. The great pointer, now what's ahead over the 40 point mark, he has 41 points.

If you like the way it felt, there was snug, and it didn't interrupt his shot.

“I think to the basket once again with 47 points, a big save in the end.”

It was just, you know, the right product for him at that time. The 76ers ended up losing that game in over time, but Iverson had one of the best games of his career scoring 51 points all while wearing a stockinette on his arm. You know, then he just began to wear it all the time, every night, and, you know, who would usually pull it off after a game and throw it into the crowd, you know, for some

adoring fan. Iverson averaged 31 points of game, leading the league and scoring after putting on the sleeve.

He won NBA MVP that season, and for the first time, took the 76ers all the way to the

NBA finals, even after his elbow beside his got better, he kept a sleeve on. And it became part of his iconic look. You know, it just clicked. I think he was just the right person to adorn that sleeve. I don't think we ever, you know, imagined it would become a fashion statement.

If you will, and a fashion item, but at the same time, a small upstart sports apparel company called Under Armour was trying to create a market for functional sports gear, basically clothing items to make every person feel like a serious athlete. And they did imagine the sleeve as a fashion item. The folks from Under Armour contacted us and said that they, you know, had a new product line

they wanted to know if Allen would try it. Although compressions leaves, they sent me a, you know, a number of different, you know,

“pieces, and I want to ask Allen, would you like to try these?”

And they built them really nicely. They were thick, so the sense of compression was still there. They also just looked sleek and cool, not like something Lenny had put together in the training room. That's what won him over.

From then on, I've ever seen wore the Under Armour sleeve in various colors that matched his jersey. It became, you know, a commercial product sold in all the sporting good stores and sold online, etc. Over the next few years, other NBA players started wearing the sleeve, even if they didn't

have elbow bercitis. Basically, everyone was trying to emulate Iverson's entire look. He transcended sports and reached the mainstream. He'd already brought hip-hop culture from the streets to the NBA. Now players were even wearing his medical gear.

Iverson was at the pinnacle of his power, both on the court and off. But that moment came at the same time that criticism of him was starting to pile up.

The NBA powers that they would embrace a certain kind of hip-hop aesthetic, but they didn't want any of the criminal associations being, you know, in your face at a game. Allen Iverson was the embodiment of that version of hip-hop aesthetic. And this is a guy who already had a criminal history. And soon Iverson's every move in word was suddenly a new story.

Here's an example. At an infamous press conference right before the 2002 season, he was asked about missing 76ers' practices. As we sitting here, I suppose to be the franchise player, and we're in here talking about practice.

I mean, listen, we're talking about practice.

This clip has basically become a meme, and I remember what a big deal it was at the

time.

“It makes Iverson seem spoiled and entitled, why won't he just show up to practice?”

But if you have the context, it makes more sense. As the season after he won the MVP, and he's the best player in the league. And now leading up to the next season, he's frustrated because he's being asked questions about practice, not about his performance. I know I suppose to be the, I know I suppose to be by example, I know that I'm not shoving

it aside, you know, like it don't mean anything, but we're talking about practice, man. What are we talking about? Even the reporters in the room seem aware of how ridiculous the question is. We're talking about practice, man. Iverson had gotten a reputation as a bad boy, a thug.

The shadow of his high school conviction followed him because he refused to conform. And that pissed off a lot of people.

“David Stern and the NBA were getting frustrated with all the negative attention, Alan”

Iverson. Their MVP was bringing to the league. He wasn't the professional corporate businessman type of player that they were used to marketing, and they worried the league was developing a bad image. And right on cue, in 2004, something happened at a game that seemed to confirm their fears.

In 2004, in the game between the Detroit Pistons and Indiana Pasters, a fight broke out between players, and soon it spilled off the court and into the crowd. Players and fans were squaring up and throwing punches. It was bad. The ball was called the malice at the palace. It became national news.

Alan Iverson wasn't involved. He wasn't even there.

“And yet it seemed to confirm the narrative that the hip-hop culture he introduced into the league,”

the close tattoos, the attitude, was ruining the NBA. You know, it almost follows the same playbook as the 1970s. Black criminality, you know, here they are wearing cornrows, they're wearing their dueregs. They look like they're straight out of the gang. NBA Commissioner David Stern saw this as much of an image problem as anything else.

And before the 2005 season, he instituted an official NBA business casual dress code. The list of things that were no longer allowed.

It's basically everything that Alan Iverson ever wore to a game.

Players could no longer wear sneakers. Dueregs. Sunglass is inside. Large chains. Bathe jeans.

The tins. Even t-shirts. It's all of the things that we... The average fan thought was like the coolest thing ever for a basketball player to embody. And David Stern was sort of saying, "Nope, we're done with that."

It was tough on me because I understood that it was a shot at me. This is Alan Iverson from an interview with SLAM Magazine's founder from a year ago. People just wanted to look like themselves. You know what I mean? They wanted to wear a poster when they thought they should wear them because of the errors

before us.

You know, it was always a suit and tie.

And then once guys saw that I was doing it, it wasn't that they were copying me.

You know what I mean?

“Guys just started dressing the way they wanted to dress.”

You know what I mean? But it was more on the hip-hop side, like to wear as it was baggy clothes and chains and earrings and watches. And I guess David Stern was like, "No." The dress code was seen as a direct response to the impact Alan Iverson had on

the league.

But Alan Iverson didn't always follow it.

Neither did some of his teammates. They racked up thousands of dollars of fines for violations. And none of this helped Alan Iverson's reputation. He continued to be seen as a troublemaker.

“And that perception, as well as mounting injuries, hurt his place in the league.”

Just five years after his MVP season, he was traded to the Denver Nuggets. He bounced around to two other teams and by 2010, he was out of the NBA. The NBA had banned the clothes he wore, but the one thing they couldn't ban was the sleeve. It was a medical item, not fashion, but it soon became fashion.

It became a representation of the way Iverson changed the game and the culture in the NBA. And it's the part of his brand that is still around. Watch an NBA game on any given night, and you'll see that half the players on the court are wearing elbow compression sleeves. That most of them don't even need for medical reasons.

And the market for elbow compression sleeves is now estimated to be over $500 million.

Companies extracted the one thing about Alan Iverson that wasn't overtly dangerous to the status quo and made a lot of money off it. But ultimately what the sleeve symbolizes to me at least is Iverson's rebellion and how his ferocious sense of independence resonates even with players today who were just babies when he retired.

There's so many players who style themselves, both in terms of how they play, on the court and also off the court in the kind of legacy of Alan Iverson. Fast forward to now, I feel good about it because you see everybody else expressing themselves the way they want to, they feel good when they come in and work. Iverson is right to be proud of the impact he had on his workplace.

Before NBA games today, there's this tradition where players are shown on TV walking into the stadium through a tunnel. Their fashion choices have turned this into a runway. Players sometimes show up wearing bright red overalls or an outrageously oversized pink sweater that looks like it belongs on a runway in Milan or Paris.

This tradition emerged as its own way of resisting the NBA dress code. This like Alan Iverson, players fought back by being authentic, by being themselves. The dress code was you could wear jeans, just wear a pair of shoes and a shirt with a collar, but our players went over the top. This is David Stern from a 2019 interview reflecting on the impacts of the dress code.

“Did you find a defensive that some people thought it was racist?”

Well, no, because the race is always an issue, and the NBA has always been on the edge

of discussions of race. David Stern passed away in 2020. Many of the players that wear a compression sleeve today probably don't even know its history or its connection to Alan Iverson, but every time they pull that sleeve up over their arm, they are carrying on a legacy, a legacy that reminds us of the ongoing tensions between

race, respectability, politics, and capitalism. It shows that black American culture cannot be controlled or regulated, that no matter how many rules the NBA put into place, self-expression, found a way. Some teen Erobloui is a producer, reporter, sound designer, and composer. He is a co-founder of the Peabody Award-winning show, Thruvine.

Today, he's still making audio stories and finishing an immersive exhibit on the history of human vision that premieres in Las Vegas in September. A history of the United States in a hundred objects is a production of 99% visible

It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.

“This episode was produced by Romteen Erobloui, who also composed music for this story.”

Our series producers are Priscilla Aloebe, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot.

This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell.

“Next scene by Iver Manley, fact-checking by Amy Bracken.”

Our theme song is by Swan Real.

From 99% visible, our executive producer is Kathy, too. From BBC studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Palet. And the production manager is Amable Phenagon Wright, artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% visible is part of the serious XM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful, uptown,

Oakland, California, and BBC studios is headquartered in beautiful, white city, West London.

“If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at 100 [email protected].”

[BLANK_AUDIO]