Your Own Personal Jesus

How did a simple painting transform into the world's most recognized depiction of Jesus?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  What do I gift my mom and nieces?

• 0:34Speaker 02

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• 0:41Speaker 01

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• 0:42Speaker 02

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• 0:49Speaker 01

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• 0:50Speaker 02

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• 0:54Speaker 01

  All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?

• 0:56Speaker 02

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• 0:58Speaker 03

  Shop gifts, no love at Walmart.

• 1:02Roman Mars?

  This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars, and I'm in the studio with Christopher Johnson. Hey, Christopher.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Hey, Roman. So I want you to do something for me, okay? And I'm coming in kinda hot, all right?

• 1:13Roman Mars?

  Okay.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  So I want you to picture in your head an image of Jesus Christ, okay? Specifically, the Jesus that you saw in your imagination when you were growing up.

• 1:26Roman Mars?

  Okay, when I was growing up, okay. This does feel like a trap, but I will play along. So mostly I'm picturing a kind of, you know, flowy brown hair, you know, a peaceful face, lean, bearded, white with blue eyes. I recognize what territory we're getting into here with blue, with blue eyes.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 1:53Roman Mars?

  You know, but like a nice surfer, like a mild, peaceful, nice surfer.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, same. Listen, this is not a trap, man. And the way that you described him, that's exactly how I grew up thinking about Jesus too. And a lot of our listeners may have also grown up seeing the same mental image of Jesus. And so what I'm here to tell you today is that that mental image that's in so many of our heads, that idea of what Jesus looks like, it actually comes in large part from one single painting that was made in 1940 in Chicago. And it was called The Head of Christ. And it's the single most popular, most ubiquitous image of Jesus in the world.

• 2:41Roman Mars?

  Wow, okay.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  So here, let me show it to you.

• 2:44Roman Mars?

  Yep, that's the dude. He's kind of, you know, three quarters, you know, of a profile, blue eyes, white, thin, lean, trimmed beard. He's got this soft glow around him, you know, as he looks softly into the distance. But yeah, that's, that's the Jesus.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  That, that's the guy, right? And this Head of Christ painting is, by some accounts, the single best-known piece of American artwork of the whole 20th century. It's been reproduced a billion times and spread all over the planet. And it has shaped so many of the popular depictions of Jesus that we know.

• 3:23Roman Mars?

  And just upfront here, like, we don't know much about what Jesus actually looked like, right?

• 3:28Speaker 04

  We don't. And the Bible doesn't tell us a whole lot. But that fact hasn't stopped anybody. Artists have been creating images of Jesus for many, many centuries all over the world.

• 3:41Roman Mars?

  Yeah. So, so Joy and I went and saw the Last Supper in Milan, like, in person last year. And, you know, I didn't really think about it much at the time, but, but I, I just kind of pulled it up as we were talking to see like, how different it was from this Head of Christ image that, that you just showed me. And it's really different.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  Like, yeah.

• 4:01Roman Mars?

  You know, so that there's lots of different images of Jesus out there. And some of them are very famous, like The Last Supper.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:08Roman Mars?

  And so how did this one painting, Head of Christ, come to dominate all of our images of, of Jesus in our, in our heads?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Okay, so that story starts with a Chicago artist named Warner Solman. Back in the 1920s, Solman was a commercial illustrator who did ads for pianos and toothbrushes and trucks and suits and stuff like that. He was also a Christian and he volunteered to be the art director for this new magazine for young people that his church had just started. And in early 1924, he was on deadline to draw something for the cover art.

• 4:45Roman Mars?

  And is he trying to draw Jesus? Like, put Jesus on the issue of this magazine? Kind of like Oprah's on every cover of Oprah magazine or just, or what?

• 4:53Speaker 04

  I mean, you know, he's the art director for this kids' Christian magazine. I guess he could make whatever he wanted. But then Salman suddenly got artist's block. Is there such a thing as artist's block?

• 5:05Speaker 05

  He said he had been working on it for a while and nothing worked out. He was unsatisfied with everything he tried.

• 5:14Speaker 04

  This is Jack Lundbaum. He's Warner Salman's biographer, and the two were good friends.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  And, yeah, it came close to the deadline. He went to sleep. And during the night, he had a dream or a vision in which he saw this picture in his mind's eye.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  So he got out of bed and he penciled out kind of a first draft. And the next day, he turned that into a larger charcoal sketch.

• 5:44Roman Mars?

  Okay, so what did this charcoal drawing look like?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  So this was a very simple, black charcoal sketch of Jesus's head. This is still 15 years before Salman would make his world famous Head of Christ painting. And this drawing is much more basic than that. But the template is definitely there and you can see the similarities. It's Jesus's head with long wavy hair, the trimmed beard, and those soft, peaceful eyes gazing off into the distance.

• 6:14Roman Mars?

  And, you know, in his biography or in the story of his life, is there ever an explanation as to why he drew Jesus this way? Why did the drawing come out like this?

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Well, there are a few answers. One answer, of course, is that this is the image that he saw in his vision.

• 6:29Roman Mars?

  Sure.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  But there are a couple of other reasons, too. You know, people had depicted Jesus for a long time before Warner Salman sat down. And Salman admitted he'd seen some of those and he got inspiration from those. But probably the biggest thing that inspired Salman was that in the mid 1920s, around the time that he made this drawing, there was this growing general concern that American Christian men were getting soft. Part of that anxiety was stoked by changes in work. People were becoming more sedentary, there were more office jobs, and folks were worried that men were getting more sluggish and putting on weight. This was especially problematic for Christians,

• 7:11Speaker 04

  who felt that a man of God was supposed to be exemplary and disciplined and strong, not some schlubby pencil pusher.

• 7:20Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  On top of that, white Protestants like Salman were really freaked out about cities.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  Oh, there was a real concern that city life zapped, sapped moral goodness and energy.

• 7:35Speaker 04

  This is David Morgan. He's an art historian who teaches religious studies at Duke, and he's written a lot about Salman's artwork.

• 7:42Speaker 06

  Salman was very much a part of this discourse about the, particularly the effect on men, that they lost their masculinity. They became effeminate. They became preoccupied with the pleasures of a city life that would distract from moral mission and fail to recognize what was supposed to make them different from the world.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  And so, one reaction to this was this movement that was called Muscular Christianity.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  The movement started in England and was picked up by Protestants in the US, who felt that they had to redefine what it meant to be a real Christian man. And so, people like Salman, who were connected to that movement, felt one of the best ways to inspire men, and especially young men and boys, to be more fit and strong and manly and courageous, was to give them images of Jesus Christ that had those same qualities.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  There's this strong desire for a new image of Jesus.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  This is Edward Bloom. He's a historian who co-authored the book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  There's a desire for a Jesus who would represent manliness and masculinity in a time when white men often feel like they're kind of losing their masculine identity.

• 9:12Speaker 04

  And so, the 1924 drawing that Warner Solomon made for The Kids magazine, that was his attempt at this.

• 9:20Roman Mars?

  Yeah, yeah. But here's the thing.

• 9:24Speaker 04

  What's up?

• 9:25Roman Mars?

  This image, it's not what I would... Masculine is not the first word that would come to me.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 9:32Roman Mars?

  You know what I'm saying? This is not stereotypically... This is a person who has a very, very gentle face. I mean, maybe the action of this moment is masculine, but this image doesn't scream that without that context.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  Hey, listen, I agree, but masculine was exactly what Warner Solomon was going for here.

• 9:53Speaker 06

  When Solomon produced his image, he was interviewed and he made this point, that my image of Jesus, that drawing, represents a manly, in his phrase, "a manly image of Christ" that our young people need.

• 10:11Roman Mars?

  And so, how was this prototype, you know, head of Christ image, received?

• 10:16Speaker 04

  Well, Solomon's church members liked it a lot, but the image mostly just circulated inside that small, tight-knit religious community.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Keep in mind, this is only in the Midwest.

• 10:31Speaker 04

  This is Solomon's friend and biographer, Jack Lumbaum, again.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Really, his exposure was largely in covenant churches in the Chicago and Midwest. Very few people outside of the Midwest would have known the Solomon name or the picture.

• 10:50Speaker 04

  But this was all about to change. And what took this image to the next level was when it went from a small, black-and-white charcoal sketch to this full-size oil painting done in color.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  In the late 1930s, Salman met a couple of marketing reps who sold Christian goods. And one of them was this guy named Fred Bates. Fred Bates worked for a big company that was later named Warner Press. Warner Press made and sold all sorts of Christian-themed merch. You've seen this stuff, like thermometers, table sets, including plates and pans, lamps, pencils, mirrors, all with biblical modos and scripture on them. Warner Press started selling prints of Salman's simple, black-and-white charcoal drawing. And then Fred Bates started whispering in Salman's ear

• 11:48Speaker 04

  that they would love to see a version of this black-and-white drawing of Jesus done in color.

• 11:54Roman Mars?

  Right.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Bates and his colleagues at Warner Press, they believed that a color version would have way more appeal to the masses.

• 12:04Roman Mars?

  And why did Fred Bates think that a color version of Jesus would do so much better commercially than the black-and-white version they were already selling?

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Because it would feel less like, you know, sketched art, which is kind of what the drawing really looked like, and more like a real portrait.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  The representatives of Warner Press said, you know, "We think doing a color version of this would have added appeal and could be used in a variety of different ways. You could create little prayer cards. You could create color reproductions to frame and hang in the home." What they were talking about were commercial possibilities.

• 12:43Speaker 04

  Mostly, Salman just kind of ignored Bates's request. But then, in 1940, Salman, on the low, actually did do a version that was a full-color oil painting, and he named that painting "Head of Christ."

• 13:00Roman Mars?

  Ah, so this is the painting that you showed me earlier. Jesus with three-quarters of a profile, gentle blue eyes, trimmed beard, white guy, that soft glow in the background, looking off into the distance, all that.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Exactly. And when Salman first painted it, he just kind of hung it above the family piano and went on with his life. And then, one night, Fred Bates stopped by Solomon's house, and he saw the Head of Christ painting. And he was like, yes, this is it. He was totally enchanted. I mean, to him, this looked like the real guy. This is what he'd been asking for. And he loved this painting.

• 13:43Speaker 06

  And when Bates saw that, they said, you know, we think, you know, this sort of thing can sell. So they felt like, we can take this from being a magazine illustration into a special object in domestic life. And I think their intuition was quite correct.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  So One Press did a print run of Head of Christ in various sizes, and they tested it and they tweaked the image. And then, in early 1941, the first print run of 100,000 copies went out into the world. They were distributed through those Christian bookstores, through door-to-door salespeople, catalogs, and of course, through churches. And that print run sold out, Roman, in two months.

• 14:25Roman Mars?

  Jesus, well, that's a lot.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  By the end of the year, more than a million copies of the Head of Christ image had been distributed. And then, over the next several years, 4 million more versions of the Head of Christ image went out in all different sizes, on all kinds of stuff, like bookmarks, baptism announcements, obituaries, you name it.

• 14:50Roman Mars?

  I mean, I can imagine it doing well. You know, it's a pretty painting of a man, you know? But surely, this isn't the only contemporary color painting of Jesus that looks kind of realistic. Like, why was this one? Why was Head of Christ, in particular, the one that was so wildly popular?

• 15:06Speaker 04

  OK, so here's what art historian David Morgan says. He says that the difference was that this image, it looked like more than just a painting. It looked to a lot of people as if someone had taken a camera and snapped a real photo of a living Jesus Christ.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  When I was talking to people, and I would sometimes ask them, what is it you really like about this picture? And some would say, Well, because it's what Jesus really looked like. And some would say, frankly, it's a photograph of Jesus. I was struck by how they would regard authenticity in photographic terms.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  And so what David noticed was just how much this painting uses elements of what was then modern studio photography portraiture. This was super popular at the time that Salman made Head of Christ, especially for things like high school and college yearbook pictures.

• 16:03Speaker 06

  You would walk in, sit down, and there was a shtick, a visual shtick. This is how you posed. This is what the photographer's looking for, because that's how everybody thinks you need to be remembered.

• 16:17Roman Mars?

  I mean, now that you mention it, I totally didn't put it together, but it really does look like Jesus Christ's senior yearbook photo.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. And so like when you, you're right, when you look at the position of Christ's head, David says it has that three quarters pose.

• 16:37Speaker 06

  Typically, looking away, looking off into the future, into the past, wherever. It gave you much of the face. And by the early 20th century, the three quarter pose was considered the dignified look of eternity. This is how I will be remembered forever.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  And then there were the ways that Salman mimicked studio lighting to get that Sears portrait studio gauziness that you see in Head of Christ. He uses yellows, whites, and tans to create the sense that Jesus is both emanating light and he's also lit up like he's in a studio.

• 17:18Speaker 06

  He decided, I think creatively, that this is how I'm going to show Jesus. This will give him a presence and a kind of relevance. And people said, you know, this is what he, one woman told me, this is what he really looked like.

• 17:33Speaker 06

  What she meant was it matched the image in her mind of what Jesus looked like. And when that happens, that clicks, that's why people form such a lively emotional connection to the picture.

• 17:48Roman Mars?

  It's so remarkable that he's using a sort of visual vernacular of this moment to create a portrait of Jesus that looks like a photograph. And then it matched the image that Christians had in their minds of what Jesus actually looked like. And so you give them this portrait that looks like a family member whose picture you just like hang up in your living room.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  A photo, basically.

• 18:13Roman Mars?

  And so this like portrait studio vibe, is this the thing that really makes it go global?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Well, that's why people were so drawn to it, was that studio portrait vibe. But what really made it go global was an incredible mass distribution effort during World War II. And that effort was called Christ in Every Purse.

• 18:34Roman Mars?

  Okay, it has a name, Christ in Every Purse. So what was that?

• 18:38Speaker 04

  It's pretty much what it sounds like. It was a huge project that was started by Christians in Indiana to get Head of Christ images that were about the size of baseball cards handed out to soldiers who wanted them.

• 18:53Speaker 06

  Every GI was offered this picture. Take this picture with you. It's made for your pocket. And many of them did. And it went through the war with them so that when these folks came back, you know, a lot, many of them still had the picture of Jesus and had developed narratives about how important it was and what it meant to them.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  David says that when he was doing research about Head of Christ, he got letters from hundreds of veterans and their families. And those letters talked about how, for the GIs in World War II, that small image became a talisman and a protector and inspiration, a source of good luck, and also a reminder of fellow soldiers who they'd lost on the battlefield.

• 19:38Roman Mars?

  That's amazing. I mean, it seems like it would become infused with a bunch of power because of that.

• 19:43Speaker 04

  Definitely. And then in the decade after the war, tens of thousands of prints were going out every month. And they were going to Alcoholics Anonymous. They were going to the Salvation Army. And they were going out to all sorts of huge international Christian groups and leagues. They were all a part of this, and they were giving Head of Christ cards away. And in the US, the spread of Solomon's image also synced up with this much larger effort to inject Christianity into public spaces.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  After the war, in the sort of Cold War setting, there were movements to put that image of Jesus in settings like courtrooms and libraries and public buildings and to blur any distinction of sacred and secular.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  That movement actually succeeded in the mid 1950s, around the same time that the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Head of Christ was being hung in public schools and hospitals and all sorts of public buildings all over the country.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Historian Edward Bloom says the biggest impact of this supersaturation of the globe with this image was that Solomon's Head of Christ then eclipsed most other images of Jesus in the popular imagination.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Before 1940, you just see lots of more localized images of Jesus. There's a lot more flexibility in how people present Jesus, how they alter images of Him. And really, after the Warner-Salman Revolution in the image, it became the "er" symbol, it became the symbol by which all other symbols that were then judged. If it was close enough to Solomon's Head of Christ, that could be what Jesus looked like. But if it was too far, then it was just symbolic or metaphorical. Solomon's Head of Christ became the Head of Christ, not a Head of Christ, for how people, not only in the United States, but around the world, then judged what Jesus actually would have looked like.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  This one image was so wildly successful that Salman's publishers at Warner Press went to him and they said, "We want more of this. Give us more Head of Christ, please." And so Salman, who passed away in 1968, made many more religious paintings featuring Jesus in all these different scenes. And so even as the scenes changed, the Jesuses still looked like the guy from the Head of Christ painting. And so I think you can trace a through line from Salman's Head of Christ and all of those Head of Christ-inspired pieces

• 22:41Speaker 04

  that he did much later to a lot of our popular culture depictions of Jesus today. And that image of Jesus, which is so fully soaked into our popular consciousness, of course, he's a white man. He's got these blue-gray eyes, this straight Roman nose. And so when Head of Christ became the dominant portrayal of Jesus, that portrayal really helped crystallize this single, popular image of this guy who is white.

• 23:19Roman Mars?

  I mean, whiteness is a very thorny and big concept, which many, many books have been written about. And it's got too much to go into here. But like, in terms of the historical Jesus, what do we know or what do we think we know about what he might have looked like?

• 23:39Speaker 04

  As you were just suggesting, there is a lot to say about this, and we won't do it here. But what we do know, of course, is that Jesus was a Jewish man who was born in what is now the West Bank in Palestine. And although the Bible doesn't tell us much about what he looked like, lots of people think that he would have been, at the very least, a lot more brown than the Jesus that's portrayed in Salman's Head of Christ and in the subsequent renderings inspired by Head of Christ.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  Warner Solman was a white Christian artist who painted a world famous image of a white Jesus. And what made the image so meaningful to so many Americans was its whiteness.

• 24:27Speaker 06

  It gave Americans, particularly white Americans, a Jesus that was theirs, their take.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  This is art historian David Morgan again.

• 24:38Speaker 06

  It gave that image a special, comforting, reliable portrait of not only who Jesus was, but who they are as Jesus people. And race is very much a part of this. They wanted to see a white Jesus.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  But as much as white Americans fell in love with this image, they were not the only ones who used it a lot in their homes and churches. But we can talk about that after the break.

• 25:07Roman Mars?

  OK, we'll do that after the break.

• 25:12Roman Mars?

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• 27:02Speaker 01

  What do I gift my mom and nieces?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Letgo.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Oh, Dad loves music.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Sonos can bring his songs to life. What sound that hits just right.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  And my coffee-obsessed bestie.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Delongi Brew's Coffee, right for morning's extra pride.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  We knew, now you do too.

• 27:28Speaker 07

  Shop gifts no love at Walmart.

• 27:37Roman Mars?

  Okay, so before the break, we were talking specifically about what this white Jesus meant to white Americans, especially white Christians. And so I'm curious about what this image meant to non-white Christians.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Head of Christ was not just popular among white Christians. You could find Solomon's image in the homes and the churches of brown and black Christians, too. I mean, I know in my family, both my grandma and my great-grandma, who were very religious black women, they definitely had things around their houses with the Head of Christ image on it. And so in black churches, you might have seen Solomon's Head of Christ in the vestibules or on people's bibles, maybe in the sanctuary, and very, very likely on those handheld paper church fans that people would use to cool themselves during service.

• 28:34Roman Mars?

  So why do you think black Christians also use this image? I mean, if white Christians saw themselves in this rendering of white Jesus, what did non-white Christians, what did they get out of this image?

• 28:45Speaker 04

  So I talked with a former pastor named Willie James Jennings about this. He teaches theology and Africana studies at Yale Divinity School. And he says one reason you find white Jesus in black Christian spaces has to do with capitalism. Historically, it's been white companies, not black ones, that control the production of religious goods. And those companies aren't necessarily thinking about diversity. They're thinking about which Jesus image is going to make their bibles and their church fans sell.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  And so to place a white Jesus on a fan that you're trying to sell made perfect sense. And for black folks, without control over that, that economy, we were often at the receiving end of that work. So what this meant was that you had church communities that were flooded with fans because we got a good deal on a package of 50.

• 29:44Speaker 04

  Jennings also says that black and brown Christians, who were part of a society that pushed white Jesus for centuries, sometimes understandably came to envision Christ that way themselves.

• 29:57Speaker 05

  There is a way of understanding our devotion to God that accepts the white Jesus image as normal. People, when, you know, they were asked to close their eyes and pray, it would not be unusual for people, not only people of African descent, but people all over the world, when they close their eyes and think about the Jesus who they're praying to, he looks like that man that is on that fan.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  But then, in the 1960s, a lot of black churchgoers started to rethink their use of images like head of Christ. This was the era of black is beautiful, racial pride. There was this huge shift in racial consciousness that permeated all sectors of black American life, including how black folks worshipped. And so churches started to get rid of depictions of white Jesus. And they started replacing those with images that looked more like them and that portrayed a religious life in which they could see themselves.

• 30:59Speaker 05

  Black churches started to get a better sense of the importance of challenging.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  The images that were being put in front of us, that's underwrote white dominance. And so that's when you start to have people change out those fans. Start to have churches change out their stained glass windows. Start to have churches create murals and paintings and pictures that depicted black life and the beauty of black life as fundamental to shaping our devotion.

• 31:35Roman Mars?

  Okay, so I definitely get the idea here, but could you give me an example of what this looked like?

• 31:41Speaker 04

  Sure. So, I mean, there are countless examples of this, but one of my favorites actually isn't about Head of Christ specifically, but it is about putting more black Jesus imagery in a black church. Specifically, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, the KKK bombed that church, killing four black girls. And in that bombing, some of the church's stained glass was damaged, including windows depicting white Christs. Two years after that bombing, the church installed what's known as the Whale's Window, which sits above the main entrance to the church.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  And the Whale's Window is this huge, gorgeous stained glass depiction of a black Jesus dressed in all white. And he's set against this backdrop that just shimmers with all these different shades of blue and purple. And there's this bright rainbow that fans out between his arms as he stretches his hands towards the sky. Roman, it is a beautiful piece of art.

• 32:51Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 04

  And there have been several popular renderings of black Jesus, at least among black folks. But still, nothing with the kind of singular global impact of Head of Christ. So, at the end of the day, despite all of these alternatives, the Head of Christ image persists, and it's still super powerful and pernicious. And it still feels to a lot of people. Like the right version of Jesus. It's really hard to undo that. When you see a black Jesus or a Korean Jesus or an indigenous Jesus, it's usually called black Jesus or Korean Jesus or Indian or native Jesus.

• 33:34Speaker 04

  Whereas Solomon's Jesus is just Christ.

• 33:38Roman Mars?

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  It's just Jesus.

• 33:40Roman Mars?

  Yeah. I mean, what's amazing to me is how much the objects that shape and represent our values all come from real, specific decisions. Like, it was a series of actions by a group of humans in the Upper Midwest who decided to depict Jesus in this particular way. And had that not happened, had this specific story not happened, this specific chain of events. And then this thing was mass-produced and then it was rallied around. It just didn't have to be this way.

• 34:09Speaker 04

  Yes, I think that's exactly right.

• 34:12Roman Mars?

  Well, this is fascinating stuff. And I love that so much comes down to this single image. What an amazing story. Well, thank you so much, Christopher. I appreciate it.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  You are welcome.

• 34:30Roman Mars?

  99% Invisible was produced this week by Christopher Johnson and edited by Emmett Fitzgerald. Mixed by Martine Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real with additional music by George Langford and Jamila Sandoto-Sinai. Fact checking by Graham Hesha. Special thanks to David Morgan for all his help researching this story. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kirk Colstead is the digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Vivian Le, LaShamadon, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California.

• 35:16Roman Mars?

  You can find us on Blue Sky and our own Discord server. There's a link to that, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  This podcast is supported by Nurtac ODT. Remedy Pant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtac. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtac can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtac is right for you, because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtac ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain,

• 36:24Speaker 02

  or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTC or visit nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast, playlist, or whatever's keeping you going today.

• 36:39Speaker 07

  Time for a quick break to talk about McDonald's. Start your morning with the $6 McRiddles Extra Value Meal, featuring your choice of a sausage, egg, and cheese McRiddles or bacon, egg, and cheese McRiddles, plus crispy hash browns and a small premium roast coffee. Sweet, savory, crispy, and caffeinated, it's everything your morning ordered, all for just $6. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing at participating McDonald's.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  What do I gift my mom and nieces?

• 37:05Speaker 02

  Walmart has top brands you know, like Ninja, Disney, Lego.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Oh, Dad loves music.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Sonos can bring his songs to life with sound that hits just right.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  And my coffee-obsessed bestie?

• 37:21Speaker 02

  They love his brews coffee right for morning's extra ride.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  All those great brands at Walmart? Who knew?

• 37:27Speaker 02

  We knew, now you do too.

• 37:29Speaker 07

  Shop gifts no love at Walmart.