Support for K-QED comes from Genentech, the original biotech company.

For 50 years, Genentech has pioneered more than 40 scientific breakthroughs across various

diseases, bringing greater hope to patients everywhere.

Learn more at gene.com. That's g-e-ne.com.

Support for this podcast comes from Bioners. Their annual event is coming up March 26 through

the 28th in Berkeley. Three days of community, solidarity, inspiring speakers, movement building,

arts and music and more. For more information, visit bioners.org slash KQED.

From KQED.

Alexis Madrigal here. We've got a pledge break going right now, so you get a bonus on the

pledge-free stream podcast or on our replay at night. I write these meditations on the

people and places of the bay. we call the series One Good Thing.

For almost five years, I've been commuting through the 16th Street Bart Station.

I exit at the northeast corner and cut down Cap to 17th toward the KQED building.

A couple weeks ago, I got off the train, did my normal thing, and walked across the mission,

hosted the show, had some meetings, started the walk back, and when I hit Cap, I felt something was off, but I couldn't put my finger on it. About halfway down the block had hit me. The building at the corner was gone. Demolitions are so fast, and in the time between arriving in San Francisco and that afternoon, they'd taken the old place down. Suddenly, I couldn't really remember what that building looked like. So much more sky was available. Maybe it was just the shock of it, but the whole area was transformed. It was as if my brain switched off autopilot and actually began to take in new information. But I had to get home and I patted down the stairs, promptly forgot about it. A few days later, I was back on my commute, zipping up from the train and through the station. I hit the stairwell, began to walk up.

Again, I had that strange, uncanny sense. This time I recognized it faster. The view

which I'd encountered hundreds of times coming up to the surface level was totally different.

Where there had been a building, now there was light. Because I am multiple types of nerd, it made me think about the Russian literary term de-familiarization,

as proposed by Victor Schlafsky in the early 20th century.

For him, the purpose of poetry was to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.

In our daily lives, the world becomes rote.

We're subject to, in his terminology, overautomization.

...