A Man, a Plan, a Canal—Mars!
How one wealthy, amateur astronomer convinced the world Martians were real. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of...
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Episodes
Latest firstWhere the F*** Are We?
For centuries, the world's greatest minds were stumped by the deadly mystery of longitude, until an obsessive underdog entered the fray and...
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Constitution Breakdown #7: California AG Rob Bonta
This is the seventh episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution. This month, Roman and Elizabeth discuss Article IV,...
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The Longest Fence in the World
How a fence meant to protect sheep transformed the entire Australian landscape. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes...
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Molar City
How a small Mexican border town transformed itself into the dental tourism capital of the world, where dental care costs up to 80% less...
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Artistic License Redux
Idaho was the first state to slap a slogan on a license plate, “Idaho Potatoes,” which may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out this...
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The Em Dash
The strange history of a punctuation mark that makes writing feel human, and why people now think it proves the opposite. Subscribe to...
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Constitution Breakdown #6: Adam Liptak
This is the sixth episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth discuss Article III,...
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What’s in a Name
Throughout Africa and beyond, Zimbabweans are known for choosing some of the most bold, head-turning English-language names. Zimbabwean...
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Audio Flux
This week we're featuring Audio Flux, a short-form audio challenge where artists squeeze surprising stories into three minutes.Find out...
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Exit Interview With Michael Bierut
A young designer faces an impossible brief and discovers the spark that will define his legendary career. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 22
Performance changing gear, a Titanic era nurse with unbelievable resilience, and an ingenious art vending project reveal how innovation and...
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Beyond the 99% Invisible City
From rogue stop signs to rooftop mini golf, discover how chaos and creativity quietly shape the urban world. Subscribe to SiriusXM...
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Constitution Breakdown #5: Dr. Tom Frieden
This is the fifth episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth turn to the rest of...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 21
A glowing Vegas pyramid, a famously mistyped domain, and a long-delayed miracle investigation unfold in three unexpected tales. Subscribe...
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Sax Appeal
From military parades to smoky clubs, one invention’s wild journey reveals how an instrument can become a symbol of rebellion and...
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The Checkerboard
A single diagonal step on a map sparks a legal war with huge consequences. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99%...
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U Is for Urbanism
How Jane Jacob's urbanism dreams came to life on the most beloved kids' TV block. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes...
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Constitution Breakdown #4: Janet Napolitano
This is the fourth episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth turn to Article Two,...
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Murderland
Writer Caroline Fraser argues a chilling link between industrial poison, deadly design, and a generation of serial killers in the Pacific...
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The Moving Walkway Is Ending
People once dreamed of sidewalks that could whisk them across cities. Somehow, that dream ended up at the airport. Subscribe to SiriusXM...
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How to Write a Joke
Comedy writer Elliott Kalan (The Daily Show, The Flop House, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and co-host of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of...
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Gear (Articles of Interest)
From buckskin breeches to Patagonia vests, uncover how America’s obsession with ruggedness and war shaped the clothes we wear every day....
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Constitution Breakdown #3: Sen. Elizabeth Warren
This is the third episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth dive into Article One,...
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Your Call Is Important to Us
What if all those dropped calls, endless wait times and dead end hotlines every time you try to reach customer service weren’t accidents...
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Hidden Levels #6: Segagaga
One SEGA employee chronicles the company’s struggles the only way he knows how: by turning it into a game.Hidden Levels is a production of...
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Hidden Levels #5: Press B to Touch Grass
From blocky biomes to breathtaking open worlds, video games are teaching us new ways to see, build, and even save nature.Hidden Levels is a...
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Hidden Levels #4: Machinima
Back in the 90s, artists turned video games into movie sets, and their wildest ideas are finally hitting documentaries.Hidden Levels is a...
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Hidden Levels #3: This Game Wants YOU
Before Fortnite and Call of Duty ruled the scene, the US Army quietly shaped the early 2000s with a wildly popular, free shooter designed...
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Hidden Levels #2: Stick It to 'Em
From airplanes to Pac-Man to the battlefield, the joystick has quietly shaped the way humans connect with machines.Hidden Levels is a...
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Hidden Levels #1: Mr. Boomshakalaka
Step back into the ’90s, when dunks broke backboards, catchphrases caught fire, and one arcade game turned every kid into an NBA...
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Get Played with Roman Mars and Ben Brock Johnson
In anticipation of the release of Hidden Levels, Roman and Ben join Heather Anne Campbell (Rick and Morty) and Matt Apodaca of Get Played...
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The Power Broker #13: Drop Dead City
Like a shadow epilogue to The Power Broker, this story plunges into the chaos of 1970s New York where debt, unions, and one brutal headline...
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Constitution Breakdown #2: Rep. Sharice Davids
This is the second episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth dive into Article One...
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The New Jungle
In a Colorado meatpacking town, refugees fleeing persecution find themselves in some of the most dangerous jobs in America.This episode was...
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Replaceable You
Mary Roach dives into the strange, funny, and unsettling world of designing new body parts, from pig hearts to prosthetic feet, revealing...
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Revisiting The 99% Invisible City
We’re excited to celebrate the 5th anniversary of The 99% Invisible City, a NYT Bestseller by Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt, with a guided...
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The 99PI Anniversary Special: 15 for 15
For 99PI’s 15th anniversary, Roman sits in the hot seat to answer 15 eclectic questions, touching on everything from his dream merch to the...
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Ambassador Bridge
A billionaire family’s private bridge empire shaped Detroit for decades, sparking battles over power, neighborhoods, and the future of an...
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All About That Bass
Vintage music barely had any bass. Today’s hits are all about the low end. What changed? An episode this week from our friends at Twenty...
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Sister Aimee and the Birth of the Megachurch
Aimee Semple McPherson built America’s first megachurch, blended showbiz with salvation, and vanished in a scandal that captivated the...
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Weeding is Fundamental Revisited
Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The...
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Constitution Breakdown #1: Nikole Hannah-Jones
This is the first official episode of our ongoing series breaking down the U.S. Constitution.This month, Roman and Elizabeth discuss the...
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The Quiet Storm
How a radio show born at a small college station in DC and dedicated to smooth, romantic love songs transformed black radio and reshaped...
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Neil Young’s iPod Killer
A rock icon sets out to save music with a strange yellow gadget that almost no one understood.Neil Young’s iPod KillerIf you're new to the...
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Roman Mars's Guide to San Francisco
In this bonus episode, an offbeat walking tour through San Francisco uncovers hidden rooftop parks, a leaning skyscraper scandal, a...
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Food Deserts
How did millions of Americans end up living in neighborhoods where finding fresh food is harder than ever, and why is the problem by...
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Open Borders
An immigration reporter’s chance encounter in the desert reveals how borders shape our actions, our beliefs, and the way we see the world...
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The Titanic's Best Lifeboat
A century-old shipwreck, a sea of glass, and the lifeboats that were never meant to save you.The Titanic Was The Lifeboat Subscribe to...
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The Red, the Black, and the Green
After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the...
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The Return of Con Law
We heard you. The chorus of voices asking “where is Con Law? Where is Professor Elizabeth Joh to guide us through this madness? We need it...
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Adapt or Design
A debilitating injury forces 99PI's Kurt Kohlstedt to confront new everyday challenges and seek out accessible design solutions for...
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Build, Interrupted: A Conversation with Ezra Klein
Why is it so hard to build anything in America? Ezra Klein explores how our good intentions led to a system that stifles progress, and what...
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Foreign in a Domestic Sense
A dusty surveillance file uncovers the story of love, betrayal, and the fight for Puerto Rico’s freedom.Foreign in a Domestic Sense...
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Fishing In The Night
Shortwave radio opened a portal to the world—then became a weapon in a high-stakes war of propaganda and power.The Divided Dial is a...
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Emoji Law 😅⚖️
A single 👍 emoji sent over text was meant to say “got it”—but instead, it kicked off a $62,000 legal battle and raised the question: can...
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Changing Stripes Revisited
At the January 6th Capitol insurrection, rioters waved Confederate, MAGA, and Trump-as-Rambo flags. Easy to miss without knowing the design...
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One-Nil to the Arsenal
A goofy Shakira remix, a nervy penalty kick, and 60,000 fans turning banter into legend—welcome to the world of football chants.One-Nil to...
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I've Got 1099 Problems...
If you're one of the millions of Americans struggling with your tax forms today, you're not alone. Even Albert Einstein allegedly found...
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Everything Is Tuberculosis
John Green uncovers how the world’s deadliest curable disease still thrives—and why everything, from cowboy hats to colonial borders,...
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A Walking Tour with Mr. Memphis
Take a whirlwind tour of Memphis with the city’s most enthusiastic historian, uncovering duck parades, telecom turf wars, and a street...
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The Great American Pyramid
In 1991, one of the strangest buildings in America opened — a 32-storey, stainless steel pyramid in Memphis, Tennessee.The Great American...
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Secret Mall Apartment
A group of artists explored the back hallways of a mall in Providence, RI, and found the perfect place to build a private hangout. We...
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Beautiful West Oakland, California
When global trade reshapes a city, who pays the price—and who fights back?Alexis Madrigal’s new book is called The Pacific Circuit: A...
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What We're Reading
After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people were asking us what other books we’d been reading. A group of us got together and...
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A Beetle By Any Other Name
A tiny, unremarkable beetle hiding in the caves of Slovenia has an infamously unfortunate name—one that has sparked heated debates in the...
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The Brutalists
A film about a struggling architect, a style the world loves to hate—The Brutalist and Brutalism itself share more than just a name. Is it...
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The Nazi Block
In the heart of Berlin’s Tempelhof-Schöneberg district sits a hulking, crumbling concrete cylinder—an abandoned relic of a Nazi plan to...
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The Power Broker Breakdown Wrap-Up
Join Roman and Elliott one last time as they reflect on their journey with you all through The Power Broker, exploring their favorite...
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Your Own Personal Jesus
How did a simple painting transform into the world's most recognized depiction of Jesus?Head of Christ Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to...
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The Wide Open
Last week, we delved into story of how the Tennessee Valley Authority, which started out as a public institution, ended up acting like a...
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Valley So Low
What went wrong in Kingston, Tennessee, and what does it reveal about the messy legacy of public utilities turned corporate giants?Valley...
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The Power Broker Breakdown Breakdown
The Power Broker Breakdown may have concluded, but if you're just tuning in (or if you just want a quick refresher), this episode is a...
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Ancient DMs
The story of an 2700 year old archive, its accidental preservation, and the unprecedented—and often funny—glimpse it gives us into the...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 20
Happy New Year! We're starting 2025 with four more mini stories about a sleepy button, electric signs, a very important sticker, and video...
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Hyperfixed: Dylan's Supermarket Cold Case
We've all got problems. Sometimes your problem is a massive roadblock in your life, or maybe it's this little thing that quietly annoys you...
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New Year, New Neighborhood
The story of New Year's Eve in Times Square, and how a quiet group of unelected Manhattan property owners used the holiday — and their own...
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The Power Broker #12: Robert Caro
This is the twelfth and final episode breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.We’ve...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 19
Cheeky highway signs, Jane Fonda’s surprising side hustle, a dynamite twist on legacy, and the Greeks’ ideal foot obsession—expect the...
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The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars
Roman Mars and the Flop House team dive into Francis Ford Coppola's intriguing and controversial film, Megalopolis, exploring its chaotic...
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The 15 Minute City
How did the “15 Minute City,” a simple urban planning idea, spark protests, conspiracy theories, and death threats? This week, we unravel...
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Raccoon Thanksgiving
After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more...
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Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation
What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore the...
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The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee Mulligan
This is the eleventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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The Memory Palace…Book!
Roman talks with The Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo, whose new book brings his poetic history podcast to life on the page. They explore...
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Meet Me at Riis
As the last warmth of summer fades, Riis Beach—a hidden queer oasis behind a decaying hospital—faces a new reality. With its shadowy...
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How the World Ran Out of Everything
Remember when grocery shelves went bare and cargo ships clogged the California coast? That chaos wasn’t just a pandemic hiccup—it was a...
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Spirit Halloween
Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America....
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The Power Broker #10: Clara Jeffery
This is the tenth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Trompe L'oeil
Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into...
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Brilliantly Boring
In this bonus episode, Roman unearths the surprising story behind the 99% Invisible's name and delves into the unnoticed brilliance of...
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Christiania
In the heart of Copenhagen, a former military base transformed into Christiania, a self-proclaimed anarchist commune where residents built...
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The Infernal Machine
The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its...
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Cue the Sun!
What started as Emily Nussbaum’s “guilty pleasure” of watching Big Brother became a deeper dive into the world of reality TV, leading to...
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The Power Broker #9: Majora Carter
This is the ninth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Planet Money: Zombie 2nd Mortgages
Karen MacDonough had paid her mortgage for years, raised her family, and lived a quiet life in her Quincy, Massachusetts home—until one...
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Medellin, Revisited
Once considered the most dangerous city in the world due to drug cartel violence, by the early 2000s Medellin had reinvented itself. But...
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Not Built For This #6: Maximum Temperature
The impacts of climate disasters are often measured in terms of property damage. But in places like Phoenix, Arizona, and in hot places all...
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Not Built For This #5: The Little Levee That Could
Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this...
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Not Built For This #4: Unbuilding the Terrace
All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more...
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Not Built For This #3: The Price is Wrong
Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as storms get more extreme...
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Not Built For This #2: The Ripple Effect
In disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not confined to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading...
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Not Built For This #1: The Bottom of the Bowl
Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up...
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The Power Broker #8: Shiloh Frederick
This is the eighth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Side Projects
This week we're highlighting a couple of series that live inside the 99pi production tent.We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for you...
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Top Billing
When you’re watching the opening credits to a movie, it’s not just a list of names. What you’re actually seeing is intense negotiations by...
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The Art of the Olympics
The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the...
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The 2024 Olympics Spectacular
From TV commercials and branded soda cans to Emily in Paris spon-con, the Olympics are once again everywhere. In the Olympic spirit, we’re...
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The Power Broker #7: Sec. Pete Buttigieg
This is the seventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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A River Runs Through Los Angeles
When you hear the word "river," you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks...
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As Slow As Possible
When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or perhaps you take your time and skip the opening act. But...
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The Containment Plan (rebroadcast)
It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the...
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Backfired: The Vaping Wars
When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the...
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The Power Broker #6: Mike Schur
This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Category 6
After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson...
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The Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars
The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn...
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Fact Checking the Supreme Court
For a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was...
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Uptown Squirrel [update]
In late 2018, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists...
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The Lost Subways of North America
Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of The...
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The Power Broker #5: Brandy Zadrozny
This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Rocket Man
In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it...
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It's Howdy Doody Time!
The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade,...
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Towers of Silence: Vulture Conservation
Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and...
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Towers of Silence
Situated right in downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the...
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The Power Broker #4: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
This is the fourth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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Anything's Pastable: Eat Sauté Love
This week we're featuring an episode from The Sporkful's series on the creation of "Anything's Pastable," Dan Pashman's new pasta...
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The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons
Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the...
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Chambre de Bonne
A chambre de bonne is usually one small room, on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building, and it’s usually just big enough...
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Roman Mars Describes Athens GA As It Is
This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and...
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Autism Pleasantville
A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about her experience called The Loudest Girl in...
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The Monster Under the Sink
In the middle of the 20th century, the small town of Jasper, Indiana did something that no other city had done before: they made garbage...
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The Power Broker #3: David Sims
This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This...
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WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm
Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can...
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Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is
Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. Santa Fe wasn’t...
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The Real Book [rebroadcast]
Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style...
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Significant Others: A Sneak Peek at the Woman Behind Benedict Arnold’s Betrayal
It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on? Often, it’s...
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You Are What You Watch
What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2...
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The Power Broker #2: Jamelle Bouie
This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.This...
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The White Castle System of Eating Houses
White Castle has its own take on fast food hamburgers. For starters, the patties are square, with five holes in each patty. And they’re...
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Between the Blocks
Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment...
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Don't Forget to Remember
When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the...
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Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is
A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in...
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The Double Kick
Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is...
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The Power Broker #1: Robert Caro
Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. Robert...
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Imitation Nation
Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 18
Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire...
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Another Visit from the Three Santas of Slovenia
We're revisiting this Christmas classic from 2021. Happy Holidays!Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy,...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 17
It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short...
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Empire of the Sum
Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep...
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Breaking Down The Power Broker (with Conan O'Brien)
Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said...
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The Known Unknown [rebroadcast]
Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back...
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Long Strange Tape
The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great. But because the cassette was so much...
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Home on the Range
In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the...
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The Six-Week Cure
In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages. The city became...
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The Fever Tree Hunt
Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the...
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Model Village
For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating,...
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Devolutionary Redesign
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key...
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You Ain’t Nothin But a Postmark
Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait...
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The Big Dig
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the...
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Devil in the Details
This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a...
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Cautionary Tales of the Sydney Opera House
The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural...
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Blood in the Machine
Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When...
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Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out AGAIN
All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you've listened to over and over again....
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Office Space
In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom...
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Melanie Speaks
The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.The way a person's voice...
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Trail Mix: Track Two
Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the...
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Cooking with Gas
Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the...
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The Country of the Blind
Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now...
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Shade Redux
This past May, the city of Los Angeles rolled out a brand new, state-of-the art feature for bus shelters. It’s called La Sombrita. La...
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Chick Tracts
In the 1980s, the little Christian comic books known as Chick Tracts were EVERYWHERE. You’d find them in movie theaters and bus station...
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In Proximity: Ryan Coogler and Roman Mars
In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity.Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts...
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Player Piano
This week we're featuring an episode of The Last ArchiveThe Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the...
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The Frankfurt Kitchen
After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in...
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The Siren of Scrap Metal
Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is a particularly iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. This recording blares from...
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Courtroom Sketch
As electronic news gathering was gaining prominence in the early 20th century, the American Bar Association began to fear its effect on...
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Goodnight Nobody [rebroadcast]
The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight...
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Train Set: Track Three
Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path...
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Paved Paradise
LA might be the most extreme parking city on the planet. Parking regulations have made it nearly impossible to build new affordable...
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Nuts and Bolts
In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies...
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For Amusement Only (Free Replay)
There's a new movie out called Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. It’s a fun and extremely meta biopic telling the story of Roger Sharpe,...
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Dear John and Roman
Last year, Roman Mars teamed up with Hank Green to guest host Dear Hank & John -- this year he's back on the Greens' show once again, but...
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For a Dollar and a Dream
From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though the odds of winning a...
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De Fiets Is Niets
Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in...
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The Panopticon Effect
The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. In the original design, all the cells are built around a central...
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The Wilderness Tool
Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly...
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Twenty Thousand Hertz- Golden
The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. I think of it as almost a sibling...
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A Whale-Oiled Machine
Back when whale oil was mainly used as a fuel to burn in lanterns and streetlights, an enterprising man named William F. Nye found a new...
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The Lost Cities of Geo Redux
If we’ve learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo! and MySpace, it’s that internet darlings rise and fall. And...
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Orange Alternative
In the 1980s a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative used cute images of a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat to...
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The Chinatown Punk Wars
When LA punks were looking for a place to play in the late 1970s, Chinatown welcomed the unruly scene. But it was an uneasy alliance that...
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The Day the Music Stopped
On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods,...
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Six-on-Six Basketball
In the 20th century, Iowa high school girls basketball was HUGE but it was not the game we know today. In 6-on-6 basketball, the three...
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The Comrades
If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of...
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A Sea of Yellow
Back in 2017 we ran an episode about the history of Brazil's iconic, yellow national soccer jersey. We were reminded of that story during...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 16
We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersection of a street and a...
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Balikbayan Boxes
This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 15
The whole conceit of this show is that if look at the world in the right way, you’ll see stories everywhere. Some of the stories are epic...
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The Divided Dial
If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed...
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Cougar Town
Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It...
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Super Citizens
Los Angeles' El Peatonito is part of a subset of real life superheroes who are more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on...
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Freedom House Ambulance Service: American Sirens
When people ask me what my favorite episode of 99% Invisible is, I have a hard time answering. Not because they’re all my precious little...
0:00--:--
Train Set: Track Two
Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one -- except we didn't actually talk about that...
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Articles of Interest: American Ivy
Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer Avery Trufelman investigates our collectively held beliefs about...
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The Safety Bicycle
The basic mechanics of the bike are pretty simple --- it’s basically a triangle with wheels and a chain drive to propel it forward. No...
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Walk of Fame
Even if you haven't made the pilgrimage to Southern California, you can probably already picture what the Walk of Fame looks like. It's a...
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Wickedest Sound
Jamaica is famous around the world for its music, including genres like ska, dub, and reggae. It’s tempting to think that the powerful...
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Tale of the Jackalope
The magical mythical "jackalope" is a essentially a horned rabbit, with antlers of different sizes and shapes. The jackalope is a mascot of...
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President Clinton Interviews Roman Mars
On this special feature episode, President Bill Clinton interviews 99% Invisible host and creator Roman Mars.Roman Mars has spent his...
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Search and Ye Might Find
Adam Rogers has been thinking and writing about what’s known in the industry simply as "search." For the last decade, people have been...
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Monumental Diplomacy
In downtown Windhoek, Namibia -- at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue -- there's an imposing gold building...
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First Errand
Back in March, Netflix picked up a long running Japanese TV program based on a children’s book from the 1970s. The show is called Old...
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What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law- The Longest Week
In the final week of the most recent term, the Supreme Court decided to limit one constitutional right (abortion) and expand another...
0:00--:--
99% Vernacular: Volume 3
In the final episode of our vernacular spectacular anniversary series, 99pi producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories...
0:00--:--
99% Vernacular: Volume 2
Only a small percentage of architecture is actually designed by architects. And while a famous architect-designed tower in a skyline might...
0:00--:--
99% Vernacular: Volume 1
For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived -- and...
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Say Aloe to My Little Frond
Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the...
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The Octagon House
99% Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an...
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Hometown Village
Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland. Russia and Japan have long fought over the territory, which has left the...
0:00--:--
The Rights of Rice and Future of Nature
The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the only...
0:00--:--
Meet Us by the Fountain
No teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra Lange. In her new book, Meet...
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Flag Days: Unfolding a Moment
Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that's what we were taught in school. But when historians go searching…there’s no proof...
0:00--:--
Divining Provenance
Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private...
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Inheriting Froebel's Gifts
In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path...
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The Missing Middle
Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family...
0:00--:--
Roman Mars on Blank Check with Griffin and David
Bonus episode: Roman Mars on Blank Check with Griffin and David talking about The Quick and The Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995)Roman note: I LOVE...
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Pandemic Tracking and the Future of Data
Data is the lifeblood of public health, and has been since the beginning of the field. But essential data gathering for the COVID pandemic...
0:00--:--
It’s a Small Aisle After All
If you’ve ever been to a supermarket in the US, you’ve probably seen an ethnic food aisle. Maybe it was called the "international aisle,"...
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Atlas Obscura
Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated...
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Rumble Strip
Every year in the spring, small towns throughout New England host their annual town meeting. Town meetings take place in high school gyms...
0:00--:--
Murder Most Fowl
While urban parks are safe havens for birds, parks are often surrounded by condos and hotels and office buildings with floor-to-ceiling...
0:00--:--
Dear Hank and John and Roman
So why don't we have mouth Roombas? Is the universe full of chickens? What scientific advances are happening? What was the first internet...
0:00--:--
Grid Locked
In February 2021, it began to snow in Austin, Texas, which was unusual, and exciting for some, at least until the power dropped out for...
0:00--:--
Natalie de Blois: To Tell the Truth
Natalie de Blois contributed to some of the most iconic Modernist works created for corporate America, all while raising four children....
0:00--:--
The Future of the Final Mile
While something like dial-up might mostly be a thing of the past, the truth is copper phone lines still connect a lot of people to the...
0:00--:--
Broken Heart Park
In the 1990s Dave Davis worked as the groundskeeper at a small neighborhood park in a suburb of St. Louis called Creve Coeur. It was an...
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According to Need wins duPont-Columbia Award
The Columbia Journalism School recently announced the 16 winners of the 2022 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, including...
0:00--:--
Art Imitates Art
There's a small neighborhood within the SEZ of Shenzhen that is known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western...
0:00--:--
Call of Duty: Free
On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But...
0:00--:--
Reaction Offices and the Future of Work
People have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. The 20th century was...
0:00--:--
Rock Paper Scissors Bus
When the two greatest auction houses in the world – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth...
0:00--:--
The Punisher Skull
The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a reaction to the failures of government at...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories : Volume 14
At the end of the calendar year and into the new year the 99pi staff collects a bunch of short, joyful little stories that are fun to...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories : Volume 13
We're kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: a strange collision of mundane infrastructure...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories : Volume 12
It's that time of year again! When 99pi producers and friends of the show join Roman to tell shorter stories, many of which have been...
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The Three Santas of Slovenia
Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green...
0:00--:--
The Epic of Collier Heights
For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just...
0:00--:--
Alphabetical Order
In much of the western world, alphabetical order is simply a default we take for granted. It’s often the one we try first -- or the one we...
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Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature
The French bulldog is now the second most popular breed in America. Their cute features, portable size, and physical features make for a...
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The Weight
Fitness trends come and go. But the simple weight is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized...
0:00--:--
Shirley Cards
Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices...
0:00--:--
Finding Julia Morgan
Born in 1872, American architect and engineer Julia Morgan designed hundreds of buildings over her prolific career, famous for her work on...
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Fifty-Four Forty or Fight
At a glance, the border between the United States and Canada would seem to be at the friendlier end of the international boundary spectrum....
0:00--:--
I Can't Believe It's Pink Margarine
Margarine is yellow, like butter, but it hasn't always been. At times and in places, it has been a bland white, or even a dull pink. These...
0:00--:--
Changing Stripes
Rioters carried many familiar flags during the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol -- Confederate, MAGA, as well as some...
0:00--:--
The House that Came in the Mail Again
The Sears & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were...
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Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse
When it comes to English spelling and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why...
0:00--:--
Yankee Pyramids
Presidential libraries are tributes to greatness, "[a] self-congratulatory, almost fictional account of someone's achievements, where all...
0:00--:--
Real Fake Bridges
The great Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, stops by to tell us two stories about the design of paper...
0:00--:--
Model Organism
Axolotls are nature’s great regenerators. They are able to grow back not just their tails, but also legs, arms, even parts of vital organs,...
0:00--:--
Full Spectrum
In 2015 the world was divided into two warring factions overnight. And at the center of this schism was a single photograph. Cecilia...
0:00--:--
A Field Guide to Water
What does water mean to you? In this feature, author Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), actress Joy Bryant, submarine pilot Erika Bergman, figure...
0:00--:--
War, Famine, Pestilence, and Design
When Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt were promoting The 99% Invisible City in late 2020, one question came up over and over again in...
0:00--:--
The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food
Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was often known simply as “Kniga” (translated: "book") because it was one of the...
0:00--:--
The Lows of High Tech
Britt Young is a geographer and tech writer based in the Bay Area. She also has what's called a "congenital upper limb deficiency." In...
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Stuff the British Stole
Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the...
0:00--:--
Katie Mingle's Right to Roam
We revisit Katie Mingle's Right to Roam episode as we say goodbyeIn the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known...
0:00--:--
Flag Days: The Red, the Black & the Green
After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the...
0:00--:--
Flag Days: Good Luck, True South
Correction: Our staff producer pronounced the the Japanese word "ōbōn" incorrectly in this episode. It is pronounced OH-bohn not...
0:00--:--
The Clinch
After Producer Katie Mingle's mom wrote a romance novel, Katie set out to understand the romance genre and its classic covers. There was a...
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Pipe Dreams
Most people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about their toilets, but they are both a modern marvel while also being somewhat of...
0:00--:--
Matters of Time
For the most part, we take time for granted; maybe we don’t have enough of it, but we at least know how it works --- well, most of the...
0:00--:--
Tanz Tanz Revolution
Today, Berlin is one of the premier destinations for techno music fans. People come from all over the world to party all night to the...
0:00--:--
Abandoned Ships
If you look around you right now, about 90% of what you’re looking at came to you onboard a cargo ship—your television, your sofa, most of...
0:00--:--
Curb Cuts (Repeat)
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it's easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections,...
0:00--:--
La Brega in Levittown
On the show this week, we’re bringing you an episode of a new podcast called, La Brega. And to tell us all about the series is Alana...
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Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux
Kurt and Roman talk about icebergs and how we visualize them all wrong. Plus, we visit a classic 99pi story by Emmett FitzGerald about...
0:00--:--
The Real Book
Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style...
0:00--:--
Science Vs Snakes
More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a...
0:00--:--
Oops, Our Bad
In the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature, but now that we’ve spent some time with the consequences, such as...
0:00--:--
The Megaplex!
Back in the early 1990s, movie theaters weren't that great. The auditoriums were cramped and narrow, and the screen was dim. But in 1995,...
0:00--:--
Artistic License
Idaho was the first state to slap a slogan on a license plate, “Idaho Potatoes,” which may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out this...
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Florence Nightingale: Data Viz Pioneer
Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but...
0:00--:--
The Batman and the Bridge Builder
Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the...
0:00--:--
12 Heads from the Garden of Perfect Brightness
The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most...
0:00--:--
Judas and the Black Messiah, Episode 1: The Chairman
Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the...
0:00--:--
The Doom Boom
Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the Times. People have always built underground survival shelters to stay safe from...
0:00--:--
Judas and the Black Messiah Trailer from 99% Invisible and Proximity Media
Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the...
0:00--:--
Stuccoed in Time
Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe (mudbrick) look that came to be called Pueblo Revival. This...
0:00--:--
Beneath the Skyway
Cities around the world have distinctive modes of transportation -- the canals of Venice, the double-decker busses of London, and the Twin...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories: Volume 11
In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from the Fresh Air Movement to the lost...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories: Volume 10
In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from climate-changing sheep to the...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories: Volume 9
Each year, 99% Invisible producers select short design stories to talk about with host Roman Mars. Some of these were just too brief to...
0:00--:--
Roman Mars on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn
Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorn on Bullseye this week to talk about life before podcasting, and what decades in radio has taught him. Roman...
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Chapter 5: Housing Finally
If homelessness is the problem, housing is the solution. But it’s not always that simple. Kate Cody has been living in her encampment...
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Chapter 4: The List
When Tulicia Lee tried to get help with housing, she was essentially put on a big long list with a bunch of other homeless people. If you...
0:00--:--
Chapter 3: Housing First
In the 1980's, a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis was working with mentally ill homeless people on the streets of New York. Sometimes, when...
0:00--:--
Chapter 2: The Hotline
Katie Mingle heard a lot about 211 doing this reporting. Not just from Tulicia Lee who called a bunch of times, but from everyone—from...
0:00--:--
Chapter 1: Tulicia
When we think about homelessness, we often have a certain image in our mind—people pushing shopping carts, or big sprawling tent...
0:00--:--
According to Need: Prologue
The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is...
0:00--:--
According to Need coming December 1
According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle that asks: What are we doing to get people into...
0:00--:--
The Great Indoors
Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health and Happiness, and she...
0:00--:--
Sean Exploder
As you might know, we have our own composer here at 99pi named Sean Real who works with the producers to score our episodes with original...
0:00--:--
In The Unlikely Event
If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you’ve been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket. Every passenger plane,...
0:00--:--
You've Got Enron Mail!
Enron collapsed nearly 20 years ago, but chances are something you use today was affected by emails sent by 150 of the company's top...
0:00--:--
The Lost Cities of Geo
Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor...
0:00--:--
Take a Walk
During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is...
0:00--:--
99pi Presents The Next Billion Users
This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first...
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Sign Stealing
In the early days of baseball, sign-stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get...
0:00--:--
For the Love of Peat
When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands...
0:00--:--
Exploring The 99% Invisible City
We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City book by host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt with a guided audio...
0:00--:--
Goodnight Nobody
The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight...
0:00--:--
The Address Book
An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and...
0:00--:--
Highways 101
Icons and symbols and signage are all around us, and nowhere more so than on the open road. So for this episode of Ubiquitous Icons: hop in...
0:00--:--
Where Do We Go From Here?
There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of...
0:00--:--
Podcast Episode
After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class...
0:00--:--
The Revolutionary Post (Repeat)
Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a...
0:00--:--
Policing the Open Road
Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the...
0:00--:--
California Love Scared Straight
Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related...
0:00--:--
Valley of the Fallen
About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It’s so big you can see it from...
0:00--:--
The Dolphin that Roared
When Emily Oberman found a flag of the island nation of Anguilla her father had helped design in her attic, she had no idea it was...
0:00--:--
A Side of Franchise
There are many books about McDonald’s that criticize the company for its many sins, and author Marcia Chatelain has read all of them. But...
0:00--:--
Freedom House Ambulance Service
One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were...
0:00--:--
Return of Oñate's Foot
All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic...
0:00--:--
Return of the Yokai
In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in...
0:00--:--
Instant Gramification
If you’re on Instagram, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of one particular building called the Yardhouse. It was designed by...
0:00--:--
Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12
A wedding was once seen as a start of young adulthood. Now, a wedding has come to represent a crowning achievement -- a symbol that your...
0:00--:--
Diamonds: Articles of Interest #11
Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks...
0:00--:--
Suits: Articles of Interest #10
Menswear can seem boring. If you look at any award show, most of the men are dressed in black pants and black jackets. This uniform design...
0:00--:--
Perfume: Articles of Interest #9
The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't...
0:00--:--
Knockoffs: Articles of Interest #8
Brands hold immense sway over both consumers and the American legal system. Few know this as well as Dapper Dan, who went from street...
0:00--:--
A Fantasy of Fashion: Articles of Interest #7
In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion...
0:00--:--
The Natural Experiment
In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and...
0:00--:--
The Smell of Concrete After Rain
There have been over 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. All have been tragic, but there are two people in particular...
0:00--:--
Masking for a Friend
Here in the US, we're not used to needing to cover half of our faces in public, but if you look at the other side of the world, it's a...
0:00--:--
Unsheltered in Place
99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle had already been working on a series about unhoused people in the Bay Area for over a year when the...
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This Day in Esoteric Political History
In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political...
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This is Chance! Redux
It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second-biggest earthquake ever measured at the time had hit...
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Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are
On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects...
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Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital
The only truly accurate map of the world would be a map the size of the world. So if you want a map to be useful, something you can hold in...
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The Weather Machine
The weather can be a simple word or loaded with meaning depending on the context -- a humdrum subject of everyday small talk or a stark...
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Over the Road
At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and...
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Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out
The story of how “Who Let The Dogs Out” ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something...
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Missing the Bus
If you heard that there was a piece of technology that could do away with traffic jams, make cities more equitable, and help us solve...
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The Worst Video Game Ever
Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of...
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Their Dark Materials
Vantablack is a pigment that reaches a level of darkness that’s so intense, it’s kind of upsetting. It’s so black it’s like looking at a...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 8
This is part 2 of the 2019- 2020 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 7
It’s the end of the year and time for our annual mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that came up in our...
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Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect
The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm...
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The ELIZA Effect
Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at...
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The Infantorium
“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county...
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Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl
In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of...
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Cautionary Tales
Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more...
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Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness
There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage....
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How To Pick A Pepper
The chili pepper is the pride of New Mexico, but they have a problem with their beloved crop. There just aren’t enough workers to pick the...
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Great Bitter Lake Association
A little-known bit of world history about a rag tag group of sailors stranded for years in the Suez Canal at the center of a war. Great...
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Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece
To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of...
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Unsure Footing
Before 1992, the easiest way to run the time off the clock in a soccer game was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper, who could pick the...
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The Kirkbride Plan
Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not...
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The Help-Yourself City
There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.” Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.” Informal urbanism covers all...
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99% Invisible presents What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that...
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The Pool and the Stream Redux
This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular...
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Wait Wait...Tell Me!
Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out...
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All Rings Considered
Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really...
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Peace Lines
There are many walls in Belfast which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Some are fences that you can see...
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Model City
During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the...
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He's Still Neutral
When confronted with trash piling up on a median in front of their home in Oakland, Dan and Lu Stevenson decided to try something unusual:...
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Invisible Women
Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado...
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Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine
Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for...
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Built on Sand
Sand is so tiny and ubiquitous that it's easy to take for granted. But in his book The World in a Grain, author Vince Beiser traces the...
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The Universal Page
Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s...
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Life and Death in Singapore
When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant...
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The Anthropocene Reviewed
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The...
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The Barney Design redux
All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our...
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The Automat
The inside of a Horn & Hardart Automat looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria -- but instead of a human handing you hot food over a...
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Depave Paradise
Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city...
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Sound and Health: Hospitals
Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals.According to...
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La Sagrada Familia (Repeat)
There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it...
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Sound and Health: Cities
Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a...
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Weeding is Fundamental
Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The...
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From Bombay with Love
From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet...
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Uptown Squirrel
This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed...
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Play Mountain
Even if you don't recognize a Noguchi table by name, you've definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer...
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The Roman Mars Mazda Virus
Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive...
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Froebel's Gifts
In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path...
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Three Things That Made the Modern Economy
50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their...
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The Many Deaths of a Painting
When Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was placed in the Stedelijk museum it was meant to be provocative,...
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Palaces for the People
Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or...
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Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!
Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from...
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The Known Unknown
The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential...
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Usonia Redux
Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most...
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Beneath the Ballpark
In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. City leaders were looking for a way to boost Los Angeles's...
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National Sword
Where does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a...
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The Secret Lives of Color
Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives...
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The Tunnel
In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting...
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Crude Habitat
Santa Barbara, California, is a famously beautiful place, but if you look offshore from one of the city's many beaches, you'll see a series...
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Atomic Tattoos
In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations....
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Mini-Stories: Volume 6
99% Invisible is starting the year off with the sixth installment of our staff mini-stories. Kicking off 2019 are a set of tales about a...
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Gathering the Magic
Magic: The Gathering is a card game and your goal is to knock your opponent down to zero points. But Magic: The Gathering also has a deep...
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Christmas with The Allusionist
For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of The Allusionist podcast)...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 5
It’s the end of 2018 and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. These are my favorite episodes of the year to make. Mini-stories are...
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Bonus Episode- Avery talks Articles of Interest with Roman
Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and use a bit of...
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The Accidental Room
A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall. Plus,...
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Oñate's Foot
Juan de Oñate is one of the world’s lesser-known conquistadors, but his name can be found all over New Mexico. There are Oñate streets,...
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Raccoon Resistance
After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more...
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The Green Book redux
The new film “Green Book” is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film, so I can’t speak to its merits or shortcomings, but...
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Orphan Drugs
We chronicle the epic struggle to get drugs that treat very rare diseases on the market, and the unintended consequence of that fight,...
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Devolutionary Design
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key...
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A Year in the Dark
Early on the morning of September 20th, 2017, a category four hurricane named Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico. It was a beast of a...
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Welcome to Jurassic Art
At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of...
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The Worst Way to Start a City
Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, guides us through the chaotic founding of Oklahoma City, which happened all in one day in 1889, in an...
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Punk Style: Articles of Interest #6
There is this myth that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think...
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Blue Jeans: Articles of Interest #5
For the most part, we tend to keep our clothes relatively clean and avoid spills and rips and tears. But denim is so hard-wearing and...
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Hawaiian Shirts: Articles of Interest #4
There are a few ways to tell if you’re looking at an authentic, high-quality aloha shirt. If the pockets match the pattern, that’s a good...
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Pockets: Articles of Interest #3
Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don’t open, or shallow pockets that can hardly hold more than a paperclip. If women's clothes...
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Plaid: Articles of Interest #2
Lumberjacks wore plaid. Punks wore plaid mini skirts. The Beach Boys used to be called the Pendletones, and they wore plaid with their...
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Kids' Clothes: Articles of Interest #1
Clothes are records of the bodies we’ve lived in. Think of the old sweater that you used to have that's just not your style anymore, or the...
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Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time
The year was 1982, and in the small city of Allentown on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania sat an AM radio station called WSAN. For years,...
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The House that Came in the Mail
The Sear & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early twentieth century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were...
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The First Straw
A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside...
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Double Standards
Blepharoplasty is often done to lift loose or sagging skin around the upper eyelids caused by aging. But for a lot of people of Asian...
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Bundyville
Most of the American west is owned by the Federal Government. About 85 percent of Nevada, 61 percent of Alaska, 53 percent of Oregon, the...
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It's Chinatown
For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles,...
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Fire and Rain
Nestled between the mountains and the ocean, right next to Santa Barbara, sits Montecito, California. The region endures a major fire...
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Built to Burn
After the massive Panorama Fire in southern California in 1980, a young fire researcher named Jack Cohen went in to investigate the houses...
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The Shipping Forecast
Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And...
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Everything is Alive
Louis is a can of generic cola. He’s been on the shelf a long while, so he’s had some time to think. Go2 is a store brand. "People call it...
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Interrobang
In the spring of 1962, an ad man named Martin Speckter was thinking about advertising when he realized something: many ads asked questions,...
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Roman Mars on ZigZag
This is a special presentation of episode #4 of Radiotopia's newest show ZigZag. Manoush and Jen give themselves 36 hours in San Francisco...
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VIDEO- Why Danger Symbols Can't Last Forever with Vox
The world is full of icons that warn us to be afraid — to stay away from this or not do that. And many of these are easy to understand...
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Right to Roam
In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started...
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Post-Narco Urbanism
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was...
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The Barney Design
Until the early 90s, basketball uniforms were pretty tame. There had been real limits to what could be done with jerseys. All the...
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Immobile Homes
"Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver...
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Breaking Bad News
When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient -- that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious...
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The Laff Box
For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What...
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Gander International Airport
The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and...
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The Hair Chart
Andre Walker became famous for being Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist, but he is also known for something else: a system that he created back...
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Lessons from Las Vegas
To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. But as...
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Making it Rain
The battlefield has always been at the mercy of the climate, but there was a time in U.S. military history when we did more than just pray...
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Airships and the Future that Never Was
They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the...
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Gerrymandering
The way we draw our political districts has a huge effect on U.S. politics, but the process is also greatly misunderstood. Gerrymandering...
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Miss Manhattan Redux
All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed....
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Fordlandia
In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and...
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Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Future, Part 2)
The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a...
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Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)
After World War 2, city planners in Amsterdam wanted to design the perfect “City of the Future.” They decided to build a new neighborhood,...
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Making a Mark: Visual Identity with Tom Geismar
The Chase logo was introduced in 1961, when the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company merged to form the Chase...
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Border Wall
When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern...
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Managed Retreat
In the 1970s it looked like the beloved, 200-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger. The sea was getting closer and threatening to...
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Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud
Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics: The...
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Thermal Delight
When air conditioning was invented in 1902, it was designed to take out the humidity in the air so printers could run four color magazines,...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 4
This part two of the 2017/2018 mini-stories episodes, where Roman interviews the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little...
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Biomimicry- Vox + 99% Invisible Video
Japan’s Shinkansen doesn’t look like your typical train. With its long and pointed nose, it can reach top speeds up to 150–200 miles per...
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Mini-Stories: Volume 3
It’s the end of the year and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are quick hit stories that were maybe pitched to us...
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Guerrilla Public Service Redux
In the early morning of August 5, 2001, artist Richard Ankrom and a group of friends assembled on the 4th Street bridge over the 110...
0:00--:--
The Nut Behind the Wheel
In the past fifty years, the car crash death rate has dropped by nearly 80 percent in the United States. And one of the reasons for that...
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A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream
While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic...
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Money Makers
For a long time, anti-counterfeiting laws made it illegal to show US currency in movies. Now you can show real money, but fake money is...
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Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television
When a new movie comes out, most of the praise goes to the director and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a...
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Dollhouses of St. Louis
Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was...
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Oyster-tecture
New York was built at the mouth of the Hudson River, and that fertile estuary environment was filled with all kinds of marine life. But one...
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La Sagrada Familia
There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it...
0:00--:--
Half Measures
The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way,...
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The Containment Plan
It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the...
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The Athletic Brassiere
Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of...
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Ponte City Tower
Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something...
0:00--:--
The Finnish Experiment
Around the world, there is a lot of buzz around the idea of universal basic income (also known as “unconditional basic income” or UBI). It...
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Coal Hogs Work Safe
Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s,...
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The Age of the Algorithm
Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether...
0:00--:--
Notes on an Imagined Plaque
Monuments don’t just appear in the wake of someone’s death — they are erected for reasons specific to a time and place. In 1905, one such...
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Person in Lotus Position
Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution...
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The Great Dismal Swamp
On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British...
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The Stethoscope
Imagine for a moment the year 1800. A doctor is meeting with a patient – most likely in the patient’s home. The patient is complaining...
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Ways of Hearing
When the tape started rolling in old analog recording studios, there was a feeling that musicians were about to capture a particular...
0:00--:--
The Trials of Dan and Dave
This is the story of an ad campaign produced for the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona. Perennial runner-up in the sports shoe category,...
0:00--:--
Repackaging the Pill
Most people are familiar with at least one version of the birth control pill’s packaging — a round plastic disc which opens like a shell...
0:00--:--
The Pool and the Stream
This is the story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in...
0:00--:--
You Should Do a Story
“You should do a story…” is the first line to a lot of the conversations you have when you work at 99pi. This week we look into a bunch of...
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In the Same Ballpark
In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the...
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Intro to a new Roman Mars podcast: What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
Special introductory episode to a new podcast produced by Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh. Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to...
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The Yin and Yang of Basketball (Repeat)
In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the...
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Squatters of the Lower East Side
In 1987, three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Wrigley found herself on the edge of homelessness. She was trying to figure out...
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New Jersey
The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. The uniform is...
0:00--:--
This Is Chance: Anchorwoman of the Great Alaska Earthquake
This episode was recorded live as part of the Radiotopia West Coast Tour. It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that...
0:00--:--
The Modern Necropolis
In the town of Colma, California, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Located just ten miles south of San Francisco, Colma...
0:00--:--
Reversing the Grid
For most people, electricity only flows one way (into the home), but there are exceptions — people who use solar panels, for instance. In...
0:00--:--
Sounds Natural
In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to...
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The Architect of Hollywood
Los Angeles is rich with architectural diversity. On the same block, you could find a retro-futuristic Googie diner next to a Spanish-style...
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Containers
We’re based in beautiful downtown Oakland, CA which is a port city in the San Francisco Bay. Massive container ships travel across the...
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The Falling of the Lenins
On the night of December 8, 2013, a huge crowd gathered on a tree-lined boulevard in downtown Kiev, Ukraine. The crowd was there to watch...
0:00--:--
Negative Space: Logo Design with Michael Bierut
Logos used to be a thing people didn’t really give much thought to. But over the last decade, the volume and intensity of arguments about...
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State (Sanctuary, Part 2)
In the 1980s, the United States experienced a refugee crisis. Thousands of Central Americans were fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and...
0:00--:--
Church (Sanctuary, Part 1)
In the 1980s, Rev. John Fife and his congregation at Southside Presbyterian Church began to help Central American migrants fleeing...
0:00--:--
Atom in the Garden of Eden
As the world entered the Atomic Age, humankind faced a new fear that permeated just about every aspect of daily life: the threat of nuclear...
0:00--:--
Usonia the Beautiful
Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the buildings we live in shape the kinds of people we become. His aim was nothing short of rebuilding the...
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The Eponymist
Eponym (noun): A person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named; a name or noun formed after a...
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The Revolutionary Post
Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way...
0:00--:--
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
On January 3, 1979, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to the home of Eulia May Love, a 39-year-old African-American...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories: Volume 2
Part 2 where host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a...
0:00--:--
Mini-Stories: Volume 1
Host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about...
0:00--:--
Plat of Zion
The urban grid of Salt Lake City, Utah is designed to tell you exactly where you are in relation to Temple Square, one of the holiest sites...
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Guano Island
In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world...
0:00--:--
NBC Chimes
The NBC chimes may be the most famous sound in broadcasting. Originating in the 1920s, the three key sequential notes are familiar to...
0:00--:--
Dollar Store Town
Dollar stores are not just a U.S. phenomenon. They can be found in Australia and the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Mexico. And a lot...
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Ten Letters for the President
People who write the White House know that the president himself will most likely not see their message. Many of their letters start with...
0:00--:--
Space Trash, Space Treasure
In the summer of 1961 the upper stage of the rocket carrying the Transit 4A satellite blew up about two hours after launch. It was the...
0:00--:--
McMansion Hell
Few forms of contemporary architecture draw as much criticism as the McMansion, a particular type of oversized house that people love to...
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Half a House
On the night of February 27th, 2010, a magnitude of 8.8 earthquake hit Constitución, Chile and it was the second biggest that the world had...
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Project Cybersyn
On September 11, 1973, a military junta violently took control of Chile, which was led at the time by President Salvador Allende. Allende...
0:00--:--
Longbox (Repeat)
Reporter Whitney Jones argues that R.E.M.’s Out of Time is the most politically significant album in the history of the United States....
0:00--:--
The Trend Forecast
Who decides that the color this season is “mint green” or that denim jackets are “back?” Of course, there’s top-down fashion, where couture...
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Making Up Ground
Large portions of San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong and Marseilles were built on top of human made land. What is now...
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Public Works
Infrastructure makes modern civilization possible. Roads, power grids, sewage systems and water networks all underpin society as we know...
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On Average
In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes,...
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Photo Credit
Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school in Germany would go on to shape modern architecture, art, and design for...
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A Sea Worth its Salt
The largest body of water in California was formed by a mistake. In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge...
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The Magic Bureaucrat
In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Congress undertook a reform effort to redesign the welfare system from one that many believed...
0:00--:--
Combat Hearing Loss
The US military buys a lot of foam ear plugs. Visit any base and you’ll find them under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms...
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America’s Last Top Model
In 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a scale model that could test flooding in all 1.25 million square miles of the...
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The Mind of an Architect
In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly...
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Unpleasant Design
Benches in parks, train stations, bus shelters and other public places are meant to offer seating, but only for a limited duration. Many...
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Remembering Stonewall
It started with a place called the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars had been raided by police for decades. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender...
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Home on Lagrange
In 1968, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind’s greatest...
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The Blazer Experiment
In 1968, the police department in Menlo Park, California hired a new police chief. His name was Victor Cizanckas and his main goal was to...
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Holdout (Repeat)
Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting...
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Loud and Clear
Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The...
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Separation Anxiety
“Für Elise” is one of the world’s most widely-recognized pieces of music. The Beethoven melody has been played by pianists the world over,...
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Turf Wars of East New York
Neighborhoods are constantly changing, but it tends to be the people with money and power who get to decide the shape of things to come....
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The Grand Dame of Broad Street
The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New...
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Unseen City
Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species....
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Supertall 101
Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of...
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Vox Ex Machina
In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating...
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The White Elephant Of Tel Aviv
Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning...
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Flying Food
The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on...
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The SoHo Effect
In San Francisco, the area South of Market Street is called SoMa. The part of town North of the Panhandle is known as NoPa. Around the...
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The Giftschrank
Centuries ago, Germany came up with a way to keep books that contained “dangerous” information without releasing them to the general...
0:00--:--
Mojave Phone Booth
Situated in the middle of the Mojave desert, over a dozen miles from the nearest pavement, a lone phone booth sat along a dirt road, just...
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Video- The Norman Door with Vox
There is an epidemic of terrible doors in the world. But when Don Norman got frustrated with them, he ended up changing the way people...
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The Green Book
The middle of the 20th Century was a golden age for road travel in the United States. Cars had become cheap and spacious enough to carry...
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Miss Manhattan
All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed....
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The Yin and Yang of Basketball
In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the...
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The Ice King
In the mid-19th century, decades before home refrigeration became the norm, you could find ice clinking in glasses from India to the...
0:00--:--
Fish Cannon
The Iron Curtain was an 8,000-mile border separating East from West during the Cold War. Something unexpected evolved in the “no man’s...
0:00--:--
The Fresno Drop
In September 1958, Bank of America began an experiment – one that would have far reaching effects on our lives and on the economy. They...
0:00--:--
Best Enjoyed By
Date labels (e.g. “use-by”, “sell-by”, “best-by”, “best if used by,” “expires on”, etc.) are on a lot of products. Forty-one states require...
0:00--:--
Bone Music
In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and...
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Tube Benders
The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more...
0:00--:--
Pagodas and Dragon Gates
For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles,...
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Worst Smell in the World
Many material trifles, such as Silly Putty, started as attempts at serious inventions, but in rare cases, the process works in reverse:...
0:00--:--
Fixing the Hobo Suit
Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume...
0:00--:--
The Landlord’s Game
From rock-paper-scissors, to tennis, to Mario Kart, every game is a designed system and all games are grounded in the same design...
0:00--:--
Fountain Drinks
On April 21st, 1859, an incredible thing happened in London and thousands of people came out to celebrate it. Women wore their finest...
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Butterfly Effects
Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good...
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War and Pizza
Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday...
0:00--:--
Atmospherians
The phrase ‘from Central Casting’ has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a stereotype or archetype, a subject so visually suited to...
0:00--:--
Structural Integrity (Rebroadcast)
99% Invisible is honored to accept a 2015 Third Coast International Audio Festival award for Structural Integrity, a story of architectural...
0:00--:--
Rajneeshpuram
Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,000...
0:00--:--
Dead Letter Office
When something is lost in the mail, it feels like it has disappeared into the ether, like it was sucked into a black hole, like it no...
0:00--:--
A Sweet Surprise Awaits You
On the night of March 30, 2005, the Powerball jackpot was 25 million dollars. The grand prize winner was in Tennessee, but all over the...
0:00--:--
Milk Carton Kids
On a Sunday morning in 1982, in Des Moines, Iowa, Johnny Gosch left his house to begin his usual paper route. A short time later, his...
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Reefer Madness
There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the...
0:00--:--
Bathysphere
In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world...
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The Great Restoration
Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has...
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Lawn Order
In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals...
0:00--:--
Hard to Love a Brute
No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who...
0:00--:--
The Sunshine Hotel
The Bowery, in lower Manhattan, is one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods. It’s been through a lot of iterations. In the 1650s, a handful...
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From the Sea, Freedom
In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state....
0:00--:--
On Location
So many classic movies have been made in downtown Los Angeles. Though many don’t actually take place in downtown Los Angeles. L.A. has...
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Johnnycab (Automation Paradox, Pt. 2)
More than 90% of all automobile accidents are all attributable to human error, for some car industry people, a fully-automated car is a...
0:00--:--
Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)
On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers, three pilots, and nine flight attendants boarded an Airbus 330 in Rio de Janeiro. This...
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Freud’s Couch
Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice...
0:00--:--
All In Your Head
People who make horror movies know: if you want to scare someone, use scary music. Some of the most creative use of music and sound to...
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Voices in the Wire
This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries...
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Viva La Arquitectura!
On January 3rd, 1961, Che Guevara suggested to Fidel Castro that they go play a round of golf. They drove out to what was then the...
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The Nutshell Studies
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will...
0:00--:--
The Post-Billiards Age
We live in a post-billiards age. There was an age of billiards, and it has been over for so long, most of us have no idea how huge...
0:00--:--
The Gruen Effect
Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go to a store looking for socks and come out with a new shirt, it’s only partly...
0:00--:--
Mystery House
According to legend, Sarah Winchester’s friends advised the grieving widow to seek the services of a Boston spiritual medium named Adam...
0:00--:--
Show of Force
During World War II, a massive recruitment effort targeted students from the top art schools across the country. These young designers,...
0:00--:--
Perfect Security
The pursuit of lock picking is as old as the lock, which is itself as old as civilization. But in the entire history of the world, there...
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The Calendar
A month is hardly a unit of measurement. It can start on any day of the week and last anywhere from 28 to 31 days. Sometimes a month is...
0:00--:--
The Colour of Money (R)
United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and...
0:00--:--
Devil’s Rope
In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in...
0:00--:--
Coin Check
The United States Military is not known for being touchy-feely. There’s not much hugging or head-patting, and superiors don’t always have...
0:00--:--
Palm Reading
Reports of palm theft have appeared in LA, San Diego, and Texas; palm rustling also gets a mention in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. To...
0:00--:--
PDX Carpet
Portlanders have a tradition when visiting their airport: taking a picture of their feet. It’s not to show off their shoes, but rather,...
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Game Over (R)
A few months before the end of the world, everyone was saying their goodbyes. The world that was ending was The Sims Online, an online...
0:00--:--
Guerrilla Public Service
At some point in your life you’ve probably encountered a problem in the built world where the fix was obvious to you. Maybe a door that...
0:00--:--
La Mascotte
The idea of the mascot came to America by way of a popular French opera from the 1880s called La Mascotte. The opera is about a down-on-his...
0:00--:--
Under The Moonlight
In 1885, Austin, Texas was terrorized by a serial killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The murderer was never actually found, but...
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Of Mice And Men
If you are looking at a computer screen, your right hand is probably resting on a mouse. To the left of that mouse (or above, if you’re on...
0:00--:--
The Sizzle
The first trademark for a sound in the United States was issued in 1978 to NBC for their chimes. MGM has a sound trademark for their...
0:00--:--
Penn Station Sucks
New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who’s got the best pizza? What’s the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But...
0:00--:--
Mooallempalooza
As you probably know, 99% Invisible is a show about the built world, about things manufactured by humans. We don’t tend to do stories about...
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Octothorpe
If you want to follow conversation threads relating to this show on social media—whether Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, Tumblr—you know...
0:00--:--
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
Hanging in the garage of Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, there’s a small, pear-shaped light bulb. It is glowing right now. This...
0:00--:--
Inflatable Men
You see them on street corners, at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. Their...
0:00--:--
And The Winner Is
There’s a little trophy shop called Aardvark Laser Engraving down the street from our office in Oakland. Its small but bustling, and its...
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Three Records from Sundown
This week on the show we’re presenting one of our favorite radio features, “Three Records from Sundown,” about singer Nick Drake. The...
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Vexillonaire
Vexillologists—those who study flags—tend to fall into one of two schools of thought. The first is one that focuses on history, category,...
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Edge of Your Seat
“A Chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” — Mies van der Rohe. The chair presents an interesting design challenge,...
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Good Bread
The first print advertisement for Wonder Bread came out before the bread itself. It stated only that “a wonder” was coming. In a lot of...
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Kickstart Radiotopia- A Storytelling Revolution
When you support Radiotopia, you are making sure 99% Invisible can keep coming to you weekly and you’ll be supporting our entire collective...
0:00--:--
Lights Out
On July 13th, 1977, lightning struck an electricity transmission line in New York City, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to...
0:00--:--
For Amusement Only
Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the...
0:00--:--
The Straight Line Is A Godless Line
Straight lines form the core of our built environment. Building in straight lines makes predicting costs and calculating structural loads...
0:00--:--
Port of Dallas
There’s a photograph we have tacked to our studio at 99% Invisible HQ. The photo, taken 1899, shows three men, all looking very...
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Castle on the Park
On the southwest corner of Central Park West and 106th Street in New York City, there’s an enormous castle. It takes up the whole east end...
0:00--:--
Genesis Object
In the beginning, there was design. Before any other human discipline, even before the dawn of mankind its self, design was a practice...
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Thomassons
Cities, like living things, evolve slowly over time. Buildings and structures get added and renovated and removed, and in this process,...
0:00--:--
Hacking IKEA
IKEA hacking is the practice of buying things from IKEA and reengineering—or “hacking”—them to become customized, more functional, and...
0:00--:--
The Sound of Sports
Way back in October 2011 (see episode #38, true believers!), we broadcast a short excerpt of a radio documentary produced by Peregrine...
0:00--:--
Walk This Way
As humans have developed cities and built environments, we have also needed to develop ways to find our way through them. Sam Greenspan...
0:00--:--
Duplitecture
The best knock-offs in the world are in China. There are plenty of fake designer handbags and Rolexes, but China’s knock-offs go way beyond...
0:00--:--
Good Egress
When designing a commercial structure, there is one safety component that must be designed right into the building from the start: egress....
0:00--:--
Cold War Kids
During the 1961 Berlin Crisis—one of the various moments in the cold war in which we came frighteningly close to engaging in actual war...
0:00--:--
Skyjacking
The term “hijacking” goes back to prohibition days, when gangsters would rob moonshine trucks saying, “Hold your hands high, Jack!”...
0:00--:--
Feet of Engineering
As a fashion object and symbol, the high heel shoe is weighted with meaning. It’s also weighted with the wearer’s entire body weight. The...
0:00--:--
Song Exploder
99% Invisible presents Song Exploder. A song is a product of design. It’s difficult to create an original melody, but that’s only the...
0:00--:--
Clean Trains
In just about every movie set in New York City in the 1970s and 80s there’s an establishing shot with a graffiti-covered subway. For city...
0:00--:--
Breaking the Bank
When I go into a bank, especially if I have to stand in line waiting to make a deposit, my mind wanders. And one of the first place it...
0:00--:--
Cow Tunnels
The westernmost part of Manhattan, between 34th and 39th street, is pretty industrial. There’s a bus depot, a ferry terminal, and a steady...
0:00--:--
Ten Thousand Years
In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New...
0:00--:--
Monumental Dilemma
About ten miles north of Concord, New Hampshire, off of interstate 93 there’s a little island with a great, big monument on it. The...
0:00--:--
Young Ruin
If you’ve wandered around Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum, or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you...
0:00--:--
Masters of the Uni-verse
Uniforms matter. When it comes to sports, they might be the only thing to which we’re actually loyal. Sports uniforms are packaging. But...
0:00--:--
Structural Integrity
When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the...
0:00--:--
The Fancy Shape
Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island...
0:00--:--
One Man is An Island
A few years ago, reporter Sean Cole was working on a radio story and needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes. Sean was living in Boston...
0:00--:--
Icon for Access
There is a beauty to a universal standard. The idea that people across the world can agree that when they interact with one specific thing,...
0:00--:--
Cover Story
You know the saying: you can’t judge a book by its cover. With magazines, it’s pretty much the opposite. The cover of a magazine is the...
0:00--:--
Higher And Higher
Like the best of these stories, the two bitter rivals started out as best friends: William Van Alen and Craig Severance. They were business...
0:00--:--
The View From The 79th Floor
On July 28, 1945, an airplane crashed into the Empire State Building. A B-25 bomber was flying a routine mission, chartering servicemen...
0:00--:--
Six Stories- the memory palace
Elevators are old. They would have to be. Because it is in our nature to rise. History is full of things that lift other things. In ancient...
0:00--:--
Numbers Stations
If you tune around on a shortwave radio, you might stumble across a voice reciting an endless stream of numbers. Just numbers, all day,...
0:00--:--
DIY Space Suit
Cameron Smith is building a space suit in his apartment. He’s not an astronaut. He’s not even an engineer. Cameron Smith is an...
0:00--:--
Future Screens are Mostly Blue
We have seen the future, and the future is mostly blue. Or, put another way: in our representations of the future in science fiction...
0:00--:--
Revolving Doors
The story goes like this: Theophilus Van Kannel hated chivalry. There was nothing he despised more than trying to walk in or out of a...
0:00--:--
All the Buildings
I love those moments when you’re walking in your neighborhood and suddenly nothing is familiar. In a good way. Sean Cole began seeing his...
0:00--:--
Kickstart Season 4 of 99% Invisible- Weekly Episodes
99% Invisible started as a side project I made in my bedroom at night, and after two years of making the program, I turned to Kickstarter...
0:00--:--
Wild Ones Live
We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible: No cardinals. Meaning, we deal with the built world, not the natural world. So, when I read Jon...
0:00--:--
Strowger and Purple Reign Redux
If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has...
0:00--:--
Bubble Houses
If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff. Neff...
0:00--:--
The Broadcast Clock
There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you...
0:00--:--
I Heart NY, TM
By now, the story is well known. A man sits in the backseat of a cab, sketching on a notepad as night falls over a crumbling city. He...
0:00--:--
Reversal of Fortune
Chicago’s biggest design achievement probably isn’t one of its amazing skyscrapers, but the Chicago River, a waterway disguised as a...
0:00--:--
Noble Effort
If you grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, you might remember seeing the name Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits....
0:00--:--
Ode to Ladislav Sutnar plus Trading Places with Planet Money
An ode to an information designer who made life a little bit easier for millions and millions of people: Ladislav Sutnar, the man who put...
0:00--:--
The Man of Tomorrow
I’m willing to concede from the get-go that I might be wrong about the entire premise of this story, but Superman has never really worked...
0:00--:--
Rebar and the Alvord Lake Bridge
There’s something about rebar that fascinates me. If nothing else because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered....
0:00--:--
An Architect’s Code
Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American...
0:00--:--
The Symphony of Sirens plus Soviet Design
For the ancient Greeks, sirens were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful,...
0:00--:--
No Armed Bandit
Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded...
0:00--:--
Game Changer
Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of...
0:00--:--
The Modern Moloch
On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children,...
0:00--:--
Secret Staircases
Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of...
0:00--:--
Hand Painted Signs
There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an...
0:00--:--
The Zanzibar and Other Building Poems
There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up–literally. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going...
0:00--:--
New Old Town
Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The...
0:00--:--
In and Out of LOVE
Though its officially name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek...
0:00--:--
The Great Red Car Conspiracy
When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car,...
0:00--:--
The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo
If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be...
0:00--:--
Built for Speed
I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major...
0:00--:--
Broken Window
When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do. One was...
0:00--:--
Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever. By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at...
0:00--:--
Razzle Dazzle
When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach. It...
0:00--:--
Derelict Dome
In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings are not usually dome-shaped. Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came...
0:00--:--
The Political Stage
On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into...
0:00--:--
A Series of Tubes
Pneumatic (adj.): of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting...
0:00--:--
BackStory- Heyward Shepherd Memorial
I only recently started listening to BackStory with the American History Guys, but it’s already earned a top spot in my crowded weekly...
0:00--:--
Two Storeys
While we’re gearing up for season 3, we present two pieces from two shows we love: First up, Language Bites from RTE Choice in Ireland....
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Names vs The Nothing
New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the...
0:00--:--
Some Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret Life
Sean Cole is a poet and he knows what you think of that. He is also a radio producer. One night, drunk and stumbling around the Hudson...
0:00--:--
Purple Reign
What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building? The hotel on the very prominent...
0:00--:--
Kickstarter Video for Season 3 of 99% Invisible
This is the Kickstarter video for funding the new season of 99% Invisible. If you enjoy the show and want to help keep it going, now is the...
0:00--:--
What Gave You That Idea
Starlee Kine’s friend Noel works in advertising. In 2003, Noel was working in at an agency in Richmond, VA. Everyone wanted to work on...
0:00--:--
Frozen Music
Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.” I like that. Of course that was before audio recording, so now, for the most part, music is...
0:00--:--
The Best Beer in the World
If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the...
0:00--:--
The Colour of Money
US paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused...
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The Xanadu Effect
What happens when we build big? Julia Barton remembers going to the top floor of Dallas’s then-new city hall when she was teenager. The...
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Galloping Gertie
Even during the construction of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the slightest...
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The Arsenal of Exclusion
“Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart” – Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities...
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Queue Theory and Design
In the US, it’s called a line. In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up. Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue. My...
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The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room
“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…” -Andrea...
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US Postal Service Stamps
Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches, but you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make...
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Vulcanite Dentures
Before the 1850s, dentures were made out of very hard, very painful and very expensive material, like gold or ivory. They were a luxury...
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Immersive Ideal
Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to...
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The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the...
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Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators
“There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators – those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they...
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Recognizably Anonymous
Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of...
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The Human-Human Interface
Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster...
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Billy Possum
It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it...
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The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet
United Nations Plaza sits in the center of San Francisco. Most people consider it a complete failure as a public space. Its central...
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Darth Vader Family Courthouse
It’s hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles,...
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Sound of Sport
If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good...
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The Steering Wheel
If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do...
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Super Bon Bonn
Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall,...
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Elegy for WTC
I want to be careful not to overstate what it means for a building to die. A building’s worth is an infinitesimal fraction of the worth a...
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The Speed of Light for Building Pyramids
Last year, Steve Burrows CBE (Principle at the engineering consulting firm Arup) spent several weeks in Egypt studying the pyramids through...
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A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll
If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships, you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line. This marking is...
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Design for Airports
When I spoke with Allison Arieff about the design of airports, she said to me, if all airports simply played Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1:...
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Feltron Annual Report
Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and...
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The Blue Yarn
In 1998 Dr. Gary Kaplan, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle received some bad news about his hospital. It was losing...
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Cul de Sac
When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort...
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Movie Title Sequences
More and more I’m finding that the first 2-3 minutes of a movie are my favorite part of the film. My life is devoted to the beautiful...
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Bridge to the Sky
There are rules that dicate what you can build and how. Rules of physics and rules of men who sit on various bureaucratic boards and...
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Chicago’s Jailhouse Skyscraper
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, is a federal jail right in the middle of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper,...
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Unsung Icons of Soviet Design
There’s something that links most of the everyday objects presented in “Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.” But it’s hard to...
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The Capitol Columns
If you were present for any of the presidential inaugurations, from Andrew Jackson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, you saw the solemn oath of...
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You Are Listening To + Radio Net
youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is...
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Free Speech Monument
In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would...
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BLDGBLOG: On Sound
Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise...
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Nikko Concrete Commando
In 2001, Delfin Vigil was walking the streets of San Francisco and ran across the name “Nikko” carved into the concrete sidewalk. After...
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RJDJ Reactive Music
This week, the radio audience heard episode #10, but for you web and podcast listeners, I have a story I did about a year and a half ago,...
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Liberation Squares plus NY Dick
In a recent piece from Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti (Professor at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at...
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Check Cashing Stores
A few years ago, journalist Douglas McGray learned that the largest chain of check cashing stores in Southern California, Nix Check...
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Concrete Furniture
The New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was the first modern, concrete, civic building in Toronto. When it opened in...
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A Designed Language
The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and...
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Sounds of the Artificial World
Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its...
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Periodic Table
Everyone knows it when they see it. The classic “castle with turrets” periodic table is a beautiful and concise icon that contains a great...
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Game Over (Snap Judgment)
99% Invisible Extra! The tape rolls as we witness the tearful end of a perfect online world. This is a piece I did for Snap Judgment, based...
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99% Guilt Free
“Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the...
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99% Undesigned
Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and...
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99% Sound and Feel
Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more...
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One Way Ticket To Mars
99% Invisible Extra! NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we leap to Mars, we might not...
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99% Private
Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but...
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99% Free Parking
It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently...
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99% Symbolic
Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn’t even know cities had their own flags. In Chicago, the city flag is everywhere. It’s...
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99% Forgotten
At the top of Mt. Olympus in San Francisco, on what was once thought to be the geographic center of the city, is a pedestal for a statue...
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99% Details
It’s a stick with bristles poking out of it. It doesn’t even qualify as a simple machine, but the careful thought and design that went into...
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99% Reality (only)
There’s not much that we can do about all the physical matter that’s been designed and built by someone else. It is the way it is. But with...
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99% Invisible: The Trailer
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly...
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