99% Invisible

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...

One study from 2018 found that Major League Baseball umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it...

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...

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...

On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods,...

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...

If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of...

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...

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...

This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all...

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...

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...

Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It...

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...

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...

Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one -- except we didn't actually talk about that...

Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer Avery Trufelman investigates our collectively held beliefs about...

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...

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...

The vuvuzela is a two foot long injection-molded plastic horn. It only plays one note: a B flat. And it gradually became a regular feature...