99% Invisible

Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health and Happiness, and she...

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...

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,...

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...

Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor...

During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is...

This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first...

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...

When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands...

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...

The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight...

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...

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...

There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of...

After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class...

Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a...

Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the...

Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related...

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...

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...