99% Invisible

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...

At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and...

If you have ever caught even one minute of the history channel, you have seen fraktur. You’ve seen the font on Nazi posters, on Nazi office...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Journalist Sam Bloch used to live in Los Angeles. And while lots of people move to LA for the sun and the hot temperatures, Bloch noticed a...

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...

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...

The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm...

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...

“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county...

In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of...

Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more...

There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage....

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...

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...

To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of...

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...