99% Invisible

Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals.According to...

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...

Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a...

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...

From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet...

This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed...

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...

Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive...

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...

50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their...

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,...

Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or...

Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from...

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...

Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most...

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...

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...

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...

In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting...

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...