99% Invisible

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...

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...

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...

While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way,...

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...

Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of...

Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something...

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...

Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s,...

Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether...

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...

Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution...

On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British...

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...