99% Invisible

No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who...

The Bowery, in lower Manhattan, is one of New York’s oldest neighborhoods. It’s been through a lot of iterations. In the 1650s, a handful...

In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state....

By the late 1980s, AIDS had been in the United States for almost a decade. AIDS had be the number one killer of young men in New York City,...

So many classic movies have been made in downtown Los Angeles. Though many don’t actually take place in downtown Los Angeles. L.A. has...

More than 90% of all automobile accidents are all attributable to human error, for some car industry people, a fully-automated car is a...

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers, three pilots, and nine flight attendants boarded an Airbus 330 in Rio de Janeiro. This...

Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice...

People who make horror movies know: if you want to scare someone, use scary music. Some of the most creative use of music and sound to...

This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries...

On January 3rd, 1961, Che Guevara suggested to Fidel Castro that they go play a round of golf. They drove out to what was then the...

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will...

We live in a post-billiards age. There was an age of billiards, and it has been over for so long, most of us have no idea how huge...

Retail spaces are designed for impulse shopping. When you go to a store looking for socks and come out with a new shirt, it’s only partly...

According to legend, Sarah Winchester’s friends advised the grieving widow to seek the services of a Boston spiritual medium named Adam...

During World War II, a massive recruitment effort targeted students from the top art schools across the country. These young designers,...

The pursuit of lock picking is as old as the lock, which is itself as old as civilization. But in the entire history of the world, there...

A month is hardly a unit of measurement. It can start on any day of the week and last anywhere from 28 to 31 days. Sometimes a month is...

Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no...

United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and...