99% Invisible

99% Invisible presents Song Exploder. A song is a product of design. It’s difficult to create an original melody, but that’s only the...

In just about every movie set in New York City in the 1970s and 80s there’s an establishing shot with a graffiti-covered subway. For city...

When I go into a bank, especially if I have to stand in line waiting to make a deposit, my mind wanders. And one of the first place it...

The westernmost part of Manhattan, between 34th and 39th street, is pretty industrial. There’s a bus depot, a ferry terminal, and a steady...

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New...

About ten miles north of Concord, New Hampshire, off of interstate 93 there’s a little island with a great, big monument on it. The...

If you’ve wandered around Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum, or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you...

Uniforms matter. When it comes to sports, they might be the only thing to which we’re actually loyal. Sports uniforms are packaging. But...

When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the...

The name is important. It’s the first thing of any product you use or buy or see. The tip of the spear. You are bombarded by thousands of...

When George Laurer goes to the grocery store, he doesn’t tell the check-out people that he invented the barcode, but his wife used to point...

When it’s three o’clock in the morning and everything is going wrong in your life, there’s a certain kind of ad you might see on basic...

Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island...

A few years ago, reporter Sean Cole was working on a radio story and needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes. Sean was living in Boston...

At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today only about a mile is left standing. Compared with other famous walls in history,...

It started with some Pittsburgh humor. Pittsburgh-based comedian Tom Muisal does a bit about a GPS unit that can give directions in...

There is a beauty to a universal standard. The idea that people across the world can agree that when they interact with one specific thing,...

You know the saying: you can’t judge a book by its cover. With magazines, it’s pretty much the opposite. The cover of a magazine is the...

Like the best of these stories, the two bitter rivals started out as best friends: William Van Alen and Craig Severance. They were business...

On July 28, 1945, an airplane crashed into the Empire State Building. A B-25 bomber was flying a routine mission, chartering servicemen...