99% Invisible
Episodes
According to Need coming December 1
29 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle that asks: What are we doing to get people into housing? ...
The Great Indoors
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health and Happiness, and she notes that...
Sean Exploder
21 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As you might know, we have our own composer here at 99pi named Sean Real who works with the producers to score our episodes with original music that s...
In The Unlikely Event
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you’ve been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket. Every passenger plane, commercial...
You've Got Enron Mail!
11 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Enron collapsed nearly 20 years ago, but chances are something you use today was affected by emails sent by 150 of the company's top employees. These ...
The Lost Cities of Geo
03 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor helped make a w...
Take a Walk
27 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is walking...
99pi Presents The Next Billion Users
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And eve...
Sign Stealing
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the early days of baseball, sign-stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse ...
For the Love of Peat
13 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain five ...
Exploring The 99% Invisible City
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City book by host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt with a guided audio tour of beaut...
Goodnight Nobody
29 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon. G...
The Address Book
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on gre...
Highways 101
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Icons and symbols and signage are all around us, and nowhere more so than on the open road. So for this episode of Ubiquitous Icons: hop in the car wi...
Where Do We Go From Here?
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that panic ha...
Podcast Episode
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’...
The Revolutionary Post (Repeat)
25 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a letter. The s...
Policing the Open Road
11 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police de...
California Love Scared Straight
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related crimes. In th...
Valley of the Fallen
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It’s so big you can see it from miles away....
The Dolphin that Roared
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When Emily Oberman found a flag of the island nation of Anguilla her father had helped design in her attic, she had no idea it was connected to one of...
A Side of Franchise
14 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There are many books about McDonald’s that criticize the company for its many sins, and author Marcia Chatelain has read all of them. But her book c...
Freedom House Ambulance Service
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were working des...
Return of Oñate's Foot
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests against ...
Return of the Yokai
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s ...
Instant Gramification
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re on Instagram, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of one particular building called the Yardhouse. It was designed by the Lo...
Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12
09 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A wedding was once seen as a start of young adulthood. Now, a wedding has come to represent a crowning achievement -- a symbol that your whole life is...
Diamonds: Articles of Interest #11
29 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks actually worth? T...
Suits: Articles of Interest #10
26 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Menswear can seem boring. If you look at any award show, most of the men are dressed in black pants and black jackets. This uniform design can be trac...
Perfume: Articles of Interest #9
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't judge a scent s...
Knockoffs: Articles of Interest #8
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Brands hold immense sway over both consumers and the American legal system. Few know this as well as Dapper Dan, who went from street hustler to fashi...
A Fantasy of Fashion: Articles of Interest #7
12 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion dolls. It ...
The Natural Experiment
06 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running experi...
The Smell of Concrete After Rain
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There have been over 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. All have been tragic, but there are two people in particular we’ve lost...
Masking for a Friend
21 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Here in the US, we're not used to needing to cover half of our faces in public, but if you look at the other side of the world, it's a different story...
Unsheltered in Place
14 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
99% Invisible producer Katie Mingle had already been working on a series about unhoused people in the Bay Area for over a year when the current pandem...
Wipe Out
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you have tried to buy toilet paper in the last few weeks, you might have found yourself staring at an empty aisle in the grocery store, wondering w...
This Day in Esoteric Political History
31 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political historian Nicole H...
This is Chance! Redux
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the second-biggest earthquake ever measured at the time had hit Anchorage, Al...
Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are
17 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects Buy Beauty Pi...
Map Quests: Political, Physical and Digital
11 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The only truly accurate map of the world would be a map the size of the world. So if you want a map to be useful, something you can hold in your hands...
The Weather Machine
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 climactic real...
Over the Road
26 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and exchange s...
Fraktur
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 building...
Whomst Among Us Has Let The Dogs Out
12 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 about in...
Missing the Bus
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 climate change, ...
The Worst Video Game Ever
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 all ti...
Their Dark Materials
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 hole ...
Shade
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 real dark ...
Mini-Stories: Volume 8
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 that don’...
Mini-Stories: Volume 7
19 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 research for ano...
Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect
15 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate t...
The ELIZA Effect
11 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 MIT. It w...
The Infantorium
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and a...
Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl
27 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of mannequin ...
Cautionary Tales
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more likely. His bas...
Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness
13 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little ...
How To Pick A Pepper
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 peppers. ...
Great Bitter Lake Association
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 Bitter Lake As...
Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. ...
Unsure Footing
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 ball up, a...
The Kirkbride Plan
08 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ag...
The Help-Yourself City
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.” Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.” Informal urbanism covers al...
99% Invisible presents What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
24 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that the news cy...
Dead Cars
18 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Everything in Bethel, Alaska comes in by cargo plane or barge, and even when something stops working, it’s often too expensive and too inconvenient ...
The Pool and the Stream Redux
10 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in So...
Wait Wait...Tell Me!
04 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design ...
All Rings Considered
28 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really said somethin...
Peace Lines
21 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There are many walls in Belfast which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Some are fences that you can see through, while...
Model City
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of Sa...
On Beeing
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples and the li...
He's Still Neutral
31 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When confronted with trash piling up on a median in front of their home in Oakland, Dan and Lu Stevenson decided to try something unusual: they would ...
Invisible Women
23 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado Perez is the ...
Goodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine
17 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for decades:...
Built on Sand
09 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sand is so tiny and ubiquitous that it's easy to take for granted. But in his book The World in a Grain, author Vince Beiser traces the history of san...
The Universal Page
02 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s where An...
Life and Death in Singapore
25 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant concrete sk...
The Anthropocene Reviewed
18 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Rev...
The Barney Design redux
11 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our hometown tea...
The Automat
04 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The inside of a Horn & Hardart Automat looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria -- but instead of a human handing you hot food over a counter, you wo...
Depave Paradise
28 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city began piping w...
Sound and Health: Hospitals
24 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals.According to Joel Beck...
La Sagrada Familia (Repeat)
21 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 was built...
Sound and Health: Cities
17 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis o...
Weeding is Fundamental
14 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 practice of fr...
From Bombay with Love
07 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had comp...
Uptown Squirrel
01 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and exp...
Play Mountain
24 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 or art dea...
The Roman Mars Mazda Virus
16 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive certain ...
Froebel's Gifts
09 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 toward educati...
Three Things That Made the Modern Economy
02 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching...
The Many Deaths of a Painting
27 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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, but one...
Palaces for the People
19 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, a...
Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!
12 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades ago. How ...
The Known Unknown
06 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 monuments. When Pre...
Usonia Redux
26 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known wor...
Beneath the Ballpark
20 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 profile a...
National Sword
13 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 Materials R...
The Secret Lives of Color
05 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 of Color by ...
The Tunnel
30 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting the two buil...