99% Invisible
Episodes
Crude Habitat
23 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
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 of artific...
Atomic Tattoos
16 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations. There, fingers...
Mini-Stories: Volume 6
09 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
99% Invisible is starting the year off with the sixth installment of our staff mini-stories. Kicking off 2019 are a set of tales about a perpetual lie...
Gathering the Magic
01 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Magic: The Gathering is a card game and your goal is to knock your opponent down to zero points. But Magic: The Gathering also has a deep mythology ab...
Christmas with The Allusionist
26 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of The Allusionist podcast) Helen Zaltzma...
Mini-Stories: Volume 5
18 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s the end of 2018 and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. These are my favorite episodes of the year to make. Mini-stories are fun, quick ...
Bonus Episode- Avery talks Articles of Interest with Roman
14 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and use a bit of that money t...
The Accidental Room
12 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall. Plus, we look at t...
Oñate's Foot
05 Dec 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Juan de Oñate is one of the world’s lesser-known conquistadors, but his name can be found all over New Mexico. There are Oñate streets, Oñate sch...
Raccoon Resistance
27 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated the inn...
The Green Book redux
21 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The new film “Green Book” is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film, so I can’t speak to its merits or shortcomings, but while...
Orphan Drugs
14 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
We chronicle the epic struggle to get drugs that treat very rare diseases on the market, and the unintended consequence of that fight, which affected ...
Devolutionary Design
06 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of ...
A Year in the Dark
31 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Early on the morning of September 20th, 2017, a category four hurricane named Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico. It was a beast of a hurricane -- th...
Welcome to Jurassic Art
23 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel,...
The Worst Way to Start a City
16 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, guides us through the chaotic founding of Oklahoma City, which happened all in one day in 1889, in an event called ...
Punk Style: Articles of Interest #6
12 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There is this myth that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who, ...
Blue Jeans: Articles of Interest #5
09 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For the most part, we tend to keep our clothes relatively clean and avoid spills and rips and tears. But denim is so hard-wearing and hard-working tha...
Hawaiian Shirts: Articles of Interest #4
05 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There are a few ways to tell if you’re looking at an authentic, high-quality aloha shirt. If the pockets match the pattern, that’s a good sign, bu...
Pockets: Articles of Interest #3
02 Oct 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don’t open, or shallow pockets that can hardly hold more than a paperclip. If women's clothes have poc...
Plaid: Articles of Interest #2
28 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Lumberjacks wore plaid. Punks wore plaid mini skirts. The Beach Boys used to be called the Pendletones, and they wore plaid with their surfboards. Lot...
Kids' Clothes: Articles of Interest #1
25 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Clothes are records of the bodies we’ve lived in. Think of the old sweater that you used to have that's just not your style anymore, or the jeans th...
Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time
19 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The year was 1982, and in the small city of Allentown on the eastern edge of Pennsylvania sat an AM radio station called WSAN. For years, it had broad...
The House that Came in the Mail
11 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Sear & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early twentieth century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were subscriber...
The First Straw
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This...
Double Standards
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Blepharoplasty is often done to lift loose or sagging skin around the upper eyelids caused by aging. But for a lot of people of Asian descent, this s...
Bundyville
21 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Most of the American west is owned by the Federal Government. About 85 percent of Nevada, 61 percent of Alaska, 53 percent of Oregon, the list goes on...
It's Chinatown
14 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, or Las Veg...
Fire and Rain
08 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Nestled between the mountains and the ocean, right next to Santa Barbara, sits Montecito, California. The region endures a major fire approximately on...
Built to Burn
01 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After the massive Panorama Fire in southern California in 1980, a young fire researcher named Jack Cohen went in to investigate the houses that were d...
The Shipping Forecast
25 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And now the Ship...
Everything is Alive
18 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Louis is a can of generic cola. He’s been on the shelf a long while, so he’s had some time to think. Go2 is a store brand. "People call it a knock...
Interrobang
10 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the spring of 1962, an ad man named Martin Speckter was thinking about advertising when he realized something: many ads asked questions, but not ju...
Roman Mars on ZigZag
05 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This is a special presentation of episode #4 of Radiotopia's newest show ZigZag. Manoush and Jen give themselves 36 hours in San Francisco to come up ...
VIDEO- Why Danger Symbols Can't Last Forever with Vox
04 Jul 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The world is full of icons that warn us to be afraid — to stay away from this or not do that. And many of these are easy to understand because they ...
Right to Roam
27 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the...
Post-Narco Urbanism
20 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying 80...
The Barney Design
13 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Until the early 90s, basketball uniforms were pretty tame. There had been real limits to what could be done with jerseys. All the details—the number...
77 Steps
06 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
As the U.S. war effort ramped up in the early 1940s, the Navy put out a request for chair design submissions. They needed a chair that was fireproof, ...
The Vault
30 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans -- but it is also home to a vault containing seeds...
Curb Cuts
23 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it's easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the s...
Immobile Homes
16 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
"Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver "is that it's...
Breaking Bad News
09 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient -- that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious consequenc...
The Laff Box
01 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did w...
Gander International Airport
25 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and difficult through ...
The Hair Chart
17 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Andre Walker became famous for being Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist, but he is also known for something else: a system that he created back in the 199...
Lessons from Las Vegas
10 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. But as Denise Scott Bro...
Making it Rain
03 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The battlefield has always been at the mercy of the climate, but there was a time in U.S. military history when we did more than just pray for advanta...
Airships and the Future that Never Was
27 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the public imag...
Gerrymandering
21 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The way we draw our political districts has a huge effect on U.S. politics, but the process is also greatly misunderstood. Gerrymandering has become a...
Miss Manhattan Redux
14 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She has gone ...
Fordlandia
07 Mar 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and shipped th...
Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Future, Part 2)
28 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a "city of the...
Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)
21 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After World War 2, city planners in Amsterdam wanted to design the perfect “City of the Future.” They decided to build a new neighborhood, close t...
Making a Mark: Visual Identity with Tom Geismar
13 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Chase logo was introduced in 1961, when the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company merged to form the Chase Manhattan Bank. At ...
Border Wall
06 Feb 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wal...
Managed Retreat
31 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s it looked like the beloved, 200-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger. The sea was getting closer and threatening to swallow it...
Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud
23 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible A...
Thermal Delight
17 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
When air conditioning was invented in 1902, it was designed to take out the humidity in the air so printers could run four color magazines, without th...
Mini-Stories: Volume 4
10 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
This part two of the 2017/2018 mini-stories episodes, where Roman interviews the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little design storie...
Biomimicry- Vox + 99% Invisible Video
02 Jan 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Japan’s Shinkansen doesn’t look like your typical train. With its long and pointed nose, it can reach top speeds up to 150–200 miles per hour. I...
Mini-Stories: Volume 3
20 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 from someon...
Guerrilla Public Service Redux
12 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 freeway in Los ...
The Nut Behind the Wheel
05 Dec 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 drop has to d...
A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream
28 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic collision wi...
Money Makers
21 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 often preferre...
Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television
14 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 film, and a ...
Dollhouses of St. Louis
07 Nov 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 prosperous...
Oyster-tecture
31 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 creature i...
La Sagrada Familia
25 Oct 2017
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...
Half Measures
18 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way, in units t...
The Containment Plan
11 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 entire do...
The Athletic Brassiere
03 Oct 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title IX in 197...
Ponte City Tower
26 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something far more co...
The Finnish Experiment
19 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 can tak...
Coal Hogs Work Safe
12 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s, when minin...
The Age of the Algorithm
05 Sep 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether we’re likel...
Notes on an Imagined Plaque
29 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 memori...
Person in Lotus Position
22 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution pixelated images fr...
The Great Dismal Swamp
15 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British colonists...
The Stethoscope
09 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
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 about short...
Ways of Hearing
01 Aug 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When the tape started rolling in old analog recording studios, there was a feeling that musicians were about to capture a particular moment. On tape, ...
El Gordo
25 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In Spain, they do the lottery differently. First of all, it’s a country-wide obsession — about 75% of Spaniards buy a ticket. There’s more than ...
The Trials of Dan and Dave
18 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
This is the story of an ad campaign produced for the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona. Perennial runner-up in the sports shoe category, Reebok, was try...
Repackaging the Pill
11 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Most people are familiar with at least one version of the birth control pill’s packaging — a round plastic disc which opens like a shell and looks...
The Pool and the Stream
04 Jul 2017
Contributed by Lukas
This is the story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern Califor...
Mexico 68
27 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The 1968 Olympics took place in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first Games ever hosted in a Latin American country. And for Mexico City, the event wa...
You Should Do a Story
20 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
“You should do a story…” is the first line to a lot of the conversations you have when you work at 99pi. This week we look into a bunch of those...
In the Same Ballpark
13 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the downtown ha...
Intro to a new Roman Mars podcast: What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
08 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Special introductory episode to a new podcast produced by Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh. Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to Constitutional Law an...
The Yin and Yang of Basketball (Repeat)
07 Jun 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the height of th...
Squatters of the Lower East Side
30 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In 1987, three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Wrigley found herself on the edge of homelessness. She was trying to figure out where to st...
New Jersey
23 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. The uniform is joyful and b...
This Is Chance: Anchorwoman of the Great Alaska Earthquake
16 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
This episode was recorded live as part of the Radiotopia West Coast Tour. It was the middle of the night on March 27, 1964. Earlier that evening, the ...
The Modern Necropolis
09 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the town of Colma, California, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Located just ten miles south of San Francisco, Colma is filled w...
Reversing the Grid
02 May 2017
Contributed by Lukas
For most people, electricity only flows one way (into the home), but there are exceptions — people who use solar panels, for instance. In those case...
Sounds Natural
18 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to film animal...
The Architect of Hollywood
11 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Los Angeles is rich with architectural diversity. On the same block, you could find a retro-futuristic Googie diner next to a Spanish-style mansion, s...
Containers
04 Apr 2017
Contributed by Lukas
We’re based in beautiful downtown Oakland, CA which is a port city in the San Francisco Bay. Massive container ships travel across the Pacific and e...
Manzanar
28 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
When Warren Furutani was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s, he sometimes heard his parents refer to a place where they once spent time — a plac...