99% Invisible
Episodes
The Falling of the Lenins
21 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On the night of December 8, 2013, a huge crowd gathered on a tree-lined boulevard in downtown Kiev, Ukraine. The crowd was there to watch as a statue ...
Negative Space: Logo Design with Michael Bierut
14 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Logos used to be a thing people didn’t really give much thought to. But over the last decade, the volume and intensity of arguments about logos have...
State (Sanctuary, Part 2)
08 Mar 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1980s, the United States experienced a refugee crisis. Thousands of Central Americans were fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, tra...
Church (Sanctuary, Part 1)
28 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1980s, Rev. John Fife and his congregation at Southside Presbyterian Church began to help Central American migrants fleeing persecution from US...
Atom in the Garden of Eden
21 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
As the world entered the Atomic Age, humankind faced a new fear that permeated just about every aspect of daily life: the threat of nuclear war. And w...
Usonia the Beautiful
15 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the buildings we live in shape the kinds of people we become. His aim was nothing short of rebuilding the entire cult...
Usonia 1
07 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Frank Lloyd Wright was a bombastic character that ultimately changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before...
The Eponymist
01 Feb 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Eponym (noun): A person after whom a discovery, invention, place, etc., is named or thought to be named; a name or noun formed after a person. An e...
The Revolutionary Post
24 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a l...
Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle
18 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
On January 3, 1979, two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department went to the home of Eulia May Love, a 39-year-old African-American mother. The...
Mini-Stories: Volume 2
10 Jan 2017
Contributed by Lukas
Part 2 where host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about...
Mini-Stories: Volume 1
20 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about design and a...
Plat of Zion
14 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The urban grid of Salt Lake City, Utah is designed to tell you exactly where you are in relation to Temple Square, one of the holiest sites for Mormon...
Guano Island
06 Dec 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world at the time....
NBC Chimes
29 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The NBC chimes may be the most famous sound in broadcasting. Originating in the 1920s, the three key sequential notes are familiar to generations of r...
Dollar Store Town
23 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Dollar stores are not just a U.S. phenomenon. They can be found in Australia and the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Mexico. And a lot of the stuf...
Reverb
16 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Through a combination of passive and active acoustics, architects and acousticians can control the sounds of spaces to fit any kind of need. With soun...
Ten Letters for the President
08 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
People who write the White House know that the president himself will most likely not see their message. Many of their letters start with phrases like...
The Shift
01 Nov 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Every now and again, a truly great athlete shatters all previous assumptions about what’s possible to achieve in a sport. When this happens, opposin...
Space Trash, Space Treasure
25 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1961 the upper stage of the rocket carrying the Transit 4A satellite blew up about two hours after launch. It was the first known hum...
McMansion Hell
18 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Few forms of contemporary architecture draw as much criticism as the McMansion, a particular type of oversized house that people love to hate. McMansi...
Half a House
11 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
On the night of February 27th, 2010, a magnitude of 8.8 earthquake hit Constitución, Chile and it was the second biggest that the world had seen in h...
Project Cybersyn
04 Oct 2016
Contributed by Lukas
On September 11, 1973, a military junta violently took control of Chile, which was led at the time by President Salvador Allende. Allende had become p...
Longbox (Repeat)
27 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Reporter Whitney Jones argues that R.E.M.’s Out of Time is the most politically significant album in the history of the United States. Because of it...
The Trend Forecast
20 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Who decides that the color this season is “mint green” or that denim jackets are “back?” Of course, there’s top-down fashion, where couture ...
Making Up Ground
13 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Large portions of San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong and Marseilles were built on top of human made land. What is now Mumbai, In...
Public Works
06 Sep 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Infrastructure makes modern civilization possible. Roads, power grids, sewage systems and water networks all underpin society as we know it, forming t...
On Average
23 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance rates, c...
Photo Credit
17 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school in Germany would go on to shape modern architecture, art, and design for decades to co...
A Sea Worth its Salt
09 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The largest body of water in California was formed by a mistake. In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge depression in...
The Magic Bureaucrat
03 Aug 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Congress undertook a reform effort to redesign the welfare system from one that many believed trapped people i...
Combat Hearing Loss
26 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The US military buys a lot of foam ear plugs. Visit any base and you’ll find them under the bleachers at the firing range, in the bottoms of washin...
America’s Last Top Model
19 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1943, the Army Corps of Engineers began construction on a scale model that could test flooding in all 1.25 million square miles of the Mississippi ...
The Mind of an Architect
13 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly creative scie...
Unpleasant Design
06 Jul 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Benches in parks, train stations, bus shelters and other public places are meant to offer seating, but only for a limited duration. Many elements of ...
Remembering Stonewall
29 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
It started with a place called the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars had been raided by police for decades. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people had b...
Home on Lagrange
22 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1968, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind’s greatest problems—issu...
The Blazer Experiment
14 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1968, the police department in Menlo Park, California hired a new police chief. His name was Victor Cizanckas and his main goal was to reform the d...
H-Day
07 Jun 2016
Contributed by Lukas
September 3rd, 1967, also known as H-Day, is etched in the collective memory of Sweden. That morning, millions of Swedes switched from driving on the ...
Holdout (Repeat)
31 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting up all ove...
Loud and Clear
25 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The Postal Ser...
Separation Anxiety
18 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
“Für Elise” is one of the world’s most widely-recognized pieces of music. The Beethoven melody has been played by pianists the world over, ...
Turf Wars of East New York
11 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Neighborhoods are constantly changing, but it tends to be the people with money and power who get to decide the shape of things to come. New York City...
The Grand Dame of Broad Street
04 May 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The...
Unseen City
27 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species. Walking down ...
Supertall 101
20 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of the small i...
Vox Ex Machina
13 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.”...
Soul City
06 Apr 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1960s, a civil rights leader named Floyd B. McKissick, at one time the head of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) proposed an idea f...
The White Elephant Of Tel Aviv
30 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning Shabbat schedu...
Flying Food
23 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on camera. It’...
The SoHo Effect
16 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In San Francisco, the area South of Market Street is called SoMa. The part of town North of the Panhandle is known as NoPa. Around the intersection o...
The Giftschrank
09 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Centuries ago, Germany came up with a way to keep books that contained “dangerous” information without releasing them to the general public: The G...
Mojave Phone Booth
02 Mar 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Situated in the middle of the Mojave desert, over a dozen miles from the nearest pavement, a lone phone booth sat along a dirt road, just waiting to b...
Video- The Norman Door with Vox
27 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
There is an epidemic of terrible doors in the world. But when Don Norman got frustrated with them, he ended up changing the way people everywhere thin...
The Green Book
24 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The middle of the 20th Century was a golden age for road travel in the United States. Cars had become cheap and spacious enough to carry families comf...
Miss Manhattan
17 Feb 2016
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 ...
The Yin and Yang of Basketball
10 Feb 2016
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 ...
The Ice King
03 Feb 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid-19th century, decades before home refrigeration became the norm, you could find ice clinking in glasses from India to the Caribbean, thanks...
Fish Cannon
27 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
The Iron Curtain was an 8,000-mile border separating East from West during the Cold War. Something unexpected evolved in the “no man’s land” tha...
The Fresno Drop
20 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1958, Bank of America began an experiment – one that would have far reaching effects on our lives and on the economy. They decided afte...
Best Enjoyed By
13 Jan 2016
Contributed by Lukas
Date labels (e.g. “use-by”, “sell-by”, “best-by”, “best if used by,” “expires on”, etc.) are on a lot of products. Forty-one state...
Bone Music
22 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and acquiring ...
Tube Benders
16 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more brightly th...
Pagodas and Dragon Gates
08 Dec 2015
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...
Worst Smell in the World
02 Dec 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Many material trifles, such as Silly Putty, started as attempts at serious inventions, but in rare cases, the process works in reverse: something deve...
Fixing the Hobo Suit
24 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume designers are lear...
The Landlord’s Game
18 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
From rock-paper-scissors, to tennis, to Mario Kart, every game is a designed system and all games are grounded in the same design principles. One popu...
Fountain Drinks
10 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On April 21st, 1859, an incredible thing happened in London and thousands of people came out to celebrate it. Women wore their finest clothing. Men we...
Butterfly Effects
04 Nov 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good ballot design ...
War and Pizza
28 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday convenienc...
Atmospherians
20 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The phrase ‘from Central Casting’ has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a stereotype or archetype, a subject so visually suited to its part ...
Structural Integrity (Rebroadcast)
14 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
99% Invisible is honored to accept a 2015 Third Coast International Audio Festival award for Structural Integrity, a story of architectural engineerin...
Rajneeshpuram
07 Oct 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,000 acres of mud...
Dead Letter Office
30 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
When something is lost in the mail, it feels like it has disappeared into the ether, like it was sucked into a black hole, like it no longer exists. B...
A Sweet Surprise Awaits You
23 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On the night of March 30, 2005, the Powerball jackpot was 25 million dollars. The grand prize winner was in Tennessee, but all over the United States,...
Milk Carton Kids
15 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On a Sunday morning in 1982, in Des Moines, Iowa, Johnny Gosch left his house to begin his usual paper route. A short time later, his parents were awa...
Reefer Madness
09 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the products yo...
Bathysphere
02 Sep 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world of possibili...
The Great Restoration
26 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has been a cas...
Lawn Order
19 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals have been de...
Hard to Love a Brute
12 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 turned ...
The Sunshine Hotel
05 Aug 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 of freed...
From the Sea, Freedom
29 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state. The resulting...
Awareness
22 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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, then of yo...
On Location
15 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 played almost...
Johnnycab (Automation Paradox, Pt. 2)
01 Jul 2015
Contributed by Lukas
More than 90% of all automobile accidents are all attributable to human error, for some car industry people, a fully-automated car is a kind of holy g...
Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)
24 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers, three pilots, and nine flight attendants boarded an Airbus 330 in Rio de Janeiro. This flight, Air Fra...
Freud’s Couch
17 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice and po...
All In Your Head
10 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 evoke fear and ...
Voices in the Wire
03 Jun 2015
Contributed by Lukas
This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and the Kitch...
Viva La Arquitectura!
27 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 ritziest, most elit...
The Nutshell Studies
20 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will end up the...
The Post-Billiards Age
13 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 billiards once was....
The Gruen Effect
06 May 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 your faul...
Mystery House
28 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
According to legend, Sarah Winchester’s friends advised the grieving widow to seek the services of a Boston spiritual medium named Adam Koombs. The ...
Show of Force
22 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
During World War II, a massive recruitment effort targeted students from the top art schools across the country. These young designers, artists, and...
Perfect Security
15 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 was only one ...
The Calendar
08 Apr 2015
Contributed by Lukas
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 four weeks lon...
Sandhogs
31 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no longer ha...
The Colour of Money (R)
25 Mar 2015
Contributed by Lukas
United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused attention...