99% Invisible

99% Invisible

Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. From award winning producer Roman Mars. Learn more at 99percentinvisible.org.

A proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.

קטגוריה: קריירה תגיות:
  • NEWS: We've got 99PI Power Broker Breakdown merch! Visit 99pi.org/store.This
    02:42:47 19/07/2024
  • When you hear the word "river," you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks
    00:43:36 16/07/2024
  • When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or perhaps you take your time and skip the opening act. But
    00:41:51 09/07/2024
  • 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
    00:26:01 02/07/2024
  • When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles
    00:52:55 25/06/2024
  • This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This
    02:58:55 21/06/2024
  • After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson
    00:39:06 18/06/2024
  • The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway?
    00:35:46 11/06/2024
  • For a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was incredibly
    00:44:13 04/06/2024
  • In late 2018, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists
    00:30:26 28/05/2024
  • Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of
    00:26:26 22/05/2024
  • This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This
    02:11:53 18/05/2024
  • In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt
    00:40:20 14/05/2024
  • The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade,
    00:37:16 07/05/2024
  • Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about
    00:32:18 03/05/2024
  • Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is
    00:56:15 30/04/2024
  • Situated right in downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the
    01:11:25 23/04/2024
  • This is the fourth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. Roman
    02:39:33 19/04/2024
  • This week we're featuring an episode from The Sporkful's series on the creation of "Anything's Pastable," Dan Pashman's new pasta cookbook.Dan
    00:44:43 16/04/2024
  • Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the
    00:35:18 09/04/2024
  • A chambre de bonne is usually one small room, on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building, and it’s usually just big enough
    00:33:22 02/04/2024
  • This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and interesting
    00:36:50 29/03/2024
  • A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about
    00:32:46 27/03/2024
  • In the middle of the 20th century, the small town of Jasper, Indiana did something that no other city had done before: they made garbage illegal.
    00:27:05 19/03/2024
  • This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 
    02:07:00 15/03/2024
  • This year marks the 40th anniversary of a lot of landmarks in pop culture, especially sci-fi and fantasy. So many franchises were born in
    00:39:12 13/03/2024
  • Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can
    00:42:39 05/03/2024
  • Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. Santa Fe
    00:33:21 02/03/2024
  • Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo,
    00:41:43 27/02/2024
  • It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on? Often, it’s impossible
    00:07:21 23/02/2024
  • What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours
    00:31:15 21/02/2024
  • This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. New
    01:45:20 16/02/2024
  • White Castle has its own take on fast food hamburgers. For starters, the patties are square, with five holes in each patty. And they’re small,
    00:42:59 13/02/2024
  • Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment
    00:33:38 06/02/2024
  • When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National
    00:39:44 30/01/2024
  • A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in
    00:37:07 26/01/2024
  • Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow
    00:51:47 24/01/2024
  • Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.
    01:33:17 19/01/2024
  • Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an
    00:34:30 16/01/2024
  • Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire
    00:34:53 09/01/2024
  • We're revisiting this Christmas classic from 2021. Happy Holidays!Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy,
    00:38:37 26/12/2023
  • It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short
    00:48:05 20/12/2023
  • Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count,
    00:33:41 13/12/2023
  • Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.The
    00:44:15 05/12/2023
  • Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes
    00:45:21 29/11/2023
  • The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper
    00:34:14 22/11/2023
  • In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the
    00:39:00 15/11/2023
  • In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages.  The city became
    00:34:58 07/11/2023
  • Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent
    00:40:59 31/10/2023
  • For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized
    00:35:58 24/10/2023
  • 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
    00:31:59 17/10/2023
  • Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait
    00:32:20 10/10/2023
  • Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig
    00:55:26 03/10/2023
  • This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes."
    00:34:23 26/09/2023
  • The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider
    00:40:32 19/09/2023
  • Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When
    00:29:04 12/09/2023
  • All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you've listened to over and over again. And
    00:38:42 05/09/2023
  • In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom loop.’
    00:32:55 29/08/2023
  • The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.The way a person's
    00:50:26 22/08/2023
  • Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the first
    00:34:07 15/08/2023
  • We deconstruct and examine what might be the original designed object-- the humble trail. We discuss how park trails are designed, what makes
    00:35:06 08/08/2023
  • Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the Consumer
    00:29:01 01/08/2023
  • Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now
    00:47:38 25/07/2023
  • This past May, the city of Los Angeles rolled out a brand new, state-of-the art feature for bus shelters. It’s called La Sombrita. La Sombrita
    00:29:50 18/07/2023
  • In the 1980s, the little Christian comic books known as Chick Tracts were EVERYWHERE. You’d find them in movie theaters and bus station bathrooms,
    00:34:59 11/07/2023
  • In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity.Proximity founder Ryan Coogler
    00:30:23 05/07/2023
  • This week we're featuring an episode of The Last ArchiveThe Last Archive is
    00:53:29 27/06/2023
  • After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in
    00:34:23 20/06/2023
  • Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is a particularly iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. This recording blares from
    00:34:37 13/06/2023
  • As electronic news gathering was gaining prominence in the early 20th century, the American Bar Association began to fear its effect on court
    00:36:56 06/06/2023
  • The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight
    00:43:45 31/05/2023
  • Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with
    00:31:17 23/05/2023
  • LA might be the most extreme parking city on the planet. Parking regulations have made it nearly impossible to build new affordable housing,
    00:26:48 17/05/2023
  • In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),
    00:37:43 09/05/2023
  • Bad closed captions can be entertaining, but  they can be serious, too, because captions are a critical tool for lots of lots of people. There
    00:32:41 02/05/2023
  • There's a new movie out called Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. It’s a fun and extremely meta biopic telling the story of Roger
    00:29:55 25/04/2023
  • Last year, Roman Mars teamed up with Hank Green to guest host Dear Hank & John -- this year he's back on the Greens' show once again,
    01:05:18 19/04/2023
  • From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though the odds of winning a
    00:39:07 11/04/2023
  • Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in
    00:43:55 04/04/2023
  • The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. In the original design, all the cells are built around a central guard
    00:37:11 29/03/2023
  • Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly 112
    00:44:23 21/03/2023
  • The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable
    00:32:41 17/03/2023
  • Back when whale oil was mainly used as a fuel to burn in lanterns and streetlights, an enterprising man named William F. Nye found a new way
    00:34:38 14/03/2023
  •  If we’ve learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo! and MySpace, it’s that internet darlings rise and fall. And
    00:43:17 07/03/2023
  • One study from 2018 found that Major League Baseball umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes
    00:27:40 28/02/2023
  • In the 1980s a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative used cute images of a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat to
    00:32:16 22/02/2023
  • When LA punks were looking for a place to play in the late 1970s, Chinatown welcomed the unruly scene. But it was an uneasy alliance that
    00:43:14 14/02/2023
  • On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods,
    00:50:58 08/02/2023
  • In the 20th century, Iowa high school girls basketball was HUGE but it was not the game we know today. In 6-on-6 basketball, the three forwards
    00:41:48 31/01/2023
  • If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of
    00:42:05 24/01/2023
  • Back in 2017 we ran an episode about the history of Brazil's iconic, yellow national soccer jersey. We were reminded of that story during
    00:34:07 17/01/2023
  • We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersection of a street and
    00:33:50 10/01/2023
  • This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all
    00:36:57 21/12/2022
  • The whole conceit of this show is that if look at the world in the right way, you’ll see stories everywhere. Some of the stories are epic
    00:37:16 14/12/2022
  • If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed
    00:46:15 06/12/2022
  • Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It restricts
    00:29:36 29/11/2022
  • Los Angeles' El Peatonito is part of a subset of real life superheroes who are more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on
    00:26:53 22/11/2022
  • When people ask me what my favorite episode of 99% Invisible is, I have a hard time answering. Not because they’re all my precious little
    00:45:16 16/11/2022
  • Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one -- except we didn't actually talk about that
    00:32:22 09/11/2022
  • Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer
    00:37:06 02/11/2022
  • The basic mechanics of the bike are pretty simple --- it’s basically a triangle with wheels and a chain drive to propel it forward. No batteries
    00:33:17 25/10/2022
  • Even if you haven't made the pilgrimage to Southern California, you can probably already picture what the Walk of Fame looks like. It's a
    00:47:20 18/10/2022
  • The vuvuzela is a two foot long injection-molded plastic horn. It only plays one note: a B flat. And it gradually became a regular feature
    00:32:12 11/10/2022
  • Jamaica is famous around the world for its music, including genres like ska, dub, and reggae. It’s tempting to think that the powerful amplifiers
    00:42:01 04/10/2022
  • The magical mythical "jackalope" is a essentially a horned rabbit, with antlers of different sizes and shapes. The jackalope is a mascot of
    00:34:14 28/09/2022
  • On this special feature episode, President Bill Clinton interviews 99% Invisible host and creator Roman Mars.Roman Mars has spent his
    00:49:12 20/09/2022
  • Adam Rogers has been thinking and writing about what’s known in the industry simply as "search." For the last decade, people have been grumbling
    00:36:12 14/09/2022
  • In downtown Windhoek, Namibia -- at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue -- there's an imposing gold building
    00:36:25 06/09/2022
  • Back in March, Netflix picked up a long running Japanese TV program based on a children’s book from the 1970s. The show is called Old Enough,
    00:28:58 30/08/2022
  • There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are
    00:31:54 23/08/2022
  • In the final week of the  most recent term, the Supreme Court decided to limit one constitutional right (abortion) and expand another constitutional
    00:29:25 18/08/2022
  • A few years back, 99pi producer Emmett FitzGerald brought us a beautiful story about peat bogs. Peat is essential for biodiversity and for
    00:40:11 10/08/2022
  • In the final episode of our vernacular spectacular anniversary series, 99pi producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories
    00:34:52 03/08/2022
  • Only a small percentage of architecture is actually designed by architects. And while a famous architect-designed tower in a skyline might
    00:30:23 26/07/2022
  • For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived -- and even
    00:33:40 19/07/2022
  • Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the
    00:39:37 12/07/2022
  • 99% Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an unusually
    00:43:04 05/07/2022
  • Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland. Russia and Japan have long fought over the territory, which has left the ethnic
    00:37:55 28/06/2022
  • The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the
    00:44:31 21/06/2022
  • No teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra
    00:35:47 14/06/2022
  • Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that's what we were taught in school. But when historians go searching…there’s no proof
    00:31:14 07/06/2022
  • Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private collections.
    00:32:45 01/06/2022
  • In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward
    00:32:19 24/05/2022
  • Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family
    00:37:29 18/05/2022
  • The greatest mode of transportation is the funicular, which is a special kind of train pulled by a cable that runs up steep slopes. But trains
    00:32:43 10/05/2022
  • Bonus episode: Roman Mars on Blank Check with Griffin and David talking about The Quick and The
    02:17:10 06/05/2022
  • Data is the lifeblood of public health, and has been since the beginning of the field. But essential data gathering for the COVID pandemic
    00:58:25 04/05/2022
  • If you’ve ever been to a supermarket in the US, you’ve probably seen an ethnic food aisle. Maybe it was called the "international aisle,"
    00:36:49 26/04/2022
  • Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated expedition
    00:45:36 20/04/2022
  • Every year in the spring, small towns throughout New England host their annual town meeting. Town meetings take place in high school gyms
    00:47:05 13/04/2022
  • While urban parks are safe havens for birds, parks are often surrounded by condos and hotels and office buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows.
    00:27:37 05/04/2022
  • So why don't we have mouth Roombas? Is the universe full of chickens? What scientific advances are happening? What was the first internet
    00:58:49 30/03/2022
  • In February 2021, it began to snow in Austin, Texas, which was unusual, and exciting for some, at least until the power dropped out for millions
    00:49:37 22/03/2022
  • Natalie de Blois contributed to some of the most iconic Modernist works created for corporate America, all while raising four children. After
    00:49:51 15/03/2022
  • While something like dial-up might mostly be a thing of the past, the truth is copper phone lines still connect a lot of people to the internet
    00:43:18 11/03/2022
  • In the 1990s Dave Davis worked as the groundskeeper at a small neighborhood park in a suburb of St. Louis called Creve Coeur. It was an unpaid
    00:37:09 08/03/2022
  • The Columbia Journalism School recently announced the 16 winners of the 2022 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, including According
    00:59:59 01/03/2022
  • There's a small neighborhood within the SEZ of Shenzhen that is known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art,
    00:40:58 22/02/2022
  • On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But
    00:49:54 16/02/2022
  • People have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. The 20th century was
    00:42:36 09/02/2022
  • When the two greatest auction houses in the world – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth
    00:31:00 02/02/2022
  • The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a reaction to the failures of government at
    00:39:39 25/01/2022
  • At the end of the calendar year and into the new year the 99pi staff collects a bunch of short, joyful little stories that are fun to produce
    00:35:36 19/01/2022
  • We're kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: a strange collision of mundane infrastructure
    00:50:27 12/01/2022
  • It's that time of year again! When 99pi producers and friends of the show join Roman to tell shorter stories, many of which have been sitting
    00:47:18 22/12/2021
  • Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green
    00:37:59 15/12/2021
  • For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just
    00:43:23 07/12/2021
  • In much of the western world, alphabetical order is simply a default we take for granted. It’s often the one we try first -- or the one we
    00:31:59 01/12/2021
  • The French bulldog is now the second most popular breed in America. Their cute features, portable size, and physical features make for a dog
    00:26:29 23/11/2021
  • Fitness trends come and go. But the simple weight is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized
    00:45:39 17/11/2021
  • Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices
    00:32:18 10/11/2021
  • Born in 1872, American architect and engineer Julia Morgan designed hundreds of buildings over her prolific career, famous for her work on
    00:42:09 02/11/2021
  • At a glance, the border between the United States and Canada would seem to be at the friendlier end of the international boundary spectrum.
    00:43:35 26/10/2021
  • Margarine is yellow, like butter, but it hasn't always been. At times and in places, it has been a bland white, or even a dull pink. These
    00:26:31 19/10/2021
  • Rioters carried many familiar flags during the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol -- Confederate, MAGA, as well as some
    00:31:29 12/10/2021
  • The Sears & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were subscribers. Anyone
    00:33:06 05/10/2021
  • When it comes to English spelling and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why
    00:30:28 28/09/2021
  • Presidential libraries are tributes to greatness, "[a] self-congratulatory, almost fictional account of someone's achievements, where all
    01:04:26 21/09/2021
  • The great Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, stops by to tell
    00:20:42 14/09/2021
  • Axolotls are nature’s great regenerators. They are able to grow back not just their tails, but also legs, arms, even parts of vital organs,
    00:31:53 07/09/2021
  • In 2015 the world was divided into two warring factions overnight. And at the center of this schism was a single photograph. Cecilia Bleasdale
    00:32:12 31/08/2021
  • What does water mean to you? In this feature, author Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), actress Joy Bryant, submarine pilot Erika Bergman,
    00:34:57 17/08/2021
  • When Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt were promoting The 99% Invisible City in late 2020, one question
    00:31:37 10/08/2021
  • Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was often known simply as “Kniga” (translated: "book") because it was one
    00:42:27 04/08/2021
  • Britt Young is a geographer and tech writer based in the Bay Area. She also has what's called a "congenital upper limb deficiency." In other
    00:40:19 27/07/2021
  • Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from
    00:39:04 20/07/2021
  • Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the
    00:46:17 14/07/2021
  • Every year, fights break out on airplanes. They happen between the people who lean back in their seats, and the people who get their knees
    00:30:18 29/06/2021
  • We revisit Katie Mingle's Right to Roam episode as we say goodbyeIn the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is
    00:34:30 23/06/2021
  • After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the
    00:34:43 15/06/2021
  • Correction: Our staff producer pronounced the the Japanese word "ōbōn" incorrectly in this episode. It is pronounced OH-bohn not
    00:44:14 08/06/2021
  • After Producer Katie Mingle's mom wrote a romance novel, Katie set out to understand the romance genre and its classic covers. There was a
    00:38:08 02/06/2021
  • Most people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about their toilets, but they are both a modern marvel while also being somewhat of
    00:36:54 25/05/2021
  • For the most part, we take time for granted; maybe we don’t have enough of it, but we at least know how it works --- well, most of the time.
    00:53:37 19/05/2021
  • Today, Berlin is one of the premier destinations for techno music fans. People come from all over the world to party all night to the rhythmic
    00:44:04 11/05/2021
  • If you look around you right now, about 90% of what you’re looking at came to you onboard a cargo ship—your television, your sofa, most of
    00:28:17 04/05/2021
  • 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
    00:48:24 28/04/2021
  • On the show this week, we’re bringing you an episode of a new podcast called, La Brega. And to tell us all about the series is Alana Casanova-Burgess.
    00:51:58 20/04/2021
  • Kurt and Roman talk about icebergs and how we visualize them all wrong. Plus, we visit a classic 99pi story by Emmett FitzGerald about
    00:35:56 14/04/2021
  • Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo,
    00:41:54 07/04/2021
  • More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a different
    00:37:01 30/03/2021
  • In the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature, but now that we’ve spent some time with the consequences, such as species
    00:30:53 23/03/2021
  • Back in the early 1990s, movie theaters weren't that great. The auditoriums were cramped and narrow, and the screen was dim. But in 1995,
    00:33:46 16/03/2021
  • Idaho was the first state to slap a slogan on a license plate, “Idaho Potatoes,” which may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out this
    00:34:07 09/03/2021
  • Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but
    00:37:17 02/03/2021
  • Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress
    00:33:01 23/02/2021
  • The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most believe
    00:36:05 16/02/2021
  • Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast
    00:36:51 12/02/2021
  • Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the
    00:33:02 09/02/2021
  • Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast
    00:03:37 08/02/2021
  • Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe (mudbrick) look that came to be called Pueblo Revival. This aesthetic
    00:43:48 02/02/2021
  • Cities around the world have distinctive modes of transportation -- the canals of Venice, the double-decker busses of London, and the Twin
    00:43:15 26/01/2021
  • In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from the Fresh Air Movement to the lost
    00:49:29 20/01/2021
  • In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from climate-changing sheep to the persistent
    00:40:21 12/01/2021
  • Each year, 99% Invisible producers select short design stories to talk about with host Roman Mars. Some of these were just too brief to make
    00:40:36 22/12/2020
  • Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorn on Bullseye
    00:36:58 18/12/2020
  • If homelessness is the problem, housing is the solution. But it’s not always that simple. Kate Cody has been living in her encampment community
    00:48:02 15/12/2020
  • When Tulicia Lee tried to get help with housing, she was essentially put on a big long list with a bunch of other homeless people. If you
    00:30:31 11/12/2020
  • In the 1980's, a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis was working with mentally ill homeless people on the streets of New York. Sometimes, when
    00:31:48 08/12/2020
  • Katie Mingle heard a lot about 211 doing this reporting. Not just from Tulicia Lee who called a bunch of times, but from everyone—from homeless
    00:34:19 04/12/2020
  • When we think about homelessness, we often have a certain image in our mind—people pushing shopping carts, or big sprawling tent encampments. But
    00:33:01 01/12/2020
  • The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is
    00:17:24 01/12/2020
  • According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle that asks: What are we doing
    00:02:52 29/11/2020
  • Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings
    00:27:19 25/11/2020
  • 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
    00:31:02 21/11/2020
  • 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
    00:30:25 18/11/2020
  • 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.
    00:31:54 11/11/2020
  • Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor helped
    00:42:38 03/11/2020
  • During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your
    00:33:18 27/10/2020
  • This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first
    00:20:27 23/10/2020
  • 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
    00:28:14 20/10/2020
  • When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain
    00:39:59 13/10/2020
  • We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City
    00:41:08 06/10/2020
  • The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight
    00:44:13 29/09/2020
  • 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
    00:26:29 22/09/2020
  • 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
    00:35:07 15/09/2020
  • 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
    00:36:29 09/09/2020
  • After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families
    00:35:27 01/09/2020
  • Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to
    00:19:17 25/08/2020
  • Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel,
    00:37:55 11/08/2020
  • Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related crimes.
    00:40:32 04/08/2020
  • 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
    00:35:00 29/07/2020
  • 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
    00:40:40 21/07/2020
  • 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
    00:38:07 14/07/2020
  • One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were
    00:44:11 08/07/2020
  • All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests
    00:53:50 30/06/2020
  • 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
    00:34:06 24/06/2020
  • 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
    00:33:52 16/06/2020
  • 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
    00:28:54 09/06/2020
  • Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks actually
    00:31:20 29/05/2020
  • 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
    00:32:30 26/05/2020
  • 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
    00:29:48 19/05/2020
  • 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
    00:31:04 15/05/2020
  • In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion
    00:39:57 12/05/2020
  • In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running
    01:09:21 06/05/2020
  • 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
    00:28:31 29/04/2020
  • 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
    00:38:56 21/04/2020
  • 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
    00:43:38 14/04/2020
  • 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,
    00:30:58 07/04/2020
  • In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political historian
    00:32:47 31/03/2020
  • 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,
    00:45:29 25/03/2020
  • 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
    00:18:10 17/03/2020
  • 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
    00:41:59 11/03/2020
  • 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
    00:29:48 03/03/2020
  • At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and
    00:44:34 26/02/2020
  • 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
    00:37:25 19/02/2020
  • 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
    00:38:34 12/02/2020
  • 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
    00:35:46 05/02/2020
  • 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
    00:26:37 28/01/2020
  • 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
    00:38:43 22/01/2020
  • 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
    00:30:47 15/01/2020
  • 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
    00:50:37 07/01/2020
  • 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
    00:40:55 19/12/2019
  • The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to
    00:05:38 15/12/2019
  • 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
    00:45:25 11/12/2019
  • “Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs
    00:34:49 03/12/2019
  • In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of
    00:41:22 27/11/2019
  • 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.
    00:31:23 19/11/2019
  • There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage.
    00:35:57 13/11/2019
  • 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
    00:35:46 05/11/2019
  • 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.
    00:33:04 30/10/2019
  • To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of
    00:27:52 23/10/2019
  • 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
    00:26:40 15/10/2019
  • Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not
    00:39:05 08/10/2019
  • There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.”  Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.”  Informal urbanism covers all
    00:31:41 01/10/2019
  • 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
    00:40:05 24/09/2019
  • 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
    00:36:21 18/09/2019
  • 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
    00:40:51 10/09/2019
  • Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out
    00:31:56 04/09/2019
  • 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
    00:36:54 28/08/2019
  • There are many walls in Belfast which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Some are fences that you can see through,
    00:35:26 21/08/2019
  • 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
    01:01:30 13/08/2019
  • Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples
    00:24:53 06/08/2019
  • 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:
    00:32:55 31/07/2019
  • 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
    00:27:07 23/07/2019
  • Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for
    00:41:28 17/07/2019
  • 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
    00:36:41 09/07/2019
  • 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
    00:38:30 02/07/2019
  • When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant
    00:33:25 25/06/2019
  • The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On
    01:04:59 18/06/2019
  • 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
    00:25:49 11/06/2019
  • 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,
    00:35:02 04/06/2019
  • Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the
    00:36:15 28/05/2019
  • Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals. According
    00:17:22 24/05/2019
  • 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
    00:31:44 21/05/2019
  • 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
    00:19:09 17/05/2019
  • 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
    00:37:57 14/05/2019
  • From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union
    00:33:17 07/05/2019
  • 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
    00:30:01 01/05/2019
  • 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
    00:37:16 24/04/2019
  • Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive
    00:52:17 16/04/2019
  • 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
    00:23:57 09/04/2019
  • 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and
    00:28:07 02/04/2019
  • 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,
    00:40:47 27/03/2019
  • Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications,
    00:44:07 19/03/2019
  • Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades
    00:27:14 12/03/2019
  • 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.
    00:45:14 06/03/2019
  • Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known
    00:39:54 26/02/2019
  • 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
    00:30:45 20/02/2019
  • 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
    00:41:13 13/02/2019
  • 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
    00:44:58 05/02/2019
  • In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting
    00:46:48 30/01/2019
  • 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
    00:35:26 23/01/2019
  • 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,
    00:34:37 16/01/2019
  • 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
    00:48:40 09/01/2019
  • 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
    00:30:03 01/01/2019
  • For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of
    00:36:50 26/12/2018
  • 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,
    00:43:45 18/12/2018
  • Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and
    00:11:03 14/12/2018
  • 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,
    00:34:37 12/12/2018
  • 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
    00:43:11 05/12/2018
  • After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated
    00:25:54 27/11/2018
  • 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
    00:27:30 21/11/2018
  • We chronicle the epic struggle to get drugs that treat very rare diseases on the market, and the unintended consequence of that fight, which
    00:27:39 14/11/2018
  • 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
    00:32:50 06/11/2018
  • 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
    00:32:24 31/10/2018
  • 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
    00:28:42 23/10/2018
  • Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, guides us through the chaotic founding of Oklahoma City, which happened all in one day in 1889,
    00:31:07 16/10/2018
  • 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
    00:30:48 12/10/2018
  • 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
    00:26:05 09/10/2018
  • 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
    00:23:18 05/10/2018
  • 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
    00:21:13 02/10/2018
  • Lumberjacks wore plaid. Punks wore plaid mini skirts. The Beach Boys used to be called the Pendletones, and they wore plaid with their surfboards.
    00:18:55 28/09/2018
  • 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
    00:23:52 25/09/2018
  • 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,
    00:28:49 19/09/2018
  • The Sear & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early twentieth century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were
    00:32:11 11/09/2018
  • 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
    00:24:49 05/09/2018
  • 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,
    00:25:41 29/08/2018
  • 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
    00:42:43 21/08/2018
  • For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles,
    00:35:53 14/08/2018
  • Nestled between the mountains and the ocean, right next to Santa Barbara, sits Montecito, California. The region endures a major fire approximately
    00:30:25 08/08/2018
  • After the massive Panorama Fire in southern California in 1980, a young fire researcher named Jack Cohen went in to investigate the houses
    00:31:54 01/08/2018
  • Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And
    00:27:53 25/07/2018
  • 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
    00:32:03 18/07/2018
  • In the spring of 1962, an ad man named Martin Speckter was thinking about advertising when he realized something: many ads asked questions,
    00:32:05 10/07/2018
  • This is a special presentation of episode #4 of Radiotopia's newest show ZigZag. Manoush and Jen give themselves 36 hours in San Francisco
    00:31:30 05/07/2018
  • 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
    00:07:16 04/07/2018
  • 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
    00:28:21 27/06/2018
  • In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying
    00:37:24 20/06/2018
  • 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
    00:22:36 13/06/2018
  • 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
    00:23:57 06/06/2018
  • 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
    00:27:06 30/05/2018
  • 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
    00:45:14 23/05/2018
  • "Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver "is
    00:28:50 16/05/2018
  • When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient -- that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious
    00:39:03 09/05/2018
  • For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened?
    00:39:58 01/05/2018
  • The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and difficult
    00:25:22 25/04/2018
  • 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
    00:23:10 17/04/2018
  • 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
    00:33:19 10/04/2018
  • 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
    00:28:22 03/04/2018
  • They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the
    00:19:13 27/03/2018
  • The way we draw our political districts has a huge effect on U.S. politics, but the process is also greatly misunderstood. Gerrymandering
    00:44:51 21/03/2018
  • All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She
    00:24:15 14/03/2018
  • 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
    00:30:11 07/03/2018
  • The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a
    00:33:01 28/02/2018
  • After World War 2, city planners in Amsterdam wanted to design the perfect “City of the Future.” They decided to build a new neighborhood,
    00:23:29 21/02/2018
  • 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
    00:27:11 13/02/2018
  • When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border
    00:28:48 06/02/2018
  • 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
    00:31:42 31/01/2018
  • Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics:
    00:31:36 23/01/2018
  • 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,
    00:28:40 17/01/2018
  • This part two of the 2017/2018 mini-stories episodes, where Roman interviews the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little design
    00:39:48 10/01/2018
  • 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.
    00:06:45 02/01/2018
  • 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
    00:37:47 20/12/2017
  • 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
    00:20:39 12/12/2017
  • 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
    00:31:35 05/12/2017
  • While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic collision
    00:53:48 28/11/2017
  • 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
    00:19:53 21/11/2017
  • 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
    00:26:35 14/11/2017
  • 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
    00:27:55 07/11/2017
  • 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
    00:29:05 31/10/2017
  • 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
    00:31:44 25/10/2017
  • The United States is one of just a handful of countries that that isn’t officially metric. Instead, Americans measure things our own way,
    00:25:41 18/10/2017
  • 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
    00:24:38 11/10/2017
  • Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title
    00:23:39 03/10/2017
  • Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something
    00:29:10 26/09/2017
  • 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
    00:28:42 19/09/2017
  • Coal miner stickers started out as little advertisements that the manufacturers of mining equipment handed out. Even before the late 1960s,
    00:19:25 12/09/2017
  • Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether we’re
    00:21:05 05/09/2017
  • 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
    00:13:04 29/08/2017
  • Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution pixelated
    00:28:01 22/08/2017
  • On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British colonists
    00:24:27 15/08/2017
  • 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
    00:19:12 09/08/2017
  • When the tape started rolling in old analog recording studios, there was a feeling that musicians were about to capture a particular moment.
    00:37:36 01/08/2017
  • 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
    00:22:53 25/07/2017
  • 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,
    00:52:18 18/07/2017
  • 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
    00:17:51 11/07/2017
  • 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
    00:30:34 04/07/2017
  • 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,
    00:21:58 27/06/2017
  • “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
    00:25:38 20/06/2017
  • In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the
    00:24:45 13/06/2017
  • Special introductory episode to a new podcast produced by Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh. Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to Constitutional
    00:11:23 08/06/2017
  • In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the
    00:19:40 07/06/2017
  • 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
    00:22:59 30/05/2017
  • The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. The uniform is
    00:19:13 23/05/2017
  • 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,
    00:27:13 16/05/2017
  • 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
    00:17:37 09/05/2017
  • For most people, electricity only flows one way (into the home), but there are exceptions — people who use solar panels, for instance. In
    00:25:30 02/05/2017
  • In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to
    00:22:43 18/04/2017
  • Los Angeles is rich with architectural diversity. On the same block, you could find a retro-futuristic Googie diner next to a Spanish-style
    00:19:48 11/04/2017
  • 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
    00:30:28 04/04/2017
  • 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
    00:23:57 28/03/2017
  • 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
    00:22:54 21/03/2017
  • 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
    00:44:36 14/03/2017
  • In the 1980s, the United States experienced a refugee crisis. Thousands of Central Americans were fleeing civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala,
    00:27:58 08/03/2017
  • In the 1980s, Rev. John Fife and his congregation at Southside Presbyterian Church began to help Central American migrants fleeing persecution
    00:26:43 28/02/2017
  • 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
    00:17:58 21/02/2017
  • 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
    00:18:42 15/02/2017
  • Frank Lloyd Wright was a bombastic character that ultimately changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings.
    00:24:40 07/02/2017
  • 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.
    00:27:59 01/02/2017
  • Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way
    00:17:53 24/01/2017
  • 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
    00:19:41 18/01/2017
  • 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
    00:29:38 10/01/2017
  • Host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about design
    00:27:17 20/12/2016
  • 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
    00:17:01 14/12/2016
  • In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world
    00:18:46 06/12/2016
  • The NBC chimes may be the most famous sound in broadcasting. Originating in the 1920s, the three key sequential notes are familiar to generations
    00:13:03 29/11/2016
  • 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
    00:15:59 23/11/2016
  • Through a combination of passive and active acoustics, architects and acousticians can control the sounds of spaces to fit any kind of need.
    00:18:49 16/11/2016
  • People who write the White House know that the president himself will most likely not see their message. Many of their letters start with
    00:14:00 08/11/2016
  • Every now and again, a truly great athlete shatters all previous assumptions about what’s possible to achieve in a sport. When this happens,
    00:16:21 01/11/2016
  • 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
    00:16:35 25/10/2016
  • Few forms of contemporary architecture draw as much criticism as the McMansion, a particular type of oversized house that people love to hate.
    00:13:19 18/10/2016
  • 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
    00:18:03 11/10/2016
  • On September 11, 1973, a military junta violently took control of Chile, which was led at the time by President Salvador Allende. Allende
    00:21:03 04/10/2016
  • 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
    00:18:29 27/09/2016
  • 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
    00:15:32 20/09/2016
  • 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
    00:18:47 13/09/2016
  • Infrastructure makes modern civilization possible. Roads, power grids, sewage systems and water networks all underpin society as we know it,
    00:13:20 06/09/2016
  • In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance
    00:17:41 23/08/2016
  • Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school in Germany would go on to shape modern architecture, art, and design for decades
    00:18:40 17/08/2016
  • The largest body of water in California was formed by a mistake. In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge depression
    00:17:35 09/08/2016
  • In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Congress undertook a reform effort to redesign the welfare system from one that many believed trapped
    00:32:44 03/08/2016
  • 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
    00:16:18 26/07/2016
  • 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
    00:19:22 19/07/2016
  • In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly creative
    00:21:31 13/07/2016
  • Benches in parks, train stations, bus shelters and other public places are meant to offer seating, but only for a limited duration. Many elements
    00:13:59 06/07/2016
  • It started with a place called the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars had been raided by police for decades. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
    00:26:33 29/06/2016
  • In 1968, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind’s greatest problems—issues
    00:26:09 22/06/2016
  • 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
    00:21:42 14/06/2016
  • September 3rd, 1967, also known as H-Day, is etched in the collective memory of Sweden. That morning, millions of Swedes switched from driving
    00:15:58 07/06/2016
  • Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting
    00:16:04 31/05/2016
  • Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The
    00:18:35 25/05/2016
  • “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,
    00:15:57 18/05/2016
  • 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
    00:27:27 11/05/2016
  • The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New
    00:19:30 04/05/2016
  • Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species. Walking
    00:26:31 27/04/2016
  • Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of
    00:15:56 20/04/2016
  • In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.”
    00:22:17 13/04/2016
  • 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
    00:30:58 06/04/2016
  • Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning Shabbat
    00:34:47 30/03/2016
  • The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on
    00:14:58 23/03/2016
  • 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
    00:17:31 16/03/2016
  • Centuries ago, Germany came up with a way to keep books that contained “dangerous” information without releasing them to the general public:
    00:18:03 09/03/2016
  • 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
    00:18:35 02/03/2016
  • 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
    00:05:31 27/02/2016
  • 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
    00:19:49 24/02/2016
  • All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She
    00:16:50 17/02/2016
  • In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the
    00:19:17 10/02/2016
  • In the mid-19th century, decades before home refrigeration became the norm, you could find ice clinking in glasses from India to the Caribbean,
    00:15:51 03/02/2016
  • 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”
    00:16:02 27/01/2016
  • 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
    00:13:47 20/01/2016
  • 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 states require
    00:13:44 13/01/2016
  • In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and
    00:11:12 22/12/2015
  • The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more
    00:14:39 16/12/2015
  • For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles,
    00:21:14 08/12/2015
  • Many material trifles, such as Silly Putty, started as attempts at serious inventions, but in rare cases, the process works in reverse: something
    00:12:35 02/12/2015
  • Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume designers
    00:18:09 24/11/2015
  • 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.
    00:13:48 18/11/2015
  • On April 21st, 1859, an incredible thing happened in London and thousands of people came out to celebrate it. Women wore their finest clothing.
    00:30:25 10/11/2015
  • Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good ballot
    00:15:43 04/11/2015
  • Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday
    00:16:12 28/10/2015
  • The phrase ‘from Central Casting’ has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a stereotype or archetype, a subject so visually suited to its
    00:18:22 20/10/2015
  • 99% Invisible is honored to accept a 2015 Third Coast International Audio Festival award for Structural Integrity, a story of architectural
    00:23:17 14/10/2015
  • Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,000
    00:28:20 07/10/2015
  • 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
    00:16:12 30/09/2015
  • 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
    00:14:22 23/09/2015
  • 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
    00:16:21 15/09/2015
  • 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
    00:14:54 09/09/2015
  • In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world
    00:21:13 02/09/2015
  • Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has
    00:29:05 26/08/2015
  • In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals
    00:16:21 19/08/2015
  • 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
    00:16:59 12/08/2015
  • 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
    00:26:42 05/08/2015
  • 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
    00:18:13 29/07/2015
  • 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,
    00:16:33 22/07/2015
  • 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
    00:14:03 15/07/2015
  • 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
    00:21:36 01/07/2015
  • 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,
    00:28:58 24/06/2015
  • Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice and
    00:13:19 17/06/2015
  • 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
    00:30:05 10/06/2015
  • This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and
    00:38:02 03/06/2015
  • 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,
    00:19:04 27/05/2015
  • The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will
    00:23:18 20/05/2015
  • 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
    00:13:14 13/05/2015
  • 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
    00:15:28 06/05/2015
  • According to legend, Sarah Winchester’s friends advised the grieving widow to seek the services of a Boston spiritual medium named Adam Koombs.
    00:16:04 28/04/2015
  • During World War II, a massive recruitment effort targeted students from the top art schools across the country. These young designers, artists,
    00:19:59 22/04/2015
  • 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
    00:14:42 15/04/2015
  • 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
    00:16:09 08/04/2015
  • Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no
    00:24:07 31/03/2015
  • United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused
    00:21:00 25/03/2015
  • In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the
    00:20:20 18/03/2015
  • The United States Military is not known for being touchy-feely. There’s not much hugging or head-patting, and superiors don’t always have
    00:15:34 11/03/2015
  • Reports of palm theft have appeared in LA, San Diego, and Texas; palm rustling also gets a mention in Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. To
    00:13:23 04/03/2015
  • Portlanders have a tradition when visiting their airport: taking a picture of their feet. It’s not to show off their shoes, but rather, what’s
    00:14:23 24/02/2015
  • A few months before the end of the world, everyone was saying their goodbyes. The world that was ending was The Sims Online, an online version
    00:09:39 18/02/2015
  • At some point in your life you’ve probably encountered a problem in the built world where the fix was obvious to you. Maybe a door that opened
    00:12:41 11/02/2015
  • The idea of the mascot came to America by way of a popular French opera from the 1880s called La Mascotte. The opera is about a down-on-his
    00:15:55 03/02/2015
  • In 1885, Austin, Texas was terrorized by a serial killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator.  The murderer was never actually found, but
    00:14:47 28/01/2015
  • If you are looking at a computer screen, your right hand is probably resting on a mouse. To the left of that mouse (or above, if you’re on
    00:17:16 21/01/2015
  • The first trademark for a sound in the United States was issued in 1978 to NBC for their chimes. MGM has a sound trademark for their roaring
    00:13:04 14/01/2015
  • New Yorkers are known to disagree about a lot of things. Who’s got the best pizza? What’s the fastest subway route? Yankees or Mets? But all
    00:16:45 07/01/2015
  • As you probably know, 99% Invisible is a show about the built world, about things manufactured by humans. We don’t tend to do stories about
    00:41:53 31/12/2014
  • If you want to follow conversation threads relating to this show on social media—whether Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, Tumblr—you know
    00:14:26 17/12/2014
  • Hanging in the garage of Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, there’s a small, pear-shaped light bulb. It is glowing right now. This
    00:12:37 10/12/2014
  • You see them on street corners, at gas stations, at shopping malls. You see them at blowout sales and grand openings of all kinds. Their wacky
    00:14:01 03/12/2014
  • There’s a little trophy shop called Aardvark Laser Engraving  down the street from our office in Oakland. Its small but bustling, and its
    00:13:49 26/11/2014
  • This week on the show we’re presenting one of our favorite radio features, “Three Records from Sundown,” about singer Nick Drake. The documentary,
    00:29:10 19/11/2014
  • Vexillologists—those who study flags—tend to fall into one of two schools of thought. The first is one that focuses on history, category,
    00:11:38 12/11/2014
  • “A Chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” — Mies van der Rohe. The chair presents an interesting design challenge, because
    00:14:58 04/11/2014
  • The Ouija board is so simple and iconic that it looks like it comes from another time, or maybe another realm. The game is not as ancient
    00:17:27 28/10/2014
  • The first print advertisement for Wonder Bread came out before the bread itself. It stated only that “a wonder” was coming. In a lot of ways,
    00:15:19 22/10/2014
  • When you support Radiotopia, you are making sure 99% Invisible can keep coming to you weekly and you’ll be supporting our entire collective
    00:02:58 19/10/2014
  • On July 13th, 1977, lightning struck an electricity transmission line in New York City, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to kick
    00:14:52 14/10/2014
  • Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the summer
    00:13:10 07/10/2014
  • Straight lines form the core of our built environment. Building in straight lines makes predicting costs and calculating structural loads
    00:15:53 30/09/2014
  • There’s a photograph we have tacked to our studio at 99% Invisible HQ. The photo, taken 1899, shows three men, all looking very fashionable,
    00:17:48 24/09/2014
  • On the southwest corner of Central Park West and 106th Street in New York City, there’s an enormous castle. It takes up the whole east end
    00:16:03 16/09/2014
  • In the beginning, there was design. Before any other human discipline, even before the dawn of mankind its self, design was a practice passed
    00:12:09 10/09/2014
  • Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting
    00:16:04 02/09/2014
  • Cities, like living things, evolve slowly over time. Buildings and structures get added and renovated and removed, and in this process, bits
    00:12:57 26/08/2014
  • IKEA hacking is the practice of buying things from IKEA and reengineering—or “hacking”—them to become customized, more functional, and often
    00:18:35 19/08/2014
  • Way back in October 2011 (see episode #38, true believers!), we broadcast a short excerpt of a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews
    00:58:53 12/08/2014
  • As humans have developed cities and built environments, we have also needed to develop ways to find our way through them. Sam Greenspan went
    00:14:20 05/08/2014
  • The best knock-offs in the world are in China. There are plenty of fake designer handbags and Rolexes, but China’s knock-offs go way beyond
    00:10:32 29/07/2014
  • 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
    00:16:47 22/07/2014
  • Well before the early 1500s, when Sir Thomas Moore first coined the term “Utopia,” people have been thinking about how to design their ideal
    00:16:41 15/07/2014
  • When designing a commercial structure, there is one safety component that must be designed right into the building from the start: egress.
    00:15:46 08/07/2014
  • During the 1961 Berlin Crisis—one of the various moments in the cold war in which we came frighteningly close to engaging in actual war with
    00:20:53 01/07/2014
  • The term “hijacking” goes back to prohibition days, when gangsters would rob moonshine trucks saying, “Hold your hands high, Jack!” However,
    00:14:22 24/06/2014
  • As a fashion object and symbol, the high heel shoe is weighted with meaning. It’s also weighted with the wearer’s entire body weight. The
    00:14:12 17/06/2014
  • 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 blueprint.
    00:19:20 10/06/2014
  • 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
    00:19:05 03/06/2014
  • 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 wanders
    00:18:44 27/05/2014
  • The westernmost part of Manhattan, between 34th and 39th street, is pretty industrial. There’s a bus depot, a ferry terminal, and a steady
    00:20:41 20/05/2014
  • In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico
    00:29:22 13/05/2014
  • 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 monument
    00:23:13 06/05/2014
  • 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
    00:18:37 29/04/2014
  • Uniforms matter. When it comes to sports, they might be the only thing to which we’re actually loyal. Sports uniforms are packaging. But unlike
    00:15:49 22/04/2014
  • When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest
    00:23:17 15/04/2014
  • 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
    00:15:44 08/04/2014
  • 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
    00:16:57 01/04/2014
  • 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 cable.
    00:18:52 25/03/2014
  • Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island
    00:14:11 18/03/2014
  • 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
    00:18:09 11/03/2014
  • 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, this
    00:20:02 05/03/2014
  • It started with some Pittsburgh humor. Pittsburgh-based comedian Tom Muisal does a bit about a GPS unit that can give directions in “Pittsburghese.”
    00:15:50 25/02/2014
  • 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,
    00:13:54 18/02/2014
  • 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 unified
    00:17:37 11/02/2014
  • Like the best of these stories, the two bitter rivals started out as best friends: William Van Alen and Craig Severance. They were business
    00:16:40 04/02/2014
  • On July 28, 1945, an airplane crashed into the Empire State Building. A B-25 bomber was flying a routine mission, chartering servicemen from
    00:14:52 15/01/2014
  • Elevators are old. They would have to be. Because it is in our nature to rise. History is full of things that lift other things. In ancient
    00:19:22 03/01/2014
  • If you tune around on a shortwave radio, you might stumble across a voice reciting an endless stream of numbers. Just numbers, all day, everyday.
    00:21:52 20/12/2013
  • Cameron Smith is building a space suit in his apartment. He’s not an astronaut. He’s not even an engineer. Cameron Smith is an archaeologist–on
    00:12:58 03/12/2013
  • We have seen the future, and the future is mostly blue. Or, put another way: in our representations of the future in science fiction movies,
    00:19:54 21/11/2013
  • There is an allure in unbuilt structures: the utopian, futuristic transports, the impossibly tall skyscrapers, even the horrible highways,
    00:19:17 13/11/2013
  • The story goes like this: Theophilus Van Kannel hated chivalry. There was nothing he despised more than trying to walk in or out of a building,
    00:14:18 06/11/2013
  • I love those moments when you’re walking in your neighborhood and suddenly nothing is familiar. In a good way. Sean Cole began seeing his
    00:17:08 29/10/2013
  • 99% Invisible started as a side project I made in my bedroom at night, and after two years of making the program, I turned to Kickstarter
    00:03:11 23/10/2013
  • We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible: No cardinals. Meaning, we deal with the built world, not the natural world. So, when I read Jon
    00:30:17 14/10/2013
  • If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has
    00:22:56 02/10/2013
  • If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff. Neff wasn’t
    00:23:33 17/09/2013
  • There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally
    00:14:48 03/09/2013
  • By now, the story is well known. A man sits in the backseat of a cab, sketching on a notepad as night falls over a crumbling city. He scribbles
    00:17:17 22/08/2013
  • Chicago’s biggest design achievement probably isn’t one of its amazing skyscrapers, but the Chicago River, a waterway disguised as a remnant
    00:18:56 09/08/2013
  • If you grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, you might remember seeing the name Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits. Chuck
    00:16:17 29/07/2013
  • An ode to an information designer who made life a little bit easier for millions and millions of people: Ladislav Sutnar, the man who put
    00:26:27 15/07/2013
  • Growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Alex Goldman was a misfit. Bored and disaffected and angry, he longed for a place to escape to. And then
    00:26:36 02/07/2013
  • I’m willing to concede from the get-go that I might be wrong about the entire premise of this story, but Superman has never really worked
    00:11:18 20/06/2013
  • There’s something about rebar that fascinates me. If nothing else because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered.
    00:10:47 07/06/2013
  • Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American Institute
    00:16:39 28/05/2013
  • For the ancient Greeks, sirens were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful,
    00:23:38 08/05/2013
  • Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded
    00:17:32 30/04/2013
  • Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of
    00:11:03 15/04/2013
  • On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children,
    00:21:50 04/04/2013
  • Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California–if
    00:10:36 21/03/2013
  • There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an arsenal
    00:11:40 08/03/2013
  • There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up–literally. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going through
    00:10:53 18/02/2013
  • Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The
    00:17:41 05/02/2013
  • Though its officially name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek
    00:16:02 23/01/2013
  • When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car,
    00:12:29 11/01/2013
  • If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be more
    00:23:24 31/12/2012
  • I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway.
    00:10:04 12/12/2012
  • When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do. One was
    00:10:29 29/11/2012
  • Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever. By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least
    00:14:54 19/11/2012
  • When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach. It
    00:09:56 05/11/2012
  • In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings are not usually dome-shaped. Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came across
    00:13:46 25/10/2012
  • On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into
    00:12:29 12/10/2012
  • Benjamen Walker had a theory that priority queues are changing the American experience of waiting in line. So he visited amusement parks,
    00:13:10 02/10/2012
  • Pneumatic (adj.):  of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting information
    00:15:57 20/09/2012
  • I only recently started listening to BackStory with the American History Guys, but it’s already earned a top spot in my crowded weekly rotation.
    00:12:28 10/09/2012
  • While we’re gearing up for season 3, we present two pieces from two shows we love: First up, Language Bites from RTE Choice in Ireland. Language
    00:08:20 22/08/2012
  • New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the
    00:12:47 06/08/2012
  • Sean Cole is a poet and he knows what you think of that. He is also a radio producer. One night, drunk and stumbling around the Hudson River
    00:16:43 25/07/2012
  • What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building? The hotel on the very prominent
    00:19:01 13/07/2012
  • This is the Kickstarter video for funding the new season of 99% Invisible. If you enjoy the show and want to help keep it going, now is the
    00:02:38 12/07/2012
  • Starlee Kine’s friend Noel works in advertising. In 2003, Noel was working in at an agency in Richmond, VA. Everyone wanted to work on flashy
    00:14:57 28/06/2012
  • Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.” I like that. Of course that was before audio recording, so now, for the most part, music is frozen
    00:10:52 14/06/2012
  • If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200
    00:13:49 31/05/2012
  • US paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused attention.
    00:17:09 16/05/2012
  • What happens when we build big? Julia Barton remembers going to the top floor of Dallas’s then-new city hall when she was teenager. The building,
    00:11:49 01/05/2012
  • Even during the construction of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the slightest breeze.
    00:12:55 18/04/2012
  • “Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart” – Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities are
    00:11:15 03/04/2012
  • The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence
    00:12:10 22/03/2012
  • In the US, it’s called a line. In Canada, it’s often referred to as a line-up. Pretty much everywhere else, it’s known as a queue. My friend
    00:10:22 09/03/2012
  • “I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…” -Andrea
    00:11:35 26/02/2012
  • Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches, but you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make
    00:12:54 10/02/2012
  • Before the 1850s, dentures were made out of very hard, very painful and very expensive material, like gold or ivory. They were a luxury item.
    00:09:54 27/01/2012
  • Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to
    00:12:33 18/01/2012
  • The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the
    00:11:55 06/01/2012
  • “There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators – those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk
    00:07:49 19/12/2011
  • Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals
    00:11:04 09/12/2011
  • Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster
    00:05:38 03/12/2011
  • It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was
    00:12:33 23/11/2011
  • United Nations Plaza sits in the center of San Francisco. Most people consider it a complete failure as a public space. Its central feature,
    00:31:45 18/11/2011
  • It’s hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles,
    00:08:01 28/10/2011
  • If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good
    00:05:57 13/10/2011
  • If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do
    00:07:47 29/09/2011
  • Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall,
    00:10:23 16/09/2011
  • I want to be careful not to overstate what it means for a building to die. A building’s worth is an infinitesimal fraction of the worth a
    00:06:50 01/09/2011
  • Last year, Steve Burrows CBE (Principle at the engineering consulting firm Arup) spent several weeks in Egypt studying the pyramids through
    00:10:27 19/08/2011
  • If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships, you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line. This marking is called
    00:07:24 04/08/2011
  • When I spoke with Allison Arieff about the design of airports, she said to me, if all airports simply played Brian Eno’s album Ambient 1:
    00:08:35 28/07/2011
  • Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed
    00:10:23 14/07/2011
  • In 1998 Dr. Gary Kaplan, the CEO of Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle received some bad news about his hospital. It was losing money.
    00:10:48 01/07/2011
  • When people critique cul-de-sacs, a lot of the time, they’re actually critiquing the suburbs more generally. The cul-de-sac has become sort
    00:12:14 17/06/2011
  • More and more I’m finding that the first 2-3 minutes of a movie are my favorite part of the film. My life is devoted to the beautiful expression
    00:09:38 10/06/2011
  • There are rules that dicate what you can build and how. Rules of physics and rules of men who sit on various bureaucratic boards and bodies.
    00:05:12 03/06/2011
  • The Metropolitan Correctional Center, or MCC, is a federal jail right in the middle of downtown Chicago. It’s a triangle-shaped skyscraper,
    00:07:49 20/05/2011
  • There’s something that links most of the everyday objects presented in “Made in Russia: Unsung Icons of Soviet Design.” But it’s hard to tell
    00:08:28 13/05/2011
  • If you were present for any of the presidential inaugurations, from Andrew Jackson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, you saw the solemn oath of office
    00:06:58 06/05/2011
  • youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is
    00:20:14 22/04/2011
  • In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate
    00:08:01 15/04/2011
  • Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise from
    00:05:50 01/04/2011
  • In 2001, Delfin Vigil was walking the streets of San Francisco and ran across the name “Nikko” carved into the concrete sidewalk. After seeing
    00:07:21 25/03/2011
  • This week, the radio audience heard episode #10, but for you web and podcast listeners, I have a story I did about a year and a half ago,
    00:09:57 21/03/2011
  • In a recent piece from Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti (Professor at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
    00:11:14 11/03/2011
  • A few years ago, journalist Douglas McGray learned that the largest chain of check cashing stores in Southern California, Nix Check Cashing,
    00:05:34 04/03/2011
  • The New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was the first modern, concrete, civic building in Toronto. When it opened in
    00:07:01 25/02/2011
  • The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures
    00:06:22 18/02/2011
  • Without all the beeps and chimes, without sonic feedback, all of your modern conveniences would be very hard to use. If a device and its sounds
    00:05:19 11/02/2011
  • Everyone knows it when they see it. The classic “castle with turrets” periodic table is a beautiful and concise icon that contains a great
    00:06:28 04/02/2011
  • 99% Invisible Extra! The tape rolls as we witness the tearful end of a perfect online world. This is a piece I did for Snap Judgment, based
    00:11:34 07/01/2011
  • I’m sorry, but if you don’t love maps, I don’t think we can be friends anymore. Maps are amazing. They are art and story. A representation
    00:04:58 17/12/2010
  • “Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the
    00:04:57 03/12/2010
  • Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful
    00:04:59 25/11/2010
  • Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more
    00:05:20 19/11/2010
  • 99% Invisible Extra! NASA is figuring out how to take the next great leap into space. The difficulty is, if we leap to Mars, we might not
    00:11:59 13/11/2010
  • Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but
    00:04:58 05/11/2010
  • It’s weird how much anxiety comes from parking in a city. Beyond the stress of looking for parking, you must contend with the frequently unreliable
    00:05:19 29/10/2010
  • Humans need a few basic things to survive- air, water, food, heat, shelter- but just surviving isn’t really enough. We also need familiarity,
    00:04:58 14/10/2010
  • Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn’t even know cities had their own flags. In Chicago, the city flag is everywhere. It’s incorporated
    00:04:57 07/10/2010
  • At the top of Mt. Olympus in San Francisco, on what was once thought to be the geographic center of the city, is a pedestal for a statue that
    00:04:58 01/10/2010
  • It’s a stick with bristles poking out of it. It doesn’t even qualify as a simple machine, but the careful thought and design that went into
    00:05:01 24/09/2010
  • There’s not much that we can do about all the physical matter that’s been designed and built by someone else. It is the way it is. But with
    00:04:58 24/09/2010
  • In the beginning, former AIA-SF president Henrik Bull and the Transamerica Pyramid did not get along. The building was an affront to late
    00:04:58 23/09/2010
  • This episode of 99% Invisible is all about acoustic design, the city soundscape, and how to make listening in shared spaces pleasant (or at
    00:04:49 23/09/2010

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