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.
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Cheeky highway signs, Jane Fonda’s surprising side hustle, a dynamite twist on legacy, and the Greeks’ ideal foot obsession—expect the unexpected.00:36:12 17/12/2024 -
Roman Mars and the Flop House team dive into Francis Ford Coppola's intriguing and controversial film, Megalopolis, exploring its chaotic01:48:20 10/12/2024
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How did the “15 Minute City,” a simple urban planning idea, spark protests, conspiracy theories, and death threats? This week, we unravel00:37:22 03/12/2024
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After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated00:27:08 26/11/2024
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What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore00:44:34 19/11/2024
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This is the eleventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:49:47 15/11/2024
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Roman talks with The Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo, whose new book brings his poetic history podcast to life on the page. They explore00:33:27 12/11/2024
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As the last warmth of summer fades, Riis Beach—a hidden queer oasis behind a decaying hospital—faces a new reality. With its shadowy protector00:37:05 05/11/2024
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Remember when grocery shelves went bare and cargo ships clogged the California coast? That chaos wasn’t just a pandemic hiccup—it was a symptom00:33:37 29/10/2024
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Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America.00:32:19 22/10/2024
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This is the tenth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:51:43 18/10/2024
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Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into00:32:31 15/10/2024
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In this bonus episode, Roman unearths the surprising story behind the 99% Invisible's name and delves into the unnoticed brilliance of everyday00:27:04 11/10/2024
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In the heart of Copenhagen, a former military base transformed into Christiania, a self-proclaimed anarchist commune where residents built00:40:04 08/10/2024
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The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its00:28:58 01/10/2024
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What started as Emily Nussbaum’s “guilty pleasure” of watching Big Brother became a deeper dive into the world of reality TV, leading00:35:32 24/09/2024
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This is the ninth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:32:17 20/09/2024
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Karen MacDonough had paid her mortgage for years, raised her family, and lived a quiet life in her Quincy, Massachusetts home—until one day,00:33:16 17/09/2024
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Once considered the most dangerous city in the world due to drug cartel violence, by the early 2000s Medellin had reinvented itself. But gentrification00:33:44 10/09/2024
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The impacts of climate disasters are often measured in terms of property damage. But in places like Phoenix, Arizona, and in hot places all00:41:06 06/09/2024
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Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this00:48:48 03/09/2024
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All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more flood-prone00:48:20 30/08/2024
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Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as storms get more extreme00:49:36 27/08/2024
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In disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not confined to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading00:57:22 23/08/2024
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Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up00:28:53 20/08/2024
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This is the eighth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:12:44 16/08/2024
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This week we're highlighting a couple of series that live inside the 99pi production tent.We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for01:05:24 13/08/2024
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When you’re watching the opening credits to a movie, it’s not just a list of names. What you’re actually seeing is intense negotiations by00:29:27 06/08/2024
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The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the00:34:02 30/07/2024
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From TV commercials and branded soda cans to Emily in Paris spon-con, the Olympics are once again everywhere. In the Olympic spirit, we’re00:40:33 23/07/2024
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This is the seventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:42:47 19/07/2024
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When you hear the word "river," you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks00:43:36 16/07/2024
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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. But00:41:51 09/07/2024
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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 the00:26:01 02/07/2024
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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 obstacles00:52:55 25/06/2024
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This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:58:55 21/06/2024
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After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson00:39:06 18/06/2024
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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
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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 incredibly00:44:13 04/06/2024
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In late 2018, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists00:30:26 28/05/2024
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Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of00:26:26 22/05/2024
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This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:11:53 18/05/2024
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In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt00:40:20 14/05/2024
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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
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Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about00:32:18 03/05/2024
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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 is00:56:15 30/04/2024
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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 the01:11:25 23/04/2024
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This is the fourth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:39:33 19/04/2024
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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.Dan00:44:43 16/04/2024
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Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the00:35:18 09/04/2024
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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 enough00:33:22 02/04/2024
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This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and interesting00:36:50 29/03/2024
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A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about00:32:46 27/03/2024
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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
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This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. This02:07:00 15/03/2024
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This year marks the 40th anniversary of a lot of landmarks in pop culture, especially sci-fi and fantasy. So many franchises were born in00:39:12 13/03/2024
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Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can00:42:39 05/03/2024
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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 Fe00:33:21 02/03/2024
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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
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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 impossible00:07:21 23/02/2024
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What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours00:31:15 21/02/2024
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This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.This01:45:20 16/02/2024
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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
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Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment00:33:38 06/02/2024
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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 National00:39:44 30/01/2024
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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 in00:37:07 26/01/2024
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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 narrow00:51:47 24/01/2024
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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
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Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an00:34:30 16/01/2024
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Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire00:34:53 09/01/2024
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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
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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 short00:48:05 20/12/2023
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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
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Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.The00:44:15 05/12/2023
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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 goes00:45:21 29/11/2023
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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 cheaper00:34:14 22/11/2023
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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 the00:39:00 15/11/2023
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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 became00:34:58 07/11/2023
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Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent00:40:59 31/10/2023
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For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized00:35:58 24/10/2023
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It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key00:31:59 17/10/2023
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Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait00:32:20 10/10/2023
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Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig00:55:26 03/10/2023
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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
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The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider00:40:32 19/09/2023
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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. When00:29:04 12/09/2023
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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. And00:38:42 05/09/2023
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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
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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's00:50:26 22/08/2023
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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 first00:34:07 15/08/2023
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We deconstruct and examine what might be the original designed object-- the humble trail. We discuss how park trails are designed, what makes00:35:06 08/08/2023
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Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the Consumer00:29:01 01/08/2023
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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 now00:47:38 25/07/2023
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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 Sombrita00:29:50 18/07/2023
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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
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In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity.Proximity founder Ryan Coogler00:30:23 05/07/2023
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This week we're featuring an episode of The Last ArchiveThe Last Archive is00:53:29 27/06/2023
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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 in00:34:23 20/06/2023
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Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is a particularly iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. This recording blares from00:34:37 13/06/2023
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As electronic news gathering was gaining prominence in the early 20th century, the American Bar Association began to fear its effect on court00:36:56 06/06/2023
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The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight00:43:45 31/05/2023
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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 with00:31:17 23/05/2023
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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
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In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way),00:37:43 09/05/2023
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Bad closed captions can be entertaining, but they can be serious, too, because captions are a critical tool for lots of lots of people. There00:32:41 02/05/2023
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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 Roger00:29:55 25/04/2023
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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
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From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though the odds of winning a00:39:07 11/04/2023
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Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in00:43:55 04/04/2023
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The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. In the original design, all the cells are built around a central guard00:37:11 29/03/2023
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Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly 11200:44:23 21/03/2023
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The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable00:32:41 17/03/2023
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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 way00:34:38 14/03/2023
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If we’ve learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo! and MySpace, it’s that internet darlings rise and fall. And00:43:17 07/03/2023
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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 makes00:27:40 28/02/2023
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In the 1980s a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative used cute images of a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat to00:32:16 22/02/2023
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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 that00:43:14 14/02/2023
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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
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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 forwards00:41:48 31/01/2023
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If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of00:42:05 24/01/2023
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Back in 2017 we ran an episode about the history of Brazil's iconic, yellow national soccer jersey. We were reminded of that story during00:34:07 17/01/2023
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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 and00:33:50 10/01/2023
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This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all00:36:57 21/12/2022
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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 epic00:37:16 14/12/2022
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If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed00:46:15 06/12/2022
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Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It restricts00:29:36 29/11/2022
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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 on00:26:53 22/11/2022
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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 little00:45:16 16/11/2022
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Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one -- except we didn't actually talk about that00:32:22 09/11/2022
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Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer00:37:06 02/11/2022
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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 batteries00:33:17 25/10/2022
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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 a00:47:20 18/10/2022
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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 feature00:32:12 11/10/2022
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Jamaica is famous around the world for its music, including genres like ska, dub, and reggae. It’s tempting to think that the powerful amplifiers00:42:01 04/10/2022
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The magical mythical "jackalope" is a essentially a horned rabbit, with antlers of different sizes and shapes. The jackalope is a mascot of00:34:14 28/09/2022
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On this special feature episode, President Bill Clinton interviews 99% Invisible host and creator Roman Mars.Roman Mars has spent his00:49:12 20/09/2022
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Adam Rogers has been thinking and writing about what’s known in the industry simply as "search." For the last decade, people have been grumbling00:36:12 14/09/2022
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In downtown Windhoek, Namibia -- at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue -- there's an imposing gold building00:36:25 06/09/2022
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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
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There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are00:31:54 23/08/2022
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In the final week of the most recent term, the Supreme Court decided to limit one constitutional right (abortion) and expand another constitutional00:29:25 18/08/2022
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A few years back, 99pi producer Emmett FitzGerald brought us a beautiful story about peat bogs. Peat is essential for biodiversity and for00:40:11 10/08/2022
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In the final episode of our vernacular spectacular anniversary series, 99pi producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories00:34:52 03/08/2022
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Only a small percentage of architecture is actually designed by architects. And while a famous architect-designed tower in a skyline might00:30:23 26/07/2022
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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 even00:33:40 19/07/2022
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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 the00:39:37 12/07/2022
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99% Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an unusually00:43:04 05/07/2022
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Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland. Russia and Japan have long fought over the territory, which has left the ethnic00:37:55 28/06/2022
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The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the00:44:31 21/06/2022
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No teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra00:35:47 14/06/2022
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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 proof00:31:14 07/06/2022
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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
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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 toward00:32:19 24/05/2022
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Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family00:37:29 18/05/2022
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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 trains00:32:43 10/05/2022
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Bonus episode: Roman Mars on Blank Check with Griffin and David talking about The Quick and The02:17:10 06/05/2022
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Data is the lifeblood of public health, and has been since the beginning of the field. But essential data gathering for the COVID pandemic00:58:25 04/05/2022
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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
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Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated expedition00:45:36 20/04/2022
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Every year in the spring, small towns throughout New England host their annual town meeting. Town meetings take place in high school gyms00:47:05 13/04/2022
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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
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So why don't we have mouth Roombas? Is the universe full of chickens? What scientific advances are happening? What was the first internet00:58:49 30/03/2022
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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 millions00:49:37 22/03/2022
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Natalie de Blois contributed to some of the most iconic Modernist works created for corporate America, all while raising four children. After00:49:51 15/03/2022
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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 internet00:43:18 11/03/2022
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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 unpaid00:37:09 08/03/2022
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The Columbia Journalism School recently announced the 16 winners of the 2022 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, including According00:59:59 01/03/2022
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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
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On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But00:49:54 16/02/2022
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People have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. The 20th century was00:42:36 09/02/2022
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When the two greatest auction houses in the world – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth00:31:00 02/02/2022
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The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a reaction to the failures of government at00:39:39 25/01/2022
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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 produce00:35:36 19/01/2022
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We're kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: a strange collision of mundane infrastructure00:50:27 12/01/2022
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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 sitting00:47:18 22/12/2021
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Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green00:37:59 15/12/2021
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For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just00:43:23 07/12/2021
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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 we00:31:59 01/12/2021
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The French bulldog is now the second most popular breed in America. Their cute features, portable size, and physical features make for a dog00:26:29 23/11/2021
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Fitness trends come and go. But the simple weight is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized00:45:39 17/11/2021
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Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices00:32:18 10/11/2021
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Born in 1872, American architect and engineer Julia Morgan designed hundreds of buildings over her prolific career, famous for her work on00:42:09 02/11/2021
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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
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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. These00:26:31 19/10/2021
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Rioters carried many familiar flags during the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol -- Confederate, MAGA, as well as some00:31:29 12/10/2021
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The Sears & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were subscribers. Anyone00:33:06 05/10/2021
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When it comes to English spelling and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why00:30:28 28/09/2021
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Presidential libraries are tributes to greatness, "[a] self-congratulatory, almost fictional account of someone's achievements, where all01:04:26 21/09/2021
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The great Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, stops by to tell00:20:42 14/09/2021
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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
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In 2015 the world was divided into two warring factions overnight. And at the center of this schism was a single photograph. Cecilia Bleasdale00:32:12 31/08/2021
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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
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When Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt were promoting The 99% Invisible City in late 2020, one question00:31:37 10/08/2021
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Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was often known simply as “Kniga” (translated: "book") because it was one00:42:27 04/08/2021
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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 other00:40:19 27/07/2021
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Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from00:39:04 20/07/2021
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Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the00:46:17 14/07/2021
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Every year, fights break out on airplanes. They happen between the people who lean back in their seats, and the people who get their knees00:30:18 29/06/2021
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We revisit Katie Mingle's Right to Roam episode as we say goodbyeIn the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is00:34:30 23/06/2021
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After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the00:34:43 15/06/2021
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Correction: Our staff producer pronounced the the Japanese word "ōbōn" incorrectly in this episode. It is pronounced OH-bohn not00:44:14 08/06/2021
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After Producer Katie Mingle's mom wrote a romance novel, Katie set out to understand the romance genre and its classic covers. There was a00:38:08 02/06/2021
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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 of00:36:54 25/05/2021
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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
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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 rhythmic00:44:04 11/05/2021
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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 of00:28:17 04/05/2021
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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, between00:48:24 28/04/2021
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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
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Kurt and Roman talk about icebergs and how we visualize them all wrong. Plus, we visit a classic 99pi story by Emmett FitzGerald about00:35:56 14/04/2021
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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
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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 different00:37:01 30/03/2021
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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 species00:30:53 23/03/2021
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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
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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 this00:34:07 09/03/2021
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Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but00:37:17 02/03/2021
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Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress00:33:01 23/02/2021
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The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most believe00:36:05 16/02/2021
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Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast00:36:51 12/02/2021
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Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the00:33:02 09/02/2021
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Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast00:03:37 08/02/2021
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Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe (mudbrick) look that came to be called Pueblo Revival. This aesthetic00:43:48 02/02/2021
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Cities around the world have distinctive modes of transportation -- the canals of Venice, the double-decker busses of London, and the Twin00:43:15 26/01/2021
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In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from the Fresh Air Movement to the lost00:49:29 20/01/2021
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In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from climate-changing sheep to the persistent00:40:21 12/01/2021
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Each year, 99% Invisible producers select short design stories to talk about with host Roman Mars. Some of these were just too brief to make00:40:36 22/12/2020
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Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorn on Bullseye00:36:58 18/12/2020
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If homelessness is the problem, housing is the solution. But it’s not always that simple. Kate Cody has been living in her encampment community00:48:02 15/12/2020
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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 you00:30:31 11/12/2020
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In the 1980's, a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis was working with mentally ill homeless people on the streets of New York. Sometimes, when00:31:48 08/12/2020
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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 homeless00:34:19 04/12/2020
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When we think about homelessness, we often have a certain image in our mind—people pushing shopping carts, or big sprawling tent encampments. But00:33:01 01/12/2020
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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 is00:17:24 01/12/2020
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According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle that asks: What are we doing00:02:52 29/11/2020
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Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings00:27:19 25/11/2020
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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 original00:31:02 21/11/2020
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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, commercial00:30:25 18/11/2020
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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
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Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor helped00:42:38 03/11/2020
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During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your00:33:18 27/10/2020
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This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first00:20:27 23/10/2020
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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 get00:28:14 20/10/2020
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When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain00:39:59 13/10/2020
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We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City00:41:08 06/10/2020
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The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight00:44:13 29/09/2020
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An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and00:26:29 22/09/2020
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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 in00:35:07 15/09/2020
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There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that00:36:29 09/09/2020
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After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families00:35:27 01/09/2020
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Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to00:19:17 25/08/2020
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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
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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
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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 miles00:35:00 29/07/2020
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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 connected00:40:40 21/07/2020
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There are many books about McDonald’s that criticize the company for its many sins, and author Marcia Chatelain has read all of them. But00:38:07 14/07/2020
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One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were00:44:11 08/07/2020
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All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests00:53:50 30/06/2020
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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 Japan00:34:06 24/06/2020
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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 by00:33:52 16/06/2020
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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 whole00:28:54 09/06/2020
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Diamonds represent value, in all its multiple meanings: values, as in ethics, and value as in actual price. But what are these rocks actually00:31:20 29/05/2020
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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 design00:32:30 26/05/2020
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The world of high end perfume is surprisingly lucrative, considering that scent is often the most ignored of our senses. But one can't judge00:29:48 19/05/2020
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Brands hold immense sway over both consumers and the American legal system. Few know this as well as Dapper Dan, who went from street hustler00:31:04 15/05/2020
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In the wake of World War II, the government of France commissioned its most prominent designers to create a collection of miniature fashion00:39:57 12/05/2020
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In general, the coronavirus shutdowns have been terrible for academic research. Trips have been canceled, labs have shut down, and long-running01:09:21 06/05/2020
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There have been over 200,000 deaths as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. All have been tragic, but there are two people in particular00:28:31 29/04/2020
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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 different00:38:56 21/04/2020
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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 current00:43:38 14/04/2020
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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
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In times like these, we could all use a little historical perspective. In this new podcast from Radiotopia, Jody Avirgan, political historian00:32:47 31/03/2020
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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
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On this shelter-in-place edition of 99pi, Roman walks around his house and tells stories about the history and design of various objects Buy00:18:10 17/03/2020
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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 in00:41:59 11/03/2020
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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 climactic00:29:48 03/03/2020
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At the Mid-America Trucking Show in Louisville, Kentucky, drivers from all over the country converge each year to show off their chrome and00:44:34 26/02/2020
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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 office00:37:25 19/02/2020
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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 something00:38:34 12/02/2020
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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 climate00:35:46 05/02/2020
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Deep within the National Museum of American History’s vaults is a battered Atari case containing what’s known as “the worst video game of00:26:37 28/01/2020
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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 hole00:38:43 22/01/2020
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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 noticed00:30:47 15/01/2020
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This is part 2 of the 2019- 2020 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world00:50:37 07/01/2020
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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 research00:40:55 19/12/2019
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The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to00:05:38 15/12/2019
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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 at00:45:25 11/12/2019
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“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs00:34:49 03/12/2019
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In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of00:41:22 27/11/2019
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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
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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
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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 the00:35:46 05/11/2019
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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
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To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of00:27:52 23/10/2019
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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 the00:26:40 15/10/2019
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Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not00:39:05 08/10/2019
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There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.” Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.” Informal urbanism covers all00:31:41 01/10/2019
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Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that00:40:05 24/09/2019
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Everything in Bethel, Alaska comes in by cargo plane or barge, and even when something stops working, it’s often too expensive and too inconvenient00:36:21 18/09/2019
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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 culture00:40:51 10/09/2019
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Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out00:31:56 04/09/2019
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Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really said00:36:54 28/08/2019
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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
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During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the01:01:30 13/08/2019
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Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples00:24:53 06/08/2019
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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
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Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado Perez00:27:07 23/07/2019
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Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for00:41:28 17/07/2019
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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 traces00:36:41 09/07/2019
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Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s00:38:30 02/07/2019
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When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant00:33:25 25/06/2019
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The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On01:04:59 18/06/2019
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All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our00:25:49 11/06/2019
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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
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Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the00:36:15 28/05/2019
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Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals.According00:17:22 24/05/2019
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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 it00:31:44 21/05/2019
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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-day00:19:09 17/05/2019
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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 practice00:37:57 14/05/2019
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From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union00:33:17 07/05/2019
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This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists00:30:01 01/05/2019
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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 lawyer00:37:16 24/04/2019
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Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive00:52:17 16/04/2019
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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 toward00:23:57 09/04/2019
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50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and00:28:07 02/04/2019
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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
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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
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Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades00:27:14 12/03/2019
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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
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Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known00:39:54 26/02/2019
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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's00:30:45 20/02/2019
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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 a00:41:13 13/02/2019
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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 Lives00:44:58 05/02/2019
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In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting00:46:48 30/01/2019
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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 series00:35:26 23/01/2019
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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
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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 perpetual00:48:40 09/01/2019
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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 deep00:30:03 01/01/2019
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For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of00:36:50 26/12/2018
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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
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Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and00:11:03 14/12/2018
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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
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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, Oñate00:43:11 05/12/2018
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After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated00:25:54 27/11/2018
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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, but00:27:30 21/11/2018
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We chronicle the epic struggle to get drugs that treat very rare diseases on the market, and the unintended consequence of that fight, which00:27:39 14/11/2018
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It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key00:32:50 06/11/2018
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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 hurricane00:32:24 31/10/2018
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At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of00:28:42 23/10/2018
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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
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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 about00:30:48 12/10/2018
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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-working00:26:05 09/10/2018
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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 good00:23:18 05/10/2018
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Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don’t open, or shallow pockets that can hardly hold more than a paperclip. If women's clothes00:21:13 02/10/2018
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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
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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 the00:23:52 25/09/2018
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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
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The Sear & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early twentieth century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were00:32:11 11/09/2018
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A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside00:24:49 05/09/2018
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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
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Most of the American west is owned by the Federal Government. About 85 percent of Nevada, 61 percent of Alaska, 53 percent of Oregon, the00:42:43 21/08/2018
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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
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Nestled between the mountains and the ocean, right next to Santa Barbara, sits Montecito, California. The region endures a major fire approximately00:30:25 08/08/2018
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After the massive Panorama Fire in southern California in 1980, a young fire researcher named Jack Cohen went in to investigate the houses00:31:54 01/08/2018
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Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And00:27:53 25/07/2018
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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 it00:32:03 18/07/2018
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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
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This is a special presentation of episode #4 of Radiotopia's newest show ZigZag. Manoush and Jen give themselves 36 hours in San Francisco00:31:30 05/07/2018
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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 because00:07:16 04/07/2018
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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 started00:28:21 27/06/2018
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In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying00:37:24 20/06/2018
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Until the early 90s, basketball uniforms were pretty tame. There had been real limits to what could be done with jerseys. All the details—the00:22:36 13/06/2018
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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 was00:23:57 06/06/2018
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Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans -- but it is also home to a vault containing00:27:06 30/05/2018
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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, between00:45:14 23/05/2018
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"Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver "is00:28:50 16/05/2018
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When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient -- that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious00:39:03 09/05/2018
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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
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The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and difficult00:25:22 25/04/2018
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Andre Walker became famous for being Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist, but he is also known for something else: a system that he created back00:23:10 17/04/2018
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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 Denise00:33:19 10/04/2018
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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 pray00:28:22 03/04/2018
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They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the00:19:13 27/03/2018
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The way we draw our political districts has a huge effect on U.S. politics, but the process is also greatly misunderstood. Gerrymandering00:44:51 21/03/2018
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All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She00:24:15 14/03/2018
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In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and00:30:11 07/03/2018
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The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a00:33:01 28/02/2018
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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
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The Chase logo was introduced in 1961, when the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company merged to form the Chase Manhattan00:27:11 13/02/2018
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When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border00:28:48 06/02/2018
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In the 1970s it looked like the beloved, 200-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger. The sea was getting closer and threatening to00:31:42 31/01/2018
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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
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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
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This part two of the 2017/2018 mini-stories episodes, where Roman interviews the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little design00:39:48 10/01/2018
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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
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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 from00:37:47 20/12/2017
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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 freeway00:20:39 12/12/2017
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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 drop00:31:35 05/12/2017
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While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic collision00:53:48 28/11/2017
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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 often00:19:53 21/11/2017
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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 a00:26:35 14/11/2017
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Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was00:27:55 07/11/2017
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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 one00:29:05 31/10/2017
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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 it00:31:44 25/10/2017
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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
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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 the00:24:38 11/10/2017
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Among the most important advances in sports technology, few can compete with the invention of the sports bra. Following the passage of Title00:23:39 03/10/2017
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Ponte City Tower, the brutalist cylindrical high-rise that towers over Johannesburg, has gone from a symbol of white opulence to something00:29:10 26/09/2017
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Around the world, there is a lot of buzz around the idea of universal basic income (also known as “unconditional basic income” or UBI). It00:28:42 19/09/2017
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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
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Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether we’re00:21:05 05/09/2017
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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 such00:13:04 29/08/2017
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Tech analysts estimate that over six billion emojis are sent each day. Emojis, which started off as a collection of low-resolution pixelated00:28:01 22/08/2017
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On the border of Virginia and North Carolina stretches a great, dismal swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, actually — that’s the name British colonists00:24:27 15/08/2017
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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 about00:19:12 09/08/2017
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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
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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 more00:22:53 25/07/2017
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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
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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 and00:17:51 11/07/2017
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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 Southern00:30:34 04/07/2017
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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
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“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 of00:25:38 20/06/2017
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In the 1992, the Baltimore Orioles opened their baseball season at a brand new stadium called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, right along the00:24:45 13/06/2017
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Special introductory episode to a new podcast produced by Roman Mars and Elizabeth Joh. Professor Elizabeth Joh teaches Intro to Constitutional00:11:23 08/06/2017
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In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the00:19:40 07/06/2017
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In 1987, three years after moving to New York City, Maggie Wrigley found herself on the edge of homelessness. She was trying to figure out00:22:59 30/05/2017
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The Brazilian soccer shirt is iconic. Its bright canary yellow with green trim, worn with blue shorts, is known worldwide. The uniform is00:19:13 23/05/2017
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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
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In the town of Colma, California, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Located just ten miles south of San Francisco, Colma00:17:37 09/05/2017
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For most people, electricity only flows one way (into the home), but there are exceptions — people who use solar panels, for instance. In00:25:30 02/05/2017
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In most wildlife films, the sounds you hear were not recorded while the cameras were rolling. Most filmmakers use long telephoto lenses to00:22:43 18/04/2017
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Los Angeles is rich with architectural diversity. On the same block, you could find a retro-futuristic Googie diner next to a Spanish-style00:19:48 11/04/2017
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We’re based in beautiful downtown Oakland, CA which is a port city in the San Francisco Bay. Massive container ships travel across the Pacific00:30:28 04/04/2017
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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 time00:23:57 28/03/2017
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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 watch00:22:54 21/03/2017
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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 about00:44:36 14/03/2017
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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
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In the 1980s, Rev. John Fife and his congregation at Southside Presbyterian Church began to help Central American migrants fleeing persecution00:26:43 28/02/2017
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As the world entered the Atomic Age, humankind faced a new fear that permeated just about every aspect of daily life: the threat of nuclear00:17:58 21/02/2017
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Frank Lloyd Wright believed that the buildings we live in shape the kinds of people we become. His aim was nothing short of rebuilding the00:18:42 15/02/2017
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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
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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
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Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America: A History, argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way00:17:53 24/01/2017
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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-American00:19:41 18/01/2017
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Part 2 where host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story00:29:38 10/01/2017
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Host Roman Mars talks to the 99pi producers about their favorite “Mini-Stories.” These are little anecdotes or seeds of a story about design00:27:17 20/12/2016
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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 sites00:17:01 14/12/2016
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In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, making it the largest marine preserve in the world00:18:46 06/12/2016
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The NBC chimes may be the most famous sound in broadcasting. Originating in the 1920s, the three key sequential notes are familiar to generations00:13:03 29/11/2016
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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 lot00:15:59 23/11/2016
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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
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People who write the White House know that the president himself will most likely not see their message. Many of their letters start with00:14:00 08/11/2016
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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
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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 first00:16:35 25/10/2016
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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
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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 had00:18:03 11/10/2016
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On September 11, 1973, a military junta violently took control of Chile, which was led at the time by President Salvador Allende. Allende00:21:03 04/10/2016
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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. Because00:18:29 27/09/2016
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Who decides that the color this season is “mint green” or that denim jackets are “back?” Of course, there’s top-down fashion, where couture00:15:32 20/09/2016
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Large portions of San Francisco, New York City, Boston, Seattle, Hong Kong and Marseilles were built on top of human made land. What is now00:18:47 13/09/2016
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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
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In many ways, the built world was not designed for you. It was designed for the average person. Standardized tests, building codes, insurance00:17:41 23/08/2016
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Founded by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school in Germany would go on to shape modern architecture, art, and design for decades00:18:40 17/08/2016
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The largest body of water in California was formed by a mistake. In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge depression00:17:35 09/08/2016
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In 1996, President Bill Clinton and the Congress undertook a reform effort to redesign the welfare system from one that many believed trapped00:32:44 03/08/2016
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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 bottoms00:16:18 26/07/2016
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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 the00:19:22 19/07/2016
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In the late 1950s, the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research embarked on a mission to study the personalities of particularly creative00:21:31 13/07/2016
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Benches in parks, train stations, bus shelters and other public places are meant to offer seating, but only for a limited duration. Many elements00:13:59 06/07/2016
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It started with a place called the Stonewall Inn. Gay bars had been raided by police for decades. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender00:26:33 29/06/2016
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In 1968, an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist started a club to address what they considered to be humankind’s greatest problems—issues00:26:09 22/06/2016
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In 1968, the police department in Menlo Park, California hired a new police chief. His name was Victor Cizanckas and his main goal was to00:21:42 14/06/2016
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September 3rd, 1967, also known as H-Day, is etched in the collective memory of Sweden. That morning, millions of Swedes switched from driving00:15:58 07/06/2016
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Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting00:16:04 31/05/2016
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Sub Pop Records has signed some of the most famous and influential indie bands of the last 30 years, including Nirvana, Sleater-Kinney, The00:18:35 25/05/2016
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“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
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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. New00:27:27 11/05/2016
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The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New00:19:30 04/05/2016
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Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species. Walking00:26:31 27/04/2016
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Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of00:15:56 20/04/2016
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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
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In the late 1960s, a civil rights leader named Floyd B. McKissick, at one time the head of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) proposed00:30:58 06/04/2016
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Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning Shabbat00:34:47 30/03/2016
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The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on00:14:58 23/03/2016
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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 intersection00:17:31 16/03/2016
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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
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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, just00:18:35 02/03/2016
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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 everywhere00:05:31 27/02/2016
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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 families00:19:49 24/02/2016
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All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She00:16:50 17/02/2016
-
In 1891, a physical education teacher in Springfield, Massachusetts invented the game we would come to know as basketball. In setting the00:19:17 10/02/2016
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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
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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
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In September 1958, Bank of America began an experiment – one that would have far reaching effects on our lives and on the economy. They decided00:13:47 20/01/2016
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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 require00:13:44 13/01/2016
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In 1950s Soviet Russia, citizens craved Western popular music—everything from jazz to rock & roll. But smuggling vinyl was dangerous, and00:11:12 22/12/2015
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The skyline of beautiful downtown Oakland, California, is defined by various towers by day, but at night there is one that shines far more00:14:39 16/12/2015
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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
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Many material trifles, such as Silly Putty, started as attempts at serious inventions, but in rare cases, the process works in reverse: something00:12:35 02/12/2015
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Superhero costumes for TV and film used to be pretty cringe-worthy. Lately, however, super outfits are looking much better. Costume designers00:18:09 24/11/2015
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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
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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
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Ballots are an essential component to a working democracy, yet they are rarely created (or even reviewed) by design professionals. Good ballot00:15:43 04/11/2015
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Households tend to take pantry food for granted, but canned beans, powered cheese, and bags of moist cookies were not designed for everyday00:16:12 28/10/2015
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The phrase ‘from Central Casting’ has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a stereotype or archetype, a subject so visually suited to its00:18:22 20/10/2015
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99% Invisible is honored to accept a 2015 Third Coast International Audio Festival award for Structural Integrity, a story of architectural00:23:17 14/10/2015
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Indian philosopher and mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh had a vision: he would build a Utopian city from the ground up, starting with 64,00000:28:20 07/10/2015
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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 longer00:16:12 30/09/2015
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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 United00:14:22 23/09/2015
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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 parents00:16:21 15/09/2015
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There are around 6,000 cargo vessels out on the ocean right now, carrying 20,000,000 shipping containers, which are delivering most of the00:14:54 09/09/2015
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In 1860, a chance find at sea forever changed our understanding of marine habitats, sparking an unprecedented push to explore a new world00:21:13 02/09/2015
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Stirling, Scotland is the home of Stirling Castle, which sits atop a giant crag, or hill, overlooking the whole town of Stirling. There has00:29:05 26/08/2015
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In communities across America, lawns that are brown or overgrown are considered especially heinous. Elite squads of dedicated individuals00:16:21 19/08/2015
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No matter which James Bond actor is your favorite, it’s undeniable that the Sean Connery films had the best villains. There’s Blofeld, who00:16:59 12/08/2015
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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 handful00:26:42 05/08/2015
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In 1933, delegates from the United States and fourteen other countries met in Montevideo, Uruguay to define what it means to be a state. The00:18:13 29/07/2015
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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
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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 played00:14:03 15/07/2015
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More than 90% of all automobile accidents are all attributable to human error, for some car industry people, a fully-automated car is a kind00:21:36 01/07/2015
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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
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Sigmund Freud’s ground-breaking techniques and theories for therapy came to be called “psychoanalysis,” and it was embodied, in practice and00:13:19 17/06/2015
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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 evoke00:30:05 10/06/2015
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This week on 99% Invisible, we have two stories about the early days of broadcasting and home sound recording, produced by Radio Diaries and00:38:02 03/06/2015
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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
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The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, Maryland is a busy place. Anyone who dies unexpectedly in the state of Maryland will00:23:18 20/05/2015
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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 billiards00:13:14 13/05/2015
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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 partly00:15:28 06/05/2015
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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
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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
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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 was00:14:42 15/04/2015
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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 four00:16:09 08/04/2015
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Eighty years ago, New York City needed another tunnel under the Hudson River. The Holland Tunnel and the George Washington Bridge could no00:24:07 31/03/2015
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United States paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused00:21:00 25/03/2015
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In the mid 1800s, not many (non-native) Americans had ever been west of the Mississippi. When Frederick Law Olmstead visited the west in the00:20:20 18/03/2015
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The United States Military is not known for being touchy-feely. There’s not much hugging or head-patting, and superiors don’t always have00:15:34 11/03/2015
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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. To00:13:23 04/03/2015
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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’s00:14:23 24/02/2015
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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 version00:09:39 18/02/2015
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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 opened00:12:41 11/02/2015
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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-his00:15:55 03/02/2015
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In 1885, Austin, Texas was terrorized by a serial killer known as the Servant Girl Annihilator. The murderer was never actually found, but00:14:47 28/01/2015
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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 on00:17:16 21/01/2015
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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 roaring00:13:04 14/01/2015
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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 all00:16:45 07/01/2015
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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 about00:41:53 31/12/2014
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If you want to follow conversation threads relating to this show on social media—whether Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, Tumblr—you know00:14:26 17/12/2014
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Hanging in the garage of Fire Station #6 in Livermore, California, there’s a small, pear-shaped light bulb. It is glowing right now. This00:12:37 10/12/2014
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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 wacky00:14:01 03/12/2014
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There’s a little trophy shop called Aardvark Laser Engraving down the street from our office in Oakland. Its small but bustling, and its00:13:49 26/11/2014
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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
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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
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“A Chair is a difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” — Mies van der Rohe. The chair presents an interesting design challenge, because00:14:58 04/11/2014
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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 ancient00:17:27 28/10/2014
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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
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When you support Radiotopia, you are making sure 99% Invisible can keep coming to you weekly and you’ll be supporting our entire collective00:02:58 19/10/2014
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On July 13th, 1977, lightning struck an electricity transmission line in New York City, causing the line’s automatic circuit breaker to kick00:14:52 14/10/2014
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Everyone has tried it at some point. The authorities started turning a blind eye years ago, but it wasn’t officially legalized until the summer00:13:10 07/10/2014
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Straight lines form the core of our built environment. Building in straight lines makes predicting costs and calculating structural loads00:15:53 30/09/2014
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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
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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 end00:16:03 16/09/2014
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In the beginning, there was design. Before any other human discipline, even before the dawn of mankind its self, design was a practice passed00:12:09 10/09/2014
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Around 2005, a Seattle neighborhood called Ballard started to see unprecedented growth. Condominiums and apartment buildings were sprouting00:16:04 02/09/2014
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Cities, like living things, evolve slowly over time. Buildings and structures get added and renovated and removed, and in this process, bits00:12:57 26/08/2014
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IKEA hacking is the practice of buying things from IKEA and reengineering—or “hacking”—them to become customized, more functional, and often00:18:35 19/08/2014
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Way back in October 2011 (see episode #38, true believers!), we broadcast a short excerpt of a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews00:58:53 12/08/2014
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As humans have developed cities and built environments, we have also needed to develop ways to find our way through them. Sam Greenspan went00:14:20 05/08/2014
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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 beyond00:10:32 29/07/2014
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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. Because00:16:47 22/07/2014
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Well before the early 1500s, when Sir Thomas Moore first coined the term “Utopia,” people have been thinking about how to design their ideal00:16:41 15/07/2014
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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
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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 with00:20:53 01/07/2014
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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
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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. The00:14:12 17/06/2014
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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
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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 city00:19:05 03/06/2014
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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 wanders00:18:44 27/05/2014
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The westernmost part of Manhattan, between 34th and 39th street, is pretty industrial. There’s a bus depot, a ferry terminal, and a steady00:20:41 20/05/2014
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In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico00:29:22 13/05/2014
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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 monument00:23:13 06/05/2014
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If you’ve wandered around Machu Picchu, or Stonehenge, or the Colosseum, or even snuck into that abandoned house on the edge of town, you00:18:37 29/04/2014
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Uniforms matter. When it comes to sports, they might be the only thing to which we’re actually loyal. Sports uniforms are packaging. But unlike00:15:49 22/04/2014
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When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest00:23:17 15/04/2014
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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 of00:15:44 08/04/2014
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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 point00:16:57 01/04/2014
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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
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Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island00:14:11 18/03/2014
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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 Boston00:18:09 11/03/2014
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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, this00:20:02 05/03/2014
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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
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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
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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 unified00:17:37 11/02/2014
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Like the best of these stories, the two bitter rivals started out as best friends: William Van Alen and Craig Severance. They were business00:16:40 04/02/2014
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On July 28, 1945, an airplane crashed into the Empire State Building. A B-25 bomber was flying a routine mission, chartering servicemen from00:14:52 15/01/2014
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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 ancient00:19:22 03/01/2014
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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
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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–on00:12:58 03/12/2013
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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
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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
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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
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I love those moments when you’re walking in your neighborhood and suddenly nothing is familiar. In a good way. Sean Cole began seeing his00:17:08 29/10/2013
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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 Kickstarter00:03:11 23/10/2013
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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 Jon00:30:17 14/10/2013
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If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has00:22:56 02/10/2013
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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’t00:23:33 17/09/2013
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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 literally00:14:48 03/09/2013
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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 scribbles00:17:17 22/08/2013
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Chicago’s biggest design achievement probably isn’t one of its amazing skyscrapers, but the Chicago River, a waterway disguised as a remnant00:18:56 09/08/2013
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If you grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, you might remember seeing the name Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits. Chuck00:16:17 29/07/2013
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An ode to an information designer who made life a little bit easier for millions and millions of people: Ladislav Sutnar, the man who put00:26:27 15/07/2013
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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 then00:26:36 02/07/2013
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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 worked00:11:18 20/06/2013
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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
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Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American Institute00:16:39 28/05/2013
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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
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Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded00:17:32 30/04/2013
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Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of00:11:03 15/04/2013
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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
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Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California–if00:10:36 21/03/2013
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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 arsenal00:11:40 08/03/2013
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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 through00:10:53 18/02/2013
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Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The00:17:41 05/02/2013
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Though its officially name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek00:16:02 23/01/2013
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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
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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 more00:23:24 31/12/2012
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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
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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 was00:10:29 29/11/2012
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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 least00:14:54 19/11/2012
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When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach. It00:09:56 05/11/2012
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In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings are not usually dome-shaped. Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came across00:13:46 25/10/2012
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On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into00:12:29 12/10/2012
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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
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Pneumatic (adj.): of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting information00:15:57 20/09/2012
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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
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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. Language00:08:20 22/08/2012
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New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the00:12:47 06/08/2012
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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 River00:16:43 25/07/2012
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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 prominent00:19:01 13/07/2012
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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 the00:02:38 12/07/2012
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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 flashy00:14:57 28/06/2012
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Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.” I like that. Of course that was before audio recording, so now, for the most part, music is frozen00:10:52 14/06/2012
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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 20000:13:49 31/05/2012
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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
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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
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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
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“Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart” – Daniel D’Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities are00:11:15 03/04/2012
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The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence00:12:10 22/03/2012
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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 friend00:10:22 09/03/2012
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“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…” -Andrea00:11:35 26/02/2012
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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 make00:12:54 10/02/2012
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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
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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 to00:12:33 18/01/2012
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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 the00:11:55 06/01/2012
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“There’s a secret jazz seeping from Washington’s aging Metro escalators – those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk00:07:49 19/12/2011
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Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals00:11:04 09/12/2011
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Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster00:05:38 03/12/2011
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It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was00:12:33 23/11/2011
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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
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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
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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 good00:05:57 13/10/2011
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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 do00:07:47 29/09/2011
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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
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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 a00:06:50 01/09/2011
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Last year, Steve Burrows CBE (Principle at the engineering consulting firm Arup) spent several weeks in Egypt studying the pyramids through00:10:27 19/08/2011
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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 called00:07:24 04/08/2011
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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
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Nicholas Felton is an information designer. Since 2005, he has tabulated thousands upon thousands of tiny measurements in his life and designed00:10:23 14/07/2011
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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
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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 sort00:12:14 17/06/2011
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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 expression00:09:38 10/06/2011
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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
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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
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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 tell00:08:28 13/05/2011
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If you were present for any of the presidential inaugurations, from Andrew Jackson to Dwight D. Eisenhower, you saw the solemn oath of office00:06:58 06/05/2011
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youarelistening.to appeared online on March 6, 2011 and I was hooked instantly. The combination of the police scanner and ambient music is00:20:14 22/04/2011
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In 1989, a group called the Berkeley Art Project decided to hold a national public art competition to create a monument that would commemorate00:08:01 15/04/2011
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Most sound design in architecture is centered around designing for silence. Buildings are trying to block out that constant stream noise from00:05:50 01/04/2011
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In 2001, Delfin Vigil was walking the streets of San Francisco and ran across the name “Nikko” carved into the concrete sidewalk. After seeing00:07:21 25/03/2011
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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
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In a recent piece from Urban Omnibus, Vishaan Chakrabarti (Professor at the Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation at00:11:14 11/03/2011
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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
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The New City Hall, designed by Finnish architect Viljo Revell, was the first modern, concrete, civic building in Toronto. When it opened in00:07:01 25/02/2011
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The idea is simple and quite beautiful: if we all shared a second, politically neutral language, people of all different nations and cultures00:06:22 18/02/2011
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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 sounds00:05:19 11/02/2011
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Everyone knows it when they see it. The classic “castle with turrets” periodic table is a beautiful and concise icon that contains a great00:06:28 04/02/2011
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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, based00:11:34 07/01/2011
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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 representation00:04:58 17/12/2010
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“Sustainable Design is a design philosophy that seeks to maximize the quality of the built environment, while minimizing or eliminating the00:04:57 03/12/2010
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Almost everything in modern life is designed to waste energy. The whole system evolved on a false premise that petroleum is cheap and plentiful00:04:59 25/11/2010
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Chris Downey explains it like this, “Beethoven continued to write music, even some of his best music, after he lost his hearing…What’s more00:05:20 19/11/2010
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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 not00:11:59 13/11/2010
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Privately Owned Public Open Spaces, or POPOS, are these little gardens, terraces, plazas, and seating areas that are private property, but00:04:58 05/11/2010
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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 unreliable00:05:19 29/10/2010
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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
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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 incorporated00:04:57 07/10/2010
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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 that00:04:58 01/10/2010
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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 into00:05:01 24/09/2010
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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 with00:04:58 24/09/2010
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In the beginning, former AIA-SF president Henrik Bull and the Transamerica Pyramid did not get along. The building was an affront to late00:04:58 23/09/2010
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This episode of 99% Invisible is all about acoustic design, the city soundscape, and how to make listening in shared spaces pleasant (or at00:04:49 23/09/2010
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