Shows / 99% Invisible
99% Invisible
Design is everywhere in our lives, perhaps most importantly in the places where we've just stopped noticing. 99% Invisible is a weekly exploration of the process and power of design and architecture. From award winning producer Roman Mars. Learn more at 99percentinvisible.org.
Episodes
- 99% Invisible
Barcodes
When George Laurer goes to the grocery store, he doesn’t tell the check-out people that he invented the barcode, but his wife used to point it out. “My husband…
- 99% Invisible
Call Now
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. Lawyers–usually…
- 99% Invisible
The Fancy Shape
Quatrefoil is the name of the four-lobed cloverleaf shape. It’s everywhere: adorning Gothic cathedrals, more modern churches, Rhode Island mansions…
- 99% Invisible
One Man is An Island
A few years ago, reporter Sean Cole was working on a radio story and needed to interview the rapper Busta Rhymes. Sean was living in Boston at the time, so he…
- 99% Invisible
Tunnel 57
At its peak, the Berlin Wall was 100 miles long. Today only about a mile is left standing. Compared with other famous walls in history, this wall had a pretty…
- 99% Invisible
UTBAPH
It started with some Pittsburgh humor. Pittsburgh-based comedian Tom Muisal does a bit about a GPS unit that can give directions in “Pittsburghese.” Because in…
- 99% Invisible
Icon for Access
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, everyone will be on…
- 99% Invisible
Cover Story
You know the saying: you can’t judge a book by its cover. With magazines, it’s pretty much the opposite. The cover of a magazine is the unified identity for a…
- 99% Invisible
Higher And Higher
Like the best of these stories, the two bitter rivals started out as best friends: William Van Alen and Craig Severance. They were business partners. Van Alen…
- 99% Invisible
The View From The 79th Floor
On July 28, 1945, an airplane crashed into the Empire State Building. A B-25 bomber was flying a routine mission, chartering servicemen from Massachusetts to…
- 99% Invisible
Six Stories- the memory palace
Elevators are old. They would have to be. Because it is in our nature to rise. History is full of things that lift other things. In ancient Greece, and China…
- 99% Invisible
Numbers Stations
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. These…
- 99% Invisible
DIY Space Suit
Cameron Smith is building a space suit in his apartment. He’s not an astronaut. He’s not even an engineer. Cameron Smith is an archaeologist–on faculty in the…
- 99% Invisible
Future Screens are Mostly Blue
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, blue seems to be…
- 99% Invisible
Unbuilt
There is an allure in unbuilt structures: the utopian, futuristic transports, the impossibly tall skyscrapers, even the horrible highways, all capture our…
- 99% Invisible
Revolving Doors
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, and locking…
- 99% Invisible
All the Buildings
I love those moments when you’re walking in your neighborhood and suddenly nothing is familiar. In a good way. Sean Cole began seeing his neighborhood…
- 99% Invisible
Kickstart Season 4 of 99% Invisible- Weekly Episodes
99% Invisible started as a side project I made in my bedroom at night, and after two years of making the program, I turned to Kickstarter to see if I should…
- 99% Invisible
Wild Ones Live
We have one cardinal rule on 99% Invisible: No cardinals. Meaning, we deal with the built world, not the natural world. So, when I read Jon Mooallem’s…
- 99% Invisible
Strowger and Purple Reign Redux
If you are an undertaker in 1878 Kansas City, and you learn that your competitor’s wife works as a telephone switchboard operator and has been diverting…
- 99% Invisible
Bubble Houses
If you were a movie star in the market for a mansion in 1930s Los Angeles, there was a good chance you might call on Wallace Neff. Neff wasn’t just an…
- 99% Invisible
The Broadcast Clock
There’s a term that epitomizes what we radio producers aspire to create: the “driveway moment.” It’s when a story is so good that you literally can’t get out…
- 99% Invisible
I Heart NY, TM
By now, the story is well known. A man sits in the backseat of a cab, sketching on a notepad as night falls over a crumbling city. He scribbles the letter I…
99% InvisibleReversal of Fortune
In the mid-1800s, Chicago was growing like crazy, but it was also built on a swamp and struggling with a basic problem: sewage. Engineers raised the city’s…
- 99% Invisible
Noble Effort
If you grew up watching Warner Brothers cartoons, you might remember seeing the name Chuck Jones in big letters in the opening credits. Chuck Jones directed…
- 99% Invisible
Ode to Ladislav Sutnar plus Trading Places with Planet Money
An ode to an information designer who made life a little bit easier for millions and millions of people: Ladislav Sutnar, the man who put parentheses around…
- 99% Invisible
Heyoon
Growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Alex Goldman was a misfit. Bored and disaffected and angry, he longed for a place to escape to. And then he found Heyoon…
- 99% Invisible
The Man of Tomorrow
I’m willing to concede from the get-go that I might be wrong about the entire premise of this story, but Superman has never really worked for me as a…
- 99% Invisible
Rebar and the Alvord Lake Bridge
There’s something about rebar that fascinates me. If nothing else because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered. My preoccupation with…
- 99% Invisible
An Architect’s Code
Lawyers have an ethics code. Journalists have an ethics code. Architects do, too. According to Ethical Standard 1.4 of the American Institute of Architects…
- 99% Invisible
The Symphony of Sirens plus Soviet Design
For the ancient Greeks, sirens were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful, it was said, that…
- 99% Invisible
No Armed Bandit
Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending…
- 99% Invisible
Game Changer
Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of pure adulation and…
- 99% Invisible
The Modern Moloch
On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play…
- 99% Invisible
Secret Staircases
Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California–if you know…
- 99% Invisible
Hand Painted Signs
There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an arsenal of squirrel- or…
- 99% Invisible
The Zanzibar and Other Building Poems
There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up–literally. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going through a tremendous…
- 99% Invisible
New Old Town
Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The Old Town. Walking…
- 99% Invisible
In and Out of LOVE
Though its officially name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek granite benches…
- 99% Invisible
The Great Red Car Conspiracy
When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been…
- 99% Invisible
The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo
If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be more precise they had a…
- 99% Invisible
Built for Speed
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. How long are the…
- 99% Invisible
Broken Window
When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do. One was buying geodes and…
- 99% Invisible
Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever. By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people…
- 99% Invisible
Razzle Dazzle
When most people think of camouflage they think of blending in with the environment, but camouflage can also take the opposite approach. It has long been…
- 99% Invisible
Derelict Dome
In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings are not usually dome-shaped. Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came across one. Katie started…
- 99% Invisible
The Political Stage
On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into the most miniscule…
- 99% Invisible
Q2
Benjamen Walker had a theory that priority queues are changing the American experience of waiting in line. So he visited amusement parks, highways, and…
- 99% Invisible
A Series of Tubes
Pneumatic (adj.): of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting information and moving…
- 99% Invisible
BackStory- Heyward Shepherd Memorial
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. With great…
- 99% Invisible
Two Storeys
While we’re gearing up for season 3, we present two pieces from two shows we love: First up, Language Bites from RTE Choice in Ireland. Language Bites is a…
- 99% Invisible
Names vs The Nothing
New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the liminal spaces…
- 99% Invisible
Some Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret Life
Sean Cole is a poet and he knows what you think of that. He is also a radio producer. One night, drunk and stumbling around the Hudson River with his friend…
- 99% Invisible
Purple Reign
What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building? The hotel on the very prominent corner of Touhy and…
- 99% Invisible
Kickstarter Video for Season 3 of 99% Invisible
This is the Kickstarter video for funding the new season of 99% Invisible. If you enjoy the show and want to help keep it going, now is the time to go to our…
- 99% Invisible
What Gave You That Idea
Starlee Kine’s friend Noel works in advertising. In 2003, Noel was working in at an agency in Richmond, VA. Everyone wanted to work on flashy spots like Apple…
- 99% Invisible
Frozen Music
Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.” I like that. Of course that was before audio recording, so now, for the most part, music is frozen music. It’s…
- 99% Invisible
The Best Beer in the World
If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200 Belgian breweries…
- 99% Invisible
The Colour of Money
US paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused attention. So pull out a…
- 99% Invisible
The Xanadu Effect
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, designed by…