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% InvisibleMini-Stories: Volume 7
It’s the end of the year and time for our annual mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that came up in our research for another…
99% InvisibleSmart Stuff with Justin and Roman- Founder Effect
The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today…
99% InvisibleThe ELIZA Effect
Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It was a simple…
99% InvisibleThe Infantorium
“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and amusement…
99% InvisibleMannequin Pixie Dream Girl
In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of mannequin that was…
99% InvisibleCautionary Tales
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. His basic lesson…
99% InvisibleUbiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness
There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little campfire…
99% InvisibleHow To Pick A Pepper
The chili pepper is the pride of New Mexico, but they have a problem with their beloved crop. There just aren’t enough workers to pick the peppers. Picking…
99% InvisibleGreat Bitter Lake Association
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. Great Bitter Lake Association…
99% InvisibleAudio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece
To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. Even if…
99% InvisibleUnsure Footing
Before 1992, the easiest way to run the time off the clock in a soccer game was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper, who could pick the ball up, and hold…
99% InvisibleThe Kirkbride Plan
Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ago they…
99% InvisibleThe Help-Yourself City
There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.” Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.” Informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to…
99% Invisible99% Invisible presents What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law
Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that the news cycle…
99% InvisibleDead Cars
Everything in Bethel, Alaska comes in by cargo plane or barge, and even when something stops working, it’s often too expensive and too inconvenient to get it…
99% InvisibleThe Pool and the Stream Redux
This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern…
99% InvisibleWait Wait...Tell Me!
Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can…
99% InvisibleAll Rings Considered
Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really said something about…
99% InvisiblePeace Lines
There are many walls in Belfast which physically separate Protestant neighborhoods from Catholic ones. Some are fences that you can see through, while others…
99% InvisibleModel City
During the depths of the Depression in the late 1930s, 300 craftspeople came together for two years to build an enormous scale model of the City of San…
99% InvisibleOn Beeing
Farmers have known for centuries that putting a hive of honeybees in an orchard results in more blossoms becoming cherries, almonds, apples and the like. Yet…
99% InvisibleHe's Still Neutral
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: they would install a…
99% InvisibleInvisible Women
Men are often the default subjects of design, which can have a huge impact on big and critical aspects of everyday life. Caroline Criado Perez is the author of…
99% InvisibleGoodness Gracious Great Balls of Twine
Vivian Le is on a mission that requires equal parts science, philosophy, and daring, in search of something that’s been hotly contested for decades: the…
99% InvisibleBuilt on Sand
Sand is so tiny and ubiquitous that it's easy to take for granted. But in his book The World in a Grain, author Vince Beiser traces the history of sand…
- 99% Invisible
The Universal Page
Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s where Andrew edited…
- 99% Invisible
Life and Death in Singapore
When Singapore gained its independence they went on a mission to re-house the population from densely-packed thatched roof huts into giant concrete…
- 99% Invisible
The Anthropocene Reviewed
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed…
- 99% Invisible
The Barney Design redux
All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our hometown team here at…
- 99% Invisible
The Automat
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, you would push…
- 99% Invisible
Depave Paradise
Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city began piping water in…
- 99% Invisible
Sound and Health: Hospitals
Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals. According to Joel Beckerman…
- 99% Invisible
La Sagrada Familia (Repeat)
There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of…
- 99% Invisible
Sound and Health: Cities
Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic…
- 99% Invisible
Weeding is Fundamental
Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up…
- 99% Invisible
From Bombay with Love
From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had completely…
- 99% Invisible
Uptown Squirrel
This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now…
- 99% Invisible
Play Mountain
Even if you don't recognize a Noguchi table by name, you've definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer or art dealer is…
- 99% Invisible
The Roman Mars Mazda Virus
Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive certain models of…
- 99% Invisible
Froebel's Gifts
In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education…
- 99% Invisible
Three Things That Made the Modern Economy
50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching…
- 99% Invisible
The Many Deaths of a Painting
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, but one reaction…
- 99% Invisible
Palaces for the People
Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although…
- 99% Invisible
Classic Cartoon Sound Effects!
Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades ago. How were…
99% InvisibleThe Known Unknown
The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but (5:11) the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has become one of the most solemn and…
- 99% Invisible
Usonia Redux
Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known works…
- 99% Invisible
Beneath the Ballpark
In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. City leaders were looking for a way to boost Los Angeles's profile as a world…
- 99% Invisible
National Sword
Where does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a Materials Recovery…
- 99% Invisible
The Secret Lives of Color
Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia…
- 99% Invisible
The Tunnel
In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting the two buildings…
- 99% Invisible
Crude Habitat
Santa Barbara, California, is a famously beautiful place, but if you look offshore from one of the city's many beaches, you'll see a series of artificial…
- 99% Invisible
Atomic Tattoos
In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations. There, fingers were…
- 99% Invisible
Mini-Stories: Volume 6
99% Invisible is starting the year off with the sixth installment of our staff mini-stories. Kicking off 2019 are a set of tales about a perpetual lie about…
- 99% Invisible
Gathering the Magic
Magic: The Gathering is a card game and your goal is to knock your opponent down to zero points. But Magic: The Gathering also has a deep mythology about an…
- 99% Invisible
Christmas with The Allusionist
For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of The Allusionist podcast) Helen Zaltzman, each…
- 99% Invisible
Mini-Stories: Volume 5
It’s the end of 2018 and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. These are my favorite episodes of the year to make. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories…
- 99% Invisible
Bonus Episode- Avery talks Articles of Interest with Roman
Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and use a bit of that money to support…
- 99% Invisible
The Accidental Room
A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall. Plus, we look at the origin…
- 99% Invisible
Oñate's Foot
Juan de Oñate is one of the world’s lesser-known conquistadors, but his name can be found all over New Mexico. There are Oñate streets, Oñate schools, and, of…
- 99% Invisible
Raccoon Resistance
After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated the innovative…