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
The Green Book redux
The new film “Green Book” is rolling out across the country. I have not seen the film, so I can’t speak to its merits or shortcomings, but while people are…
- 99% Invisible
Orphan Drugs
We chronicle the epic struggle to get drugs that treat very rare diseases on the market, and the unintended consequence of that fight, which affected the cost…
- 99% Invisible
Devolutionary Design
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of one's…
- 99% Invisible
A Year in the Dark
Early on the morning of September 20th, 2017, a category four hurricane named Maria hit the island of Puerto Rico. It was a beast of a hurricane -- the…
- 99% Invisible
Welcome to Jurassic Art
At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will…
- 99% Invisible
The Worst Way to Start a City
Sam Anderson, author of Boom Town, guides us through the chaotic founding of Oklahoma City, which happened all in one day in 1889, in an event called the Land…
- 99% Invisible
Punk Style: Articles of Interest #6
There is this myth that it’s frivolous or unproductive to care about how you look. Clothing and fashion get trivialized a lot. But think about who, culturally…
- 99% Invisible
Blue Jeans: Articles of Interest #5
For the most part, we tend to keep our clothes relatively clean and avoid spills and rips and tears. But denim is so hard-wearing and hard-working that it just…
- 99% Invisible
Hawaiian Shirts: Articles of Interest #4
There are a few ways to tell if you’re looking at an authentic, high-quality aloha shirt. If the pockets match the pattern, that’s a good sign, but it’s not…
- 99% Invisible
Pockets: Articles of Interest #3
Womenswear is littered with fake pockets that don’t open, or shallow pockets that can hardly hold more than a paperclip. If women's clothes have pockets at…
- 99% Invisible
Plaid: Articles of Interest #2
Lumberjacks wore plaid. Punks wore plaid mini skirts. The Beach Boys used to be called the Pendletones, and they wore plaid with their surfboards. Lots of…
- 99% Invisible
Kids' Clothes: Articles of Interest #1
Clothes are records of the bodies we’ve lived in. Think of the old sweater that you used to have that's just not your style anymore, or the jeans that just…
- 99% Invisible
Billboard Boys: The Greatest Radio Contest of All Time
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, it had broadcast…
- 99% Invisible
The House that Came in the Mail
The Sear & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early twentieth century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were subscribers. At its…
- 99% Invisible
The First Straw
A straw is a simple thing. It’s a tube, a conveyance mechanism for liquid. The defining characteristic of the straw is the emptiness inside it. This is the…
- 99% Invisible
Double Standards
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, this surgery is…
- 99% Invisible
Bundyville
Most of the American west is owned by the Federal Government. About 85 percent of Nevada, 61 percent of Alaska, 53 percent of Oregon, the list goes on. And…
- 99% Invisible
It's Chinatown
For Americans, the sight of pagoda roofs and dragon gates means that you are in Chinatown. Whether in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, the…
- 99% Invisible
Fire and Rain
Nestled between the mountains and the ocean, right next to Santa Barbara, sits Montecito, California. The region endures a major fire approximately once every…
- 99% Invisible
Built to Burn
After the massive Panorama Fire in southern California in 1980, a young fire researcher named Jack Cohen went in to investigate the houses that were destroyed…
- 99% Invisible
The Shipping Forecast
Four times every day, on radios all across the British Isles, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script. "And now the Shipping…
- 99% Invisible
Everything is Alive
Louis is a can of generic cola. He’s been on the shelf a long while, so he’s had some time to think. Go2 is a store brand. "People call it a knockoff," says…
- 99% Invisible
Interrobang
In the spring of 1962, an ad man named Martin Speckter was thinking about advertising when he realized something: many ads asked questions, but not just any…
- 99% Invisible
Roman Mars on ZigZag
This is a special presentation of episode #4 of Radiotopia's newest show ZigZag. Manoush and Jen give themselves 36 hours in San Francisco to come up with a…
- 99% Invisible
VIDEO- Why Danger Symbols Can't Last Forever with Vox
The world is full of icons that warn us to be afraid — to stay away from this or not do that. And many of these are easy to understand because they represent…
- 99% Invisible
Right to Roam
In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a…
- 99% Invisible
Post-Narco Urbanism
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar, the notorious drug lord, had effectively declared war on the Colombian state. At one point, his cartel was supplying 80% of the…
- 99% Invisible
The Barney Design
Until the early 90s, basketball uniforms were pretty tame. There had been real limits to what could be done with jerseys. All the details—the numbers, the…
- 99% Invisible
77 Steps
As the U.S. war effort ramped up in the early 1940s, the Navy put out a request for chair design submissions. They needed a chair that was fireproof…
- 99% Invisible
The Vault
Svalbard is a remote Norwegian archipelago with reindeer, Arctic foxes and only around 2,500 humans -- but it is also home to a vault containing seeds for…
- 99% Invisible
Curb Cuts
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it's easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and…
- 99% Invisible
Immobile Homes
"Part of the paradox at the heart of manufactured housing," explains Esther Sullivan, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver "is that it's…
- 99% Invisible
Breaking Bad News
When a doctor reveals a terminal diagnosis to a patient -- that process is as delicate a procedure as any surgery, with potentially serious consequences if…
- 99% Invisible
The Laff Box
For nearly five decades, the laugh track was ubiquitous on television sitcoms, but in the early 2000s, it began to disappear. What happened? How did we get…
- 99% Invisible
Gander International Airport
The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and difficult through the…
- 99% Invisible
The Hair Chart
Andre Walker became famous for being Oprah Winfrey’s hair stylist, but he is also known for something else: a system that he created back in the 1990s to…
- 99% Invisible
Lessons from Las Vegas
To this day, architects tend to turn their noses up at Las Vegas, or simply dismiss it as irrelevant to serious design theory. But as Denise Scott Brown…
- 99% Invisible
Making it Rain
The battlefield has always been at the mercy of the climate, but there was a time in U.S. military history when we did more than just pray for advantageous…
- 99% Invisible
Airships and the Future that Never Was
They are hulking, but graceful -- human-made whales that float in the air. For over a century, lighter-than-air vehicles have captured the public imagination…
- 99% Invisible
Gerrymandering
The way we draw our political districts has a huge effect on U.S. politics, but the process is also greatly misunderstood. Gerrymandering has become a…
- 99% Invisible
Miss Manhattan Redux
All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She has gone by many…
- 99% Invisible
Fordlandia
In the late 1920s, the Ford Motor Company bought up millions of acres of land in Brazil. They loaded boats with machinery and supplies, and shipped them deep…
- 99% Invisible
Blood, Sweat and Tears (City of the Future, Part 2)
The Bijlmermeer (or Bijlmer, for short) was built just outside of Amsterdam in the 1960s. It was designed by modernist architects to be a "city of the future"…
- 99% Invisible
Bijlmer (City of the Future, Part 1)
After World War 2, city planners in Amsterdam wanted to design the perfect “City of the Future.” They decided to build a new neighborhood, close to Amsterdam…
- 99% Invisible
Making a Mark: Visual Identity with Tom Geismar
The Chase logo was introduced in 1961, when the Chase National Bank and the Bank of the Manhattan Company merged to form the Chase Manhattan Bank. At the time…
- 99% Invisible
Border Wall
When current President Donald Trump took office, he promised to build an “an impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful, southern border wall." The…
- 99% Invisible
Managed Retreat
In the 1970s it looked like the beloved, 200-year-old Cape Hatteras lighthouse was in danger. The sea was getting closer and threatening to swallow it up. And…
- 99% Invisible
Speech Bubbles: Understanding Comics with Scott McCloud
Cartoonist and theorist Scott McCloud has been making and thinking about comics for decades. He is the author of Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. This…
- 99% Invisible
Thermal Delight
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, without the colors…
- 99% Invisible
Mini-Stories: Volume 4
This part two of the 2017/2018 mini-stories episodes, where Roman interviews the staff and our collaborators about their favorite little design stories that…
- 99% Invisible
Biomimicry- Vox + 99% Invisible Video
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. It didn’t always…
- 99% Invisible
Mini-Stories: Volume 3
It’s the end of the year and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are quick hit stories that were maybe pitched to us from someone in the…
- 99% Invisible
Guerrilla Public Service Redux
In the early morning of August 5, 2001, artist Richard Ankrom and a group of friends assembled on the 4th Street bridge over the 110 freeway in Los Angeles…
- 99% Invisible
The Nut Behind the Wheel
In the past fifty years, the car crash death rate has dropped by nearly 80 percent in the United States. And one of the reasons for that drop has to do with…
- 99% Invisible
A 700-Foot Mountain of Whipped Cream
While the 1960s shift in print and TV advertising has been heavily documented and mythologized by Mad Men, Madison Avenue’s radiophonic collision with the…
- 99% Invisible
Money Makers
For a long time, anti-counterfeiting laws made it illegal to show US currency in movies. Now you can show real money, but fake money is often preferred…
- 99% Invisible
Hero Props: Graphic Design in Film & Television
When a new movie comes out, most of the praise goes to the director and the lead actors, but there are so many other people involved in a film, and a lot of…
- 99% Invisible
Dollhouses of St. Louis
Back in the 1950s, St. Louis was segregated and The Ville was one of the only African-American neighborhoods in the city. The community was prosperous…
- 99% Invisible
Oyster-tecture
New York was built at the mouth of the Hudson River, and that fertile estuary environment was filled with all kinds of marine life. But one creature in…
- 99% Invisible
La Sagrada Familia
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…