99% Invisible

Bright, flamboyant central African fashion

The history of the chambre de bonne, the tiny French apartment type that may be, finally, on the way out.

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Athens, Georgia.

How to accommodate autism in the built world

The garbage disposer and the dream of a garbage-free city

Featuring Blank Check co-host and The Atlantic movie critic David Sims covering the first section of Part 4, chapters 11-15

The constant and sometimes fraught back and forth between cartoons and toys, as exemplified by Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Understanding the clunky Prop 65 warnings on products

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Santa Fe.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book and originally it was a totally unlicensed publication

It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on?

How much film and television shapes us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give it credit for

Featuring New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie covering Part 3.

How White Castle invented fast food

The interblock parks of Sofia, Bulgaria that are caught between old failed communism and new hyper capitalism

There are memorials to lost fishermen, lost astronauts, even lost members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. What should a COVID pandemic memorial look like?

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Chicago

The design evolution of the seemingly simple, but not all that simple, skateboard

Featuring author Robert Caro covering The Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2.

The fake villages and role players used to train US soldiers

Upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler, and a fire that has been burning...and will burn... for decades.

Mapping the long history of Slovenia onto the three "Santas' that visit each year

We have a year-end mix of short stories about a rogue architect, spooky kitchens, a hundred year old music streaming service, and the crazy way the French tried to make telling time less crazy

The storied evolution of pocket calculation

Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan are starting The Power Broker book club that will run through all of 2024 as bonus episodes. This introductory episode features Conan O'Brien.

The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknown goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential monuments.

A band that was never meant to be recorded and a personal recorder that was never designed to capture music came together and were somehow perfect for each other

A town's fight to be free from the noise and trauma of the Cincinnati Police Department's open-air gun range

How Reno became the go-to place to get a quick divorce and how divorce laws have changed over time

The hunt to cultivate the cure for malaria

Designing environments for people with dementia

Devo’s first record and the fight over the arresting image of a flashy, handsome golf legend on the cover.

The historic vote over which version of Elvis should be immortalized on a postage stamp

Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for big government ‘boondoggles.’ But the full story is of course much more complicated – and really represents a turning point in how America builds infrastructure.

Two stories where the devil is in the details

The triumph and tragedy of the Sydney Opera House

Who were the real Luddites?

The story of how "Who Let The Dogs Out" ended up stuck in all of our brains. A story that goes back over 50 years and spans continents.

Solving the housing crisis and the office vacancy crisis with one obvious and elegant idea: office to housing conversion. If it were only that simple.

The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access

More about the trails as an object and an idea

We take the humble trail, what might be the original designed object, and deconstruct it

The decades-long campaign to get us to love our gas stoves

Andrew Leland takes us through the fascinating history of alternative reading technologies designed for blind people and discusses his fantastic new book The Country of the Blind, which is out today!

La Sombrita and the politics of shade

The ubiquity and cultural legacy of the shocking little Christian comics books called Chick Tracts

Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts with Roman Mars

Composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world

Many consider Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen.

The pregones of Mexico City and the one call that stands out from the cacophony

How courtroom artists became the preferred way to document trials

The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library's children's reading room and Goodnight Moon

Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.

The massive consequence of parking minimums

Seven small inventions that changed the world in a big way

The scourge of bad closed captioning

The strange design history and modern resurgence of pinball

Best-selling author John Green and Roman Mars answer questions and give dubious advice

From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though the odds of winning a big jackpot is infinitesimally small.

Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise, but that was far from inevitable

The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. It’s become the metaphor for the surveillance state, but very few actual prisons were built around this idea. Breda Dome is one of them.

The rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is also the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness.

Two stories about the transformative power of silence from our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz

Friction, tribology, and the complex art and science of lubrication

When online worlds end

The surprisingly long history of trying to use robots to call balls and strikes in baseball

The importance of humor and art in protesting (and ousting!) oppressive regimes

When LA punks were looking for a place to play in the late 1970s, Chinatown welcomed the unruly scene. But it was an uneasy alliance that led to fierce rivalries, hurt feelings, blatant racism, and broken toilets. At the center of it all was Esther Wong.

On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they refused to record until they got their fair share.

In the 20th century, Iowa high school girls basketball was HUGE but it was not the game we know today

How an ultra-marathon called The Comrades became a national obsession in South Africa and a model for inclusion during some of the most divided moments in the country's history

The shifting symbolism of Brazil's iconic yellow soccer jersey

We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersection of a street and a road; the most unlikely of theme parks; and the evolution of ancient alleyways in Beijing, China.

A Balikbayan box is a huge cardboard box (often weighing over 100 pounds) that Filipinos living all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines

It's Mini-Story Season! You’ll hear about a very, very long escalator! Beavers dropping from the sky!  We’ll hear from Janet, Miss Jackson, if you’re nasty! And a visit from the queen!

If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed something. Right wing radio talk is everywhere.

The epic tale of the Hollywood celebrity mountain lion known as P-22

There is a subset of real life superheroes who are more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on civic issues than catching criminals in alleys

The incredible story of the black men who became America's first paramedics

Roman and Kurt are back with another series of railroad tales. All aboard!

Avery Trufelman's Articles of Interest is back!

Jody Rosen joins us to talk about the evolution of the bicycle, how it became a cultural phenomenon in the late 1800s, then a symbol of protest, and a lightning rod for political controversy. And we’ll find out what’s next for the bike, in a world built for cars.

Reporter/producer Gillian Jacobs (Community, Winning Time) takes us on a stroll on the Walk of Fame, a 1.3 mile monument which chronicles Hollywood history and the vicissitudes of fame itself

The history and significance and of the much maligned vuvuzela

Jamaica is famous around the world for its music, including genres like ska, dub, and reggae. It’s tempting to think that the powerful amplifiers and giant speakers at the dance parties were designed to perfectly capture Jamaica’s indigenous sounds. But it’s actually the other way around. Those speakers and amps came first.

The jackalope is a mythical mascot of the American West – inspiring an absolute river of trinkets and songs and whiskies and postcards and tall tales.

On this special feature episode, President Bill Clinton interviews 99% Invisible host and creator Roman Mars.

How did we get to a point where "search" is failing us?

North Korea's state-run design studio has long been a prolific maker of statues around the world, particularly in Africa

The infrastructure, zoning, and cultural factors that make the hit Japanese TV program Old Enough, where toddlers go on errands by themselves, possible

There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are other options, too, like silence -- so why did this particular *bleep* sound become ubiquitous?

We're sharing the latest episode of Roman's other show What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law, your guide to the US Constitution and the Supreme Court.

For the love of peat

In the final episode of our vernacular spectacular anniversary series, 99pi producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories of regional architecture–some close to home, some on remote islands– that capture our imagination and inspire us to look deeper.

The utilitarian and "ugly" architecture that is beautiful to us

We often tell stories about how people shape the built world, but on this milestone 500th episode, we're telling stories about how the built world has shaped us (with good history and facts thrown in, because we're us).

The history of taking plants that grow naturally in one place, and moving them halfway around the world to an entirely different place with a different, often inhospitable, climate-- and then keeping them alive by growing them in potting soil that we bought at Home Depot.

The Octagonal House fad and self-improvement in the 1800s

The story of a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland and the ethnic Koreans who have had no choice but to call it home for decades.