PODCAST
99% Invisible
by Roman Mars
A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.
Episodes
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99% Invisible-71- In and Out of LOVE
Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park. With its sleek granite benches, geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement, its success as a pedestrian plaza is debatable. But it turned out to be perfect…
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99% Invisible-70- 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 this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city--until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on...
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99% Invisible-69- The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the New UC Logo
So 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 new “visual identity system,” which is the kind of entirely accurate, but completely wonky description that gets met with sarcastic…
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99% Invisible-68- 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 stripes and the spaces between them? You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to. Over the course of many years, a psychology...
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99% Invisible-67- Broken Window
http://99percentinvisible.org/post/36839932084/episode-67-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 smashing them apart with a hammer. (You know geodes, right? Those...
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99% Invisible-66- 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 (with estimates of up to 50,000). That's a population density of at least 3.2 million per square mile. For New York City to get that dense,...
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99% Invisible-65- 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 hypothesized that stripes on zebras make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one zebra from another when the zebras are in a large herd....
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99% Invisible-64- 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 asking around about the dome. She found it was built by the late Buckminster Fuller, who called himself a "comprehensive anticipatory...
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99% Invisible-63- 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 details of a political campaign. Andrea reveals seven (and a half) secrets about the staging of events along the campaign trail. Like how...
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99% Invisible-62- 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 community colleges to find out how these priority queues work and who is using them. What started as an episode of 99% Invisible became a…
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99% Invisible-61- 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 material objects were essentially the same challenge. The way you sent someone a message was pretty much the same process as sending…
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60b- BackStory- Heyward Shepherd Memorial
Season 3 starts on September 19! From then on you’ll get a new episode every nine days. This is only possible because of your generous support in making 99% Invisible the highest-funded journalism project in Kickstarter history. In the meantime, I still want you to listen to good stories, so I’m...
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99% Invisible-60a- Two Storeys
Two Storeys: Language Bites and the memory palace 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 series of 1-minute programs exploring the origins of popular phrases in the English…
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99% Invisible-60- 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 within cities that are not traditionally framed as “public space” because, quite frankly, they are often ugly and unpleasant, the leftover…
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99% Invisible-59- Some Other Sign that People Do Not Totally Regret Life
Episode 59- 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 Malissa O'Donnell, he discovered a monument -- two of them actually -- to...
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99% Invisible-58- 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 Kilbourn Avenues in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town’s most famous building: The first Hyatt hotel in all of Chicagoland…
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57- 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 or Nike or Gatorade. Do you know what wasn’t flashy? Insurance. Which is why when a company called Geico became a client everyone hoped…
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99% Invisible-56- 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 only very recently in the history of music that we’ve been able to freeze music into an object. In my life, the form of this object mattered…
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99% Invisible-55- 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, there’s a very specific sub-type: Trappist beers. According to our reporter Cyrus Farivar (also from Episode #36 “Super Bonn Bon”), there...
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99% Invisible-54- 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 greenback from your wallet (or look at a picture one online) and just take really take it in. All the fonts, the busy filigree, the micro...
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99% Invisible-53- 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 I.M. Pei, is a huge trapezoid jutting out over a wide plaza. Julia found the view from the top pretty fantastic, especially when munching…
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99% Invisible-52- Galloping Gertie
Even during the construction of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the deck would go up and down by several feet with the slightest breeze. Construction workers on the span chewed on lemon wedges to stop their motion sickness. They nicknamed the structure Galloping Gertie. The original Tacoma...
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99% Invisible-51- The Arsenal of Exclusion
"Cities exist to bring people together, but cities can also keep people apart" Daniel D'Oca, Urban Planner, Interboro Partners. Cities are great. They have movement, activity and diversity. But go to any city and it’s pretty clear, a place can be diverse without really being integrated. This...
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99% Invisible-50- DeafSpace
The acoustics of a building are a big concern for architects. But for designers at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC, it’s the absence of sound that defines the approach to architecture. Gallaudet is a university dedicated to educating the deaf and hard of hearing, and for the last 3 years,...
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99% Invisible-49- Queue Theory and Design
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 friend Benjamen Walker is obsessed with queues. He keeps sending me YouTube clips of queue violence. This preoccupation led him to find a man known as “Dr. Queue.”...
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99% Invisible-48- The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room
“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…” -Andrea Seabrook, NPR Congressional Correspondent In the eight years Andrea Seabrook has been reporting on Congress, she has made it a point to get to know the whole...
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99% Invisible-47- US Postal Service Stamps
"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 make it work." -Ethel Kessler, Art Director for USPS Stamp Services Stamps design takes, on average, a year to a year and a half, from conception to execution....
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99% Invisible-46- Vulcanite Dentures
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. The invention of Vulcanite hard rubber changed everything. It was moldable, it could be precisely fitted, and it was relatively cheap. Everyone began…
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99% Invisible-45- Immersive Ideal
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 to be Afraid) and their last album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, came out in 2004. In the interim, the singer/guitarist/producer for Beauty Pill, Chad Clark, got...
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99% Invisible-44- The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
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 the 1950’s were supposed to solve the impending population crisis in inner city St. Louis. It was supposed to save the urban poor from the indignities of the...
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99% Invisible-43- The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators
“There's a secret jazz seeping from Washington's aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?” -Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro's screechy, wailing escalators”...
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99% Invisible-42- Recognizably Anonymous
Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals who… have been variously described as hackers, hacktivists, free-expression zealots, Internet troublemakers, and assorted combinations thereof.” But…
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99% Invisible-41- The Human-Human Interface
“There’s a whole universe in every single object when put in relationship with a human.” – Paolo Antonelli Paola Antonelli is the Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Her most recent blockbuster show, Talk to Me, explored the communication…
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99% Invisible-40- Billy Possum
It’s totally unfair. Hydrox cookies came out four years before the introduction of Oreos, but Hydrox could never shake the image that it was a cheap knock-off, an also-ran. As a consumer product, it’s completely out of your hands if you’re deemed a mighty Transformer, or a loathsome Gobot....
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99% Invisible-39X- The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet
In the center of San Francisco, there is a plaza with no benches. Its central feature at the entrance of the plaza is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprin in 1975.The water shoots out at various angles, from inside a sunken pit, filled with large granite slabs. It’s a design…
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99% Invisible-39- Darth Vader Family Courthouse
It's hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles, abuse, divorce- and if you were to design a place to reflect and amplify that misery, not mitigate it, it'd probably take the form of the old New York County...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.
HOSTED BY
Roman Mars
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does 99% Invisible have?
99% Invisible currently has 76 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is 99% Invisible about?
A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.
How often does 99% Invisible release new episodes?
99% Invisible has 76 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
Where can I listen to 99% Invisible?
You can listen to 99% Invisible on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts 99% Invisible?
99% Invisible is created and hosted by Roman Mars.
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