99% Invisible

By Roman Mars

Arts Design

What's 99% Invisible about?

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.
A proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX. Learn more at radiotopia.fm.

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438- The Real Book

04.07.2021

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers ...

99% Invisible episodes:

04.07.2021 438- The Real Book Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers ...
03.30.2021 437- Science Vs Snakes More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a different horrible effect to your body. Some attack your muscles, while others attack your ...
03.23.2021 436- Oops, Our Bad In the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature, but now that we’ve spent some time with the consequences, such as species extinction and climate change, humans are focused on the control of the control of ...
03.16.2021 435- The Megaplex! Back in the early 1990s, movie theaters weren't that great. The auditoriums were cramped and narrow, and the screen was dim. But in 1995, the AMC Grand 24 in Dallas changed everything. It was the very first movie megaplex in ...
03.09.2021 434- Artistic License Idaho was the first state to slap a slogan on a license plate, “Idaho Potatoes,” which may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out this idea would end up having outsized consequences, and not just for Idaho. ...
03.02.2021 433- Florence Nightingale: Data Viz Pioneer Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back ...
02.23.2021 432- The Batman and the Bridge Builder Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bridge was a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake ...
02.16.2021 431- 12 Heads from the Garden of Perfect Brightness The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most believe all such cultural artifacts should return to China, but many others argue that these objects ...
02.12.2021 Judas and the Black Messiah, Episode 1: The Chairman Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX. In the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” host and critic Elvis Mitchell of KCRW ...
02.09.2021 430- The Doom Boom Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the Times. People have always built underground survival shelters to stay safe from things like plagues or hurricanes. But in modern history, we've really outdone ourselves. Garrett will be our guide ...
02.08.2021 Judas and the Black Messiah Trailer from 99% Invisible and Proximity Media Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX. In the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” host and critic Elvis Mitchell of KCRW ...
02.02.2021 429- Stuccoed in Time Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe (mudbrick) look that came to be called Pueblo Revival. This aesthetic combines elements of indigenous pueblo architecture and the New Mexico's old Spanish missions, resulting in mostly ...
01.26.2021 428- Beneath the Skyway Cities around the world have distinctive modes of transportation -- the canals of Venice, the double-decker busses of London, and the Twin Cities (of Minneapolis and St. Paul) have skyways. In both downtowns, there are vast networks of climate-controlled pedestrian ...
01.20.2021 427- Mini-Stories: Volume 11 In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from the Fresh Air Movement to the lost Lenin in Antarctica. Mini-Stories: Volume 11
01.12.2021 426- Mini-Stories: Volume 10 In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from climate-changing sheep to the persistent urban legend behind the invention of a space pen. Mini-Stories: Volume 10 99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is ...
12.22.2020 425- Mini-Stories: Volume 9 Each year, 99% Invisible producers select short design stories to talk about with host Roman Mars. Some of these were just too brief to make into full 99pi episodes, but many also reveal aspects of how we find ideas for ...
12.18.2020 Roman Mars on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorne on Bullseye this week to talk about life before podcasting, and what decades in radio has taught him. Roman has worked in podcasts and radio for decades at this point, but his career didn't start ...
12.15.2020 Chapter 5: Housing Finally If homelessness is the problem, housing is the solution. But it’s not always that simple. Kate Cody has been living in her encampment community for a long time. And there’s no guarantee she’ll be able to make the transition inside, ...
12.11.2020 Chapter 4: The List When Tulicia Lee tried to get help with housing, she was essentially put on a big long list with a bunch of other homeless people. If you live in the U.S., your community probably has a list like this too. ...
12.08.2020 Chapter 3: Housing First In the 1980's, a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis was working with mentally ill homeless people on the streets of New York. Sometimes, when he thought it was necessary to keep someone safe, Sam would have people committed to a psychiatric ...
12.04.2020 Chapter 2: The Hotline Katie Mingle heard a lot about 211 doing this reporting. Not just from Tulicia Lee who called a bunch of times, but from everyone—from homeless people and service providers and advocates. In her mind, it was the 911 of homelessness. ...
12.01.2020 Chapter 1: Tulicia When we think about homelessness, we often have a certain image in our mind—people pushing shopping carts, or big sprawling tent encampments. But for the vast majority of homeless people, the experience is less visible. Many people who are unable ...
12.01.2020 According to Need: Prologue The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is one -- it just wasn’t designed to help everyone. According to Need is a documentary ...
11.29.2020 According to Need coming December 1 According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible’s Katie Mingle that asks: What are we doing to get people into housing? Coming December 1
11.25.2020 424- The Great Indoors Emily Anthes is the author of The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behaviour, Health and Happiness, and she notes that even before the pandemic hit, we humans spent about 90 percent of our time indoors ...
11.21.2020 423- Sean Exploder As you might know, we have our own composer here at 99pi named Sean Real who works with the producers to score our episodes with original music that she writes and records right here in Oakland. She has created over ...
11.18.2020 422- In The Unlikely Event If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you’ve been directed to study the safety briefing card in your seatback pocket. Every passenger plane, commercial or private, has to have safety cards on board. Mo Laborde is a reporter who has ...
11.11.2020 421- You've Got Enron Mail! Enron collapsed nearly 20 years ago, but chances are something you use today was affected by emails sent by 150 of the company's top employees. These emails — about meetings and energy markets but also affairs, divorces, and fraud — ...
11.03.2020 420- The Lost Cities of Geo Geocities was an online collection of metropolises, each with their own neighborhoods built around shared interests. The city metaphor helped make a whole new group of users understand the world wide web for the first time. At its peak, it ...
10.27.2020 419- Take a Walk During publicity interviews for The 99% Invisible City someone asked us, “What is your favorite way to experience the city?” The answer is walking. If you have nothing to do, take a walk. If you are overwhelmed with things to ...
10.23.2020 99pi Presents The Next Billion Users This bonus episode is sponsored by Google’s Next Billion User Initiative. Every week millions of people come online for the very first time. And everyone – no matter where they live, what language they speak or their level of digital ...
10.20.2020 418- Sign Stealing In the early days of baseball, sign-stealing was almost like a game within the game. Teams and players would try all kinds of tricks to get a glimpse of what the catcher was signaling to the pitcher. Even with this ...
10.13.2020 417- For the Love of Peat When we think about carbon storage, we tend to think about forests, but peatlands are also incredible carbon sinks. In Europe, peatlands contain five times more carbon than forests. But back in the 80s, most people didn't know this remarkable ...
10.06.2020 416- Exploring The 99% Invisible City We're excited to celebrate the release of The 99% Invisible City book by host Roman Mars and producer Kurt Kohlstedt with a guided audio tour of beautiful downtown Oakland, California. In this episode, we explain how anchor plates help hold ...
09.29.2020 415- Goodnight Nobody The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon. Goodnight Nobody Pre-order The 99% Invisible City
09.22.2020 414- The Address Book An address is something many people take for granted today, but they are in fact a fairly recent invention that has shaped our cities and taken on great political importance. Deirdre Mask is the author of The Address Book: What ...
09.15.2020 413- Highways 101 Icons and symbols and signage are all around us, and nowhere more so than on the open road. So for this episode of Ubiquitous Icons: hop in the car with Roman and Kurt for a crash course in roadside signage. ...
09.09.2020 412- Where Do We Go From Here? There have been many waves of panic and resistance to new people moving into the public sphere and needing accommodation. And a focus of that panic has often been… public bathrooms. The debate about trans bathroom access became a big ...
09.01.2020 411- Podcast Episode After the 1970s oil crisis, the global economy went into a recession. American unemployment hit 11 percent. And suddenly, middle-class families didn’t have money for name brands like Coke or Kellogg’s. Consumers wanted cheaper food. In response, supermarkets had to ...
08.25.2020 244- The Revolutionary Post Winifred Gallagher, author of How the Post Office Created America argues that the post office is not simply an inexpensive way to send a letter. The service was designed to unite a bunch of disparate towns and people under one ...
08.11.2020 410- Policing the Open Road Before the twentieth century, most Americans rarely came into contact with police officers. But with more and more drivers behind the wheel, police departments rapidly expanded their forces and increased officers’ authority to stop citizens who violated traffic laws. The ...
08.04.2020 409- California Love Scared Straight Walter Thompson-Hernandez was just eleven years old when he was admitted to L.A.'s infamous Scared Straight program for graffiti related crimes. In this episode, Walter, through a chance encounter, checks-in with his friend who went through the program with him, ...
07.29.2020 408- Valley of the Fallen About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It’s so big you can see it from miles away. Beneath the cross, there’s a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved ...
07.21.2020 407- The Dolphin that Roared When Emily Oberman found a flag of the island nation of Anguilla her father had helped design in her attic, she had no idea it was connected to one of the strangest political revolutions in history. The Dolphin that Roared ...
07.14.2020 406- A Side of Franchise There are many books about McDonald’s that criticize the company for its many sins, and author Marcia Chatelain has read all of them. But her book comes at this famous fast-food restaurant from a different angle and with a much ...
07.08.2020 405- Freedom House Ambulance Service One night halfway through a graveyard shift at the hospital, orderly John Moon watched as two young men burst through the doors. They were working desperately to save a dying patient. Maybe today he wouldn’t bat an eye at this ...
06.30.2020 404- Return of Oñate's Foot All across the country, protestors have been tearing down old monuments. These monuments have been falling in the middle of historic protests against police brutality. Sparked by the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, these demonstrations have spread to communities, ...
06.24.2020 403- Return of the Yokai In the US, mascots are used to pump up crowds at sporting events, or for traumatizing generations of children at Chuck E. Cheese, but in Japan it’s different. There are mascots for towns, aquariums, dentists' offices, even prisons. There are ...
06.16.2020 402- Instant Gramification If you’re on Instagram, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of one particular building called the Yardhouse. It was designed by the London-based architecture collective Assemble. The design of the building had a lot to say about creating ...
06.09.2020 Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12 A wedding was once seen as a start of young adulthood. Now, a wedding has come to represent a crowning achievement -- a symbol that your whole life is together and you have accrued the time and space and resources ...

Older episodes

99% Invisible

What's 99% Invisible about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

99% Invisible episodes:

438- The Real Book

437- Science Vs Snakes

436- Oops, Our Bad

435- The Megaplex!

434- Artistic License

433- Florence Nightingale: Data Viz Pioneer

432- The Batman and the Bridge Builder

431- 12 Heads from the Garden of Perfect Brightness

Judas and the Black Messiah, Episode 1: The Chairman

430- The Doom Boom

Judas and the Black Messiah Trailer from 99% Invisible and Proximity Media

429- Stuccoed in Time

428- Beneath the Skyway

427- Mini-Stories: Volume 11

426- Mini-Stories: Volume 10

425- Mini-Stories: Volume 9

Roman Mars on Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

Chapter 5: Housing Finally

Chapter 4: The List

Chapter 3: Housing First

Chapter 2: The Hotline

Chapter 1: Tulicia

According to Need: Prologue

According to Need coming December 1

424- The Great Indoors

423- Sean Exploder

422- In The Unlikely Event

421- You've Got Enron Mail!

420- The Lost Cities of Geo

419- Take a Walk

99pi Presents The Next Billion Users

418- Sign Stealing

417- For the Love of Peat

416- Exploring The 99% Invisible City

415- Goodnight Nobody

414- The Address Book

413- Highways 101

412- Where Do We Go From Here?

411- Podcast Episode

244- The Revolutionary Post

410- Policing the Open Road

409- California Love Scared Straight

408- Valley of the Fallen

407- The Dolphin that Roared

406- A Side of Franchise

405- Freedom House Ambulance Service

404- Return of Oñate's Foot

403- Return of the Yokai

402- Instant Gramification

Wedding Dresses: Articles of Interest #12

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