Invisibilia

By NPR

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What's Invisibilia about?

Unseeable forces control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions. Invisibilia—Latin for invisible things—fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently.

4.6

19,568 ratings

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LAST EPISODE

Life Kit: What's your attac...

01.13.2023

The new year is a time to be reflective and make changes - maybe to yourself or how you relate to others. With resolutions in mind, we bring you this NPR Life Kit episode exploring what attachment styles reveal about ...

Invisibilia episodes:

01.13.2023 Life Kit: What's your attachment style? The new year is a time to be reflective and make changes - maybe to yourself or how you relate to others. With resolutions in mind, we bring you this NPR Life Kit episode exploring what attachment styles reveal about ...
12.16.2022 Revisiting Love and Lapses: A Conversation with Code Switch host B.A. Parker Sometimes the holidays are filled with the people you love. Other times, they're marked by an absence. In this special holiday episode, new Code Switch co-host and former Invisibilia producer B.A. Parker tells a story about family, loss and preserving ...
10.07.2022 Power Tools Bad bosses. Obnoxious coworkers. Unfair compensation. There are so many reasons people feel disempowered in the workplace. But how can our feelings about power enable or disrupt the larger dynamics we hate at work? This week, Yowei Shaw seeks answers ...
09.30.2022 Freedom Diving After months of working from home and retreating from the world, Kia Miakka Natisse is stuck - in her house, and in her head. In an attempt to break out of the funk, she's searching for wisdom at the bottom ...
09.23.2022 Therapy Ghostbusters In San Jose, California, a community clinic was stumped as to why their clients were seeing ghosts. This week, a story about grappling with ghosts of our past and one clinic's attempt to heal intergenerational trauma.
09.16.2022 A Little Bit Pregnant This week on Invisibilia, could the rebrand of a familiar pill open up a new way to control fertility in a post-Roe America?
09.09.2022 The P-Word Alex is a comic who feels perfectly comfortable commanding a packed, rowdy audience, but consistently submits to what other people want in everyday life. This week, a look at how uncomfortable feelings about power can backfire on ourselves and the ...
09.06.2022 Invisibilia Takes Control 2022 feels like walking a tightrope. We're grappling with control of our bodies, our time, the direction of our country - while trying to not spin out and just doomscroll. So this season, Invisibilia takes on control. The narratives we ...
03.03.2022 Uncomfortable with power? Tell us about it! Invisibilia is seeking stories about discomfort with power. Stories about leaders denying their power, organizations with supposedly flat power structures and invisible hierarchies, or personal relationships with difficult power dynamics. If you have a story about power – at a ...
12.09.2021 The Nostalgia Bone from Throughline This week at Invisibilia, we're bringing you an episode from NPR's Throughline about an emotion you might be feeling a lot these days: nostalgia. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance ...
11.18.2021 How To Make Friends from Life Kit It's the end of the friendship season! We'll be back next year with more Invisibilia. In the meantime, if you're hungry for more friendship content, our friends over at Life Kit have done several episodes about it - from how ...
11.04.2021 Therapy, with Friends Would you ever consider going to therapy with a friend?Two best friends who call themselves brothers were drifting apart, so they asked psychotherapist Esther Perel to help — and we listened in. This episode was recorded in collaboration with Where ...
10.28.2021 Poop Friends Sh*t happens. So why is it so hard to talk about? This week, the ways that poop divides and binds us in our friendships.
10.21.2021 Friends with Benefits A lot of us think that it's a bad idea to get physical with friends. We worry it'll get messy, maybe even ruin the friendship. But if physical intimacy between friends weren't so taboo, what could our friendships look like? ...
09.30.2021 International Friend of Mystery You know the old saying--keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But what if you can't tell the difference? In this episode, the story of two friends who got caught up in a Top Secret operation that tested their ...
09.23.2021 Nun of Us Are Friends It's a basic tenet of friendship that you get to choose your friends. We look at two institutions that took away that choice: convents circa the 1960s and a summer program with unusual rules. What do we lose and what ...
09.16.2021 A Friendly Ghost Story It's one of the most common and infuriating friend mysteries out there - a friend disappears into thin air. But where do these ghosts go? And why are we so haunted by them? If you or someone you know may ...
09.14.2021 The Friendship Season Friendship gets the Invisibilia treatment.
07.07.2021 Presenting: On Our Watch A 16-year-old Black kid walks into a gas station in Stockton, Calif. to buy gummy worms for his little sister. When the teen gets in an argument with the clerk over a damaged dollar bill, a white officer in plainclothes ...
06.12.2021 American Slow Radio Let's get slow. Producer Abby Wendle picks up the gauntlet that was thrown down in the last episode "The Great Narrative Escape." Sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
05.20.2021 The Great Narrative Escape Imagine a TV show with no plot, no characters, no tension... and yet, it went viral! In this episode, we have a story that questions storytelling as we know it. Plus, co-hosts Kia Miakka Natisse and Yowei Shaw take a ...
05.13.2021 The Chaos Machine: A Looping Revolt Is 209 Times helping or hurting the community it claims to serve? What does the site mean for the future of local news in America? And what can be done about it? In the final installment of "The Chaos Machine" ...
05.06.2021 The Chaos Machine: Wrathful Lord The man behind 209 Times is not who you'd expect. In Part 2, co-host Yowei Shaw discovers the website's surprising origin story, and ends up at the frontlines of a revolt against the mainstream media and a fight over who ...
04.29.2021 The Chaos Machine: An Endless Hole Yowei gets a tip about Russian trolls in Stockton, California and falls down a hole of swirling conspiracy theories. At the center is a scrappy, controversial website that has become one of the most popular sources of local news in ...
04.22.2021 Eat The Rich Invisibilia explores a social experiment with money, focused around a contentious topic: reparations. What happens when you demand white people give up their wealth?
04.19.2021 Season 7: New Stories. New Hosts. Invisibilia is back! Stories that help you see the world differently, with new hosts Kia Miakka Natisse and Yowei Shaw.
06.13.2020 Trust Fall Hacking, phishing, surveillance, disinformation... these are tools used to silence dissidents and influence elections. But what happens when these same methods are used against an ordinary citizen? The story of a man fighting an enemy he can't see and becoming ...
04.10.2020 Two Heartbeats A Minute The strange story of an unlikely crew of people who band together to take on one of our largest problems using nothing but whale sounds, machine learning, and a willingness to think outside the box. Even stranger, several of the ...
04.03.2020 White v. White? A city council candidate says he's black. But his opponent accuses him of being a white man pretending to be black. If race is simply a social construct and not a biological reality, how do we determine someone's race? And ...
03.27.2020 An Unlikely Superpower What if you had a superpower that allowed you to see part of the world that was to come? At the age of 60, a Scottish woman named Joy Milne discovers she has a biological gift that allows her to ...
03.22.2020 The Confrontation Welcome to what is possibly the most tense and uncomfortable summer program in America! The Boston-based program aims to teach the next generation the real truth about race, and may provide some ideas for the rest of us about the ...
03.16.2020 The Reluctant Immortalist Daniel Martinez discovered the unthinkable: a creature that breaks one of the most fundamental laws of life. In the wake of his discovery--which has been widely confirmed by the scientific community--all kinds of people have thrown themselves into trying to ...
03.08.2020 The Last Sound Bernie Krause was a successful musician as a young man, playing with rock stars like Jim Morrison and George Harrison in the 1960s and '70s. But then one day, Bernie heard a sound unlike anything he'd ever encountered and it ...
03.02.2020 Season 6 Trailer You hear the train barreling towards you and you're tied to the tracks. It's an impossible situation. Most people would panic, and then a tiny handful would think up improbable workarounds. This season on Invisibilia: inventors in desperate times.
01.30.2020 Invisibilia Presents: Throughline Alix presents one of our favorite episodes from our friends at NPR's history podcast "Throughline." For centuries, the United States has been a prime destination for migrants hoping for better economic opportunities, fleeing danger in their home countries or just ...
12.20.2019 VIDEO: The (Future) Friendship Machine An original animated video in two parts!
12.17.2019 Raising Devendra What happens when you treat artificial intelligence with unconditional love?
11.22.2019 Love and Lapses Producer B.A. Parker started recording her calls with her father because she was concerned about the care at his nursing home. But the recordings gave her a window into something very different: their relationship. So she started recording her calls ...
10.25.2019 Back When I Was Older As a parent, what do you do when your four-year-old starts telling you about memories that can't possibly be his? Memories that he says are from a past life?
10.18.2019 Rough Translation: Liberté, Égalité and French Fries Alix presents a new episode from NPR's Rough Translation about residents of an immigrant neighborhood in Marseille, France who considered their local McDonalds to be a home of sorts, so when the owner tries to sell it, they take extreme ...
09.20.2019 The Profile A mysterious profile pops up on a dating app - leading to a bubble of chaos and confusion. A story about trying to sort fact versus fiction, how destabilizing that can be, and a very strange confrontation with the truth. ...
08.23.2019 Kraftland Richard Kraft was in a fog of grief when he bought his first Disney collectible at an auction. But once he started, he couldn't stop. In the first episode of our new fall season, we explore the role of positive ...
07.26.2019 Invisibilia Presents: Rough Translation Hanna presents an episode from one of our favorite NPR podcasts, Rough Translation, which tells the story of two people on a mission to help Evangelicals and environmentalists find common ground.
05.17.2019 Invisibilia Presents: Embedded What do you do when someone you love makes a terrible mistake? Hanna presents one of her favorite episodes from the latest season of Embedded, that explores how far one woman will go to save her brother's life.
05.03.2019 Things That Serve Webs Tech Genii Alix and Hanna expose the unseen forces behind the extra downloads that may have mysteriously appeared in your feed this week.
04.12.2019 The End of Empathy Invisibilia is a show that runs on empathy. We believe in it. But are we right? In this episode, we'll let you decide. We tell the same story twice in order to examine the questions: who deserves our empathy? And ...
04.05.2019 A Very Offensive Rom-Com A young woman discovers a pattern in her dating habits that disturbs her - a pattern that challenges her very conception of who she is and what she believes in. The realization sets her off on a quest to change ...
03.29.2019 The Remote Control Brain What would it be like if you could control your mood with a hand held device? Literally turn the device to different settings and make yourself happier and sadder? Alix Spiegel talks to a woman who has that power. If ...
03.22.2019 The Weatherman In this episode of Invisibilia, we explore our relationship with uncertainty through the eyes of a chief meteorologist. We wonder: what do you do when you don't know what to do? And how do we handle it when that question ...
03.15.2019 Post, Shoot What is the relationship between the version of you that lives online and the one that walks around the earth? We think of our online selves as shadow versions of us which we can control. But in this age when ...

Older episodes

Invisibilia

What's Invisibilia about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Invisibilia episodes:

Life Kit: What's your attachment style?

Revisiting Love and Lapses: A Conversation with Code Switch host B.A. Parker

Power Tools

Freedom Diving

Therapy Ghostbusters

A Little Bit Pregnant

The P-Word

Invisibilia Takes Control

Uncomfortable with power? Tell us about it!

The Nostalgia Bone from Throughline

How To Make Friends from Life Kit

Therapy, with Friends

Poop Friends

Friends with Benefits

International Friend of Mystery

Nun of Us Are Friends

A Friendly Ghost Story

The Friendship Season

Presenting: On Our Watch

American Slow Radio

The Great Narrative Escape

The Chaos Machine: A Looping Revolt

The Chaos Machine: Wrathful Lord

The Chaos Machine: An Endless Hole

Eat The Rich

Season 7: New Stories. New Hosts.

Trust Fall

Two Heartbeats A Minute

White v. White?

An Unlikely Superpower

The Confrontation

The Reluctant Immortalist

The Last Sound

Season 6 Trailer

Invisibilia Presents: Throughline

VIDEO: The (Future) Friendship Machine

Raising Devendra

Love and Lapses

Back When I Was Older

Rough Translation: Liberté, Égalité and French Fries

The Profile

Kraftland

Invisibilia Presents: Rough Translation

Invisibilia Presents: Embedded

Things That Serve Webs

The End of Empathy

A Very Offensive Rom-Com

The Remote Control Brain

The Weatherman

Post, Shoot

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