Invisibilia

By NPR

Personal Journals Society & Culture Social Sciences

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

The Chaos Machine: A Loopin...

05.13.2021

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" ...

Invisibilia episodes:

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 ...
03.08.2019 The Fifth Vital Sign We look at how our culture's massive effort to address pain has paradoxically increased it. And we follow one young girl as she struggles through a bizarre and extreme treatment program. NOTE: The treatment in this episode is administered by ...
03.04.2019 Season 5 Trailer This moment in our culture can feel fraught. From 'fake news' to the opioid crisis, there's a lot of uncertainty about the future. So this season, Invisibilia helps you discern truth from fiction, cure your pain, and find your true ...
12.21.2018 BONUS: Youth Radio Girl Mystery When truth becomes stranger than fiction.
12.07.2018 BONUS: The Prayer How one prayer changed a life.
10.16.2018 BONUS: Who Do You Let In? Who do you let in and who do you keep out?
09.14.2018 BONUS: Leave A Message Why would you leave a message when you can just send a text?
06.14.2018 BONUS: Invisibilia Live with Story District On April 19, 2018 Invisibilia co-hosted our first-ever live event with our friends at Story District.
04.13.2018 The Callout When someone in your community transgresses, do you banish them in an attempt to make the community safer for everyone? WARNING: This episode contains obscenities and descriptions of sex and violence.
04.06.2018 Everything Good We're living in a polarized world, where picking a side is almost a requirement. But what happens in the space in between?
03.30.2018 The Pattern Problem Are we destined to repeat our patterns or do we generally stray in surprising directions? CONTENT WARNING: This episode contains descriptions of sexual abuse.
03.22.2018 What Was Not Said We examine how leaving things unsaid with our intimates can lead to misunderstandings and missed connections.
03.16.2018 The Other Real World Can a reality show - and telling a certain kind of story - call a different kind of reality into being?
03.09.2018 I, I, I. Him What happens when you lose something so central to your life that you no longer understand who you are? How do you find yourself again?
02.23.2018 Season 4 Trailer We're living in a black and white world, where the stories we tell ourselves lock us into one side or the other. These stories define us – imprison or liberate us. In their fourth season, co-hosts Hanna Rosin and Alix ...
12.22.2017 BONUS: Catch-Up with Max Hawkins What happens when you have to choose between having an open mind, or a moral backbone? Listen to the original episode here: http://apple.co/2DoRC5X
09.12.2017 BONUS: Catch-Up with Bill Millar In a special podcast bonus, co-host Hanna Rosin checks in with Bill Millar, who we met in Season 2's "Flip the Script." They talk about dating, cats, and how love can look different for everyone. Listen to the original episode ...
06.22.2017 Emotions It feels like emotions just come at us, and there is nothing we can do. But we might have it backwards. We look at an unusual legal case and examine a provocative new theory about emotions.
06.22.2017 High Voltage (Emotions Part 2) An anthropologist discovers an emotion, and after a tragic event, comes to understand it. And a young woman does the one thing guaranteed to ruin a date, and learns something about her emotional life.
06.15.2017 Reality What happens when we can't agree on reality? In Eagle's Nest Township, Minnesota, residents have been grappling with that question since long before the polarizing presidential election of 2016.
06.15.2017 Bubble-Hopping (Reality Part 2) The concept of social bubbles has become popular lately as people grapple with the unexpected outcomes of the 2016 election. We meet two people making radical attempts to break out of their bubbles.
06.08.2017 The Culture Inside Is there a part of ourselves that we don't acknowledge, that we don't even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encountered it?

Older episodes

Invisibilia

What's Invisibilia about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Invisibilia episodes:

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

The Fifth Vital Sign

Season 5 Trailer

BONUS: Youth Radio Girl Mystery

BONUS: The Prayer

BONUS: Who Do You Let In?

BONUS: Leave A Message

BONUS: Invisibilia Live with Story District

The Callout

Everything Good

The Pattern Problem

What Was Not Said

The Other Real World

I, I, I. Him

Season 4 Trailer

BONUS: Catch-Up with Max Hawkins

BONUS: Catch-Up with Bill Millar

Emotions

High Voltage (Emotions Part 2)

Reality

Bubble-Hopping (Reality Part 2)

The Culture Inside

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