All over Oakland right now people are wearing Warriors shirts and flying their Warriors flags from their cars, and as much as we like our hometown team here at 99pi, we've been following these NBA finals for another design-related reason. When you watch the games in Toronto the whole stadium is filled with people wearing red raptors jerseys, but every now and then you'll see these little flashes of purple. Those bold fans are wearing one of the most polarizing jerseys in the history of sports. A...
Jun 11, 2019•26 min•Ep. 357
The inside of a Horn & Hardart Automat looked like a glamorous, ornate cafeteria -- but instead of a human handing you hot food over a counter, you would push your tray up to a wall of little glass cubbies. Each cubby housed a fresh, hot portion of food on a small plate. It could be anything from a side of peas to a turkey sandwich, to a slice of pie. You simply put in some nickels, and then the door to that cubby would unlock and you could take the plate that was inside. This automated food exp...
Jun 04, 2019•35 min•Ep. 356
Mexico City is in a water crisis. Despite rains and floods, it is running out of drinking water. To solve the scarcity issue, the city began piping water in from far away as well as from aquifer below ground, creating yet another problem: the city began to sink as the moisture was sucked up and out from below. Meanwhile, rainwater which should be replenishing the ground can’t penetrate it thanks to impermeable paved surfaces above. Uneven ground and crooked buildings reflect this subterranean cr...
May 28, 2019•36 min•Ep. 355
Sound can have serious impacts on our health and wellbeing. And there’s no better place to think about health than hospitals. According to Joel Beckerman, sound designer and composer at Man Made Music: "Hospitals are horrible places to get better." Hospitals can be bad for your health because hospitals sound terrible . But sound designers and health care workers are looking to change that. This is part two in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can b...
May 24, 2019•17 min
There are a lot of Gothic churches in Spain, but this one is different. It doesn’t look like a Gothic cathedral. It looks organic, like it was built out of bones or sand. But there’s another thing that sets it apart from your average old Gothic cathedral: it isn’t actually old. Gaudí wasn’t able to build very much of his famous church before he died in 1926. Most of it has been built in the last 40 years, and it still isn’t finished. Which means that architects have had to figure out, and still ...
May 21, 2019•32 min•Ep. 281
Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term impacts on our mental and physical health. This is part one in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can be designed to reduce harm and even improve wellbeing. Sound and Health: Cities Learn more about Sonic Humanism Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen t...
May 17, 2019•19 min
Libraries get rid of books all the time. There are so many new books coming in every day and only a finite amount of library space. The practice of freeing up library space is called weeding. When the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library was damaged by an earthquake 1989, the argument over which books need to be weeded, and how they were chosen for removal, reached fever pitch. Weeding is Fundamental This episode also features “The Pack Horse Librarians Of Eastern Kentucky” produced b...
May 14, 2019•38 min•Ep. 354
From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had completely different politics, languages, and cultures. But for a brief time, these two nations found they had much more in common than expected, and realized this through a love of movies. From Bombay with Love Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a f...
May 07, 2019•33 min•Ep. 353
This past fall, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions around the globe. But this latest gathering was held to celebrate the first biological census of its kind –an effort to count all of the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park. Squirrels were purposefully introduced into our cities in the 1800s, and when their populat...
May 01, 2019•30 min•Ep. 352
Even if you don't recognize a Noguchi table by name, you've definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer or art dealer is really sophisticated, they put a Noguchi table in their waiting room. Noguchi was a world renowned sculptor and he had huge ambitions. His largest and most personal concept was a giant public sculpture that took the form of a massive pyramid. Try to Imagine a cross between a Mayan temple and a mountain. It pushes out of the earth with a long...
Apr 24, 2019•37 min•Ep. 351
Gimlet’s Reply All orchestrated a grand podcast crossover event to try to solve a years old bug plaguing 99% Invisible listeners that drive certain models of Mazda. You can find all the fake podcast episodes and feeds on the Reply All website. Reply All is a fantastic show! If you don’t know it, you'll love it. Start listening now. Find the link to the Mazda-safe podcast feed here: The Roman Mars Mazda Virus Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and g...
Apr 16, 2019•52 min•Ep. 350
In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich Froebel was on track to become an architect when a friend convinced him to pursue a path toward education instead. And in changing course, Froebel arguably ended up having more influence on the world of architecture and design than any single architect -- all because Friedrich Froebel created kindergarten. If you’ve ever looked at a piece of abstract art or Modernist architecture and thought “my kindergartener could have made that," well, that may b...
Apr 09, 2019•24 min•Ep. 349
50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching consequences. This week, 99% Invisible is featuring three episodes that explain how the s-bend pipe revolutionized indoor plumbing, how high-tech ‘death ray’ led to the invention of radar, and the impact of bricks. Subscribe to * 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy *on iTunes and RadioPublic Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episo...
Apr 02, 2019•28 min•Ep. 348
When Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was placed in the Stedelijk museum it was meant to be provocative, but one reaction that it received was so intense, so violent, it set off a chain of events that shook the art world to its core. The Many Deaths of a Painting Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/...
Mar 27, 2019•41 min•Ep. 347
Social Infrastructure is the glue that binds communities together, and it is just as real as the infrastructure for water, power, or communications, although it's often harder to see. But Eric Klinenberg says that when we invest in social infrastructures such as libraries, parks, or schools, we reap all kinds of benefits. We become more likely to interact with people around us, and connected to the broader public. If we neglect social infrastructure, we tend to grow more isolated, which can have...
Mar 19, 2019•44 min•Ep. 346
Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made. Even modern cartoons continue to use the same sound effects from decades ago. How were these legendary sounds made and how have they stood the test of time? This story originally appeared on Twenty Thousand Hertz Subscribe to Twenty Thousand Hertz in Apple Podcasts , RadioPublic , or wherever you listen. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes....
Mar 12, 2019•27 min•Ep. 345
The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential monuments. When President Reagan added the remains of an unknown serviceman who died in combat in Vietnam to the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in 1984, it was the only set of remains that couldn’t be identified from the war. Now, thankfully, there will never likely be a soldier who dies in battle whose body can’t be identified. And as a result o...
Mar 06, 2019•45 min•Ep. 344
Frank Lloyd Wright changed the field of architecture, and not just through his big, famous buildings. Before designing many of his most well-known works, Wright created a small and inexpensive yet beautiful house. This modest home would go on to shape the way working- and middle-class Americans live to this day. Usonia Redux This episode is a recut combination of episodes 246 & 247 Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonu...
Feb 26, 2019•40 min•Ep. 343
In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. City leaders were looking for a way to boost Los Angeles's profile as a world class city and also give Angelenos something to rally behind. They believed that what L.A. really needed was a baseball team. They picked Chavez Ravine, near downtown LA, as the perfect home for a perfect new stadium, but the land had been home to a vibrant community of Mexican and Mexican American families for decades. Beneath the Ballpark...
Feb 20, 2019•31 min•Ep. 342
Where does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). From there, much of it is shipped off to mills, where bales of paper, glass, aluminum, and plastic are pulped or melted into raw materials. Some of these mills are here in the U.S. And once upon a time, many of them were in China. Since 2001, China was one of the biggest buyers of American recycling. That is, until last year...
Feb 13, 2019•41 min•Ep. 341
Here at 99% Invisible, we think about color a lot, so it was really exciting when we came across a beautiful book called The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair It’s this amazing collection of stories about different colors, the way they’ve been made through history, and the lengths to which people will go to get the brightest splash of color. The Secret Lives of Color Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episo...
Feb 05, 2019•45 min•Ep. 340
In May of 1990, law enforcement raided a warehouse in Douglas, AZ and a private home across the border in Agua Prieta, Mexico. Connecting the two buildings, they found a tunnel, more sophisticated than anything anyone had seen before. The tunnel in Douglas became a kind of prototype for many tunnels afterwards and a hallmark of the Sinaloa Cartel. The Tunnel Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start ...
Jan 30, 2019•47 min•Ep. 339
Santa Barbara, California, is a famously beautiful place, but if you look offshore from one of the city's many beaches, you'll see a series of artificial structures that stand out against the natural blue horizon. These oil platforms are at the center of a complicated debate going on right now within the environmental community about the relationship between nature and human infrastructure. Crude Habitat 99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is supported by Autodesk . The Autodesk Foundation su...
Jan 23, 2019•35 min•Ep. 338
In the early 1950s, teenage students in Lake County, Indiana, got up from their desks, marched down the halls and lined up at stations. There, fingers were pricked, blood was tested and the teenagers were sent on to the library, where they waited to get a specialized tattoo. Each one was in the same place on the torso, just under the left arm, and spelled out the blood type of the student. This experimental program was called Operation Tat-Type. It was administered by the county and the idea was...
Jan 16, 2019•35 min•Ep. 337
99% Invisible is starting the year off with the sixth installment of our staff mini-stories. Kicking off 2019 are a set of tales about a perpetual lie about New York City, karaoke, a 50-foot-tall burning puppet, the result of a Canada-U.S. border dispute, and time thieves. Mini-Stories: Volume 6 Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/p...
Jan 09, 2019•49 min•Ep. 336
Magic: The Gathering is a card game and your goal is to knock your opponent down to zero points. But Magic: The Gathering also has a deep mythology about an infinite number of parallel worlds. Eric Molinsky of Imaginary Worlds looks at why this handheld card game has survived the onslaught of competition from digital games, and how the designers at Wizards of the Coast create a sense of story and world-building within a non-sequential card game. Subscribe to Imaginary Worlds on Apple Podcasts an...
Jan 01, 2019•30 min•Ep. 335
For the holidays this year, we're presenting a two-part Radiotopia feature with friend of the show (and host of The Allusionist podcast) Helen Zaltzman, each tackling a different aspect of this festive season. Subscribe to The Allusionist on Apple Podcasts and RadioPublic Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus ....
Dec 26, 2018•37 min•Ep. 334
It’s the end of 2018 and time for our annual Mini-stories episodes. These are my favorite episodes of the year to make. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that don’t quite warrant a full episode and two months of hard reporting, but they’re great 99pi stories nonetheless. This week we have stories of 60s cult TV shows, semi-useless gadgets, woo woo miracles cures, and a modern Christmas tradition. Mini-Stories: Volume 5 Support Radiotopia today! Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to ...
Dec 18, 2018•44 min•Ep. 333
Roman talks with Avery about the lessons learned from making Articles of Interest Don’t buy that new piece of clothing and use a bit of that money to support Radiotopia Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus ....
Dec 14, 2018•11 min
A group of artists find a secret room in a massive shopping center in Providence, RI and discover a new way to experience the mall. Plus, we look at the origin of the very first mall and the fascinating man who designed it, Victor Gruen. The Accidental Room Subscribe to Vanessa Lowe’s Nocturne DONATE NOW to Radiotopia ! Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and get exclusive access to bonus episodes. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or b...
Dec 12, 2018•35 min•Ep. 332
