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.
693 episodes transcribedWhen a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memoria...
A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in his house --...
Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the...
Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. Robert Caro happe...
Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an effort coor...
Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire that has bee...
We're revisiting this Christmas classic from 2021. Happy Holidays!Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croati...
It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short stories ab...
Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and the...
The Power Brokerby Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said to have built more structures and moved more earth than anyone in human his...
Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a...
The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great. But because the cassette was so much cheaper and e...
In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local elemen...
In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages. The city became known as t...
Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent an...
For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized envir...
It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of on...
Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait of Elvis w...
Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway...
This week we have two stories featuring the devil.An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of h...
