0 comments
Arts
536- Nuts and Bolts
Episode Date: May 10, 2023In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines...
99% Invisible
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.
714 episodes transcribed 0 comments
Arts
535- Craptions
Episode Date: May 3, 2023Bad closed captions can be entertaining, but they can be serious, too, because captions are a critical tool for lots of lots of people. There are the...
0 comments
Arts
534- For Amusement Only (Free Replay)
Episode Date: April 26, 2023There's a new movie out called Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. It’s a fun and extremely meta biopic telling the story of Roger Sharpe, who, with...
0 comments
Arts
533- Dear John and Roman
Episode Date: April 19, 2023Last year, Roman Mars teamed up with Hank Green to guest host Dear Hank & John -- this year he's back on the Greens' show once again, but this time wi...
0 comments
Arts
532- For a Dollar and a Dream
Episode Date: April 12, 2023From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though the odds of winning a big jackpot...
0 comments
Arts
531- De Fiets Is Niets
Episode Date: April 5, 2023Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. T...
0 comments
Arts
530- The Panopticon Effect
Episode Date: March 29, 2023The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. In the original design, all the cells are built around a central guard tower, de...
0 comments
Arts
529- The Wilderness Tool
Episode Date: March 22, 2023Vintage crosscuts that were made between 1880 and 1930 are often the tool of choice for trail workers who maintain the country’s roughly 112 million a...
0 comments
Arts
Twenty Thousand Hertz- Golden
Episode Date: March 18, 2023The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz is a show about the world's most interesting and recognizable sounds. I think of it as almost a sibling of 99% Invis...
0 comments
Arts
528- A Whale-Oiled Machine
Episode Date: March 15, 2023Back when whale oil was mainly used as a fuel to burn in lanterns and streetlights, an enterprising man named William F. Nye found a new way to sell w...
0 comments
Arts
420- The Lost Cities of Geo Redux
Episode Date: March 8, 2023If we’ve learned anything from watching the turnover of tech giants like Yahoo! and MySpace, it’s that internet darlings rise and fall. And there’s s...
0 comments
Arts
527- RoboUmp
Episode Date: March 1, 2023One study from 2018 found that Major League Baseball umpires blow about 14 calls every game. That’s 34,000 bad calls every year. And it makes a differ...
0 comments
Arts
526- Orange Alternative
Episode Date: February 22, 2023In the 1980s a Polish anti-communist group called the Orange Alternative used cute images of a mythical creature with a tiny pointed hat to spread its...
0 comments
Arts
525- The Chinatown Punk Wars
Episode Date: February 15, 2023When LA punks were looking for a place to play in the late 1970s, Chinatown welcomed the unruly scene. But it was an uneasy alliance that led to fierc...
0 comments
Arts
524- The Day the Music Stopped
Episode Date: February 8, 2023On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they re...
0 comments
Arts
523- Six-on-Six Basketball
Episode Date: February 1, 2023In the 20th century, Iowa high school girls basketball was HUGE but it was not the game we know today. In 6-on-6 basketball, the three forwards only p...
0 comments
Arts
522- The Comrades
Episode Date: January 25, 2023If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of a whole co...
0 comments
Arts
521- A Sea of Yellow
Episode Date: January 18, 2023Back in 2017 we ran an episode about the history of Brazil's iconic, yellow national soccer jersey. We were reminded of that story during the recent w...
0 comments
Arts
520- Mini-Stories: Volume 16
Episode Date: January 11, 2023We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersection of a street and a road; the...
0 comments
Arts
519- Balikbayan Boxes
Episode Date: December 21, 2022This time of year, right in the middle of the holiday season, there's a beloved, frenzied tradition playing out in Filipino households all around the...