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.
682 episodes transcribedHanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from materials r...
Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the UK and the world. The...
Every year, fights break out on airplanes. They happen between the people who lean back in their seats, and the people who get their knees smooshed. S...
We revisit Katie Mingle's Right to Roam episode as we say goodbyeIn the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the righ...
After Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd last year, tens of thousands of people all over the world took to the streets to...
Correction: Our staff producer pronounced the the Japanese word "ōbōn" incorrectly in this episode. It is pronounced OH-bohn not oh-BAHN.Let us be the...
After Producer Katie Mingle's mom wrote a romance novel, Katie set out to understand the romance genre and its classic covers. There was a lot to unpa...
Most people probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about their toilets, but they are both a modern marvel while also being somewhat of a failure...
For the most part, we take time for granted; maybe we don’t have enough of it, but we at least know how it works --- well, most of the time. A lot of...
Today, Berlin is one of the premier destinations for techno music fans. People come from all over the world to party all night to the rhythmic beat of...
If you look around you right now, about 90% of what you’re looking at came to you onboard a cargo ship—your television, your sofa, most of the stuff i...
If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it's easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sid...
On the show this week, we’re bringing you an episode of a new podcast called, La Brega. And to tell us all about the series is Alana Casanova-Burgess....
Kurt and Roman talk about icebergs and how we visualize them all wrong. Plus, we visit a classic 99pi story by Emmett FitzGerald about visualizing din...
Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a bla...
More than 100,000 people die every year from snake bites. Snake venom can have up to 200 different toxins inside it and each toxin has a different hor...
In the 20th century, humans became very good at the control of nature, but now that we’ve spent some time with the consequences, such as species extin...
Back in the early 1990s, movie theaters weren't that great. The auditoriums were cramped and narrow, and the screen was dim. But in 1995, the AMC Gran...
Idaho was the first state to slap a slogan on a license plate, “Idaho Potatoes,” which may not seem like a big deal, but it turns out this idea would...
Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greate...
