A single dot of color on a curb (just above a storm drain) could be dismissed as a stray splotch of spray paint, but a series of them stands out, even amidst all the visual noise of San Francisco’s streets. These aren’t art or underground utility markings, but rather signals of a … | Continue reading
Sand is so tiny and ubiquitous that it’s easy to take for granted. But in his book The World in a Grain, author Vince Beiser traces the history of sand, exploring how it fundamentally shaped the world as we know it. “Sand is actually the most important solid substance on Earth,” … | Continue reading
Reporter Andrew Leland has always loved to read. An early love of books in childhood eventually led to a job in publishing with McSweeney’s, where Andrew edited essays and interviews, laid out articles, and was trained to take as much care with the look and feel of the words as h … | Continue reading
In 1959, after nearly a century and a half of British colonial rule, the people of Singapore took the first step toward their independence. They voted to run their own internal government. It was a joyous moment. But they inherited a difficult situation. The island had been bombe … | Continue reading
The Anthropocene is the current geological age, in which human activity has profoundly shaped the planet and its biodiversity. On The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green rates different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale. This week 99% Invisible is featuring t … | Continue reading
On a March afternoon in 1996, a brand new team NBA called the Toronto Raptors were playing the Chicago Bulls. This was the Michael Jordan era. The Bulls were the best team in the league, and the Raptors … not so much. The Raptors actually beat the Bulls that day, but it was a mos … | Continue reading
A new restaurant called Eatsa opened up a few years back in downtown San Francisco It was designed to be a high-tech affair where people order on iPads and then retrieve food out of a cubby. Instead of placing an order with a waiter or someone behind a counter, customers were di … | Continue reading
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 special tattoo. Each one … | Continue reading
The largest city in North America, Mexico City, sits at the center of a high valley, 7,000 feet in the air, surrounded by volcanoes. Over a millennium and a half ago, a volcano called Xitle erupted. Molten lava poured into the valley and covered around 30 square miles in a bed of … | Continue reading
Sounds can have serious impacts on our wellbeing, even (or especially) in places focused on health like hospitals. This is the second episode in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation about how sound can be designed to reduce harm and even improve wellb … | Continue reading
The line to enter Barcelona’s most famous church often stretches around the block. La Sagrada Família, designed by Antoni Gaudí, draws so many people to see it that the neighborhood is congested with tour buses and taxis and scooters. It’s estimated that some three million people … | Continue reading
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 sup … | Continue reading
On October 17th, 1989, the Oakland A’s were playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, but just as the game was kicking off—the television broadcast cut out. When the signal came back, it was no longer the baseball game. These were the early minutes of the Loma Prieta … | Continue reading
When São Paulo introduced its Clean City Law (Lei Cidade Limpa) a decade ago, over 15,000 marketing billboards were taken down. An additional 300,000 ostentatious business signs, hanging over streets or painted in large letters on facades, were also subject to a hefty fine if the … | Continue reading
Deepa Bhasthi grew up in a very small town in Southern India, with mainly books to keep her company. But one day, when she was ten-years-old, Bhasthi’s father brought home a children’s magazine with penpals listed from all over the world: Asia, Europe, South America — and Deepa d … | Continue reading
In 1990, the federal government invited a group of geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation … | Continue reading
This past fall, hundreds of 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 includings treks to the north pole, the moon and th … | Continue reading
As technologies evolved, early wood building blocks gave way to modular Lincoln Logs, interconnected Tinker Toys and plastic LEGO bricks that snap together, each representing a flexible world of creative potential. Each of these, though, was largely independent of the others, at … | Continue reading
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. Since it was introduced in 1948, it’s become one of t … | Continue reading
Cardboard revolutionized the packaging industry. This new material allow for the construction and distribution of cheap, light, flat-pack boxes that could be assembled and shipped on demand, enabling companies to bring distribution in-house. In parallel, though, cardboard had a l … | Continue reading
It’s the crossover event you’ve all been waiting for: Reply All‘s Super Tech Support takes on an annoyingly specific technology problem involving 99% Invisible. Ben loves podcasts, but he has a problem. When he tries to listen to 99% Invisible in particular, his car stereo comple … | Continue reading
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 a … | Continue reading
Architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a complicated relationship with his son John, including falling outs and reconciliations along the way. While Frank Lloyd Wright became a renowned designer his son bounced around between various careers. In the end, John’s legacy was largely overs … | Continue reading
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 a … | Continue reading
Ski maps around the world have a similar aesthetic and common set of usability design tricks, in no small part because hundreds of them were painted by the same person. James Niehues has been illustrating ski mountains and other destinations since the late 1980s, since the previo … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
In 1975, Barbara Visser was a nine-year-old kid on a school field trip to the Stedelijk art museum when she first saw a painting titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III by the American post-war artist Barnett Newman. What she saw was a massive canvas, nearly 18 feet wide … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
In the trailer for Ready Player One, a science-fiction film set in a packed dystopia, we zoom in on our protagonist living in a dilapidated landscape of stacked “mobile homes” known aptly as “the Stacks.” The Stacks symbolize anything but mobility, either physical or economic — i … | Continue reading
Eric Klinenberg is the author of a book called Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. The phrase “palaces for the people” actually comes from Andrew Carnegie who was known as a titan of the Gilded … | Continue reading
How to honor unidentified remains has always been one of the great conundrums of war. The Romans were fond of honoring them with an empty sarcophagus. After the Civil War, the Union buried 2,111 soldiers in a mass grave in Arlington that they purposely built in the middle of Robe … | Continue reading
Cars are made to be driven, but they spend just 5% of every day in motion. The rest of the time, cars in the US sit in the country’s 800+ million parking spaces, which occupy roughly 25,000 square miles. Even if all of the vehicles in the nation were parked at once, including bot … | Continue reading
Few creative professions can point to a single figure as famous in their field as Frank Lloyd Wright. This architect’s legacy includes some of the most iconic and gorgeous buildings in the United States, such as the spiraling Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Fallingwater house … | Continue reading
These days, our phones tend to keep track of these things for us, but back when most people memorized numbers, they didn’t always make sense. The first digits of zip codes and social security numbers assigned in the United States ascend from east to west, starting low around the … | Continue reading
In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. For decades, people had been moving to California for the climate, the jobs, and the cheap real estate. It was a city on the rise but something was still missing. “When Americans were asked to talk ab … | Continue reading
At a glance, “design” of these Brutalist artifacts of the automotive age may appear relatively simple. But a great deal of thought and experimentation is baked into the prefabricated concrete of a “Jersey barrier” (known in parts the western United States as a “K-rail”). And they … | Continue reading
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 pul … | Continue reading
Aside from flag design and plaque questions, one of the things we get asked about most at 99% Invisible is recommended reading material. Being researchers and storytellers, we read a lot of books (and being audio people, a number of us listen to books as well). Some of these are … | Continue reading
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. Claire. It’s this amazing collection of stories about different colors, the way they’ve been made through history, and … | Continue reading
Seeing metal stars set against white mortar stripes along a red-brick facade in America’s first capital city, one might assume they were some kind of vintage patriotic decor — an artistic interpretation of the country’s flag, embedded in its architecture. In reality, these plates … | Continue reading
The United States Military is not known for being touchy-feely. There’s not much hugging or head-patting, and superiors don’t always have the authority to offer a serviceman a raise or promotion. When a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard wants to sh … | Continue reading
The color spectrum can seem immutable — a fixed physical reality that is self-evident and unchanging. But the names we give colors in one language don’t always translate into others. And some linguists argue that our experience of reality itself is shaped by language, including: … | Continue reading
In downtown Providence, Rhode Island there is a large and prominent plot of land that sits on the bank of the Woonasquatucket River. In 1838, it was the home of the the Rhode Island State Prison. Later, the land housed the Continuing Education campus for the University of Rhode I … | Continue reading
Abbey Meyers’ first son, David, was born in 1968. By the time David was two, Abbey noticed something was different about him. David’s face would twitch. He sometimes made involuntary noises. His arms flailed around out of control, so he could barely feed himself. Other kids would … | Continue reading
Engineers at Bell Labs first envisioned a modern cellular communications network back in the 1940s. Wireless towers, they imagined, would create biological cell-like coverage areas. But that was the extent of their organic metaphor — they never would have guessed that the towers … | Continue reading
With the spread of American train networks in the late 1800s, more and more hobos (individuals without permanent jobs or homes) tried their luck on the rails, riding illegally across the country to find work and leaving their marks along the way, including visual symbols scrawled … | Continue reading
In 1976, construction workers accidentally cut into a petroleum pipeline running under the streets of Culver City, California, resulting in a fatal explosion that essentially leveled half of a city block. It wasn’t the first or last accident of its kind, but it helped catalyze th … | Continue reading
At least for the time being, art is the primary way we experience dinosaurs. We can study bones and fossils, but barring the invention of time travel, we will never see how these animals lived with our own eyes. There are no photos or videos, of course, which means that if we wan … | Continue reading