May 2013
1 post
Episode 79- Symphony of Sirens, Revisited
Sirens, for the ancient Greeks, were mythical creatures who sang out to passing sailors from rocks in the sea. Their music was so beautiful, it was said, that the sailors were powerless against it—they would turn their ships towards these sea nymphs and crash in the impassable reefs around them.
(The Siren, Edward Armitage, 1888)
There’s moment in Homer’s Odyssey where...
April 2013
3 posts
Episode 78- No Armed Bandit
Americans now spend more money on slot machines than movies, baseball, and theme parks combined.
(Credit: Natasha Dow Schüll)
Americans have always had an uneasy relationship with gambling. To circumvent anti-gambling laws in the US, early slot machines masqueraded as vending machines. They gave out chewing gum as prizes, and those prizes could be redeemed for cash.
That’s where...
Episode 77- Game Changer
Regardless of how you feel about basketball, you’ve got to appreciate the way it can bring groups of strangers together to share moments of pure adulation and collective defeat.
Case in point: the buzzer beater:
You know this moment: time is running out, the team is down by one, a player arcs the ball from downtown just as the buzzer sounds—and sinks it. it’s exhilarating. It’s...
Episode 76- The Modern Moloch
On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.”
And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began killing thousands of children, every year.
(Credit: New York Times, Nov 23, 1924)
Much of the public viewed the car as a death machine. One...
March 2013
2 posts
Episode 75- Secret Staircases
Wherever there is sufficient demand to move between two points of differing elevation, there are stairs. In some hilly neighborhoods of California—if you know where to look—you’ll find public, outdoor staircases.
(Credit: Alana Goldstein)
The large number of often hidden, public staircases is part of what makes California so great. San Francisco’s tourist-crushing...
Episode 74- Hand Painted Signs
There was a time when every street sign, every billboard, and every window display was painted by hand. This sounds unremarkable until you actually think about what that actually means.
(Sign painter Chancey Curtis in Mankato, MN, ca. 1930. Courtesy of Sign Painters and Princeton Architectural Press.)
Every single sign in existence was made by a sign artist with a paint kit and an arsenal of...
February 2013
2 posts
Episode 73- The Zanzibar and Other Building Poems
There comes a time in the life of a modern city where it begins to grow up—literally. Santiago, the capital of Chile, has been going through a tremendous growth spurt since its economic boom of the mid 1990s. It happened fast. In just a few years, single family homes all over the city gave way to high rises.
(Credit: Miguel Angel)
A man named Rodrigo Rojas played a small part in...
Episode 72- New Old Town
Like many cities in Central Europe, Warsaw is made up largely of grey, ugly, communist block-style architecture. Except for one part: The Old Town.
(Credit: Andy Wright)
Walking through the historic district, it’s just like any other quaint European city. There are tourist shops, horse-drawn carriage rides, church spires. The buildings are beautiful—but they are not original.
...
January 2013
3 posts
Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Last year I appeared on Debbie Millman’s Design Matters and now the episode is on Soundcloud for easy sharing. This is my mom’s favorite interview with me. Design Matters has posted 141 past episodes for your listening pleasure!
4 tags
Episode 71- In and Out of LOVE
(Credit: Mike Blabac)
Though its official name is JFK Plaza, the open space near Philadelphia’s City Hall is more commonly known as LOVE Park, after the Robert Indiana sculpture installed there.
Designed by Edmund Bacon and Vincent Kling, the park was fashioned in high modernism: sleek, granite benches; geometric raised planter beds, and long expanses of pavement. Its success as a...
Episode 70- The Great Red Car Conspiracy
When Eric Molinsky lived in Los Angeles, he kept hearing this story about a bygone transportation system called the Red Car. The Red Car, he was told, had been this amazing network of streetcars that connected the city—until a car company bought it, dismantled it, and forced a dependency on freeways.
If this sounds familiar, it might be because it was the evil scheme revealed at the end...
Episode 69- The Brief and Tumultuous Life of the...
**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**
If you’re not from California, or missed this bit of news, the University of California has a new logo. Or rather had a new logo. To be more precise they had a new “visual identity system,” which is the kind of entirely accurate but completely wonky description that gets met with sarcastic eye rolls from...
December 2012
3 posts
Episode 68- Built for Speed
**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**
I want you to conjure an image in your mind of the white stripes that divide the lanes of traffic going the same direction on a major highway. How long are the stripes and the spaces between them?
You can spread your arms out to estimate if you want to.
Over the course of many years, a psychology...
November 2012
3 posts
Episode 67- Broken Window
**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**
When Melissa Lee was growing up in Hastings-on-Hudson, a small town in upstate New York, there were only so many fun things to do. One was buying geodes and smashing them apart with a hammer. (You know geodes, right? Those dull-looking brown rocks that you break open to reveal crystalline structures...
Episode 66- Kowloon Walled City
**Subscribe to the 99% Invisible podcast in iTunes or the podcatcher of your choice.**
Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever.
(“Walled City Night Views (from SW Corner), 1987.” Greg Girard.)
By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000). That’s a population density of...
Episode 65- Razzle Dazzle
This is probably not what you think of when you think of camouflage.
(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI..)
(Erik Gould, courtesy of the Fleet Library at RISD, Providence, RI.)
Becoming invisible with your surroundings is only one type of camouflage. Camofleurs call this high similarity or blending camouflage. But camouflage can also take the opposite...
October 2012
5 posts
Episode 64- Derelict Dome
In the Cape Cod town of Woods Hole, buildings do not usually look like this:
(Credit: Will Coley)
Producer Katie Klocksin was pretty surprised when she came across it. She found a way inside.
(Credit: JP Davidson)
Katie started asking around about the Dome. She found it was built by the late Buckminster Fuller, who called himself a “comprehensive anticipatory design...
Episode 63- The Political Stage
On this special edition of 99% Invisible, we joined forces with Andrea Seabrook of DecodeDC to investigate all the thought that goes into the most miniscule details of a political campaign. Andrea was the star of episode #48 of 99% Invisible, The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room. Andrea reveals seven (and a half) secrets about the staging of events along the campaign trail. Like how every campaign...
OK Ikumi
Kris, a longtime listener (way back from the Invisible Ink days), tipped me off to his brother’s band OK Ikumi and the songs are just spectacular. I used a couple tracks already in the Q2 episode (check the timed comments to find the start times). The man behind OK Ikumi, Karl, has his own Utah based record label Hel Audio. He is offering the whole album called Alpine Sequences on bandcamp...
Episode 62- Q2
Benjamen Walker had a theory that priority queues are changing the American experience of waiting in line. So he visited amusement parks, highways, and community colleges to find out how these priority queues work and who is using them. What started as an episode of 99% Invisible became a half-hour radio documentary for the BBC.
Along the way Walker met the man that may be responsible for the...
September 2012
3 posts
Episode 61- A Series of Tubes
Pneumatic (adj.): of, or pertaining to, air, gases, or wind. In the world before telephone, radio, and email, the tasks of transmitting information and moving material objects were essentially the same challenge. The way you sent someone a message was pretty much the same process as sending someone a package—you had to send a piece of physical media through the post, or on a ship. It...
Episode 60b- BackStory: Heyward Shepherd Memorial
Season 3 starts on September 19! From then on you’ll get a new episode every nine days. This is only possible because of your generous support in making 99% Invisible the highest-funded journalism project in Kickstarter history.
In the meantime, I still want you to listen to good stories, so I’m showcasing a piece from another podcast I think you’ll really like.
I only recently started...
New "Staff favorites" page
New to 99% Invisible? The new “Staff Favorites” page is a good place to start. I’ve also embedded the playlist below. It’s an assortment of some of the most popular episodes mixed with some personal favorites that provide a good mix of what we do here. Share it, embed it, and send newbies here.
August 2012
4 posts
Episode 60a- Two Storeys: Language Bites and the...
While we’re gearing up for season 3, we present two pieces from two shows we love:
First up, Language Bites from RTE Choice in Ireland. Language Bites is a series of 1-minute programs exploring the origins of popular phrases in the English language. It’s presented by Colette Kinsella and sound designed by Lochlainn Harte. This episode is about the origin of the word “storey” (or in American...
Funded!
Thanks everyone for making 99% Invisible the highest-funded journalism project in Kickstarter history.
(Above: Most funded projects in the “Publishing” group. Seth Godin (never heard of him!) is #1 in the non-fiction category and 99% Invisible is #1 in the “journalism” category, #2 in publishing.)
Episode 60- Names vs The Nothing
**Become one of the 5000 BACKERS of 99% Invisible on Kickstarter and help the show get an extra $10,000 from the Design Matters Institute. PLEDGE NOW!!!**
New Public Sites is an investigation into some of the invisible sites and overlooked features of our everyday public spaces. These are the liminal spaces within cities that are not traditionally framed as “public space” because, quite...
July 2012
4 posts
Episode 59- Some Other Sign that People Do Not...
**Become one of the 5000 BACKERS of 99% Invisible on Kickstarter and help the show get an extra $10,000 from the Design Matters Institute. PLEDGE NOW!!!**
Sean Cole is a poet and he knows what you think of that.
He is also a radio producer. One night, drunk and stumbling around the Hudson River with his friend Malissa O’Donnell, he discovered a monument — two of them actually...
Episode 58- Purple Reign
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What’s the difference between what the public sees and what an architect sees when they look at a building?
The hotel on the very prominent corner of Touhy and Kilbourn Avenues in Lincolnwood, Illinois used to be the town’s most famous building: The first Hyatt hotel in all of Chicagoland, premiere...
Kickstart Season 3!
Help 99% Invisible thrive by donating to fund season 3. There are loads of great incentives and prizes during this 30 day campaign. Join us!
June 2012
4 posts
Episode 57- What Gave You That Idea?
Starlee Kine’s friend Noel works in advertising. In 2003, Noel was working in at an agency in Richmond, VA. Everyone wanted to work on flashy spots like Apple or Nike or Gatorade. Do you know what wasn’t flashy? Insurance. Which is why when a company called Geico became a client everyone hoped the campaign wouldn’t end up on their desk. Noel ultimately got stuck with Geico. His job was help them...
Grooveshark playlist for 99% Invisible
Score your life like it’s an episode of 99% Invisible, but this time with Grooveshark. I don’t think this one requires you to download or sign up, so just hang out here and groove, like a shark (Oh man, all the good names for things can’t be gone, right?).
99% Invisible by Roman Mars on Grooveshark
Spotify Playlist for 99% Invisible
Score your life like it’s an episode of 99% Invisible. Mostly instrumental, some words.
If you guys like it, I’ll keeping adding songs to this one. Check back.
Episode 56- Frozen Music
Goethe said, “Architecture is frozen music.” I like that.
Of course that was before audio recording, so now, for the most part, music is frozen music.
It’s only very recently in the history of music that we’ve been able to freeze music into an object. In my life, the form of this object mattered a lot. I once bought vinyl albums and cassette tapes, where there were two first songs per album,...
May 2012
5 posts
Episode 55- The Best Beer in the World
If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200 Belgian breweries, there’s a very specific sub-type: Trappist beers.
According to our reporter Cyrus Farivar (also from Episode #36 “Super Bonn Bon”), there are two things you need to know about Trappist beers. First, they’re amazing. Second, they’re made...
Episode 54- The Colour of Money
US paper currency is so ubiquitous that to really look at its graphic design with fresh eyes requires some deliberate and focused attention. So pull out a greenback from your wallet (or look at a picture online) and really take it in. All the fonts, the busy filigree, the micro patterns…it’s just dreadful.
Even though paper currency itself, just idea of money, is a massive, world changing...
April 2012
3 posts
Possibly more Roman Mars than you require
Hi Team! A bunch of interviews I did over the past couple months all came out at once last week, so if you want to hear all about me and the show go listen.
Hear how Ray Suarez inadvertently got me started in radio (twice)! Hear about my early days in plant genetics! Hear about how I’m basically nonfunctional in real life and require radio to be a complete person!
Design Matters with...
March 2012
3 posts
UPDATE: Podcast/RSS feed back up, for now
After 15 hours of downtime, the podcast is available again.
I’ve talked to PRX and we’re working on getting the show moved over to a more reliable host. It may be a painful transition, but I’d hate to keep growing the program and have it not be available for long stretches like this. I’ll let you know what happens.
Thanks for your patience, everyone!
February 2012
3 posts
Monday on 99% Invisible...
A mystery guest leads our own Sam Greenspan on an unsanctioned, exploratory mission through the depths of the US Capitol Building.
“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…”
