The Best of 99 Percent Invisible
10+ most popular 99 Percent Invisible articles, as voted by our community.
99 Percent Invisible on Architecture
Ghost Plants: Reusing Huge Abandoned Sears Buildings Across Urban America
A few years back, I moved into a Sears building — no, not that famous skyscraper in Chicago, or one of those department stores in the suburbs, but a city block-sized brick behemoth just south of…
99 Percent Invisible on Autism
Autism Pleasantville
A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about her experience called The Loudest Girl in the World. And she found herself imagining a fantasy world…
99 Percent Invisible on Food
The White Castle System of Eating Houses
White Castle has its own take on fast food hamburgers. For starters, the patties are square, with five holes in each patty. And they’re small, too –- two-and-a-half inch sliders. Just big enough to…
99 Percent Invisible on History
The Monster Under the Sink
In the middle of the 20th century, the small town of Jasper, Indiana did something that no other city had done before: they made garbage illegal. The city would still collect some things, like soup…
Streaming in the Victorian Era: Early Synthesizer Sent Out Tunes by Telephone
In the late 1800s, lawyer and inventor Thaddeus Cahill patented his “telharmonium,” a machine which would make music and pipe it across Manhattan along phone lines — a century before Rhapsody and…
99 Percent Invisible on Music
One Year: The Day the Music Stopped
On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they refused to record until they got their fair share.…
99 Percent Invisible on Plants
Say Aloe to My Little Frond
Houseplants are having a moment right now. In 2020, 66% of people in the US owned at least one plant, and sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic. Meanwhile, Instagram accounts like House Plant…
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Ketchup & Mustard Theory: How Marketers Use Colors to Convince Consumers
These days, it is easy to go to art stores and buy a variety of paint colors and without needing to understand they come from. But according to The Harvard Art Museums, some of the world’s rarest…
Devolutionary Design
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 one’s experience with a record or tape or CD. The…
Bleep!
Note: This episode contains references to adult language, and might not be suitable for younger listeners. You’ll likely know within the first fifteen seconds if this episode is appropriate for your…
De Fiets is Niets
Today 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. The country has more than 20,000 miles of dedicated…
The Sound of Sports
When we think of the sound of sports on TV or radio, it’s generally commentary. But sports broadcasts would be nothing without all the sounds that are behind the commentary — the crowds, the kicks, the thwacks, and the grunts. During the World Cup of 2010, the constant noise of Vuvuzelas made many people realize that the
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