99% Invisible

Happy New Year! We're starting 2025 with four more mini stories about a sleepy button, electric signs, a very important sticker, and video you can smell.

Mini-Stories: Volume 20

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We've all got problems. Sometimes your problem is a massive roadblock in your life, or maybe it's this little thing that quietly annoys you that you've learned to grudgingly put up with. But regardless of the size of your problem, it would be so great if someone would just fix it for you. Not just fix it, hyperfix it.

Today, we're playing a great story from Alex and his new show, Hyperfixed. Alex investigates why there's no door in a place where there really should be a door. You'll never shop for sour cream or shredded mozzarella the same way again.

Hyperfixed: Dylan's Supermarket Cold Case

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The story of New Year's Eve in Times Square, and how a quiet group of unelected Manhattan property owners used the holiday — and their own undemocratic municipal power — to transform the neighborhood from its porn-theater-and-vice-rich past to its flashy, family-friendly present.

New Year, New Neighborhood

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This is the twelfth and final episode breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.

We’ve waited until the evening to see how splendid the day has been, and for this final installment, there was only one guest truly worthy of the last slot: Robert Caro. This time, he discusses the book’s lasting legacy, parallels to today, and how he decided on the last line of the book.

This week, Elliott and Roman also cover Chapters 47 through 50, discussing the major story beats and themes.

To those of you who turned every page with us: thank you.

If you finished The Power Broker with us (or know someone who did), get the 99PI Power Broker challenge coin to commemorate your achievement! Visit 99pi.org/store to get the challenge coin and other 99PI merch.

The Power Broker #12: Robert Caro

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Cheeky highway signs, Jane Fonda’s surprising side hustle, a dynamite twist on legacy, and the Greeks’ ideal foot obsession—expect the unexpected.

Mini-Stories: Volume 19

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Roman Mars and the Flop House team dive into Francis Ford Coppola's intriguing and controversial film, Megalopolis, exploring its chaotic narrative, ambitious ideas, and perplexing execution.

Listen to The Flop House wherever you get your podcasts!

The Flop House: Megalopolis, with Roman Mars

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How did the “15 Minute City,” a simple urban planning idea, spark protests, conspiracy theories, and death threats? This week, we unravel how a concept for livable cities became a global flashpoint.

The 15 Minute City

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After Toronto unveiled its "raccoon-resistant" compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved, but many more celebrated the innovative design. Rolling out this novel locked bin opened a new battlefront in city's ongoing "war on raccoons."

Journalist Amy Dempsey was researching the bins and raccoon behavior when her reporting took an unexpected turn down her own garbage-strewn alleyway. Had local raccoons finally figured out how to defeat the greatest human effort in our “war” against their kind?

This episode original aired in 2018.

Raccoon Resistance

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What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore the humanity, drama, and untold stories behind his iconic book. Recorded live from the New York Historical Society.

Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation

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This is the eleventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brennan Lee Mulligan, a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he’s the creator of Dimension 20 — a Dungeons & Dragons show that features incredibly complex and campaigns, with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories. Season three of Dimension 20 takes place in a magical New York City, where the main villain is a fictionalized, undead Robert Moses, who shares the real Robert Moses’s passion for building roads and destroying lives through bureaucracy.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 7 (Chapter 42 through Chapter 46), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee Mulligan

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Roman talks with The Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo, whose new book brings his poetic history podcast to life on the page. They explore how moments of wonder and empathy shape Nate’s stories, turning forgotten history into something intensely personal. Plus, Roman shares two beautifully haunting tales from The Memory Palace that remind us just how close the past really is.

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past comes out November 19th and will be available everywhere books are sold. We highly recommend you check it out!

The Memory Palace...Book!

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As the last warmth of summer fades, Riis Beach—a hidden queer oasis behind a decaying hospital—faces a new reality. With its shadowy protector demolished, can this haven survive in the open, or will its magic disappear with the ruins?

Meet Me at Riis

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Remember when grocery shelves went bare and cargo ships clogged the California coast? That chaos wasn’t just a pandemic hiccup—it was a symptom of a supply chain stretched to its limits. With insights from Peter Goodman’s new book, discover the unlikely invention that made the modern supply chain possible—and why it’s now at risk of collapsing.

How the World Ran Out of Everything

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Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America. What does this seasonal invasion say about the retail apocalypse? And why are people so drawn to its eerie aisles? Explore the spooky rise of Spirit Halloween—where the scares are temporary, but the obsession is real.

Spirit Halloween

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This is the tenth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She’s had a long and storied career editing works of investigative journalism that speaks truth to power and afflicts the comfortable, including so she brings that perspective to her understanding of The Power Broker. Clara hadn’t read The Power Broker before and this podcast inspired her to pick it up and read along with us.

Elliott and Roman also cover the last section of Part 6 and the first section of Part 7 (Chapter 39 through Chapter 41), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #10: Clara Jeffery

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Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into going way faster than it should want to. And impeccably made fake signs meant to guide you to the right freeway. Three classic, favorite 99PI's completely updated, remixed, and rescored.

Trompe L'oeil

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In this bonus episode, Roman unearths the surprising story behind the 99% Invisible's name and delves into the unnoticed brilliance of everyday design—from the origins of reinforced concrete to the artistry of Japan’s manhole covers. 

This episode is sponsored by PNC Bank, where “brilliantly boring” means stability that allows you to focus on what truly matters.

Brilliantly Boring

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In the heart of Copenhagen, a former military base transformed into Christiania, a self-proclaimed anarchist commune where residents built a new way of living, free from traditional rules. But as the years passed, external pressures and internal conflicts—especially a growing drug trade—put Christiania’s radical ideals to the test, forcing the community to confront whether it can stay true to its roots or be reshaped by the forces around it.

If you want to learn more about Christiania – and hear other fascinating stories from around the world – be sure to check out Scott Gurian’s own podcast, Far From Home.

Christiania

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The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction. From revolutionizing infrastructure to arming political radicals, dynamite shaped the rise of both terrorism and modern law enforcement.

The Infernal Machine

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What started as Emily Nussbaum’s “guilty pleasure” of watching Big Brother became a deeper dive into the world of reality TV, leading to her book, Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV. From its early, often morally questionable experiments with shows like Candid Microphone, to the strategy and drama of Survivor, Nussbaum traces the history of a genre that’s shaped how we see the world—and even influenced who gets elected. If you think reality TV is all fluff, this episode might just change your mind.

Cue the Sun!

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This is the ninth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Majora Carter, an urban revitalization strategist and real estate developer from the South Bronx. Growing up, she always viewed the neighborhood as a place she had to leave in order to find success. But as she got older, she began to undo some of Robert Moses’ legacy, like building Hunt’s Point Riverside Park along the Bronx River. She is a champion for bettering neighborhoods like the South Bronx, so that they are places where people want to remain—even when they have been ruined by a tyrant.

Elliott and Roman also cover the third section of Part 6 (Chapter 35 through Chapter 38), discussing the major story beats and themes. 

The Power Broker #09: Majora Carter

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Karen MacDonough had paid her mortgage for years, raised her family, and lived a quiet life in her Quincy, Massachusetts home—until one day, a group of strangers appeared on her lawn, claiming her house was up for foreclosure. What followed was a surreal discovery of “zombie mortgages,” forgotten second loans from the housing bubble era that have come back to haunt homeowners like Karen. As real estate prices rise, debt collectors are reviving these dormant debts, threatening homes across the country.

This episode is from our friends at Planet Money, a podcast about economics...possibly the biggest thing that we all collectively try not to think about, only to have it greet us at the grocery store, at the gas station, even in our homes. This episode illustrates how massive forces pull at the economy like tides and create ripple effects in our lives, like how a decade-old loan can suddenly come back to life and take everything away.

Subscribe to Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts. They also have a digital piece with further reporting on Zombie Mortgages from NPR’s Investigations Team. You can find that at npr.org/zombie.

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Once considered the most dangerous city in the world due to drug cartel violence, by the early 2000s Medellin had reinvented itself. But gentrification is allowing criminal gangs to reap large profits from a shadow economy powered by the tourist boom.

Medellin, Revisited

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The impacts of climate disasters are often measured in terms of property damage. But in places like Phoenix, Arizona, and in hot places all over the world, climate change is wreaking a very different kind of havoc – on living things. In the final episode of Not Built for This, we reckon with the biological limits of climate adaptation.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this story is about a place that managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will actually help it survive climate change. How after more than two decades of tireless work, the residents of Hamilton City, California finally got the levee they deserved. 

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more flood-prone as the climate continues to change. Residents who live in these danger zones are often trapped in a demoralizing loop—flooding, rebuilding, and praying each time that the pattern doesn’t repeat. However in some neighborhoods the government is trying a different approach. They’re buying out flood-prone homes and helping residents relocate to higher ground. But what’s it like for residents to fight like hell for help, and the only help on offer means leaving the place they love?

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as storms get more extreme and unpredictable a lot of insurers are running the numbers on Florida and realizing that the math just isn’t working anymore. For decades, low cost insurance helped mask the risks of living in some of the riskiest parts of the country. However a climate correction is now underway. Prices are skyrocketing. And on America’s riskiest peninsula, residents are beginning to feel climate change where it hurts—in their bank accounts.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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In disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not confined to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading into the surrounding area, as the survivors are forced to go looking for new places to live. This is the story of what happened after the famous fire in Paradise, California, and where many of the survivors ended up. It’s a cautionary tale about a town caught in the cross hairs of both the climate crisis and the housing crisis, and what happened when thousands of displaced people showed up on its doorstep.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up call in the form of a devastating flood.

All throughout the United States, people are watching the places they love change in unpredictable and scary ways. Places that once felt safe are starting to feel risky. Places that already felt risky are starting to feel downright dangerous. And as the climate continues to change, people are being forced to make impossible decisions about how to live, and where to live, in an increasingly unstable and unfamiliar world.

This is a series about climate change and how we prepare for the extremely bumpy ride ahead of us. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. 

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is the eighth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Shiloh Frederick. Born and raised in New York City, Shiloh is a writer and influencer who shares her love of the city’s history and architecture on Instagram and TikTok. Last year, she chronicled her rather ambitious plan to read The Power Broker in 30 days, and her viral videos about her endeavor ended up making some real change in the city.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 6 (Chapter 33 through Chapter 34), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #08: Shiloh Frederick

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This week we're highlighting a couple of series that live inside the 99pi production tent.

We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for you called Not Built for This, created and hosted by Emmett FitzGerald. It's a show about climate change, but not in the way you might think. It's about how the complex systems that govern our lives are not designed for the tectonic changes that are coming our way. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. You can find Not Built for This in the 99% Invisible feed starting August 20th.

We're also announcing the relaunch of Roman's side project What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law by featuring a new episode and one from two weeks ago.

Side Projects

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When you’re watching the opening credits to a movie, it’s not just a list of names. What you’re actually seeing is intense negotiations by Hollywood stars and their agents playing out in text form. Title designers have to create something that’s entertaining to watch, while also presenting the names of all the creative people in a very particular order. It’s like a game of Tetris, to make sure everybody gets their due.

Top Billing

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The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the Olympics.

First up, a story about the design and iconography of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Then, Kurt Kohlstedt tells us about Olympic poetry.

The Art of the Olympics

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From TV commercials and branded soda cans to Emily in Paris spon-con, the Olympics are once again everywhere. In the Olympic spirit, we’re bringing you four stories about the games in all their international, theatrical glory.

In the first story, Christopher Johnson introduces the obscure, non-traditional sports from a forgotten part of Olympic history. The second story, by Chris Berube, offers a glimpse into the financial strain brought about by Montreal’s host venue for the 1976 games. In Vivian Le’s third story, the opening ceremony for Seoul’s 1988 Olympics begins on an unfortunate note. The final story, by Avery Trufelman, proposes a twist on the traditional Olympic host-country format.

The 2024 Olympics Spectacular

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This is the seventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Pete Buttigieg, the US Secretary of Transportation. One of his major responsibilities as Secretary is overseeing the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which has contributed billions of dollars to infrastructure projects around the country.

Secretary Buttigieg was also responsible for several major infrastructure projects when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And he’s talked about the importance of acknowledging and dismantling the racism built into transportation systems around the country — somewhat paraphrasing The Power Broker — and has gotten a lot of pushback for it.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second half of Part 5 and the first section of Part 6 (Chapter 27 through Chapter 32), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #07: Sec. Pete Buttigieg

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When you hear the word "river," you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks nothing like that. Most people who see it probably mistake it for a giant storm drain. It's a deep trapezoidal channel with steep concrete walls, and a flat concrete bottom. Los Angeles was founded around this river. But decades ago it was confined in concrete so that, for better or worse, the city could become the sprawling metropolis that it is today. All these years later the county is still grappling with the consequences of those actions.

Reported by Gillian Jacobs, guest hosted by 99PI producer, Vivian Le.

A River Runs Through Los Angeles

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When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or perhaps you take your time and skip the opening act. But generally, you want to be there when the show starts. In February, everyone who went to a concert in Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late. The performance is of a piece called ORGAN2/ASLSP. ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played, and this particular day would involve a chord change. The last time ORGAN2/ASLSP had a chord change was in 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change, in August, 2026. There is a change the year after that, and the following year, and so on, until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years. Reporter Gabe Bullard travels to Germany to witness the chord change and to discover why such a concert is even happening in the first place.

As Slow As Possible

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It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the entire downtown area of Los Angeles. It’s very clear when you’ve entered Skid Row. The sidewalks are mostly occupied by makeshift homes. A dizzying array of tarps and tents stretch out for blocks, improvised living structures sitting side by side.

The edge of Skid Row is clearly defined and it wasn’t drawn by accident.  It’s the result of a very specific plan to keep homeless people on one side and development on the other. And, perhaps surprisingly to outsiders: it’s a plan that Skid Row residents and their allies actually designed and fought for.

The Containment Plan

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When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead—or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

Backfired is the latest podcast from Prologue Projects, the award-winning team behind Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice: Michael Jackson. Backfired is a show about the business of unintended consequences—what happens when solving one problem inadvertently leads to a host of new ones?

In this tale of opportunity, addiction, and good intentions gone awry, hosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes offer a definitive account of Juul Labs’ rise and fall, as well as the ubiquitous illegal vape market that sprouted up in its wake. Through dozens of original interviews, they gain access to the key players who got swept up—sometimes unwittingly—in the firestorm that reshaped the culture of nicotine.

Backfired: The Vaping Wars

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This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Mike Schur, who created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, Rutherford Falls, and Netflix’s upcoming, A Classic Spy. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy Award-winning NBC hit The Office.

Mike also happens to be a big fan of The Power Broker, and has cited the book as his inspiration behind Parks & Rec.

Elliott and Roman also cover the first section of Part 5 (Chapter 25 through Chapter 26), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #6: Mike Schur

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After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale as a way to quickly warn the public when dangerous storms were on the way. Today, we’re still using the scale and its system of ranking storms as Categories 1 to 5. But in the 55 years since the scale was created, hurricanes have become more frequent, and they have gotten bigger, faster, more devastating. There's now debate among meteorologists about whether the scale is obsolete, and it may be time for something new.

Category 6

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The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway? In a lot of towns and cities, the gas-powered leaf blower has been banned. In others, there are strict guidelines on where and when they can be used. In Los Angeles, California, the leaf blower has never gone quiet, but the war to ban them has been raging for decades.

The Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars

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For a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was incredibly narrow. It was to basically look at the question of the case in front of them, check that question against any existing laws, and then make a decision. Unlike today, no one was going out of their way to hear what economists or sociologists or historians thought. Judges were just sticking to law books. The rationale for this way of judging was that if you always and only look at clean, dry law the decisions would be completely objective.

In the late 19th, early 20th century a movement rose up to challenge legal formalism. They called themselves the legal realists. Fred Schauer, professor of law at University of Virginia, says the Realists felt that the justices weren’t actually as objective as they said they were. "Supreme Court justices were often making decisions based on their own political views, their own economic views, and would disguise it in the language of precedence or earlier decisions," says Schauer. The realists said lets just accept that reality and wanted to arm the judges with more information so those judges could make more informed decisions.
For a long time the debate between realists and formalists had been mostly theoretical. That is until the arrival of the Brandeis Brief. The Brandeis brief came during a pivotal court case in the early 20th century. And the man at the center of that case was a legal realist and progressive reformer named Louis Brandeis.

Fact Checking the Supreme Court

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In late 2018, two hundred 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 around the globe. But this latest gathering was held to celebrate the first biological census of its kind –an effort to count all of the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park. Squirrels were purposefully introduced into our cities in the 1800s, and when their population exploded, we lost track of how many there are.

2024 update: We have a number!

Uptown Squirrel

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Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of The Lost Subways of North America, tells us about how, time after time, when North American cities seemed just inches away from having a robust, utopian future of fast, reliable, and convenient public transportation systems, something gets in the way. That thing is sometimes dysfunctional local politics, sometimes it’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s the way our infrastructure favors cars over mass transit, and too often, it’s racism.

The Lost Subways of North America

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This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News who covers misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the internet. Brandy recently finished The Power Broker, and she’s got a great perspective on what the book says about the press and its relationship to power, what has changed in journalism, and what has remained the same.

Elliott and Roman also cover the last section of Part 4 of the book (Chapter 21 through Chapter 24), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #5: Brandy Zadrozny

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In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder... why did they fall off the radar? 

Rocket Man

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The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 5pm, kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents’ tiny televisions and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick Howdy Doody.

The show was disproportionately important in the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world of television was strange. In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild-west days of early TV. A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along. Starting with what to put on television in the first place.

It's Howdy Doody Time!

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Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lasha Madan and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good. 

On the one hand, it's a very specific story, it's about a unique set of circumstances that happened to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant. Because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there’s a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something we are on track to see more of in these times. Lasha Madan collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in their reporting but it didn't quite fit into the original story that we wanted to tell but it's so vital and interesting that we're releasing this bonus episode to cover it all.

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Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It's the face you make when you taste something disgusting. He's the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck. Aptly enough: he was designed to be the symbol for hazardous substances, aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. The idea what that if you saw a Mr. Yuk sticker on something around the house, it meant that that something was poison.

Friend of the show, Gillian Jacobs, is a BIG FAN of Mr Yuk, who turns out to be a hometown hero of her beloved Pittsburgh, and talked Roman through the origins of the mean, green face that was meant to save children from their worst impulses.

Plus, we revisit another story about warning symbols from our archive: the quest to find a symbol that would warn future humans of dangerous radiation 10,000 years in the future.

Mr. Yuk

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Situated right in downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the world, this is a place where peacocks roam freely -- a space out of time. This forest is protected by a religious community. It has survived in a relatively undeveloped state in the middle of this gargantuan city. Importantly, it’s also home to an ancient tradition in crisis -- one that is central to the lives (and deaths) of a particular population.

There’s a certain point in this forest beyond which almost no one can step -- only special caretakers of these grounds can go any further. They go by many names: khandia, nassassalar, pallbearer, corpse bearer. Their work here is holy. They carry dead bodies to their final resting place – atop stone structures that stand gray against the lush green. These buildings are called Towers of Silence.

Towers of Silence

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This is the fourth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district, who describes the lasting impact Moses’ highways have made on her district, and her own philosophy when it comes to political power and bringing ambitious projects to life.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 4 of the book (Chapter 16 through Chapter 20), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #4: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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This week we're featuring an episode from The Sporkful's series on the creation of "Anything's Pastable," Dan Pashman's new pasta cookbook.

Dan talks with Roman about how this massive project came to be and all the design decisions required to put together a cookbook.

And then, in part two of “Anything’s Pastable,” Dan embarks on an epic trip across Italy in search of lesser-known pasta dishes — and to learn about the evolution of pasta more broadly. He starts in Rome, where food writer Katie Parla reveals a shocking truth about pasta. Then an Italian food historian challenges Dan’s thinking about carbonara. Finally, he heads south to meet a chef who was there when a regional specialty called spaghetti all’assassina (“assassin’s spaghetti”) was invented. All of this leads Dan to wonder: What does evolution look like in a food culture that’s so often depicted in sepia tones? And what’s his place in that process?

Preorder Dan’s cookbook today (including signed copies), and see if he’s visiting a city near you on his tour of book signings and live podcast tapings with special guests! Follow Dan on Instagram to see photos and videos from the Anything’s Pastable journey.

Anything's Pastable: Eat Sauté Love

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Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the 1970s, sapeurs (from: le sape, short for "Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes") have been known for donning technicolored three-piece suits with flamboyant accessories like golden walking sticks and leopard-print fedoras, and then cat-walking through their city streets.

In recent years, Solange, Kendrick and SZA have all featured sapeurs in their music videos. The iconic British menswear designer Paul Smith did a whole spring line of sapeur-inspired suits and bowler hats.

The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons

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A chambre de bonne is usually one small room, on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building, and it’s usually just big enough to fit a bed and a table. It’s affordable housing in a city where finding housing is nearly impossible. Reporter Jeanne Boëzec tells about the history of the chambre de bonne apartments, and how while cute, they are also cramped and can be unpleasant spaces for people who have to live there, a living embodiment of the gap between the rich in Paris and everyone else.

Chambre de Bonne

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This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and interesting spots in cities he loves. 

Roman moved to Athens, Georgia, to pursue a PhD in plant genetics, but dropped out and got into the local music and art scene instead, and started making his way toward radio.

Roman Mars Describes Athens GA As It Is

Note: This series is made possible by the all-new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

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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 where everything is tailored to Lauren’s very specific autistic needs. And she called this magical imagined place, wonderfully devoid of overwhelming stimuli "Autism Pleasantville."

"Obviously," Ober notes, "there’s not a one-size fits all diagnosis or even definition of autism ... as the autism adage goes: 'If you know one autistic person…you know one autistic person.' But despite our wide variety of needs, I wanted to know how design is evolving to better accommodate us" -- how were ideals being handled in the real world.

Autism Pleasantville

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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 cans and plastics, but yucky junk, like food waste, wouldn't get picked up.

This change was made possible by a new appliance: the garbage disposer – that little grinding machine at the bottom of a lot of kitchen sinks.

The Monster Under the Sink

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This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Blank Check podcast co-host and The Atlantic movie critic David Sims as our book club guest.

Elliott, Roman, and David cover the first section of Part 4 (Chapter 11 through Chapter 15), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #3: David Sims

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of a lot of landmarks in pop culture, especially sci-fi and fantasy. So many franchises were born in 1984. Some came to define the genre or invent new genres. The great podcast Imaginary Worlds noticed this and produced a three-part series about 1984's Cambrian explosion of creativity that  landed on the big screen, the small screen, bookstore shelves and, of course, the toy store.

In this episode we learn about at two iconic franchises that launched in 1984: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They came from opposite ends of the business spectrum. Transformers was a top-down marketing synergy between American and Japanese toy companies along with Marvel Comics to compete against He-Man -- another TV toy behemoth. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would eventually rival them in cultural dominance, but it began with two indie comic book creators making a black and white comic as a lark. But Turtles and Transformers both ended up wrestling with similar questions around what happens when you put the cart before the horse in creating content to sell products.

Toyetic

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Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can seem rather terrifying at first, but within the state, they are ubiquitous, on everyday objects from power tools to potato chips, dietary supplements, leather jackets, gas pumps, coffee tables, the list goes on. All of which raises the question: if these labels are on so many things, are they actually useful in warning us of real dangers?

572- WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm

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Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. 

Santa Fe wasn’t always on the proverbial map — in fact, the Santa Fe railroad just passed it on by. A lot of care has been taken to keep Santa Fe cute and quaint over its history, with steps to preserve native architecture and historical design. The result is a mixture of structures old and new, but mostly made to look old, for better or worse.

Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

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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 black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The Real Book

This episode originally aired in April 2021

Roman note: I love this episode. An all time favorite. Pass it along to someone jazzy if so inclined.

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It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on? Often, it’s impossible to find out. But once in a while, we get lucky, and the story was not only recorded, it’s really good.
Well that’s what this podcast is all about. “Significant Others” is a show that tells a story you might not know about a person you probably do.

For example, in this episode we explore how Benedict Arnold might never have turned on his country were it not for his wife, Peggy, who influenced his betrayal.

Head over to Significant Others to listen to the rest of the episode and to other stories like how Amelia Earhart would neither have found fame nor, possibly, disappeared over the Pacific, had it not been for her husband, George Putnam, or who is really to blame for Friedrich Nietzsche’s connection to Nazism. Listen and subscribe to “Significant Others” wherever you get your podcasts.

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What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day. That’s a whopping 19 percent of our waking hours. Walt Hickey is a data journalist and author of a new book called You Are What You Watch. In it, Walt makes a case for how much film and television shapes us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give it credit for.

You Are What You Watch

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This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with New York Times political columnist Jamelle Bouie as our book club guest.

Elliott and Roman cover Part 3 of the book (Chapter 6 through Chapter 10), discussing the major story beats and themes, with occasional asides from Jamelle Bouie guiding us through the politics of the era.

The Power Broker #02: Jamelle Bouie

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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 fit into the palm of your hand. And since they’re steamed on a bed of onions, everything is infused with this very specific onion-esque flavor.

Today, White Castles can be hard to find, depending on where you live. But KCUR's Mackenzie Martin, a producer at A People's History of Kansas City, says that it’s time to stop thinking of White Castle as a semi-obscure cultural punchline, because over a century ago, White Castle invented something that became so important and all-encompassing that, today, it touches pretty much every person in America. Sometimes several times a day. Something that, in other countries, has almost come to define American culture: it has a strong claim to being the first fast-food restaurant.

The White Castle System of Eating Houses

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Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment structures are a defining characteristic of the city. They're not so much "parks" in the formal sense, with fences and gates, just open green areas growing up in interstitial spaces left behind.

But as green as it still looks today, Sofia used to be even greener.  Since the fall of Bulgarian communism in the late 1980s, Sofia has lost more than half of its green space. To understand why, one has to look back to how the city evolved and grew in the Soviet era.

Between the Blocks

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When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, it’s always different. Sometimes a handful of concerned citizens get together and make it happen. Sometimes a nonprofit pushes for it, or a foundation. There’s usually a lot of activism, and a lot of fraught conversations – about design, location, the story it should tell about what happened, and who it affected. 

And how does one memorialize such a vast and distributed tragedy like COVID-19,  which was devastating physically but also divisive politically?

Don't Forget to Remember

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A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in his house -- realizing that he, like the audience, didn't have many other places to go.  (You should check it out. It's called "Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are"-- it’s a real time capsule and a fan favorite.) Since then, he's been thinking about and wanting to record a companion episode out in the world.

Over the next couple months, he's going to three cities that shaped who Roman is and how he thinks about design. We'll start in Chicago. 

Chicago is a design lover's paradise, from its carefully thought-out original grid to its exceptionally stellar flag design. The city is home to some of the most influential architecture in the US as well.

Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is

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Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends, like a popsicle stick. This may seem stupid simple, but that basic, clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a lot of experimentation and iteration. In 1989, one particular board would cement skateboard design as we know it. But to understand it, we have to go back over a decade to the mid-70s, as more and more money poured into the growing sport.

The Double Kick

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Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. Robert Caro happens to be our special guest for this episode and you do not get more special than that.

On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2 of the book (the intro through the end of Chapter 5), discussing the major story beats and themes, and then we will bring the great Robert Caro to the stage. 

Power Broker #01: Robert Caro

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Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an effort coordinated and constructed by the U.S. military to prepare soldiers for war. Fake villages designed for training purposes dot the entire United States, not to mention other countries. Researchers have identified over 400 of them around the world.

Imitation Nation

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Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire that has been burning for decades.

Check out Lizzie No's latest album Halfsies on Band Camp.  She's on tour in 2024. Go see her and say hi for me!

Mini-Stories 18

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We're revisiting this Christmas classic from 2021. Happy Holidays!

Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green valleys, and turquoise rivers. The country is beautiful in all seasons, but it is perhaps at its most magical around Christmastime. This nation of just over 2 million people is visited by, not one, not two, but three different "santas" every festive season. But it hasn't always been this way. Each Santa has had his moment in the spotlight—each in a different period of Slovenia’s complicated history. And in order to have a Christmas season that reflects that history and speaks to all Slovenians, you need three magical men.

The Three Santas of Slovenia

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It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short stories about a rogue architect, spooky kitchens, a hundred year old music streaming service, and the crazy way the French tried to make telling time less crazy.

Today's episode featured a story from Sound Detectives. Listen to Sound Detectives on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and go to sounddetectivespodcast.com to find coloring pages, sound terms, and more.

Mini-Stories: Volume 17

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Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it: a calculator. But depending on what era you were born in, and maybe even what country, what constituted a 'calculator' varied widely.

Keith Houston wrote about the evolution of the calculator in his latest book, Empire of the Sum The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. It is exactly the kind of nerdery we like to get up to here at 99% Invisible -- history explained through the lens of an everyday designed object.

Empire of the Sum

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Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said to have built more structures and moved more earth than anyone in human history. And he did it without ever holding elected office. Outside of New York City, Robert Moses wasn't exceptionally well known. Inside of New York, he was mostly accepted by the media as simply the man who built all those nice parks. But The Power Broker, which is subtitled Robert Moses and The Fall of New York, changed all that. It is a tour de force of journalism, history, and biography. Roman also argues it's really fun to read and is strongly in contention for the best book ever written.

But there is something of a catch, which can hang readers up: the book is a daunting 1200 pages long. As influential and amazing as this bestseller is, many people own an unopened copy gathering dust on their bookshelf. But that is a crime because this book needs to be read or at least discussed at length on a podcast.

Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan (Flop House, Daily Show) are starting The Power Broker book club that will run through all of 2024 as bonus episodes and in this introductory episode, Conan O'Brien joins us to talk all things Robert Caro.

Breaking Down The Power Broker

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Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!

The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential monuments. When President Reagan added the remains of an unknown serviceman who died in combat in Vietnam to the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in 1984, it was the only set of remains that couldn’t be identified from the war. Now, thankfully, there will never likely be a soldier who dies in battle whose body can’t be identified. And as a result of DNA technology, even the unknowns currently interred in the tomb can be positively identified.

The Known Unknown

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The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people didn't care so much about the audio quality. They just wanted to be able to use something that they could carry around with them. The cassette’s other big advantage: it was easy to record on.

We talked to Marc Masters about his new book High Bias, about the history of the cassette. One chapter about concert bootleggers covers perhaps the greatest success story of the cassette: Grateful Dead live tapes.

Long Strange Tape

Plus we're featuring a bonus story that we produced in 2016 in collaboration with Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything about a place where cassettes were of vital importance.

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In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local elementary school. You’ll hear the highway that takes commuters down to Cincinnati. At the woods on the edge of town, the birdsong is delightful. The town feels calm and peaceful - at least, until the gunfire starts. Most weekdays, it begins in the morning, and lasts through the afternoon. Sometimes it goes past sundown, and occasionally into the weekends. Once the shooting begins, it comes in rapid-fire waves throughout the day. People say it makes it hard to focus or relax, and those who work the night shift say they can’t sleep.

The noise of gunfire isn’t from street violence. It all comes from an open-air gun range that’s owned by the Cincinnati Police Department.

Home on the Range

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In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages.  The city became known as the "Divorce Capital of the World." For much of modern history, it has been relatively easy to get married, and extremely difficult to get divorced -- and for a time, this was true in the New World as well. But Reno provided the cure: The Six-Week Cure.

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Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria. There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to corner the market in cinchona. And the trees themselves were under threat.

This week on 99pi, we feature a story from Stuff the British Stole, a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. So "grab a gin and tonic and come with us to hear how a botanical empire took off — and gave birth to a quintessential cocktail."

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For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized environments. But around the world, a new architectural movement is starting to challenge that old paradigm. Designing environments where people with dementia can live as normally as possible, until the very end.

Model Village

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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 design of the album cover created a first impression of what was to come. Album art was certainly important to reporter Sean Cole, one particular album by one particular band: Devo. This is the story of Devo’s first record and the fight over the arresting image of a flashy, handsome golf legend on the cover.

Plus, former 99pi EP Katie Mingle gets the backstory of the Langley Schools Music Project LP, a haunting and uplifting outsider artist masterpiece.

This episode was originally broadcast in 2018

Devolutionary Design

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Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait of Elvis would be forever immortalized on a 29 cent US postage stamp. It was put to a popular vote: should the stamp feature an image of young Elvis at the start of his rise, or an older Elvis in his iconic white jumpsuit.

The resulting Elvis stamp eventually outsold every single commemorative stamp before and since.

You Ain’t Nothin But a Postmark

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Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for big government ‘boondoggles.’ But the full story is of course much more complicated – and really represents a turning point in how America builds infrastructure.

Subscribe and Listen to the full series of The Big Dig.

The Big Dig

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This week we have two stories featuring the devil.

An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of highway with the misfortune of being officially named US Route 666.

Devil in the Details

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The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream it up, but the saga of making this world heritage landmark a reality is a tale for the ages: a cautionary tale. And for Cautionary Tales, I turn to the brilliant Tim Harford. I’ve been dying to hear the story of the Sydney Opera House told in this way, and Tim and his team just nailed it,  and I know you are going to love it as much as I do. Enjoy.

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Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When he wrote a story that was critical of tech, he'd be accused of being a "Luddite."

Like most people, Brian knew at least vaguely what the term "Luddite" meant. But as time went on, and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more curious about the actual Luddites. Who were they? And what did they really believe? 

Brian has a new book out about the Luddites called Blood in the Machine. And it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods.

Blood in the Machine

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All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you've listened to over and over again. And then there's a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— "Who Let The Dogs Out" by the Baha Men.

The story of how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. 

Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out AGAIN

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In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom loop.’ Converting an office into housing can solve both of these crises at once, using one piece of property. This solution just seems so obvious and elegant. But for all the hype around this idea, there are surprisingly few adaptive reuse projects actually underway.

Office Space

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The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.

The way a person's voice changes over time feels like a simple, and overlooked act of magic. Whether intentionally or subconsciously, our voices are products of our environments as much as they are part of us. Today we’re featuring an episode about voices from a series called Sounds Gay, a brilliant show about queer culture, community and music.

Plus, guest host Swan Real discusses the universality of voice training with 99pi regular host Roman Mars.

Melanie Speaks

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Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the first episode yet you should totally go back and listen. It’s a lot of fun.

Take this episode with you on your next hike!

Trail Mix: Track Two

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We deconstruct and examine what might be the original designed object-- the humble trail. We discuss how park trails are designed, what makes a good trail, and...what even is a trail anyway?

Trail Mix

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Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates stuff like furniture and electronics and household appliances. Basically, the agency is supposed to make sure that the stuff we buy is safe, and won't kill us or make us sick.  The Bloomberg story talked about how a growing body of research shows that gas stoves are really bad for indoor air quality. They let off pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, and they've been linked to heart problems, cancer, and asthma. And in this story, Trumka said the government would look into it, and maybe recommend some regulations on the appliance. 

Within days, the US went batshit crazy and gas stoves were all over the news. They had become the subject of the latest skirmish in our seemingly never-ending culture war. 

Cooking with Gas

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Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left. In this episode, Andrew takes us through the fascinating history of alternative reading technologies designed for blind people and discusses his fantastic new book The Country of the Blind, which is out today!

The Country of the Blind

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This past May, the city of Los Angeles rolled out a brand new, state-of-the art feature for bus shelters. It’s called La Sombrita. La Sombrita is a metal screen that’s intended to provide shade for the thousands of people who ride the bus every day. The shade screen is about two feet wide, ten feet tall, and it kinda looks like a curved teal metal surfboard filled with tiny holes. Right away, Angelinos were not happy. This heated conversation got us thinking about our interview with Sam Bloch about inequality and shade and we asked Sam back to get thoughts about La Sombrita, and whether the controversial shade sail could actually be a good thing for shade-starved Angelinos. 

Shade Redux

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In the 1980s, the little Christian comic books known as Chick Tracts were EVERYWHERE. You’d find them in movie theaters and bus station bathrooms, on subways, and all over shopping malls. People would slip them inside VHS rentals or library books. 

Many Chick Tracts are black and white Christian horror stories that pull from a huge cast of characters: witches, bikers, Hindus, rock and rollers, Catholics, queer people, truckers, Masons and trick-or-treaters. And at some point in the tract, the protagonist often has to make a choice: either accept Jesus as their savior, or get tossed like cordwood into a Lake Of Fire. 

Chick Tracts have left a really complicated legacy. Collectors are mesmerized by their edginess and kitsch. The Smithsonian regards Chick Tracts as American religious artifacts, and keeps a bunch of them in its vaults.  At the same time, many of these comics are filled with some ugly and dangerous messages, including homophobia and Islamophobia. So the same tracts that have been hoarded and preserved have ALSO been boycotted and banned, and condemned as hate speech.

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In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity.

Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts with Roman Mars, host and creator of 99% Invisible, a sound-rich narrative podcast about architecture and design. They discuss holding pandemic meetings about the business of podcasting, Roman’s journey from science to public radio to 99% Invisible, finding the balance between being an artist and business owner plus why Roman believes a producer is the highest form of worker, collaborating on the Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast, the read-to-tape system, and Prox Recs that include a good coffee table book that will impress your friends and how to make great radio.

Listen to In Proximity on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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This week we're featuring an episode of The Last Archive

The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s everything.

On this episode of The Last Archive, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world.

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After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive housing effort was, in many ways, eye-poppingly impressive, with all new construction and sleek, cutting edge architecture. But one room in these new housing units was far and away the most lauded and influential: and that was the kitchen.

Many consider the Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen. A few of these kitchens still exist, some in museums. And it's strange to see one there, because to modern eyes, it doesn’t appear to be high art. It just looks like a kitchen.

The Frankfurt Kitchen

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Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is a particularly iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. This recording blares from trucks that cruise the streets all across this massive city. The crews inside are looking to buy old household items and appliances to fix and resell or to just sell for scrap. Basically, they’re scrap metal haulers, and the recording is their pitch to prospective sellers. Their pitch culminates in "o algo de fierro viejo que vendan," which basically means “or any old metal thing you’re selling.” This last bit has become the recording’s namesake: fierro viejo, literally “old iron.”

How this recording (and its subsequent remixes for live performances and otherwise) managed to achieve icon status in Mexico is a story of an unlikely alchemy: a family that, through grit, talent and a bit of luck, transmuted scrap metal into poetry, music, and joy.

The Siren of Scrap Metal

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As electronic news gathering was gaining prominence in the early 20th century, the American Bar Association began to fear its effect on court trials and adopted something called Canon 35. This condemned the use of photography, motion picture, and radio recording within the confines of the courtroom. It wasn't a law, per se, but a code of ethics that cautioned against recording technology in the trial process. Many state and federal courts followed suit...making way for illustrators. Cameras began to creep their way back into courtrooms over the decades, but courtroom artists are still constantly used in high profile cases.

Courtroom Sketch

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The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon.

Goodnight Nobody

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Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta.

Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.

Train Set: Track Three

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LA might be the most extreme parking city on the planet. Parking regulations have made it nearly impossible to build new affordable housing, or to renovate old buildings. And parking has a massive impact on how the city looks. LA is chock full of commercial strip malls, where buildings sit alone and isolated in a sea of asphalt. And all of this is the result of one policy decision that has reshaped American cities for the last eighty years.

Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, tells a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful super-organism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between.

Paved  Paradise

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In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.

Click here to get the book! Available for pre-order at W. W. Norton in the US and Bookshop.org in the UK.

Nuts and Bolts

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Bad 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 people learning a new language and of course captions are essential for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. In the US, that’s about 15% of the adult population.

Craptions

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There'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 one perfect shot, helped legalize pinball in New York. That’s right – pinball was banned in many states up until the 1970s. We told that story and interviewed the REAL Roger about, oh, 400 episodes or so ago. So if you haven’t gone that far back in the catalog, we wanted to give you a free replay. After that, we’ve got a new segment with Keith Elwin, a tournament champion who made the move into designing pinball machines.

For Amusement Only (Free Replay)

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Last 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 with Hank's brother John Green (Turtles All the Way Down, The Fault in Our Stars, The Anthropocene Reviewed).

In their podcast Dear Hank & John, "hosts John and Hank Green (who are also best-selling authors and pioneering YouTubers) offer both humorous and heartfelt advice about life’s big and small questions. They bring their personal passions to each episode by sharing the week’s news from Mars (the planet) and AFC Wimbledon (the third-tier English football club)."

This week, guest host Roman Mars joins the show to discuss things like: Are roaches a moral failing? How do they do surgery on a fish? Why do only old people like stinky cheese?

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From 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 is infinitesimally small. Jonathan D. Cohen is a historian and the author of the book  For a Dollar and a Dream; State Lotteries in Modern America and he says it isn’t just the people playing the lottery who irrationally think the game will solve their financial woes, the states running the lotteries suffer from the same delusion.

For a Dollar and a Dream

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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 cycling paths. International policymakers make pilgrimages to the Netherlands to learn how to create good bike infrastructure.

But none of that was inevitable. It wasn't something that magically emerged from Dutch culture.

In fact, in the 1960s and 70s, it looked like the Netherlands would follow the same path as the United States. The Dutch had fallen in love with cars and they were rebuilding their cities to make room for them. It was only because of a multi-decade pro-cycling movement that cars didn't take over the country entirely.

De Fiets is Niets

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The “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, designed to maintain order just by making prisoners believe that they are constantly being watched.  Over time, the panopticon has turned into something way bigger than just a blueprint for penitentiaries. It’s become the metaphor for the surveillance state. Philosopher Michel Foucault had probably the most popular take on the panopticon concept. He used it to warn society that what actually keeps all of us in check isn’t necessarily that someone is watching you. It’s just the feeling that someone might be watching you. But very few actual prisons were built around this idea. Breda Dome is one of them.

The Panopticon Effect

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Vintage 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 acres of protected land. That’s ahead of chain saws and newly made crosscuts. And the reason this old tool has stuck around so long -- even in an age when there’s a newer, better gadget coming out every year -- it goes way beyond the physical saw itself. The rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is also the story of how America created the very concept of wilderness.

The Wilderness Tool

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The 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% Invisible: lovingly produced and reported deep dives into everyday things that make you see the world differently. In case of Twenty Thousand Hertz, hear the world differently. 

We’ve collaborated a number of times, but we’re featuring them today because our sibling podcast produced an episode with my actual sibling Leigh Marz, co-author of the book Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise. 

Leigh showed up on a mini-story episode 99pi a few months talking about the ever increasing loudness of sirens as a way of measuring just how loud our world has become. But the story Twenty Thousand Hertz produced tackles the main thesis of Golden more head on. I love how this episode turned out and I’m so proud of everyone involved, that I want to share it with you as a bonus episode. 

In a noisy, tumultuous world, how can we find inner peace? This episode features two stories about the transformative power of silence. In the first, the Lieutenant Governor of Washington State abandons politics to become a Jesuit novice, and takes a temporary vow of silence. In the second, a death row inmate at San Quentin discovers Buddhist practices that help to calm his mind, and embrace compassion.

Featuring Cyrus Habib, Jarvis Masters, Leigh Marz, and Justin Zorn.

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Back 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 whale oil to a rapidly changing world: as a lubricant for all the new fangled machines. Nye specialized in specialization- selling different oils for watches, sewing machines, bicycles. Lubrication has had a largely invisible role in the design of the modern world, but its importance cannot be overstated.

A Whale-Oiled Machine

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 If 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 something darkly fascinating about watching it happen in realtime.

Maybe we’re seeing it now with Twitter and Facebook– some of us will mourn the loss of the communities and connections that we’ve created in the virtual spaces owned by these billion dollar companies...

While others will enjoy visiting the graves of these once unstoppable behemoths  to tramp the dirt down.

Either way, the values and trends and hopes and ambitions that go into the architecture of the virtual world say as much about us as the architecture of the real world. And that’s what these two stories are all about.

The Lost Cities of Geo Redux

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One 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 difference. A blown strike call can decide a win or a loss, a championship or six months at home, wondering what could have been. And while umpires are about 97% accurate in calling balls and strikes, Major League Baseball has been considering something drastic. Something to take us up to 100% accuracy. They have a plan to replace human umpires with robots.

RoboUmp

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In 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 anti-authoritarian message. That innocent symbol of an impish dwarf amplified a powerful political message to the world, which ultimately contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union. This approach is being used in creative and clever ways today by people protesting Russia's invasion of Ukraine. 

Orange Alternative

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When 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 fierce rivalries, hurt feelings, blatant racism, and broken toilets. At the center of it all was a 62 year old Chinese immigrant named Esther Wong, aka Madame Wong, aka The Godmother of Punk.

The Chinatown Punk Wars

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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. One Year's Evan Chung explores one of the most consequential labor actions of the 20th century, and how it coincided with an underground revolution in music led by artists like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

Subscribe to the fantastic One Year: 1942

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In 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 play offense. And the three guards only play defense. No one is allowed to leave their assigned half of the court. 6-on-6 still uses the full length of a basketball court, but in a different way than 5-on-5. In 6-player, three forwards from one team and three guards from the opposing team play at one end of the court. Meanwhile their teammates wait at the half court line. This basketball variant made for high scores, quick action, and the girls who played it were local superstars. 

Six-on-Six Basketball

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If 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 country’s new years resolutions and mid-life crises. They’re the kind of thing that a totally ordinary, not-athletic person wakes up one day and decides they’re going to do -- and then does.  In one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, extreme distance running is a sport that feels like it includes everybody. And improbably, that inclusiveness happened during one of the darkest, most divided moments in South Africa’s history – during the final years of apartheid. 

The Comrades

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Back 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 world cup, and then again on January 8th as a mob of right wing rioters attacked the Brazilian capital, many of them wearing those iconic yellow shirts. Needless to say the story of the yellow jersey has taken some real twists and turns in recent years, so today we’re going to rerun the original story about the jersey’s origins, and then producer Emmett Fitzgerald is going to update us on everything that has happened since.

A Sea of Yellow

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We’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 most unlikely of theme parks; and the evolution of ancient alleyways in Beijing, China.

Mini-Stories: Volume

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This 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 world, with which reporter Gabrielle Berbey is intimately familiar. A Balikbayan box is a huge cardboard box (often weighing over 100 pounds) that Filipinos living all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines. The word Balikbayan literally means homecoming in Tagalog.

Balikbayan Boxes

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The whole conceit of this show is that if look at the world in the right way, you’ll see stories everywhere. Some of the stories are epic power struggles chronicling the construction of a famous skyscraper or the founding of a city; but other stories are more modest, smaller in scope and scale. We call those mini-stories and they're part of an ongoing, end-of-the-year tradition in which 99pi producers and friends of the show talk to host Roman Mars about something cool and fun that you can tell your friends or family about during a holiday get together.

You’ll hear about a very, very long escalator! Beavers dropping from the sky!  We’ll hear from Janet, Miss Jackson if you’re nasty! Plus a visit from the queen! 

Mini-Stories 15: Volume 15

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If you’ve ever flipped through the radio dial — not satellite, not podcasts, but good old-fashioned AM and FM radio — you may have noticed something. Right wing radio talk is everywhere.

But the airwaves weren't always so dominated by such a narrow range of voices. Reporter and friend of the show Katie Thornton has the story of how talk radio has evolved (and perhaps devolved at times) over the past century, and what all of it means for the airwaves today.

The Divided Dial

Hear the rest of the the series from On the Media 

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Wildlife and urban development don’t usually go well together. Roads in particular fracture the habitats of wide-ranging animals. It restricts their movements and makes it harder for them to find food or a mate. But biologists and urban planners have started working together –- crafting a plan to try to help pumas move more safely around the city. And in the process this one cat, dubbed P-22, has turned into something of a celebrity—the symbol of a movement to redesign our cities and make the built environment more friendly to animals.

Cougar Town

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Los Angeles' El Peatonito is part of a subset of real life superheroes who are more focused on things like picking up trash and taking on civic issues than catching criminals in alleys.

These super citizens take their inspiration from comic books but in some ways have more ambitious goals than defeating a make believe villain. They are out to solve big societal problems. Wherever a city is plagued by traffic accidents, or people are living on the streets…these heroes heed the call of service. 

Super Citizens

Check out David Weinberg's brilliant series The Superhero Complex

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When people ask me what my favorite episode of 99% Invisible is, I have a hard time answering. Not because they’re all my precious little babies or some such nonsense, but mostly it’s because I just can’t remember them all and there’s no simple criteria to judge them against each other. But the show is definitely in contention for the best episode we’ve ever made. It just has everything– engaging storytellers, brilliant reporting, and a compelling history of a moment when the world really changed. It’s called the Freedom House Ambulance Service. It originally aired in the summer of 2020, when a lot of the fundamental aspects of work, life, health, law enforcement, structural racism, cities were all being questioned by more and more people because of COVID and the George Floyd protests. Kevin Hazzard, who reported the piece, subsequently released a whole book on the Freedom House Ambulance Service  called American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics. It’s new, it’s out now, you should buy it. should read it, it should be on all your Christmas lists. To celebrate the book’s release, I’m proud to re-present to you: The remarkable story of the Freedom House Ambulance Service.

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Funiculars are great, which is why the main image from our previous train episode featured one -- except we didn't actually talk about that one during the show. It's a cable car from Wellington, and as it turns out it's one of hundreds of funiculars in this city. Roman and Kurt are back with another series of railroad tales. All aboard!

Train Set: Track Two

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Articles of Interest is a show about what we wear. Host and producer Avery Trufelman investigates our collectively held beliefs about fashion and explores topics like the intellectual property law behind knockoffs, creation of tartan and the history of plaid, and how a dolls in a rural museum in Washington state saved French haute couture. This new season investigates a style that keeps coming back again and again and again.

Previously part of 99% Invisible, the show is now an independent production and a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.

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The basic mechanics of the bike are pretty simple --- it’s basically a triangle with wheels and a chain drive to propel it forward. No batteries or engines. It seems obvious in hindsight .... And that’s why most people guess the bike was invented a long time ago. Yet the ‘running machine,' a kind of early proto-bike, debuted around 1817.

For much more on the history of the bicycle, check out Jody Rosen's book: Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle. 

The Safety Bicycle

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Even if you haven't made the pilgrimage to Southern California, you can probably already picture what the Walk of Fame looks like. It's a 1.3 mile walkway lined with terrazzo and brass squares. Each slab spotlights a salmon-pink star, and the name of a different famous celebrity deemed worthy enough to become a permanent part of Hollywood's urban fabric. The Walk of Fame is the story of Hollywood, the film industry. and the very origin of stardom itself.

Reporter/producer Gillian Jacobs (Community, Winning Time) takes us on a stroll on the Walk of Fame, which chronicles Hollywood history and the vicissitudes of fame itself.

Walk of Fame

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The vuvuzela is a two foot long injection-molded plastic horn. It only plays one note: a B flat. And it gradually became a regular feature of South African soccer. But prior to the 2010 World Cup, the rest of the world had never heard anything quite like it.  Even people in the soccer world didn’t know what they were. But by the time the first game of the tournament was underway, vuvuzelas were all over. For critics, the vuvuzela was a relatively new, mass produced noisemaker. But supporters ended to think of the vuvuzela as an instrument, producing a loud, attention grabbing sound that grew out of South Africa's rich footballing tradition.

Vuvuzela

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Jamaica is famous around the world for its music, including genres like ska, dub, and reggae. It’s tempting to think that the powerful amplifiers and giant speakers at the dance parties were designed to perfectly capture Jamaica’s indigenous sounds. But it’s actually the other way around. Those speakers and amps came first. And the electricians, mechanics and engineers who built and adapted that technology would then play a decisive role in the creation of Jamaica’s modern music. They helped pioneer approaches to making and performing music that would spawn whole other scenes from the Bronx to the UK.

Wickedest Sound

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The magical mythical "jackalope" is a essentially a horned rabbit, with antlers of different sizes and shapes. The jackalope is a mascot of the American West – inspiring an absolute river of trinkets and songs and whiskies and postcards and tall tales.

Tale of the Jackalope

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On this special feature episode, President Bill Clinton interviews 99% Invisible host and creator Roman Mars.

Roman Mars has spent his career chronicling these bits of human ingenuity that we so often take for granted—things like the utility codes, the curb cuts, the traffic signals, and much more. As host of the 99% Invisible and, with Kurt Kohlstedt, co-author of the book The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, his work challenges all of us to look up and around, and to think about the how and the why of design around the world in a different way.

Subscribe to Why Am I Telling You This? with Bill Clinton on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher

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Adam Rogers has been thinking and writing about what’s known in the industry simply as "search." For the last decade, people have been grumbling about not being able to find things online, both in our private data and on the public web, despite ever-evolving algorithms. Ever since humans started writing stuff down, the struggle has been in how to organize it all so that its contents wouldn't be lost in the stacks. Search has always been an attempt to fix that problem.

Search and Ye Might Find

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In downtown Windhoek, Namibia -- at the intersection of Fidel Castro Street and Robert Mugabe Avenue -- there's an imposing gold building with an affectionate nickname: the Coffee Maker. This notable structure was built to commemorate Namibia’s fight for independence from apartheid South Africa, which it achieved in 1990. And for many of the visitors, the museum feels like a huge achievement. But for a museum that commemorates throwing off the chains of colonialism and forging a new era of self-determination, it has one pretty strange feature. It wasn't designed by a Namibian architect. It wasn't even designed by an African architect. It was built by North Korea's state-run design studio, which has long been a prolific maker of statues around the world. North Korea has left a distinct visual stamp across Africa in particular, with museums and monuments erected in more than a dozen African countries since the 1970s.

Monumental Diplomacy

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Back in March, Netflix picked up a long running Japanese TV program based on a children’s book from the 1970s. The show is called Old Enough, but the name of the original Japanese program translates to My First Errand. Because in each episode, a child runs an errand for the very first time. Episodes are only 10 to 20 minutes long, but in that short time a toddler treats the audience to a bite-sized hero's journey. 

My First Errand is a gimmicky show with hokey music and a laugh track, but it’s also rooted in a truth about Japanese society: most children are remarkably independent from a very young age -- way more independent than children in the US. In Japanese cities, fifth-graders make 85 percent of their weekday trips without a parent. And this remarkable child mobility is made possible by everything from the neighbors next door to the width of the streets.

First Errand

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There's a particular one-kilohertz tone that is universally understood to be covering up inappropriate words on radio and TV. But there are other options, too, like silence -- so why did this particular *bleep* sound become ubiquitous?

Bleep!

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In the final week of the  most recent term, the Supreme Court decided to limit one constitutional right (abortion) and expand another constitutional right (guns). But there were other cases decided that week, which were also important and marked this as one of the most historically significant terms in over 100 years. So what happened in those other cases and why are they so important?

What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law

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A few years back, 99pi producer Emmett FitzGerald brought us a beautiful story about peat bogs. Peat is essential for biodiversity and for the climate – it is really, really good at storing carbon. But like a lot of things we cover on the show, peat often goes unnoticed, in part because it is literally out of sight underground. We’ve  noticed peat and carbon sequestration more and more in the news lately. Journalists have been brilliantly covering stories about the tree planting movement, private ownership of Scotland’s bogs, and the threat to peat in the Congo Basin. Couple that with more extreme weather happening in more places, we thought it would be a good idea to repeat this story.

For the Love of Peat

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In the final episode of our vernacular spectacular anniversary series, 99pi producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories of regional architecture–some close to home, some on remote islands– that capture our imagination and inspire us to look deeper.  Stories of Bermuda roofs, Queen Anne Cottages, and what exactly counts as an "earth tone."

99% Vernacular: Volume 3

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Only a small percentage of architecture is actually designed by architects. And while a famous architect-designed tower in a skyline might be the best way to identify a city at a distance, up close it’s the subtle cues and vernacular design that make the city what it is. This week, 99pi producers and friends of the show share more stories about architecture we love from our hometowns and other places we've lived, but with an emphasis on examples that may be a bit shaggier, and have somewhat more functional origins. These may not be the first things people call beautiful, but they’re beautiful to us, and they are essential parts of the places they’re built.

501- 99% Vernacular: Volume 2

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For the 500th episode of 99% Invisible, we started thinking about the kinds of designs that we love from the places we have lived -- and even some regional vernacular we love from places we haven’t lived, but just admire. 99% Invisible is all about who we are through the lens of the things we build. We often tell stories about how people shape the built world, but these are more about how the built world has shaped us.

99% Vernacular: Volume 1

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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 Club have a million followers. Over the past decade there has been a steady stream of think pieces offering explanations for the emergence of this new obsession. But while millennials may have perfected the art of plant parenting, this is not the first time people have gotten completely obsessed with houseplants. Journalist Anne Helen Petersen digs into the history of domesticated plants in a series of articles on her Substack, Culture Study, and joins us to talk about what she's found.

Say Aloe to My Little Frond

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99% Invisible producer emeritus Avery Trufelman traveled from New York to San Francisco recently, and took host Roman Mars to see an unusually shaped old building on the west side of the Bay. As it turns out, this peculiar octagonal home isn't unique -- there was a whole architectural fad of building these back in the mid 1800s, tapping into a parallel trend: self-improvement.

Publisher Orson Fowler (most famous for being a phrenologist) used his professional position to self-publish a book about the many benefits, health and otherwise, of living in an octagonal home. His book, Octagon House: A Home For All, became a sensation. In its wake, hundreds of octagon houses started popping up all over the country.

The Octagon House

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Sakhalin is a long, skinny island east of Russia's mainland. Russia and Japan have long fought over the territory, which has left the ethnic Koreans who came to work on the island starting in the early 1900s in a kind of limbo. Tatyana Kim, a native of Sakhalin, guides us through its unusual history and the difficulties of a repatriation that is long overdue.

Hometown Village

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The Ojibwe name for wild rice is Manoomin, which translates to “the good berry.” The scientific name is Zizania palustris. It’s the only grain indigenous to North America, and while it might be called rice, it’s actually not closely related to brown or white rice at all. It has long played an important role in Ojibwe cultures, but last year, Manoomin took on a new role: plaintiff in a court case. Last August, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources was sued by wild rice. The case of Manoomin v Minnesota Department of Natural Resources alleges that the Minnesota DNR infringed on the wild rice’s right to live and thrive. But can wild rice sue a state agency? The short answer is: yes. This is the story about what might happen if rice wins.

The Rights of Rice and Future of Nature

Support for this episode was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. RWJF is working to build a culture of health that ensures everyone in the United States has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org. If you have a hunch about how changes to the way we live, learn, work and play today are shaping our future, share it here: www.shareyourhunch.org

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No teenager in America in the 1980s could avoid the gravitational pull of the mall, not even author Alexandra Lange. In her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain, Lange writes about how malls were conceptually born out of a lack of space for people to convene in American suburbs. Despite the fact indoor shopping malls are no longer in their heyday, malls have not gone away completely. Lange writes about the history of mall culture, and how the mall became a ubiquitous part of American life.

Meet Us by the Fountain

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Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. At least, that's what we were taught in school. But when historians go searching…there’s no proof to be found. In this collaboration with the podcast Sidedoor, we unravel this vexillological tall tale to find out how this myth got started, and who Betsy Ross really was.

Plus we talk about the real flag that inspired the song, The Star Spangled Banner.

Flag Days: Unfolding a Moment

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Priceless cultural artifacts have been plundered and sold for hundreds of years. You can find these relics in museums and in private collections. In recent years, with the advent of online marketplaces, researchers have begun to find a lot of artifacts for sale on the web.

The Syrian War has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. Not to mention, hundreds of billions in damages. And that battle has played out on land considered to be the cradle of civilization -- a place rich with layers of archeological history.

Producer Zeina Dowidar and her team on the Kerning Cultures podcast tell stories about the Middle East and North Africa. For this episode, they took a comprehensive, inside look at how one country struggled to retain its cultural heritage in the midst of a brutal conflict.

Divining Provenance

Plus we have an interview and preview of the podcast Real Good

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In the late 1700s, a young man named Friedrich 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 any single architect -- all because Friedrich Froebel created kindergarten.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s son, John, was an architect, but his most famous creation wasn’t a building. It was a toy set that kids have been playing with for over 100 years.

 Inheriting Froebel's Gifts

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Downtown Toronto has a dense core of tall, glassy buildings along the waterfront of Lake Ontario. Outside of that, lots short single family homes sprawl out in every direction. Residents looking for something in between an expensive house and a condo in a tall, generic tower struggle to find places to live. There just aren’t a lot of these mid-sized rental buildings in the city.

And it's not just Toronto -- a similar architectural void can be found in many other North American cities, like Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston and Vancouver. And this is a big concern for urban planners -- so big, there's a term for it. The "missing middle." That moniker can be confusing, because it's not directly about middle class housing -- rather, it's about a specific range of building sizes and typologies, including: duplexes, triplexes, courtyard buildings, multi-story apartment complexes, the list goes on. Buildings like these have an outsized effect on cities, and cities without enough of these kinds of buildings often suffer from their absence.

The Missing Middle

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The greatest mode of transportation is the funicular, which is a special kind of train pulled by a cable that runs up steep slopes. But trains are great even when they're not going up treacherous terrain. And in that spirit: here are some of the most ambitious, fascinating, and downright crazy trains that the world has ever seen.

Train Set

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Bonus episode: Roman Mars on Blank Check with Griffin and David talking about The Quick and The Dead (Sam Raimi, 1995)

Roman note: I LOVE this show!  Many of us on the 99pi staff are huge fans and follow it religiously. If you've never heard or it, search through to find a director you like and listen to a whole series. You'll be hooked.

Not just another bad movie podcast, Blank Check with Griffin & David reviews directors' complete filmographies episode to episode. Specifically, the auteurs whose early successes afforded them the rare ‘blank check’ from Hollywood to produce passion projects. Each new miniseries, hosts Griffin Newman and David Sims delve into the works of film’s most outsized personalities in painstakingly hilarious detail.

Subscribe! It will make you happy! Apple, Stitcher, Spotify

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Data is the lifeblood of public health, and has been since the beginning of the field. But essential data gathering for the COVID pandemic was hindered by a couple of of underlying weakness in the US public health apparatus. We have a fractured system where the power lies in US states that don't always coordinate effectively. Also there has been inconsistent funding. When there was an immediate crisis, there would be an infusion of cash. But then, when the crisis passed, the resources would evaporate. 

We take a look at data gathering in regards to public health from the 1600s to today and how it might change in the future.

Support for this episode was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation. RWJF is working to build a culture of health that ensures everyone in the United States has a fair and just opportunity for health and well-being. For more information, visit www.rwjf.org. If you have a hunch about how changes to the way we live, learn, work and play today are shaping our future, share it here: www.shareyourhunch.org

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If you’ve ever been to a supermarket in the US, you’ve probably seen an ethnic food aisle. Maybe it was called the "international aisle," or "world foods," but it was the same idea. This is the “It’s A Small World After All” part of the shopping experience. It’s where you’ll find ramen next to coconut milk, next to plantain chips next to harissa. Although ethnic aisles look different in every supermarket, they’re often variations on the same theme. And while so-called “ethnic food brands” get a chance to feed the American masses, they’re still confined to the ethnic aisle. And they may never leave.

It's a Small Aisle After All

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Standing on Beechey island, a peninsula off Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic, are four lonely graves: three members of an ill-fated expedition to the Northwest Passage, and one of the men who went looking for them. In 1845, Sir John Franklin led an expedition to find the Northwest Passage, a direct route from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean across the arctic, on two ships that were called "unstoppable" at the time. They were stopped, though the exact circumstances remain murky.

The story of the graves is chronicled on the Atlas Obscura Podcast, a short, daily celebration of the world's strange and wondrous places. The podcast has a mission similar to 99pi, which is to inspire wonder and curiosity about the world.  Today we're featuring two stories from the show.

The second story visits the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsboro, Alabama, which bills itself as "the nation's only retailer of lost luggage." If you've ever lost a bag during air travel, it probably wound up there, along with many other treasures and oddities.

Subscribe to Atlas Obscure on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.

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Every year in the spring, small towns throughout New England host their annual town meeting. Town meetings take place in high school gyms or town halls, and anyone can come. In fact, in Vermont, Town Meeting Day is a public holiday. Everyone gets the day off work to make sure they have the chance to participate. It’s a moment when everyone who lives there can come together to talk out the issues facing the town and decide how they want to spend their money.

Radio producer Erica Heilman lives in Vermont and is the host of a  jewel of a podcast called Rumble Strip. It’s ostensibly all about life in Vermont, but it may just also be about life in general.

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While urban parks are safe havens for birds, parks are often surrounded by condos and hotels and office buildings with floor-to-ceiling windows. And these all-glass building facades are the absolute worst for migrating birds. Because unlike people, birds don’t really understand glass.

It’s believed that building collisions are one of the biggest causes of bird death. Birds crash into buildings during the day because they don’t see the glass, and they run into buildings at night because they are lured in by artificial lighting. Most of these collisions happen below 100 feet, because that’s where birds are used to landing in trees.

Murder Most Fowl

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So why don't we have mouth Roombas? Is the universe full of chickens? What scientific advances are happening? What was the first internet purchase? How do I convince my parents to let me check a bag? What is Twitter? What's the difference between a telescope and a camera? Are sea monkeys natural? Hank Green and Roman Mars have answers!

In their podcast Dear Hank & John, hosts John and Hank Green (who are also authors and YouTubers) offer both humorous and heartfelt advice about life’s big and small questions. They bring their personal passions to each episode by sharing the week’s news from Mars (the planet) and AFC Wimbledon (the third-tier English football club)."

Dear Hank and John and Roman

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In February 2021, it began to snow in Austin, Texas, which was unusual, and exciting for some, at least until the power dropped out for millions of people. To many, this came as a shock – how could a state known for its energy production have such widespread, prolonged power outages? To understand the situation, one has to look at the history of the grid, and how Texas came to be what we call an “energy island.” It's the only state in the lower 48 that operates its own independent electric grid.

For more on the Texas grid by Mose Buchele, be sure to check out The Disconnect.

Grid Locked

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Natalie de Blois contributed to some of the most iconic Modernist works created for corporate America, all while raising four children. After leaving this significant mark on postwar Park Avenue, she transferred to the SOM Chicago office, where she became actively involved in the architecture feminist movement and was one of the leaders in the newly formed Chicago Women in Architecture advocacy group. Later, she finished her career as a professor at UT Austin, where she trained a future generation of architects.

In the New Angle: Voice podcast, “Hear from historians, family, colleagues, and the women themselves, how it was to be an architect coming up in the early 20th century. Imagine sitting with these pioneering women, who opened up the magic of the built environment professions to all who had the gifts, grit and persistence to endure.”

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While something like dial-up might mostly be a thing of the past, the truth is copper phone lines still connect a lot of people to the internet over DSL. And even many people’s coaxial cable connections aren’t fast enough to meet the federal government’s definition of broadband (25 megabits per second download speed, and 3 megabit upload). Who gets fiber is determined by the market, and the market is determined not by who wants fiber, but really just who can already afford it. So for a lot of the country, the last mile remains a deep and vexing problem. Different cities have tried to solve that problem in different ways.

Support for this episode was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. In partnership with others, RWJF is working to develop a Culture of Health rooted in equity that provides every individual with a fair and just opportunity to thrive, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have.

The Future of the Final Mile

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In the 1990s Dave Davis worked as the groundskeeper at a small neighborhood park in a suburb of St. Louis called Creve Coeur. It was an unpaid position, but it came with a strange perk: as part of the job, he got to live in a house on the grounds. On the outside, it looks like an ordinary ranch-style house, but once you got inside, something seemed a little off: it looked like someone had completed it in a hurry. It turns out that this house wasn’t supposed to be the home for the groundskeeper, and the park was never supposed to be a park.  It was private property that belonged to a prominent Black doctor back in the 1950s. But the land was taken from him before he could even finish building his home.

Broken Heart Park

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The Columbia Journalism School recently announced the 16 winners of the 2022 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards, including According to Need, a project of 99% Invisible produced by Katie Mingle.

We listen back to a couple stories and get an update from Katie Mingle.

According to Need wins duPont-Columbia Award

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There's a small neighborhood within the SEZ of Shenzhen that is known for mass-producing copies of the most celebrated works of Western art, all painted quickly and by hand. The place is called Dafen Village. There is a very good chance that you've been in the presence of a painting made in Dafen. Perhaps you passed by one at the dentist’s office, or in a conference room of a Marriott in Orlando. You may have even hung one up in your home without even realizing it. 

To learn more about the origin of Special Economic Zones listen to the previous episode Call of Duty: Free

Art Imitates Art

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On the west coast of Ireland, on the banks of an estuary dividing county Limerick from county Clare, lies a small town called Shannon. But Shannon is not a quaint fishing village or farming community. Its industry is its airport. And Shannon Airport is big. It handles up to 1.7 million passengers and 20,000 flights a year, most of them from other countries. It looks like a cosmopolitan international airport, but it has a unique claim to fame: the world's first airport duty-free store.

Today, the store has what you would expect -- designer perfumes, jewelry and various fine foods, with a lot of local (in this case Irish) products in particular. But like the area around the airport, the shop started out small, with a local boy from the area who would go on to change the world of tax-free commerce in and beyond Shannon.

Call of Duty: Free

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People have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. The 20th century was full of misbegotten fads and productivity innovations that continue to this day, even when the whole notion of what it means to be in an office has shifted during the pandemic. In this first episode of our series "The Future Of..." we look at the past, present, and future of the office through the lens of the office furniture that has been designed to solve all our problems.

Support for this episode was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. In partnership with others, RWJF is working to develop a Culture of Health rooted in equity that provides every individual with a fair and just opportunity to thrive, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have.

Reaction Offices and the Future of Work

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When the two greatest auction houses in the world – Christie’s and Sotheby’s – vied for the privilege of auctioning off $20 million worth of art in 2004, little did they know that they would be forced to engage in an ancient form of ritualized combat known as rock paper scissors.

Plus, we get a hilarious breakdown of the Shang-Chi bus fight scene by a real San Francisco Muni bus operator, Mc Allen.

Rock Paper Scissors Bus

Subscribe to Snap Judgment

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The Punisher has always been a complicated Marvel antihero: a man whose creator imagined him as a reaction to the failures of government at home and in the Vietnam War. So why is the Punisher’s trademark dripping skull insignia — a menacing image used throughout history to denote imminent death — being painted on police vehicles, adopted by members of the military, and donned by white supremacists?

This episode of Endless Thread explores the story of The Punisher’s symbol as a meme, and looks at how well we understand its origins, its use today, and whether its creator — or Marvel — can take it back.

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At the end of the calendar year and into the new year the 99pi staff collects a bunch of short, joyful little stories that are fun to produce and make us happy. We call them mini-stories. This is the third and final episode of this batch and the 14th volume overall and it’s a good one- we have surprisingly architectural sport commentary, Ben Franklin’s role in Daylight Saving Time, and the origin story of the fire pole.

Mini-Stories : Volume 14

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We're kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: a strange collision of mundane infrastructure and political insurrection; a graphic design history mystery dating back to the 1980s; what may be the most hated architectural design of 2021; and a record-breaking album cover design so cutting edge it cost more money to make than to buy.

Mini-Stories: Volume 13

Get Beauty Pill's Instant Night

Get New Order's Blue Monday

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It's that time of year again! When 99pi producers and friends of the show join Roman to tell shorter stories, many of which have been sitting on our idea shelves, just waiting for this moment. Our first set of minis delves into the surprisingly controversial logo of a major sports league; a wild goose chase into erroneous statistics; the largely forgotten arts competitions of the Olympic Games; and a Modernist penguin pool that is beloved by preservationists but not so adored by actual penguins. And this is the first batch of our turn-of-the-year mini-stories. Tune back in for more minis at the beginning of 2022!

Mini-Stories: Volume 12

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Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green valleys, and turquoise rivers. The country is beautiful in all seasons, but it is perhaps at its most magical around Christmastime. This nation of just over 2 million people is visited by, not one, not two, but three different "santas" every festive season. But it hasn't always been this way. Each Santa has had his moment in the spotlight—each in a different period of Slovenia’s complicated history. And in order to have a Christmas season that reflects that history and speaks to all Slovenians, you need three magical men.

The Three Santas of Slovenia

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For Black Americans, Collier Heights became a suburban jewel in the postwar South spanning thousands of acres and packed with nature. Just as amazing as the expansive beauty is how this neighborhood came to be, especially given everything that stood in the way. Collier Heights was established in the early 1950s, when redlining and racial zoning all put hard limits on where black people could live. Driving its development was a team of community leaders who used cold, sharp strategy, flipping the logic of Jim Crow housing segregation on its head.

The Epic of Collier Heights

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In much of the western world, alphabetical order is simply a default we take for granted. It’s often the one we try first -- or the one we use as a last resort when all the other ordering methods fail. It’s boring, but it works, and it’s so ingrained that it’s hard to imagine not using it. But despite its endurance for most of its history, the alphabet wasn’t initially used to order much of anything. Judith Flanders, author of A Place For Everything, a history of alphabetical order, says that in societies like ancient Rome and early medieval Europe, writing implements were still rare. So what mattered most was organizing knowledge in a way that helped you to memorize it. And that was usually much easier to do in the order you naturally came across the information, like: chronologically, or by size, or geography, or region, or hierarchically.

Alphabetical Order

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The French bulldog is now the second most popular breed in America. Their cute features, portable size, and physical features make for a dog that can easily travel and doesn't require a lot of exercise. But these characteristics sometimes have a detrimental effect on the dog's health. Tove K. Danovich writes "Rather than requiring human owners to change their lives to accommodate a new dog, the French bulldog is a breed that’s been broken to accommodate us."

Historically, dogs were bred for functional reasons, not aesthetics. But evaluating a breed based on how they accomplish a task is tricky, leading to the rise of visual standards more easily judged. As breed standards were formalized, purebred dogs grew in popularity and became a luxury of sorts; but with a limited genetic pool, this popularity naturally led to a lot of inbreeding to maintain breed consistency.

Cute Little Monstrosities of Nature

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Fitness trends come and go. But the simple weight is an anchor in the shifting tides of culture. As workout equipment has become canonized within the realm of home appliances, this heavy metal object aids in our dual — and sometimes conflicting — pursuit of athletics and aesthetics.

In season 2 of the Nice Try! podcast, show host and former 99pi producer Avery Trufelman heads inside the home, interrogating how individuals channel utopian ambitions through the lifestyle technologies and home goods that determine the ways we clean, cook, exercise, and sleep in order to lead better lives. But the problems these objects are designed to solve, and the way they solve them, promote a distinctly American ideal that prioritizes personal betterment over improving society as a whole.

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Even if we think of the camera as a neutral technology, it is not. In the vast spectrum of human colors, photographic tools and practices tend to prioritize the lighter end of that range. One example of this bias was Kodak's Shirley Card, a reference photo used to calibrate photo printing machines.  For decades all of the models on the Shirley Cards were white. This meant that photographs of people with darker skin tones were often not printed correctly. But that's just one example of the limited dynamic range of photography purposefully excluding people with darker skin.

Shirley Cards

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Born in 1872, American architect and engineer Julia Morgan designed hundreds of buildings over her prolific career, famous for her work on incredible structures like the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.

She was also the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first woman architect licensed in California. But it wasn't until 2014 that she became the the first woman to receive American Institute of Architects’ highest award, the AIA Gold Medal, posthumously.

In the New Angle: Voice podcast, "Hear from historians, family, colleagues, and the women themselves, how it was to be an architect coming up in the early 20th century. Imagine sitting with these pioneering women, who opened up the magic of the built environment professions to all who had the gifts, grit and persistence to endure."

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At a glance, the border between the United States and Canada would seem to be at the friendlier end of the international boundary spectrum. But even though the US-Canada border is now pretty tame, when two countries touch each other over a stretch of 5500 miles, it can result in some surprisingly weird disputes, misunderstandings,  geographical quirks and ...really good stories. 

Fifty-Four Forty or Fight

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Margarine is yellow, like butter, but it hasn't always been. At times and in places, it has been a bland white, or even a dull pink. These strange variations were a byproduct of 150-year war to destroy margarine, and everything that it stands for. During this epic fight for survival, margarine has had to reinvent itself, over and over again. 

I Can't Believe It's Pink Margarine

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Rioters carried many familiar flags during the January 6th insurrection at the United States Capitol -- Confederate, MAGA, as well as some custom-made ones like a flag of Trump looking like Rambo. Except for onlookers who were already familiar with the design, it would have been easy to overlook one particular bright yellow flag with three red horizontal stripes across the center. This was the flag of South Vietnam.

There were actually several confounding international flags present at the Capitol riot that day: the Canadian, Indian, South Korean flags, all were spotted somewhere in the mayhem. But what was peculiar about the Vietnamese flag being there was that it's not technically the flag of Vietnam but the Republic of Vietnam, a country that no longer exists. And what this flag stands for (or should stand for) remains a really contentious issue for the Vietnamese American community.

Changing Stripes

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The Sears & Roebuck Mail Order Catalog was nearly omnipresent in early 20th century American life. By 1908, one fifth of Americans were subscribers. Anyone anywhere in the country could order a copy for free, look through it, and then have anything their heart desired delivered directly to their doorstep. At its peak, the Sears catalog offered over 100,000 items on 1,400 pages. It weighed four pounds. Today, those 1,400 pages provide us with a snapshot of American life in the first decade of the 20th century, from sheep-shearing machines and cream separators to telephones and china cabinets. The Sears catalog tells the tale of a world -- itemized. And starting in 1908, the company that offered America everything began offering what just might be its most audacious product line ever: houses.

Buy The 99% Invisible City!

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When it comes to English spelling and pronunciation, there is plenty of rhyme and very little reason. But what is the reason for that? Why among all European languages is English so uniquely chaotic today?

To help us answer that question, we spoke with linguist and longtime friend of the show, Arika Okrent, author of the new book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language. In it, Arika explores the origins of those phonetic paradoxes, and it turns out some of the reasons for confusion are as counterintuitive as the words themselves.

Corpse, Corps, Horse and Worse

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Presidential libraries are tributes to greatness, "[a] self-congratulatory, almost fictional account of someone's achievements, where all the blemishes are hidden," explains one New York architect.  But they're also a "weird mix of a historical repository of records and things that have a lot of meaning." Studying their origins and evolution, one can begin to see how presidential libraries have always involved tensions and contradictions.

Yankee Pyramids

The premise of using the extreme example of Trump to heighten the contradictions of executive branch norms is what we do on Roman's other podcast What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law. It's good! And it's not really about Trump, so don't worry. It's essentially a current events based Constitutional Law class taught by an incredible professor, Elizabeth Joh. We included the latest episode here for you to check out. 

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The great Jacob Goldstein, author of Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing, stops by to tell us two stories about the design of paper currency around the world. First, the story of the making of the Euro banknotes, the design of which was supposed to unify Europe and not rely on any one country's national heroes or monuments. Then we learn about China's early pioneering experiments in paper currency, hundreds of years before it caught on in the rest of the world. 

Real Fake Bridges

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Axolotls are nature’s great regenerators. They are able to grow back not just their tails, but also legs, arms, even parts of vital organs, including their hearts. This remarkable ability is one of several traits that turned the axolotl into a scientific superstar. The axolotl is one of the most abundant laboratory animals in biology. They can be found swimming in tanks at universities all around the world. But in the wild they’ve only ever been found in one place: Mexico City.

Model Organism

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In 2015 the world was divided into two warring factions overnight. And at the center of this schism was a single photograph. Cecilia Bleasdale took a picture of a dress that she planned to wear to her daughter's wedding and that photo went beyond viral. Some saw it as blue with black trim; others as white with gold trim. For his part, Wired science writer Adam Rogers knew there was more to the story -- a reason different people looking at the same object could come to such radically divergent conclusions about something as simple as color.

Rogers recently wrote a book titled Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern. In this episode, Roman Mars talks with the author about how the pursuit to organize, understand, and create colors has been one of the driving forces shaping human history, starting with the story of this hotly debated piece of apparel from 2015 then winding back through built environments of global World's Fairs.

Full Spectrum

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What does water mean to you? In this feature, author Bonnie Tsui (Why We Swim), actress Joy Bryant, submarine pilot Erika Bergman, figure skater Elladj Baldé, 85-year-old synchronized swimmer Barbara Eison-White, professional mermaid Olivia Gonzales, and others share stories about the many ways water influences our lives.

From Pop-Up Magazine, creators of this Field Guide series: "We recommend listening outside, near water if you can. Head to the ocean if you’re on the coast. Or walk to a nearby pond or creek. Sit by a fountain at a park. Or just pour yourself a glass of water."

Plus, an excerpt of Roman Mars On The Anatomy Of A Good Story (w/ Michelle Fournet, Roman Mars, Pedro Pascal), part of the Periodic Talks podcast. It's a show about what gets people curious, from virtual experiences to celestial bodies, with Gillian Jacobs (Community, Netflix's LOVE) and Diona Reasonover (NCIS)

A Field Guide to Water

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When Roman Mars and Kurt Kohlstedt were promoting The 99% Invisible City in late 2020, one question came up over and over again in conversations and interviews about our built environment: in what ways will the COVID pandemic change cities long term? Realistically, it's hard to answer a question about the future while in the midst of a crisis, but we can look to and extrapolate from precedents, like: designs born out of past disasters.

War, Famine, Pestilence, and Design

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Officially titled The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food, it was often known simply as “Kniga” (translated: "book") because it was one of the only cookbooks to exist in the Soviet Union. The volume is peppered with glossy photographs of really lavish spreads and packed with text as well. There are recipes for lentils and crab salad and how to cook buckwheat nine different ways. But this book was meant to do so much more than show people how to make certain dishes — it's a Stalinist document aimed at addressing hunger itself in the USSR. "The book" was at the vanguard of a radical Soviet food experiment that, despite its numerous obstacles, transformed Russian cuisine.

The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food

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Britt Young is a geographer and tech writer based in the Bay Area. She also has what's called a "congenital upper limb deficiency." In other words, she was born without the part of her arm just below her left elbow. She's used different sorts of prosthetic devices her whole life, and in 2018, she celebrated the arrival of a brand new, multi-articulating prosthetic hand. This prosthetic hand has a sleek carbon fiber casing, with specific pre-programmed grips that she can control just by flexing the muscles in her residual limb. She can use a precision pinch to pick a hairpin off of the table, or a Hulk-style power fist to squeeze objects. This kind of assistive technology has been life-changing for a lot of people who have limb differences. But for Britt, in particular, it hasn't been life-changing at all. In fact, her cutting-edge bionic arm has been a pretty major disappointment. "It's just not what you imagine. It's not like I'm like everyone else now, it's something different."

The Lows of High Tech

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Hanko, sometimes called insho, are the carved stamp seals that people in Japan often use in place of signatures. Hanko seals are made from materials ranging from plastic to jade and are about the size of a tube of lipstick. The end of each hanko is etched with its owner’s name, usually in the kanji pictorial characters used in Japanese writing. This carved end is then dipped in red cinnabar paste and impressed on a document as a form of identification. Hanko seals work like signatures, only instead of signing on a dotted line, you impress your hanko in a small circle to prove your identity. But unlike a signature, which you can make with any old pen or touch screen, in Japan you need to have your own personal hanko with you whenever you stamp something, and you have to stamp it in person.

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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. They usually come with polite plaques. The ABC podcast Stuff the British Stole is a six episode series about the not-so-polite history behind a few of those objects.

We’re going to play the first episode and Roman talks to the presenter and creator Marc Fennell about the series.

Stuff the British Stole

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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. Sometimes planes have to be grounded because of these arguments. If you think about it, these arguments are the result of confusion. Both people paid for a seat on the airplane, but it's unclear who owns the space behind it. Jim Salzman and Michael Heller are law professors and the authors of a new book called Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives. They write about these common instances where ownership is not clear cut. According to Salzman and Heller, confusing ownership rules are often the result of poor ownership design. This is true not just for airplane seats, but also for battles over digital privacy, climate change, and wealth inequality.

Mine!

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We revisit Katie Mingle's Right to Roam episode as we say goodbye

In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England.

Right to Roam

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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 protest police violence against Black people. And if you look at images from these marches, you will probably start to notice a common color scheme -- one involving a lot of red, black, and green. The flag was invented to unite Black people all over the world living under racial repression. When it first came into existence, the flag posed some bold questions about where Black people owed their loyalty: was it to the nations where their lives were demeaned and threatened? Or to a new nation - one they would build entirely for themselves? For hundreds of thousands of Black people, the red-black-and-green symbolized the answer.

 Flag Days: The Red, the Black & the Green

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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 first to wish you a Happy Flag Day, beautiful nerds!  Anyone who has listened to 99% Invisible regularly knows we have a thing for flags, which can beautiful things that give communities something symbolic to rally around. This year, we decided to get the celebration started early then keep the party going with two whole weeks of flag-related stories. They look like normal Japanese flags (hinomaru) at a glance, but upon inspection, they are covered in handwritten notes often radiating outward in kanji from the central red circle (a sun against a field of white). Different messages are written in different hands directly on the fabric. These so-called "good luck flags" were gifted to soldiers, particularly during WWII, as part of a send-off from loved ones -- and their name in English comes from one of the most commonly written phrases on them: good luck. Antarctica is a wonderfully strange place, and not just because of its infamously frigid climate. This huge landmass doesn’t have an independent government or even a permanent human population. It also has a lot of flags, though strangely: no single official one. Flag Days: Good Luck, True South

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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 unpack. 

The Clinch

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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 of systems design. On the one hand, it has created a vast sanitation system that has helped add decades to human lifespan by reducing disease. But on the other hand, less than half of the world’s population can access a toilet that safely manages bodily waste, including many right here in the United States. We use about 100 trillion gallons of water for toilets every year at a time when water is becoming more scarce. While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quo—in part because the topic of toilets is taboo.

Pipe Dreams

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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 what we think about time is relatively recent, and some of what we take for granted isn't quite as universal as one might think. This series of time-centric stories challenges what you know (or think you know) about the way time works around the world.

Matters of Time

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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 Berlin's club scene. And this music that the city is most famous for developed in large part because of the thing the city is most infamous for: the Berlin wall, which divided the city into east and west for almost thirty years. When the wall fell in 1989, everyone was euphoric and parties started popping up everywhere. East Berlin was like a big playground of derelict buildings. It wasn't just the abandoned apartments. There were also former military sites and factories that had been shut down and buildings that had been condemned. And these places were perfect for techno. Tanz Tanz Revolution

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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 in your kitchen. But as the number of these cargo ships has increased, so has a problem: workers stuck on ships that have been completely abandoned by the owners, leaving them stranded out at sea without basic supplies like food. In some cases, seafarers (that's the industry term for cargo ship workers) have been stuck on these abandoned vessels without enough supplies for months, or even years.

Abandoned Ships

This episode was produced in collaboration with the podcast Kerning Cultures, a podcast that makes audio stories - like this one - from the Middle East and North Africa.

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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 sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago -- when an activist named Ed Roberts was young -- most urban corners featured a sharp drop-off, making it difficult for him and other wheelchair users to get between blocks without assistance.

Curb Cuts plus a special announcement from Roman Mars about the future of 99pi.

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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. Casanova-Burgess traces back the story of the boom and bust of Levittown, a massive suburb that was founded on the idea of bringing the American middle-class lifestyle to Puerto Rico during a time of great change on the island. Casanova-Burgess (herself the granddaughter of an early Levittown resident) explores what the presence of a Levittown in Puerto Rico tells us about the promises of the American Dream in Puerto Rico.

La Brega in Levittown

Subscribe to La Brega on Sitcher, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify

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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 dinosaurs.

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 want to picture how they look, someone has to draw them.

The illustrated interpretation of dinosaur morphology and behavior has had a big impact on how the public views dinosaurs and it's gone through a couple of key turning points, including a more recent push for more speculative paleoart.

Welcome to Jurassic Art Redux

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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 black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The Real Book

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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 horrible effect to your body. Some attack your muscles, while others attack your nerves. And sometimes two different toxins can work together to form an even more sinister combination. Part of the reason people are dying is because they're not getting antivenom - the medicine required to fight these horrible toxins - fast enough. The system we have to create snake antivenom is a time-consuming and inefficient process that basically hasn't changed for more than 100 years.

This is a collaboration with the great podcast Science Vs from Gimlet

Science Vs Snakes

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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 extinction and climate change, humans are focused on the control of the control of nature. In this episode, Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky, talks about everything from the introduction of poisonous frogs in Australia to launching diamond dust into the stratosphere.

Oops, Our Bad

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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 Grand 24 in Dallas changed everything. It was the very first movie megaplex in the United States. This is the gigantic, neon, big-box store of moviegoing that we're all used to  today, and it's easy to dismiss as a tacky ‘90s invention. But the megaplex—specifically this first megaplex in Dallas—upended the entire theater business and changed the kinds of movies that got made in ways you might not imagine.

The Megaplex!

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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 end up having outsized consequences, and not just for Idaho. Because what started in one state would soon spread. And when it did, the question of what should go on a license plate, and what shouldn't, would prove surprisingly contentious.

Artistic License

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Victorian nurse Florence Nightingale (played in this episode by her distant cousin Helena Bonham Carter) is a hero of modern medicine - but her greatest contribution to combating disease and death resulted from the vivid graphs she made to back her public health campaigns. Her charts convinced the great and the good that deaths due to filth and poor sanitation could be averted - saving countless lives. But did Nightingale open Pandora's Box, showing that graphs persuade, whether or not they depict reality?

Cautionary Tales is a podcast by Tim Harford from Pushkin Industries.

You can read more about the remarkable legacy of Florence Nightingale and the perils of misinformation in Tim Harford's new book The Data Detective (US/Canada) / How To Make The World Add Up (UK / International).

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Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bridge was a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. It needed to be rebuilt with more contemporary beams called “box beams.” The box beams sit below the road’s surface, and they needed to be spaced a certain distance apart. Bloschock and the other engineers decided that the gap should be somewhere between ¾ of an inch and an inch and a half, which didn’t seem like a particularly meaningful decision… until the bats moved in.

A tale of bats and bridges and how the built environment and the natural environment don’t need to be at odds with one another.

The Batman and the Bridge Builder

Plus, we talk with Simon Doble, CEO of Solar Buddy. Light access (both day and night) is a basic need many people take for granted. SolarBuddy is an Australian charity uniting a global community with a big dream to gift six million solar lights to children living in energy poverty by 2030, to help them to study after dusk and improve their education outcomes.

99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is supported by Autodesk. The Autodesk Foundation supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Learn more about these efforts on Autodesk’s Redshift, which tells stories about the future of making across architecture, engineering, infrastructure and manufacturing.

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The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most believe all such cultural artifacts should return to China, but many others argue that these objects are also serving as nationalistic propaganda.

12 Heads from the Garden of Perfect Brightness

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Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX.

In the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” host and critic Elvis Mitchell of KCRW is joined by Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. — son of Chairman Fred Hampton and head of the Black Panther Party Cubs — as well as the film’s actors and creative team, and by members of the Black Panther Party who knew Chairman Fred Hampton. Together, they look at the true stories behind the events portrayed in the film.

In episode 1, we get the real story of how Fred Hampton became The Chairman.

Watch the film and subscribe to the rest of the series here:

Apple Podcasts

Stitcher

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Bradley Garrett is the author of Bunker: Building for the Times. People have always built underground survival shelters to stay safe from things like plagues or hurricanes. But in modern history, we've really outdone ourselves. Garrett will be our guide to the fascinating world of architecture for the end times. And we're going to find out why today we're going through a true bunker renaissance.

The Doom Boom

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Proximity, 99% Invisible, and Warner Bros. present the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” an official film companion from the Radiotopia podcast network from PRX.

In the “Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast,” host and critic Elvis Mitchell of KCRW is joined by Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. — son of Chairman Fred Hampton and head of the Black Panther Party Cubs — as well as the film’s actors and creative team, and by members of the Black Panther Party who knew Chairman Fred Hampton. Together, they look at the true stories behind the events portrayed in the film.

Subscribe and look for episode 1 February 12

Apple Podcasts

Stitcher

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Santa Fe is famous in part for a particular architectural style, an adobe (mudbrick) look that came to be called Pueblo Revival. This aesthetic combines elements of indigenous pueblo architecture and the New Mexico's old Spanish missions, resulting in mostly low, brown buildings with smooth edges. Buildings in the city's historical districts in particular have to follow a number of design guidelines so that they fit this desired look; deviating from those aesthetics can stir up a lot of controversy.  But this adherence to a single style hasn't always been the norm -- for a time, there was actually a powerful push to "Americanize" the city's built environment. Then, over a century ago, a group of preservationists laid out a vision for the look and feel of Santa Fe architecture, and in the process changed the city forever.

Stuccoed in Time

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Cities around the world have distinctive modes of transportation -- the canals of Venice, the double-decker busses of London, and the Twin Cities (of Minneapolis and St. Paul) have skyways. In both downtowns, there are vast networks of climate-controlled pedestrian bridges that reach over the streets and connect adjacent buildings. They were long viewed as modern marvels, but a lot of residents and urban planners want them gone. For critics, skyways are problematic because of who gets to enjoy them and who does not as well as their impact on street activity below.

Beneath the Skyway

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In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from the Fresh Air Movement to the lost Lenin in Antarctica.

Mini-Stories: Volume 11

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In this set of short stories, 99% Invisible producers talked with host Roman Mars about everything from climate-changing sheep to the persistent urban legend behind the invention of a space pen.

Mini-Stories: Volume 10

99% Invisible’s Impact Design coverage is supported by Autodesk. Autodesk enables the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing social and environmental challenges. Learn more about these efforts on Autodesk Redshift, a site that tells stories about the future of making things across architecture, engineering, infrastructure, construction and manufacturing.

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Each year, 99% Invisible producers select short design stories to talk about with host Roman Mars. Some of these were just too brief to make into full 99pi episodes, but many also reveal aspects of how we find ideas for (and ultimately make) the show. In this collection, we'll talk about everything from movie novelizations to disco costume designs!

Mini-Stories volume 9

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Roman Mars joins Jesse Thorn on Bullseye this week to talk about life before podcasting, and what decades in radio has taught him. Roman has worked in podcasts and radio for decades at this point, but his career didn't start out in audio. He was originally getting a PhD in genetics, pipetting stuff into tubes, recording data and the like. Roman and Jesse also spoke about how the pandemic has affected the design of cities, and which of those changes might be permanent.

Get The 99% Invisible City today

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If homelessness is the problem, housing is the solution. But it’s not always that simple. Kate Cody has been living in her encampment community for a long time. And there’s no guarantee she’ll be able to make the transition inside, even with the golden ticket.

 The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is one - it just wasn’t designed to help everyone. Katie Mingle’s According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible that asks: what are we doing to get people into housing?

If you've enjoyed this series and were moved by the stories you heard, we've compiled a list of Bay Area organizations that you can support.

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When Tulicia Lee tried to get help with housing, she was essentially put on a big long list with a bunch of other homeless people. If you live in the U.S., your community probably has a list like this too. Where one ends up on the list can have huge implications, but how one rises to the top of it is a bit of a mystery. In this episode, Katie finally gets to see how it works.

The List

The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is one - it just wasn’t designed to help everyone. According to Need is a documentary podcast in 5 chapters from 99% Invisible that asks: what are we doing to get people into housing?

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In the 1980's, a psychologist named Sam Tsemberis was working with mentally ill homeless people on the streets of New York. Sometimes, when he thought it was necessary to keep someone safe, Sam would have people committed to a psychiatric hospital. But a few months later, he’d notice that person was back on the streets. Sam knew he needed to try something different. What he did changed everything about the way we think about solving homelessness.

In this episode, what happens when you ask people what they need.

Chapter 3: Housing First