99% Invisible

Journalist Sam Bloch used to live in Los Angeles. And while lots of people move to LA for the sun and the hot temperatures, Bloch noticed a real dark side to this idyllic weather: in many neighborhoods of the city, there's almost no shade. Shade can literally be a matter of life and death. Los Angeles, like most cities around the world, is heating up. And in dry, arid environments like LA, shade is perhaps the most important factor influencing human comfort. Without shade, the chance of mortality, illness, and heatstroke can go way up. Shade Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is part 2 of the 2019- 2020 mini-stories episodes where I interview the staff about their favorite little stories from the built world that don’t quite fill out an entire episode for whatever reason but they are cool 99pi stories nonetheless… We have centuries old bonds, standard tunings mandated by international treaty, abandoned mansions, and secret babies. If you ever need a conversation starter, the mini-stories are our gift to you. Mini-Stories 8 Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

It’s the end of the year and time for our annual mini-stories episodes. Mini-stories are fun, quick hit stories that came up in our research for another episode...or maybe it was some cool thing someone told us about that we found really interesting. They didn’t quite warrant a full episode and two months of hard reporting, but they’re great 99pi stories nonetheless. And my favorite part is we do them as unscripted interviews where I’m in the studio with the people who work on this show, who I like a lot. Sometimes I know a little about what they’re going to talk about, but sometimes I know nothing. It’s very fun. This week we have stories of mistaken identity, unreachable iconic tour destinations, haunted architecture, and of course, raccoons. Mini-Stories: Volume 7 Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

The long-awaited return of Smart Stuff with Justin and Roman, featuring Justin McElroy and Roman Mars. Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Everyone should listen to My Brother, My Brother, and Me on the Max Fun Network. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Throughout Joseph Weizenbaum's life, he liked to tell this story about a computer program he’d created back in the 1960s as a professor at MIT. It was a simple chatbot named ELIZA that could interact with users in a typed conversation. As he enlisted people to try it out, Weizenbaum saw similar reactions again and again -- people were entranced by the program. They would reveal very intimate details about their lives. It was as if they’d just been waiting for someone (or something) to ask. ELIZA was one of the first computer programs that could convincingly simulate human conversation, which Weizenbaum found frankly a bit disturbing. The ELIZA Effect Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

“Incubators for premature babies were, oddly enough, a phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century that was available at state and county fairs and amusement parks rather than hospitals,” explains Lauren Rabinowitz, an amusement park historian. If you wanted your at-risk premature baby to survive, you pretty much had to bring them to an amusement park. These incubator shows cropped up all over America. And they were a main source of healthcare for premature babies for over forty years. The Infantorium Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

In the 1930s, Lester Gaba was designing department store windows and found the old wax mannequins uninspiring. So he designed a new kind of mannequin that was sleek, simple, but conveyed style and personality. As a marketing stunt, he took one of these mannequins everywhere with him and she became a national obsession. “Cynthia” captivated millions and was the subject of a 14-page spread in Life Magazine. Cynthia and the other Gaba Girls changed the look and feel of retail stores. Mannequin Pixie Dream Girl Make your mark. Go to radiotopia.fm to donate today. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more layers to a system intended to avert disaster often makes catastrophe all the more likely. His basic lesson has been ignored in nuclear power plants, financial markets and at the Oscars... all resulting in chaos. At the 2017 Academy Awards, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway famously handed the Best Picture Oscar to the wrong movie. In this episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford takes us through all of the poor design choices leading into the infamous La La Land/Moonlight debacle, and how it could have been prevented. Cautionary Tales Subscribe to Cautionary Tales on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

There are symbols all around us that we take for granted, like the lightning strike icon, which indicates that something is high voltage. Or a little campfire to indicate that something is flammable. Those icons are pretty obvious, but there are others that aren't so straightforward. Like, why do a triangle and a stick in a circle indicate "peace"? Where does the smiley face actually come from? Or the power symbol? We sent out the 99PI team to dig into the backstory behind some of those images you see every day. Ubiquitous Icons: Peace, Power, and Happiness Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

The chili pepper is the pride of New Mexico, but they have a problem with their beloved crop. There just aren’t enough workers to pick the peppers. Picking chili peppers can be especially grueling work even compared to other crops. So most workers are skipping chili harvests in favor of other sources of income.  As a result, small family farms have been planting less and less chili every year in favor of other less-labor intensive crops. So, scientists are trying to find ways to automate the harvest, but picking chilis turned out to be a tough job for a robot. How To Pick A Pepper Rose Eveleth’s podcast is called Flash Forward. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or RadioPublic. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

A little-known bit of world history about a rag tag group of sailors stranded for years in the Suez Canal at the center of a war. Great Bitter Lake Association Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

To help celebrate its 60th anniversary, the Guggenheim Museum teamed up with 99% Invisible to offer visitors a guided audio experience of the museum. Even if you've never been to the Guggenheim Museum, you probably recognize it. From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and from the inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling. We’re going to take the greatness of this building as a given. What we’re going to focus on are the oddities, the accretions, the interventions that reveal a different kind of genius. Not just the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his bold, original vision, but the genius of all the people that made this building function, adapt, and grow over the decades. Audio Guide to the Imperfections of a Perfect Masterpiece Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Before 1992, the easiest way to run the time off the clock in a soccer game was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper, who could pick the ball up, and hold it for a few seconds before throwing it back into play. This was considered by some to be unsportsmanlike and bad for spectators. So in 1992, the International Football Association Board, the committee in charge of determining the rules of soccer, made a minor change to the laws of the game. From that season forward, in every league throughout the world, when a player passed the ball back to the goalkeeper, the goalkeeper could no longer use their hands. The backpass law didn’t seem like a huge change at the time, but it fundamentally changed soccer. Unsure Footing Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Today, there are more than a hundred abandoned asylums in the United States that, to many people, probably seem scary and imposing, but not so long ago they weren't seen as scary at all. Many of them were built part of a treatment regimen developed by a singular Philadelphia doctor named Thomas Story Kirkbride. Kirkbride was obsessed with architecture and how it could be harnessed therapeutically to cure people suffering from mental illness. The Kirkbride Plan Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

There’s an idea in city planning called “informal urbanism.”  Some people call it “do-it-yourself urbanism.”  Informal urbanism covers all the ways people try to change their community that isn’t through city planning or some kind of official process. If you’ve put up a homemade sign warning people not to sit on a broken bench, that’s DIY urbanism. If you’ve used cones or a chair to reserve your own parking spot on a public street, that’s also DIY urbanism. Gordon Douglas has written a whole book about this idea called “The Help Yourself City.” It looks at all the ways people are taking matters into their own hands. Both for good reasons and for incredibly selfish ones. The Help-Yourself City Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Donald Trump took office 977 days ago, and it has been exhausting. Independent of where you are politically, I think we can all agree that the news cycle coming out of Washington DC has been very intense for anyone who has been paying attention at all. One of the reasons for the fervor is Trump’s role as a very norm breaking president. If you like him, that’s why you like him, if you hate him, that’s why you hate him. But my reaction to all this, was that I realized I didn’t really know what all the norms and rules are, so I wanted to create for myself a Constitutional Law class and the syllabus would be determined by Trump’s tweets. This is where my friend, neighbor and brains behind this operation, Elizabeth Joh, comes in. She is a professor at the UC  Davis school of law and she teaches Con Law. And since June of 2017, she has been kind enough to hang out with me and teach me lessons about the US Constitution, that I then record and release as the podcast What Trump Can Teach us About Con Law. We call it T

Everything in Bethel, Alaska comes in by cargo plane or barge, and even when something stops working, it’s often too expensive and too inconvenient to get it out again. So junk accumulates. Diane McEachern has been a resident of Bethel for about 20 years, and she’s made it her personal mission to count every single dead car in the city. Dead cars are the most visible manifestation of the town’s junk problem. You see them everywhere -- broken down, abandoned, left to rust and rot out in the elements. Dead Cars Plus, a preview of Radiotopia’s newest series Passenger List. Subscribe! Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is the newly updated story of a curvy, kidney-shaped swimming pool born in Northern Europe that had a huge ripple effect on popular culture in Southern California and landscape architecture in Northern California, and then the world. A documentary in three parts with a brand new update about how this episode resulted in a brand new skate park in a very special city. The Pool and the Stream Redux Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Waiting is something that we all do every day, but our experience of waiting, varies radically depending on the context. And it turns out that design can completely change whether a five minute wait feels reasonable or completely unbearable. Transparency is key. Wait Wait...Tell Me! Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

Before we turned our phones to silent or vibrate, there was a time when everyone had ringtones -- when the song your phone played really said something about you. These simple, 15 second melodies were disposable, yet highly personal trinkets. They started with monophonic bleeps and bloops and eventually became actual clips of real songs. And it was all thanks to a man named Vesku-Matti Paananen. All Rings Considered Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.