99% Invisible

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Episodes

Date Title & Description Contributors
2023-03-21

  529- The Wilderness Tool

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 t...
  Lasha Madan author
2023-03-17

  Twenty Thousand Hertz- Golden

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 diffe...
  twenty thousand hertz author
2023-03-14

  528- A Whale-Oiled Machine

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...
  daniel ackerman, Jeyca Maldonado Medina author
2023-03-07

  420- The Lost Cities of Geo Redux

 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 Twitte...
  Roman Mars author
2023-02-28

  527- RoboUmp

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 ...
  chris berube author
2023-02-22

  526- Orange Alternative

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 me...
  sofie kodner author
2023-02-14

  525- The Chinatown Punk Wars

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 ...
  Roman Mars author
2023-02-08

  524- The Day the Music Stopped

On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening their livelihoods, so they refused to record until they got their fair share. One Year's Evan Chung explores one of the most conseq...
  Roman Mars author
2023-01-31

  523- Six-on-Six Basketball

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...
  Ellie Gordon-Moershel author
2023-01-24

  522- The Comrades

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, ...
  Ryan Lenora Brown author