Spirit Halloween
Each fall, across the United States and Canada, around 1500 empty storefronts are taken up by the signature yellow, orange and black signage of Spirit Halloween. The seasonal retailer sells…
Towers of Silence
this story is about a specific thing but also about how a system collapses when the keystone is removed
Empire of the Sum – 99% Invisible
Whether or not you’re a fan of math, we’ve always had a need to count things. Maybe it’s to figure out the maximum weight an airplane can safely hold, or…
The Six-Week Cure – 99% Invisible
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…
99 Percent Invisible – Episode 561 Long Strange Tape
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…
De Fiets is Niets
Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise. Dutch people own more bicycles per capita than any other place in the world. The country has more…
A Whale-Oiled Machine – 99% Invisible
In the 1800s, whaling was a vast and brutal industry–sometimes as deadly for the sailors involved as it was for the whales. And the global epicenter of whaling could be…
One Year: The Day the Music Stopped – 99% Invisible
The problem seems not to be new technology but who owns the means of production.
Cougar Town – 99% Invisible
Mountain lions are classified as a “specially protected species”—not quite endangered, but close. There are somewhere between 2,000 and 6,000 of them spread across the foothills and mountains of California.…
The Octagon House – 99% Invisible
99 Percent 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…