Sounds can have serious impacts on our wellbeing, even (or especially) in places focused on health like hospitals. This is the second episode in a two-part series supported by the Robert Wood Johnson…

The line to enter Barcelona’s most famous church often stretches around the block. La Sagrada Família, designed by Antoni Gaudí, draws so many people to see it that the neighborhood is congested with…

Is our blaring modern soundscape harming our health? Cities are noisy places and while people are pretty good at tuning it out on a day-to-day basis our sonic environments have serious, long-term…

On October 17th, 1989, the Oakland A’s were playing the San Francisco Giants in the World Series, but just as the game was kicking off—the television broadcast cut out. When the signal came back, it…

Deepa Bhasthi grew up in a very small town in Southern India, with mainly books to keep her company. But one day, when she was ten-years-old, Bhasthi’s father brought home a children’s magazine with…

This past fall, hundreds of 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…

As technologies evolved, early wood building blocks gave way to modular Lincoln Logs, interconnected Tinker Toys and plastic LEGO bricks that snap together, each representing a flexible world of…

Even if you don’t recognize a Noguchi table by name, you’ve definitely seen one. In movies or tv shows when they want to show that a lawyer or art dealer is really sophisticated, they put a Noguchi…

Cardboard revolutionized the packaging industry. This new material allow for the construction and distribution of cheap, light, flat-pack boxes that could be assembled and shipped on demand, enabling…

It’s the crossover event you’ve all been waiting for: Reply All‘s Super Tech Support takes on an annoyingly specific technology problem involving 99% Invisible. Ben loves podcasts, but he has a…

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a complicated relationship with his son John, including falling outs and reconciliations along the way. While Frank Lloyd Wright became a renowned designer his son…

In the late 1700s, a young man named Freidrich 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…

Ski maps around the world have a similar aesthetic and common set of usability design tricks, in no small part because hundreds of them were painted by the same person. James Niehues has been…

50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching consequences. This week, 99% Invisible is…

In 1975, Barbara Visser was a nine-year-old kid on a school field trip to the Stedelijk art museum when she first saw a painting titled Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III by the American post…

Eric Klinenberg is the author of a book called Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. The phrase “palaces for the…

Cartoon sound effects are some of the most iconic sounds ever made and are instantly recognizable. From the sound of a prolonged high-pitched whistle illustrating Wile E. Coyote falling off of a cliff…

How to honor unidentified remains has always been one of the great conundrums of war. The Romans were fond of honoring them with an empty sarcophagus. After the Civil War, the Union buried 2,111…

Cars are made to be driven, but they spend just 5% of every day in motion. The rest of the time, cars in the US sit in the country’s 800+ million parking spaces, which occupy roughly 25,000 square…

Few creative professions can point to a single figure as famous in their field as Frank Lloyd Wright. This architect’s legacy includes some of the most iconic and gorgeous buildings in the United…

These days, our phones tend to keep track of these things for us, but back when most people memorized numbers, they didn’t always make sense. The first digits of zip codes and social security numbers…

In the 1950s, Los Angeles was an up-and-coming city but wasn’t quite there yet. For decades, people had been moving to California for the climate, the jobs, and the cheap real estate. It was a city on…

Where does your recycling go? In most places in the U.S., you throw it in a bin, and then it gets carted off to be sorted and cleaned at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF). From there, much of it is…