Complete & chronological playlist of the first 284 episodes Roman Mars' wonderful program, 99 Percent Invisible. Ninety two hours of fascinating stuff! This is not automated. I update it when new episodes are uploaded to Soundcloud.

Unfortunately, the last update to the official account was at the end of 2017 & I have been unable to get an answer as to whether 99% Invisible will be further updated on Soundcloud. I've switched to Stitcher for personal listening.

For the latest episodes go go https://99percentinvisible.org/

99% INVISIBLE complete playlist

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A tiny radio show about design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

99% Invisible

Dharma Talk by Korin Charlie Pokorny on July 7, 2013 at Green Gulch Farm Zen Center.

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Everyone Has a Light

99% Invisible-01- 99% Noise

99% Invisible-02- 99% 180

99% Invisible-03- 99% Reality (only)

99% Invisible-04- 99% Details

99% Invisible-05- 99% Forgotten

99% Invisible-06- 99% Symbolic

99% Invisible-09- 99% Private

99% Invisible-15- Sounds of the Artificial World

99% Invisible-16- A Designed Language

99% Invisible-18- Check Cashing Stores

99% Invisible-20- Nikko Concrete Commando

If you look at the outer hull of commercial ships you might find a painted circle bisected with a long horizontal line- this simple marking is called the load line, or as I prefer, the Plimsoll line- and not to oversell it, but this elegant graphic design has saved thousands of lives. Tristan Cooke (http://Humansindesign.tumblr.com) tells us the history of the Plimsoll line and explains why it's one of his favorite examples of design.

99% Invisible-33- A Cheer for Samuel Plimsoll

I want to be careful not to overstate what it means for a building to die. A building’s worth is an infinitesimal fraction of the worth a person’s life. Even two buildings don’t even move the needle in comparison to real human loss. But a building is still a living thing in a way. It breathes and it moves. This movement makes a sound.

Les Robertson, the structural engineer of the World Trade Center, says that the people working inside the tower couldn’t feel this movement, but they could hear it.

This episode of 99% Invisible was produced with the Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva, and the creaking “Buildings Speak” section was mixed by Jim McKee of Earwax Productions. It’s comprised of extracts and outtakes from the Peabody Award Winning Sonic Memorial Project produced in 2002. A new, tenth anniversary edition of the Sonic Memorial Project, which is narrated by my literary hero Paul Auster, is going to be playing on public radio stations around the country. Find out where and when it’s playing on your local public radio station and make an appointment to listen. 



99% Invisible-35- Elegy for WTC

Cities are pretty robust organisms, they tend to survive even when put under tremendous stress and strain. Local industries rise and fall, people immigrate and emigrate, but most of these changes happen over decades. What happens to a city when its purpose is stripped away virtually overnight? Bonn was the quiet, unlikely capital of West Germany and then the newly unified Germany for 50 years, and then the Cold War ended and the seat of government was moved back to its historic home of Berlin. Ten years after the move, Bonn is finding its new identity and purpose, but hidden clues in the urban landscape remind us of the city it used to be.
Cyrus Farivar takes us on a tour of his neighborhood in what used to be the diplomatic quarter of Bonn with local historian and tour guide Michael Wenzel. Farivar is the science and technology editor at Deutsche Welle English and the author of The Internet of Elsewhere – about the history and effects of the Internet on different countries around the world.


99% Invisible-36- Super Bon Bonn

If I asked you to close your eyes and mimic the action of using one of the simple human interfaces of everyday life, you could probably do it. Without having a button to push, you could close your eyes and pretend push a button, and that action would accurately reflect the action of pushing a real button. The same goes for flipping a switch or turning a door knob. If you closed your eyes and faked the movement, it would sync up with its real world use.
Now if I asked you to do the same with a car’s steering wheel, you’d think you’d be able to describe steering accurately and mime the correct movements with your hands in the air, but you’d be wrong. Very, very wrong. You’d probably kill a bunch of imaginary people.
Our friends at Humans in Design, Tristan Cooke and Tom Nelson, bring us this story about how our brain knows how to steer without really knowing how to steer and what that means for steering wheel design. They interviewed Dr. Steve Cloete, from The University of Queensland, who conducted the blind driver studies.


99% Invisible-37- The Steering Wheel

If Dennis Baxter and Bill Whiston are doing their job right, you probably don’t notice that they’re doing their job. But they are so good at doing their job, that you probably don’t even know that their job exists at all. They are sound designers for televised sporting events. Their job is to draw the audience into the action and make sports sound as exciting as possible, and this doesn’t mean they put a bunch of microphones on the field. This episode of 99% Invisible is produced by Peregrine Andrews for Falling Tree Productions. It is an extract from a much longer, and really stunning doc called “The Sound of Sport.” 

99% Invisible-38- Sound of Sport

It's hard to imagine a place where more desperate and depressing drama unfolds on a daily basis than a family courthouse- custody battles, abuse, divorce- and if you were to design a place to reflect and amplify that misery, not mitigate it, it'd probably take the form of the old New York County Family Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.

The original shiny black cube, built in 1975, was referred to as the “Darth Vader building” by court employees (presumably after 1977). The foreboding and intimidating structure is primarily criticized in relation to its function as a family courthouse, which should strive to inspire a feeling of trust, authority, and (one hopes) inclusion.

The building was remodeled in 2006. The bones are largely the same, but the shiny, black cladding is gone, replaced by a more conventional grey/beige. The problematic entrance to the building has been completely opened up, making ingress and egress a much less daunting proposition. To quote our 99% Invisible reporter this week, Brett Myers, “walking into the building is no longer like being consumed by a beast.”  

But a little something was lost in the facelift. The original building was definitely not boring and commanded your attention. I don’t know if the same can be said for the current design. Modern design principles and cultural preservation are not necessarily at loggerheads, but when they do come into conflict, it’s not always easy answer which ideology should win.


99% Invisible-39- Darth Vader Family Courthouse

In the center of San Francisco, there is a plaza with no benches. Its central feature at the entrance of the plaza is a unique fountain that was designed by Lawrence Halprin in 1975.The water shoots out at various angles, from inside a sunken pit, filled with large granite slabs. It’s a design that kind of pulls you in and invites you to take the steps down to the water and climb in between the hulking stones. And that’s part of the problem.
In 2004, radio producer Ben Temchine, created a really fantastic documentary of UN Plaza, called “The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet” that first aired on my first radio program called Invisible Ink in May of 2004. (Yep another "invisible" show)
The documentary really takes a hard look at UN Plaza when it was really at its worst and asks the question, is there a point where good the intentions and idealism of a design become so removed from reality, that it actually borders on negligence?


99% Invisible-39X- The Biography of 100,000 Square Feet

“There's a secret jazz seeping from Washington's aging Metro escalators - those anemic metal walkways that fill our transit system…they honk and bleat and squawk…why are you still wearing those earbuds?”
 
-Chris Richards, “Move along with the soundtrack of Metro's screechy, wailing escalators” Washington Post

Ever since the industrial revolution, when it became possible for products to be designed just once and then mass produced, it has been the slight imperfections and wear introduced by human use that has transformed a quality mass produced product into a thing we love. Your worn blue jeans, your grandmothers iron skillet, the initial design determined their quality, but it’s their imperfections that make them comfortable, that make them lovable, that make them yours. 

And if you think that a “slightly broken” escalator can’t be lovable, then our own Sam Greenspan would like to introduce you to Chris Richards.

Chris Richards is a music critic for the Washington Post, and after years of ignoring the wailing and screeching of the much maligned, often broken escalators in the DC Metro, he began to hear them in a new way. He began to hear them as music.


99% Invisible-43- The Accidental Music of Imperfect Escalators

The Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis became most famous at the moment of its demise. The thirty-three high-rise towers built in the 1950’s were supposed to solve the impending population crisis in inner city St. Louis. It was supposed to save the urban poor from the indignities of the downtown slums that lacked natural light, water and fresh air. And for a short while, it worked. It was a housing marvel. But when conditions started to decline, everything got very bad, very fast.
It got so bad, only two decades after it was built; the housing authority blew it up. The image of the first Pruitt-Igoe controlled implosion circled the globe.
The implosion footage became the unassailable proof that Modernist architecture and federal housing just didn’t work.
Chad Freidrichs is the director of the new documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth and in the film he examines all the reasons people cite for the demise of Pruitt-Igoe. 
In this episode of 99% Invisible, we focus on the popular idea that the architecture was to blame.



99% Invisible-44- The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Beauty Pill is band I really like from Washington DC. They have released two EPs (The Cigarette Girl From the Future and You Are Right to be Afraid) and their last album, The Unsustainable Lifestyle, came out in 2004.
In the interim, the singer/guitarist/producer for Beauty Pill, Chad Clark, got very sick and nearly died. That can be enough to make anyone stop making music, but in Clark’s case, he continued to make music, but he just never felt the need to release a record or play live. His music was just for him and his friends, and that was OK.
But a strange confluence of opportunity, desire and architecture knocked Beauty Pill out of their unforced exile. The curators at a new multimedia art center called Artisphere invited Chad Clark to come in and do something musical in the space. While they were showing him around, he saw the angled, 2ndfloor window overlooking the Black Box Theater and it reminded him of the window in Abbey Road Studio 2, made famous by The Beatles. Months later, the Black Box Theater was transformed into a very public recording studio, capturing the sounds and energy of the band, onlookers and guests over the course of a couple weeks.
They called the project Immersive Ideal.


99% Invisible-45- Immersive Ideal

Before the 1850s, dentures were made out of very hard, very painful and very expensive material, like gold or ivory. They were a luxury item. The invention of Vulcanite hard rubber changed everything. It was moldable, it could be precisely fitted, and it was relatively cheap. Everyone began making dentures with Vulcanite bases. But in 1864, a long disputed patent application, originally filed in 1852, was awarded and then acquired by the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company. It was an outfit created to collect fees, or very often, sue dentists who already used vulcanite, and there were plenty of dentists to go after.

The person in charge of pursuing the violators was Josiah Bacon, the treasurer of the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company.

The patent was enforced with extreme prejudice, despite the protestations of the US dental profession. 

To quote the secretary of the Goodyear Dental Vulcanite Company, Ernest Caduc:
“Many dentists…relying upon the secret nature of the business, prefer to steal this property rather than buy it…”

It all came to a head on Easter Sunday in 1879. A Vulcanite denture patent violating dentist named Samuel Chalfant went to settle his business with his pursuer, Josiah Bacon, in his San Francisco hotel room. Chalfant brought a gun.

A print version of this story originally appeared in the fanzine Murder Can Be Fun by John Marr.


99% Invisible-46- Vulcanite Dentures

"Somebody might be able to do a great painting that’s 20 x 30 inches, but you take that down to 1 x 1.5 inches, and it’s a challenge to make it work." -Ethel Kessler, Art Director for USPS Stamp Services

Stamps design takes, on average, a year to a year and a half, from conception to execution. Unfortunately, most of the stamps we encounter on a day-to-day basis are the rather predictable flag, bell, and love stamps, but there are some really fantastic commemorative stamps, which are supremely functional and affordable tiny works of art.

To determine what should go on a US stamp, the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee combs through nearly 50,000 suggestions per year offered by the general public. Once the subjects are chosen and approved by the Postmaster General, they are assigned to a handful of art directors to be designed.

There are loads guidelines to help stamp subject selection, but one of the big rules recently changed. In 2012, the first living person will be commemorated on an official USPS stamp.

If you were the Postmaster General, whom would you pick?

Julie Shapiro, Art Director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival, produced this episode. Julie spoke with Terry McCaffrey, the retired manager of stamp development for the USPS Stamp Services Office, and Ethel Kessler, an Art Director who’s been working with Stamp Services for over 15 years.


99% Invisible-47- US Postal Service Stamps

“I have this habit of walking into any door that’s unlocked…You start poking around, going into doors…you find the coolest things…”
-Andrea Seabrook, NPR Congressional Correspondent

In the eight years Andrea Seabrook has been reporting on Congress, she has made it a point to get to know the whole Capitol building.  "The members of the House Republican Caucus--and sometimes the Democrats--meet in the basement for their closed door secret strategy sessions," Andrea says.  "And it's really good place to get a tip from members that you know about what’s going on."  One day, after getting the info she needed for her story, she decided to press further on into the depths of the Capitol.

That's when she found the marble bathtubs.

The bathtubs were installed around 1860 during the expansion of the Capitol. DC is known for its swampy summers, and legend has it that senators could be banished from the chamber if they were too smelly.  But lawmakers--like most Americans at the time--didn't have indoor plumbing at home. They needed a place where they could wash up.

So the Architect of the Capitol ordered six marble bath tubs, each three by seven feet and carved by hand in Italy, to be installed in the Capitol basement--three on the House side, three on the senate. Today, only two tubs remain on the Senate side, in a room which now stores the building's heating and cooling equipment. But evidence of room's former grandeur remains.

99% Invisible-48- The Bathtubs or the Boiler Room

If you’re a beer nerd, or have a friend who’s a beer nerd, you’ve heard of Belgian beers. Belgians take beer very seriously. Amongst the 200 Belgian breweries, there’s a very specific sub-type: Trappist beers. 

According to our reporter Cyrus Farivar (also from Episode #36 “Super Bonn Bon”), there are two things you need to know about Trappist beers. First, they’re amazing. Second, they’re made by Trappist monks. These monks trace their roots to a monastery in 17th century France, and have since spread out to all over the world.

The main concept behind the Trappist lifestyle is that the abbey should be economically self-sufficient. In other words, the monks should make something and sell it to the public as a way to fund the operations of the abbey itself. Some make cheese. Some make spirits. There’s even one in Germany that makes lentil soup. But none of the Trappist products are as famous as the beer.

The beer that is considered the best of the best is Westvleteren 12. With its plain brown bottle, no label, the only writing is on the cap- the beer is super cool. It’s quite rare and year after year it’s rated the best beer in the world.

But here’s the thing about Westvleteren. You can’t just go there and have as much beer as you want. You can’t even have it shipped from the abbey. If you want to buy beer to take with you, you have to look up the beer reservation phone number on the abbey’s website. Then, you call certain phone number during certain hours, on certain days.

If you’re lucky enough to talk to a monk to take your reservation, you have to give your license plate number and be available to come pick up your crate during the appointed time that weekend. You’re limited to one crate per person per car, maximum two per car. And, you can’t buy more than one crate during a 60-day period. You also have to agree not to resell the beer.

This sort of thing is not unheard of: velvet ropes and random reward have long been imposed to create artificial scarcity to heighten demand, but the mainstream trend today seems to be more geared toward greater access and accommodation for customers. The new ideal is that everything is available, at all times, no matter where you live. Yet the Westvleteren Trappists are trying to make it as difficult as possible.

Jef van den Steen, author of a book called “Trappist: The Seven Heavenly Beers” and an acclaimed brewer himself, says that’s not the case, “Before, Westvleteren was only well-known was in Belgium. And now it’s worldwide, and that’s the problem. They decide we will brew the same amount as the last 40-50 years, and they have enough for that, so why must they brew more? Because you want? No. They live between the walls of the abbey, so for them it’s not a problem.”

The “customer service” is not designed to provide convenience for the consumer of their beer, it is designed for monks themselves. Their “customer” is God. They have a mission, and making beer is only a fraction of that. The Head of the Abbey says, "We are not brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks."

Cyrus Farivar recently returned to California after having lived in Bonn, Germany for two years. These days, he can be found frequenting The Trappist bar in downtown Oakland. He plans on presenting a bottle of Westvleteren 12 to his favorite bar owners. His book, "The Internet of Elsewhere," was published last year.


99% Invisible-55- The Best Beer in the World

A tiny radio show about design, architecture &amp; the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.

http://99percentinvisible.org/

New episodes every Wednesday.

On the radio on 91.7 KALW in San Francisco. Fridays at 7:35am and 4:30pm, Saturdays at 8:35am.  And public radio stations across the country.

Created by Roman Mars.
