Day 142: Today's Pick — 99% Invisible (the Podcast)

There is a podcast that, in its most recent episode at the time of this writing, taught me something fascinating about the history of the highway median, and I would like to take a moment to recommend it to you in the strongest possible terms.

99% Invisible — the show is now over 600 episodes deep — is a weekly podcast about design, broadly construed, hosted by Roman Mars, made out of a small studio in Oakland, California, and distributed via Stitcher / Sirius XM / wherever you get your podcasts. Each episode is between 20 and 45 minutes long, takes a single small object or phenomenon — a building, a typeface, a road sign, a piece of legislation, a brand of paint, a folkloric ritual that produced a specific kind of fence — and tells you the story of how that thing came to look and behave the way it does.

It is, in short, a podcast about the world's seams. The places where someone made a decision, that shaped a building, that shaped a city, that shaped a life. After a hundred episodes you start to see those seams everywhere.

The show began in 2010 as a tiny three-minute segment on KALW San Francisco, narrated by Roman Mars in his uniquely calm, patient, gravelly voice. Over fifteen years it has scaled up to a fully produced editorial program with a stable of producers, a regular roster of contributing reporters, and a distinctive "house style" — short, stitched, segmented, generous with sound design, never narrated at you so much as thought through with you. The show has spawned spinoffs (Articles of Interest with Avery Trufelman, on clothing; The Power Broker book club with Roman and Elliott Kalan; the late lamented Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are) and a book (The 99% Invisible City, which is excellent and a perfect coffee table object).

What I love most about the show is its taste. Roman and his producers have, over fifteen years, developed an extremely consistent editorial nose for the kind of design story that is low-stakes but high-meaning. They will not do an episode on a Steve Jobs keynote. They will do an episode on the grooves on the edge of a curb cut, the international diplomatic standard for the color of mailboxes, the typeface used in the New York City subway, the man who designed the modern fire hydrant. The stakes of any individual episode are tiny. The accumulated effect, after a few dozen, is an enormous, joyful expansion of the kinds of things you notice.

A small list of episodes I would recommend to a first-time listener:

• Episode 122, "Fish Cannon." A brief, perfect episode about a tube that vacuums salmon over hydroelectric dams. Will make you laugh out loud.
• Episode 312, "Tanz Tanz Revolution." The rise and fall of Berlin's club Berghain, with an unexpected design throughline.
• Episode 207, "Half a House." Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena's incremental social housing scheme. Quietly humane.
• Episode 387, "The Speed of Soft." A history of the Marshmallow Peep that is, I will not exaggerate, one of the best half-hours of audio I have ever heard.
• Episode 469, "The Power Broker, Pt. 1." The book club reads Robert Caro. Listening to Roman and Elliott talk about The Power Broker is the closest a podcast gets to grad school.

Practical notes. 99% Invisible is free on every podcast platform. The show runs ads, which fund the staff, but they are mostly host-read and rarely intrusive. If you want to support the show, there is a Patreon-style program (the "99% Invisible Plus" subscription via Sirius XM) that gets you ad-free episodes and back-catalog access; the cost is roughly $4 a month. The book — The 99% Invisible City — is one of those rare object-of-the-decade-style coffee table books that is more or less universally enjoyable, and is the right gift for any thoughtful reader on your holiday list.

A small final note about Roman Mars's voice, because I cannot end this review without it. There is a quality to it — slow, low-in-the-throat, a tiny bit gravelly, a tiny bit kind — that has, for fifteen years, made me feel like I am being told a small good story by a friend who has had time to think about it. That is rarer in 2025 than it was in 2010. Treasure it.

Subscribe. Press play. By Friday you will have a new favorite podcast.

Day 142. Today's pick is in your ear.