Logo
    Search

    559- The Six-Week Cure

    en-usNovember 07, 2023

    About this Episode

    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 Capital of the World." For much of modern history, it has been relatively easy to get married, and extremely difficult to get divorced -- and for a time, this was true in the New World as well. But Reno provided the cure: The Six-Week Cure.

     

    Recent Episodes from 99% Invisible

    572- WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm

    572- WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm

    Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can seem rather terrifying at first, but within the state, they are ubiquitous, on everyday objects from power tools to potato chips, dietary supplements, leather jackets, gas pumps, coffee tables, the list goes on. All of which raises the question: if these labels are on so many things, are they actually useful in warning us of real dangers?

    572- WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm

    Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

    Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

    Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. 

    Santa Fe wasn’t always on the proverbial map — in fact, the Santa Fe railroad just passed it on by. A lot of care has been taken to keep Santa Fe cute and quaint over its history, with steps to preserve native architecture and historical design. The result is a mixture of structures old and new, but mostly made to look old, for better or worse.

    Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

    Note: This series is made possible by the new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

    99% Invisible
    en-usMarch 02, 2024

    438- The Real Book [rebroadcast]

    438- The Real Book [rebroadcast]

    Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

    The Real Book

    This episode originally aired in April 2021

    Roman note: I love this episode. An all time favorite. Pass it along to someone jazzy if so inclined.

    Significant Others: A Sneak Peek at the Woman Behind Benedict Arnold’s Betrayal

    Significant Others: A Sneak Peek at the Woman Behind Benedict Arnold’s Betrayal

    It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on? Often, it’s impossible to find out. But once in a while, we get lucky, and the story was not only recorded, it’s really good.
    Well that’s what this podcast is all about. “Significant Others” is a show that tells a story you might not know about a person you probably do.

    For example, in this episode we explore how Benedict Arnold might never have turned on his country were it not for his wife, Peggy, who influenced his betrayal.

    Head over to Significant Others to listen to the rest of the episode and to other stories like how Amelia Earhart would neither have found fame nor, possibly, disappeared over the Pacific, had it not been for her husband, George Putnam, or who is really to blame for Friedrich Nietzsche’s connection to Nazism. Listen and subscribe to “Significant Others” wherever you get your podcasts.

    99% Invisible
    en-usFebruary 23, 2024

    571- You Are What You Watch

    571- You Are What You Watch

    What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day. That’s a whopping 19 percent of our waking hours. Walt Hickey is a data journalist and author of a new book called You Are What You Watch. In it, Walt makes a case for how much film and television shapes us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give it credit for.

    You Are What You Watch

    The Power Broker #2: Jamelle Bouie

    The Power Broker #2: Jamelle Bouie

    This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

    New York Times political columnist Jamelle Bouie is our book club guest.

    On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover Part 3 of the book (Chapters 6 through the end of Chapter 10), discussing the major story beats and themes, with occasional asides from Jamelle Bouie guiding us through the politics of the era.

    The Power Broker #2: Jamelle Bouie

    Join the discussion on Discord and our Subreddit

    570- The White Castle System of Eating Houses

    570- The White Castle System of Eating Houses

    White Castle has its own take on fast food hamburgers. For starters, the patties are square, with five holes in each patty. And they’re small, too –- two-and-a-half inch sliders. Just big enough to fit into the palm of your hand. And since they’re steamed on a bed of onions, everything is infused with this very specific onion-esque flavor.

    Today, White Castles can be hard to find, depending on where you live. But KCUR's Mackenzie Martin, a producer at A People's History of Kansas City, says that it’s time to stop thinking of White Castle as a semi-obscure cultural punchline, because over a century ago, White Castle invented something that became so important and all-encompassing that, today, it touches pretty much every person in America. Sometimes several times a day. Something that, in other countries, has almost come to define American culture: it has a strong claim to being the first fast-food restaurant.

    The White Castle System of Eating Houses

    569- Between the Blocks

    569- Between the Blocks

    Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment structures are a defining characteristic of the city. They're not so much "parks" in the formal sense, with fences and gates, just open green areas growing up in interstitial spaces left behind.

    But as green as it still looks today, Sofia used to be even greener.  Since the fall of Bulgarian communism in the late 1980s, Sofia has lost more than half of its green space. To understand why, one has to look back to how the city evolved and grew in the Soviet era.

    Between the Blocks

    568- Don't Forget to Remember

    568- Don't Forget to Remember

    When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, it’s always different. Sometimes a handful of concerned citizens get together and make it happen. Sometimes a nonprofit pushes for it, or a foundation. There’s usually a lot of activism, and a lot of fraught conversations – about design, location, the story it should tell about what happened, and who it affected. 

    And how does one memorialize such a vast and distributed tragedy like COVID-19,  which was devastating physically but also divisive politically?

    Don't Forget to Remember

    Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is

    Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is

    A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in his house -- realizing that he, like the audience, didn't have many other places to go.  (You should check it out. It's called "Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are"-- it’s a real time capsule and a fan favorite.) Since then, he's been thinking about and wanting to record a companion episode out in the world.

    Over the next couple months, he's going to three cities that shaped who Roman is and how he thinks about design. We'll start in Chicago. 

    Chicago is a design lover's paradise, from its carefully thought-out original grid to its exceptionally stellar flag design. The city is home to some of the most influential architecture in the US as well.

    Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is

    Note: This series is made possible by the new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM.