Dan Pashman embarks on an epic trip across Italy in search of lesser-known pasta dishes — and to learn about... more

Bright, flamboyant central African fashion

The history of the chambre de bonne, the tiny French apartment type that may be, finally, on the way out.

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Athens, Georgia.

How to accommodate autism in the built world

The garbage disposer and the dream of a garbage-free city

Featuring Blank Check co-host and The Atlantic movie critic David Sims covering the first section of Part 4, chapters 11-15

The constant and sometimes fraught back and forth between cartoons and toys, as exemplified by Transformers and the Teenage Mutant... more

Understanding the clunky Prop 65 warnings on products

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Santa Fe.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book and originally it was a... more

It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made... more

How much film and television shapes us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give it credit... more

Featuring New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie covering Part 3.

How White Castle invented fast food

The interblock parks of Sofia, Bulgaria that are caught between old failed communism and new hyper capitalism

There are memorials to lost fishermen, lost astronauts, even lost members of Lynyrd Skynyrd. What should a COVID pandemic memorial... more

A 99pi guide to some of our favorite design features of Chicago

The design evolution of the seemingly simple, but not all that simple, skateboard

Featuring author Robert Caro covering The Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2.

The fake villages and role players used to train US soldiers

Upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler, and a fire that has been burning...and will burn... for decades.

Mapping the long history of Slovenia onto the three "Santas' that visit each year

We have a year-end mix of short stories about a rogue architect, spooky kitchens, a hundred year old music streaming... more

The storied evolution of pocket calculation

Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan are starting The Power Broker book club that will run through all of 2024 as... more

The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknown goes back only about a century, but it has become one of... more

A band that was never meant to be recorded and a personal recorder that was never designed to capture music... more

A town's fight to be free from the noise and trauma of the Cincinnati Police Department's open-air gun range

How Reno became the go-to place to get a quick divorce and how divorce laws have changed over time

The hunt to cultivate the cure for malaria

Designing environments for people with dementia

Devo’s first record and the fight over the arresting image of a flashy, handsome golf legend on the cover.

The historic vote over which version of Elvis should be immortalized on a postage stamp

Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the... more

Two stories where the devil is in the details

The triumph and tragedy of the Sydney Opera House

Who were the real Luddites?

The story of how "Who Let The Dogs Out" ended up stuck in all of our brains. A story that... more

Solving the housing crisis and the office vacancy crisis with one obvious and elegant idea: office to housing conversion. If... more

The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard... more

More about the trails as an object and an idea

We take the humble trail, what might be the original designed object, and deconstruct it

The decades-long campaign to get us to love our gas stoves

Andrew Leland takes us through the fascinating history of alternative reading technologies designed for blind people and discusses his fantastic... more

La Sombrita and the politics of shade

The ubiquity and cultural legacy of the shocking little Christian comics books called Chick Tracts

Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts with Roman Mars

Composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT... more

Many consider Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen.

The pregones of Mexico City and the one call that stands out from the cacophony

How courtroom artists became the preferred way to document trials

The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library's children's reading room and Goodnight Moon

Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.

The massive consequence of parking minimums

Seven small inventions that changed the world in a big way

The scourge of bad closed captioning

The strange design history and modern resurgence of pinball

Best-selling author John Green and Roman Mars answer questions and give dubious advice

From scratchers to the Powerball, the lottery is the most popular form of gambling in the United States, even though... more