Архитектура

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 goes back over 50 years and sp...

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

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

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...

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-addl...

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 the...

Today the Netherlands has a reputation as a kind of bicycling paradise, but that was far from inevitable

The “panopticon” might be the best known prison concept in the world. It’s become the metaphor for the surveillance sta...

The rise, fall, and unexpected second life of the crosscut saw is also the story of how America created the very concept...

Two stories about the transformative power of silence from our friends at Twenty Thousand Hertz

Friction, tribology, and the complex art and science of lubrication

When online worlds end

The surprisingly long history of trying to use robots to call balls and strikes in baseball

The importance of humor and art in protesting (and ousting!) oppressive regimes

When LA punks were looking for a place to play in the late 1970s, Chinatown welcomed the unruly scene. But it was an une...

On Aug. 1, 1942, the nation’s recording studios went silent. Musicians were fed up with the new technologies threatening...

In the 20th century, Iowa high school girls basketball was HUGE but it was not the game we know today

How an ultra-marathon called The Comrades became a national obsession in South Africa and a model for inclusion during s...

The shifting symbolism of Brazil's iconic yellow soccer jersey

We’re kicking off the new year at 99pi with a fresh installment of mini-stories, including: what lies at the intersectio...

A Balikbayan box is a huge cardboard box (often weighing over 100 pounds) that Filipinos living all over the world send ...