The flagship podcast in the Radiotopia.FM lineup is tiny, but packs a big punch
Here’s the deal: Radiotopia.FM, the brainchild of Roman Mars (99% Invisible, PRX Remix) and the Public Radio Exchange, was announced into existence last week. There are seven shows currently included in the project: 99% Invisible, Love + Radio, KCRW’s Strangers, The Truth, Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, Radio Diaries and Fugitive Waves. More shows will be added over time.
I’m going to listen to as many episodes of each show in Radiotopia as I can. This week, I listened to 75 episodes of 99% Invisible — two seasons’ worth. Season four just started. You can listen to 99% Invisible on iTunes and Stitcher, and find out more about it here.
This is 99 Percent Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. 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 of 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.
That passage, taken from the 35th episode of Radiotopia’s flagship podcast, 99 Percent Invisible, is to my mind the perennial example of what this show is about. In the background, the steady, rhythmic creaking of a building swaying back and forth. Producer and host Roman Mars’ voice, softly reading script, telling the story of a living building. The voice of Les Robertson, World Trade Center structural engineer, untrained for radio yet melodious in its own right, talking about his buildings the way a man who has lost a child would.
There is no crescendo, no condescension. Mars lets Robertson speak, and the piece fades to sonic black.
Not every episode deals with such sensitive topics, but every episode is put together with the same care. Mars, a revolving cast of contributing producers, and now a staff of producer Sam Greenspan, monthly contributor Sean Cole, interns and contract reporters thanks to the massive success of 99% Invisible’s 2013 Kickstarter campaign ($25,000 of which went to forming Radiotopia with the Public Radio Exchange).
At 100 episodes and counting, 99% Invisible has one of the largest backlogs of the shows featured on Radiotopia. Yet, thanks to each episode’s short runtime — early shows generally run about four minutes in length, more recent shows rarely pass 30 minutes — I was able to consume large amounts of the podcast at a time, and thanks to the subject matter and presentation, my attention has rarely wandered.
99% Invisible is officially an architecture and design podcast, but the broad project seems to concern itself more with the way the world works behind the scenes. As the show evolved, it began to incorporate social issues behind design and architecture decisions; the best examples of this are in episodes 53, The Xanadu Effect, and 22, Free Speech Monument (which was about an anarchic six-inch circle of dirt on the UC Berkeley campus).
99% Invisible has been in my podcast queue for a long time, but this week gave me an opportunity to discover how great it is for the first time. Go check it out.