99% Invisible

Across the West, there's a contentious debate playing out over how to adapt homes and neighborhoods to this era of increasingly extreme wildfire risk. In Berkeley, California, it's become a particularly emotional fight because of a very specific architectural history that began all the way back in the 1890s. Emmett Fitzgerald reports on the new rules about what plants you can grow around your house.
Check out our previous episode on defensible space: Built to Burn

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In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label…it was an internet company: America Online. The AOL Disc was a marketing coup—hugely successful. It’s not an overstatement to say that it’s the campaign that introduced America to the internet. Because of how well it worked, for a while the internet was AOL. And then… it felt like AOL just disappeared. So what happened? Alex Goldman (Reply All, Hyperfixed) finds out.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

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Esperanto is what linguists call a “constructed language.” It isn’t attached to a nation or a region, and it didn’t evolve from another language over time. Instead, nearly 150 years ago, someone decided to sit down and design the whole thing from scratch.
That someone was L. L. Zamenhof, also known as Doktoro Esperanto. He created this language with the hope that it would unite the world under one shared tongue. Today, reporter Katie Thornton tells the story of Doktoro Esperanto’s dream, and what we can all still learn from Esperanto right now.
For more, check out Katie's story on Esperanto in Harper's Magazine.

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In 1932, the Women's House of Detention—New York City's first women's prison—opened in the heart of Greenwich Village. It was opened to make "wayward" women quiet, private, and properly feminine. And the building had one unique feature originally meant to be a sort of kindness—a special kind of window that the women inside could open. Roman Mars and historian Hugh Ryan trace how those special windows had an impact that nobody could have predicted—helping to build a mecca of gay America and, ultimately, a movement.

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This episode is sponsored by Acura.
From the outside, the building is a light gray spiral, and from the inside, the art is displayed on one long ramp that curves up towards a glass skylight in the ceiling. We’re going to take the greatness of this building as a given. What we’re going to focus on are the oddities, the accretions, the interventions that reveal a different kind of genius. Not just the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, and his bold, original vision, but the genius of all the people that made this building function, adapt, and grow over the decades.

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