Wipe Out
99% Invisible7 Apr 2020

Wipe Out

If you have tried to buy toilet paper in the last few weeks, you might have found yourself staring at an empty aisle in the grocery store, wondering where all the toilet paper has gone. Although it may seem like a product that we've always been reliant upon, toilet paper has not actually been around very long, and may not be as essential as we think it is. Instead, it's the product of very good marketing.

Plus, we talk about the bane of wastewater utilities everywhere: flushable wipes.

Wipe Out

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Episoder(777)

Turf Wars of East New York

Turf Wars of East New York

Neighborhoods are constantly changing, but it tends to be the people with money and power who get to decide the shape of things to come. New York City has an especially long history with change driven...

11 Mai 201627min

The Grand Dame of Broad Street

The Grand Dame of Broad Street

The Bellevue-Stratford opened in 1904 and quickly became one of the most luxurious hotels of its time, rivaling the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The building was an incredible work of French Renaissan...

4 Mai 201619min

Unseen City

Unseen City

Humans form cities from concrete, metal, and glass, designing structures and infrastructure primarily to serve a single bipedal species. Walking down a familiar city street, it is easy to overlook squ...

27 Apr 201626min

Supertall 101

Supertall 101

Starting in the late 1990s, the government of Taipei began looking into how they could turn global attention to their city, the capital of the small island of Taiwan. The initial idea was to create tw...

20 Apr 201615min

Vox Ex Machina

Vox Ex Machina

In 1939, an astonishing new machine debuted at the New York World’s Fair. It was called the “Voder,” short for “Voice Operating Demonstrator.” It looked sort of like a futuristic church organ. An oper...

13 Apr 201622min

Soul City

Soul City

In the late 1960s, a civil rights leader named Floyd B. McKissick, at one time the head of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality) proposed an idea for a new town.  He would call this town Soul City an...

6 Apr 201630min

The White Elephant Of Tel Aviv

The White Elephant Of Tel Aviv

Israeli buses regularly make international headlines, be it for suicide bombings, fights over gender segregation, or clashes concerning Shabbat schedules. One particular ill-fated megastructure, howev...

30 Mar 201634min

Flying Food

Flying Food

The last hundred years or so of food advertising have been shaped by this one simple fact: real food usually looks pretty unappetizing on camera. It’s static and boring to look at, and it tends to wil...

23 Mar 201614min

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