Person in Lotus Position

Behind every cheesy karaoke track was a surprisingly ambitious filmmaking experiment. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Host ... Show More

What do Civil War pension files reveal about one of history's most successful slave rebellions? Historian Edda Fields-Black joins Roman to trace a story of fire, flight, and freedom — beginning on a South Carolina rice plantation in 1863, where a Union raid liberated over 700 peo ... Show More

Canada reshaped its music industry with a quirky radio rule that changed who got heard. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Ho ... Show More

We dig into the unexpected origin story of the universal screen language… emoji! We talk to the designers behind emoji, and the steps (and missteps) emoji design took before the icons found their way to our screens. Read the PDF transcript of this episode. 

<p>Emoji are those little images you can send in text messages to friends and family. Nine-year-old Leila in New Jersey wants to know how they were invented. So in this episode we find out with Jane Solomon, editor at<a href="https://emojipedia.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank ... Show More

The emoji, invented in Japan in the 1990s, and now standardised on every device and platform we have, has become a new type of global communication. Whether you love them or hate them, they stir up surprisingly strong feelings and the fight for representation on the emoji keyboar ... Show More

Emojipedia founder Jeremy Burge joins David and Stephen to talk about emoji, how they're made and why they've found such huge success. Then, he explains how tech needs change when one lives on a ⛵. 

<p>Emojis are arguably one of the most effective ways to express emotions when texting. In today's episode, Xuan Lu shares her research on the use of emojis by developers. She explains how the study of emojis can track the emotions of remote workers and predict future behavior. L ... Show More

The emoji, invented in Japan in the 1990s, and now standardised on every device and platform we have, has become a new type of global communication. Whether you love them or hate them, they stir up surprisingly strong feelings and the fight for representation on the emoji keyboar ... Show More

In the future, 10 years from now, will our fingers still reach for a laughing face with crying eyes? Will Unicode and its strict approval process for new emoji be relevant at all? Possibly not. We travel to Zimbabwe to hear how some designers are bypassing Silicon Valley by build ... Show More

<p>Si les émojis parsèment les messages que nous envoyons à nos proches, qu’en est-il dans le cadre professionnel ? Un petit sourire dans un email à un·e collègue, ça peut permettre d’humaniser les relations, et de renforcer le lien au sein des équipes. Mais parfois, l’émoji peut ... Show More

Our journey into the emoji universe takes some surprising directions. We reveal some of the human stories behind those tiny pictures on our screens. From the early days of reggae in Kingston, Jamaica to San Francisco’s Chinatown, we meet some of the people responsible for the emo ... Show More

We travel to California to find out who controls the emoji available on every single smartphone in the world - the mysterious Unicode Consortium. This secretive organisation decides what is included and what is left off the official emoji keyboard. But are they up to the job? Not ... Show More