In 1982, a twelve-year-old paperboy, Johnny Gosch, vanished from a quiet Iowa street and sparked an unlikely campaign: the faces of missing children printed on milk cartons by the billions. Roman Mars and Annie Brown trace how a regional dairy campaign exploded into a national symbol — and how the “stranger danger” fears it stoked shaped American misconceptions about child safety that still echo today.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

Family stories have a way of sticking around, even when no one can quite prove them.

This week we’re sharing an episode of Family Lore, a show produced by former 99PI producer Katie Mingle. It follows the story of Charles Frederick Page, a self-taught inventor from central Louisiana whose family has long believed he designed and built an airship before the Wright brothers took flight.

What begins as a piece of family lore opens into a much bigger story about invention, historical memory, and the people who get left out of it.

Listen to Family Lore wherever you get your podcasts.

In 1902, an American classic was born: the teddy bear. Named after President Theodore Roosevelt, the toy became a huge hit, and sparked an idea…maybe every president from then on should have their own viral stuffed animal. Jon Mooallem tells the story of the ill-fated billy possum, and how our fickle feelings about animals have shaped the history—and perhaps the future—of our relationship with the natural world.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

C. Thi Nguyen teaches philosophy at the University of Utah, and he got into the field because he’s drawn to life’s big questions. Weird, romantic, bizarre questions. What is art for? Are we just wasting our time on our dumb hobbies, or are they the best part of life? Then he started teaching, and learned that what makes a “good” philosopher at a prestigious school had less to do with curiosity and more to do with metrics: your value was whether your papers were getting published in highly ranked journals. Nobody ever told him to care about the rankings. Everybody just talked in that language, and soon he found himself automatically assuming that climbing the list was what success in philosophy meant. All the joy got sucked out of the thing he loved. He was so bored with what he was writing that he nearly quit the profession after burning ten years in it. Instead he did something that looked like career suicide: he threw out the metrics and went after something harder to measure. His own curiosity.

That story opens his latest book, The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, which expands the definition of games to cover all the ways metrics and scoring systems play out in our lives: journal rankings, Duolingo, step counting, and beyond. At its center is a concept Nguyen calls value capture. Your values start out rich, subtle, and still developing. Then some institution or technology feeds you simplified, typically quantified versions of them, and the simplified versions take over. You have been here. Maybe you started going to school because you wanted to learn, or started walking more for your health, and then a metric took over (straight As, ten thousand steps) and suddenly you were very far from whatever drove you to the thing in the first place.

Even Nguyen gets captured, and he’s been working on this stuff for five years. Watching his kid, he catches himself thinking: I should reduce his screen time. But if you think about it, screen time is a crap metric. One week Nguyen’s own numbers skyrocketed. The reason? He was reading two different translations of Kant on his iPad. Not exactly a vice. Meanwhile his nine-year-old’s screen hours might be the dumbest possible ASMR videos, or videos explaining the rise of the two world wars, or dumb clicker games, or architectural masterpieces in Minecraft with coded logic gates. There’s no way these are valuable in anything like the same amount. But a device can’t tell the difference. It can capture minutes, and that’s it. Which is Nguyen’s core worry: we’re outsourcing our values, and usually not to some Machiavellian telling us what to want. Just to whatever process happens to be convenient at scale.

So why do we keep falling for it? Partly because life is full of nauseating existential tradeoffs (more time with the kids, or on hobbies, or answering email), and deciding that one measurable thing matters shelters you from the storm. And partly because metrics make you instantly comprehensible to other people. While researching scoring systems, Nguyen got deep into yo-yoing, and telling fellow adults at a dinner party that a philosophy professor spends his free time yo-yoing gets him looks. The real reasons a weird obsession moves you don’t transmit over appetizers. A record to beat would make the whole thing legible in seconds.

Here is the paradox that drives the book: the same scoring systems that drain the soul out of work and education are the beautiful, animating heart of games. The difference is who’s in charge. Scoring systems are little dictators, little definitions of success and failure, but in games those definitions are temporary, playful, and under your control; if you don’t like one, you can throw it away and never play again. In institutions, they’re authoritarian. Games use scores to hand us alternate selves and alternate desires. Make baskets, collect sheep, get to the top of the rock, and suddenly an activity you never cared about unlocks. Nguyen distinguishes achievement play, where you actually want to win, from striving play, where you temporarily adopt the desire to win in order to experience the struggle, and what matters is whether the struggle was interesting.

Games also work because they happen inside what the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga called a magic circle, where the meanings of your actions are screened off from ordinary life. The points are, galactically speaking, valueless, which is exactly what releases players to lie, scheme, and hunt for each other’s weaknesses across the table without anyone taking it personally. And a game’s rules can act as a support structure for states of mind that are hard to reach directly. Fly fishing, one of Nguyen’s obsessions, forces a kind of hyper-focus: reading the water for rising trout, tracking insect hatches that can change every twenty minutes. Left alone at a river, he’s bored in a minute. Given the game, he can focus for hours, until he arrives at altered mental states that seated meditation has never gotten him to.

None of this means metrics are simply evil. Nguyen points to the quantification of New York policing, a story he cheerfully admits he learned from The Wire. In the early days nobody could tell which precincts were doing well, so the city put in clear numbers everyone could understand: arrests made, cases closed. At first it worked great. The brute clarity exposed corruption and bias and forced them out of the system. Then people learned to game the numbers. Want a better case-closure rate? Discourage people from reporting crimes. Or write speeding tickets, which open and close a case in the same stroke. Still, some targets really are stable at scale. Everyone counts lifespan and deaths the same way; nobody counts mental health the same way. That’s what makes metrics so good at coordinating vast efforts like cutting emissions or raising vaccination rates, and it’s also the price. We over-attend to the things everyone can count, and under-attend to the ones nobody can.

So what do we do with all this? Nguyen won’t give the peppy answer, because quitting isn’t symmetrical. Quit a game and nothing happens. Quit your KPIs and you get fired, and then you starve. But you can keep some ironic distance: there’s a difference between wanting the most subscribers and wanting to communicate, needing subscribers to do it, and being willing to trade them off. And where you can, design the game you actually want to be playing. Nguyen realized that for all his complaining about the tyranny of metrics, he was in charge of a huge one: his students’ grades. He was being an unthinking authoritarian. So now, in his tech and design ethics class, students democratically design their own grading system and assignments. How did it go? Amazing. Unbelievable. The system they built was actually quite good, but Nguyen kind of doesn’t care, because arguing seriously about what an education is for, what grades are for, what AI in the classroom is for, got him what he wanted from the class in the first place.

Before the Declaration of Independence was even a twinkle in the founding fathers’ eyes, there was James Otis. Journalist Jack Hitt returns to tell the wild, tragic story of America’s forgotten proto-founding father and his inflammatory 1764 pamphlet. A story that is, in many ways, the story of the founding document of the United States of America.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

Terms like “the cloud” and “WiFi” can make it seem like the Internet exists in the air, without wires. But that’s not true. Almost all of our online world moves around the planet not across the sky or through space, but by way of a massive complex of cables crisscrossing the globe. And those cables are based on fiber optics.

Fiber optic technology turns information into pulses of light which are sent down long, hair-thin glass fibers, and then turned back into information on the other side. Today, fiber optic cables are the infrastructural backbone of the global internet. Countless fiber optic cables are in use around the world right now. Some of those lines are on land.

But there are also 1.5 million kilometers of fiber optics cables stretched across the bottom of entire oceans.

“About 95% or so of intercontinental traffic goes via submarine telecommunications cables,” says Jane Ruffino, a researcher studying global subsea cables. “No matter how wireless your device is and no matter how wireless you think your connection is, there is always a wire somewhere.”

Nearly all of the data moving around the planet this second is traveling across the bottom of an ocean somewhere.

And all of those submarine fiber optic lines in use today—about a million miles worth—all owe their existence to a single cable that started it all.

It’s known as the “Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optic Submarine Cable 8.” TAT-8, for short. It was the first ever fiber optic cable to cross an ocean, and it really proved what fiber was capable of. It was a huge part of a telecommunications revolution, paving the way for the Internet that we have today.

TAT-8’s long journey began in the mid 19th century, when people first started experimenting with fiber optic technology, but not for communications. “It was essentially like a Victorian party trick,” Ruffino says. The glass fibers were used to light up gardens and dazzle guests. “They sort of had this technology and they weren’t quite sure what to do with it.”

Into the late 19th century, physicians began working fiber optics, using illuminated glass to light up bodies during surgery.

But by the second half of the 20th century, engineers began to see the potential of fiber optics and telecommunications.

And in the mid to late 70s, the first fiber optic telephone lines went up.

Before then, phone cables were copper-based. That was a problem when it came to the long distance submarine cables connecting continents across vast distances. Those copper cables couldn’t carry a lot of calls before the lines would start to sound static-y, or they became too busy for more phone traffic.

By contrast, a fiber optic line could theoretically carry way more calls, more quickly, and with way less static. And so very gradually, these old copper cables were getting replaced with the new fiber optics technology.

And not just phone lines, AT&T did the first ever live fiber optics TV transmission when it broadcast the Winter Olympics in 1980 from Lake Placid. And then they made this little promo film to brag about it.

But while the new technology was impressive, there were also big limitations. Fiber optic lines were still only available in a few places, and for relatively short distances. And all of it is terrestrial.

At the same time, satellites were threatening to squash fiber optics technology before it really even took off. “As soon as satellite technology developed, as soon as they started to put satellites for communication in space,” says Ruffino, “a lot of these cable and telephone companies said, ‘we’re cooked. Everything’s gonna be satellites. These are the last cables. We’re gonna go straight from telegraph cables to obsolescence.’”

At the time, satellite technology was becoming more and more popular. There were already some communications satellites in use. When it came to global telecommunications, the assumption was that satellites were the future and that they would be the thing that fully replaced those old copper cables.

The rising popularity of telecom satellites in the 1970s was partly because of the larger cultural obsession with space. Beaming phone calls to and from a satellite, hovering above the Earth—that felt way more exciting and futuristic than using wires.

“Satellites were a genuine competitor because they could carry voice traffic a lot more cheaply because cables are incredibly expensive to build,” Ruffino says. Satellite telecommunication was also simpler on a diplomatic level, because the U.S. could build and operate its own equipment, which the government preferred. “These cables that go between countries had to be built with consortia. So companies from different countries had to collaborate with each other. And with a satellite, an American company could just do it.”

In fact, the Federal Communications Commission, which gave permission for things like running new phone cables, was very pro-satellite. The FCC did not think that any cable-based telecom was worth it, especially compared to the newer, space-age technology. Ruffino says they drew a hard line with U.S. telecom on this. “The FCC said, ‘you know what, if you can’t find some way to compete on capacity and price, we’re not going to approve any more cables.’”

So despite all of its promise, it wasn’t a given that fiber optics would be the future for big long distance telecommunications.

But fiber did have one very big champion: AT&T. They were at the front of this fiber optics evolution. They were America’s giant telecom monopoly. Which is why in the 1970s the federal government began to break AT&T up.

As AT&T’s dissolution loomed, one way for the communications giant to keep and even extend its control of U.S. long distance communication was fiber optics cables. AT&T had been laying long distance cable for more than a hundred years. AT&T had all the expertise and equipment to lay cables all over the world. They wanted to keep the world running on cables because AT&T already controlled a lot of US telecom cables, including the undersea wires that were running from the US out into the world.

But they had to get the approval of the FCC, which told AT&T if it was going to lay more long distance cables, they had to build something that was better than satellites.

And AT&T’s Hail Mary would be TAT-8.

They teamed up with telecom companies in the UK and in France. And they formed this consortium. Together, they developed a plan to build a massive submarine fiber optic cable, and run it from the East Coast of the US, all the way over to western Europe. This would be the first fiber cable to ever cross a whole ocean.

In the early 1980s, they began doing stress tests around the world, dropping simulation cables into the North Atlantic to see how pressure change and temperature affected signal transmission, and if laying and recovering the cable caused any breaks in the fiber.

At the Bell Labs’ complex in Holmdel, New Jersey—where Severance is filmed—they also built the Ocean Simulation Facility to see if deep sea conditions disrupt the cable’s ability to transmit light across all that distance.

During one of their tests, they discovered breaks in the cable electrical signal. According to Ruffino, one of the lead researchers at Bell Labs had the shark teeth that’d been pulled from the glitchy cable.

There are competing versions of this story, but Jane Ruffino says the faults in the cables were probably abrasions from the seafloor. Nevertheless, out of an abundance of caution, engineers added extra layers of protection and insulation to the cable.

In 1986, AT&T began laying the cable across the floor of the Atlantic, from England and France across to Tuckerton, New Jersey, not far from Atlantic City.

In December 1988, they finally switched on the “Transatlantic Telephone Fiber Optic Submarine Cable 8,” the massive, first of its kind, state-of-the-art cable.

It was immediately clear that TAT-8 was a revolution in global telecommunications. First, because it was a quantum leap in capacity. TAT-8 could carry 40,000 phone calls at once—10 times the capacity of its predecessor, which was a copper-based cable.

The superiority of subsea fiber optics to satellites was plain to see. Satellites had a problem with latency, where the time it took for a signal to go up to space and back caused delays. And the quality of that signal quality was mediocre compared to the fiber cables of TAT-8.

Also, TAT-8 proved that submarine fiber cables could actually be cheaper to make, install, and repair.

Perhaps best of all, TAT-8 was coming into use just as the World Wide Web was taking off. So it was also perfectly positioned to fill the immediate demand for infrastructure that could move huge amounts of information all over the world quickly.

Once TAT-8 proved the concept of international submarine lines, the FCC invested more and more in fiber optics cables. By the 1990s, the capacity of fiber optics overtook satellites and it just kept growing. Today we are completely reliant on fiber optic technology, with more than 600 sprawling subsea cables enmeshing the planet right now.

Although cables like TAT-8 were developed by international telecom consortia, today half of all the bandwidth across the world’s subsea cables is controlled by giant tech corporations—Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon.

The expansion of AI has sparked a subsea cable boom. All of those tech giants need wires that connect all those data centers around the world. And they’re investing more and more in subsea cables.

As for TAT-8: even though it revolutionized global telecom and played a decisive role in the birth of the Internet, it won’t be part of the AI explosion.

That’s because TAT-8 didn’t actually work for all that long. It was switched on in 1988, and it stopped working in 2002—just 14 years later. It’s been sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic for almost 40 years.

Now, crews have started recovering TAT-8. Partly because there are limited routes where subsea cables can run, and demand for that space is surging. TAT-8 is made of some valuable components like copper, which is getting stripped and recycled.

The steel in TAT-8 is being turned into fencing. And the plastic is being recycled into consumer goods. “So when next time you’re washing your hair,” Jane Ruffino says, “you can imagine that you could be squeezing your shampoo from part of what used to be the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.”

In this episode, Roman and historians Heather Ann Thompson and Elliot Williams tell the story of the sharpened screwdriver: the object at the heart of the 1984 Bernhard Goetz subway shooting. In a difficult moment in New York City, four Black teenagers were transformed in the public imagination into armed criminals. What follows is a gripping account of how misinformation takes hold, how fear shapes public opinion, and how one narrative can ripple outward – echoing through decades of similar cases that continue to unfold today.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

This past February, the American Numismatic Association held its annual convention in Savannah, Georgia. Numismatics is the fancy word for coins (and the study of coins), and the hall was full of small but avid fandoms: gold pieces struck from California gold rush ore, dealers in three-cent silver pieces, a whole society devoted to crushed pennies, which they call “elongateds”.

Reporter Katie Thornton went as a numanistics novice, asking after the most widely collected coin in American history: the state quarter. From 1999 to 2009 the US Mint issued 56 of them, one for every state and territory and Washington DC, and put billions into circulation. Chances are you have one in a couch cushion right now. Most people figured the state quarters were a fun little thing the government did for the hell of it, but they represented a high-stakes government program, which is part of how the US makes money off of making money.

The story starts before America had a currency of its own. The first coins here were whatever settlers happened to carry over: English shillings, Portuguese joes, German talers. It was chaotic. A coin was worth its metal and nothing else, so every piece got weighed at the counter, and a worn coin bought less than a fresh one. There were never enough to go around, either, which is why the colonies went ahead and made corn and wheat and barley into legal tender, with a bushel of corn trading for six shillings in 1631. Then independence came, and Jefferson sat down to write his Notes on Coinage. The argument was basically a gripe. British money made no sense; meanwhile, the Spanish used clean halves and quarters. So in 1792 the new US Mint opened and struck silver dollars, named for the Spanish dólar. A gold eagle was worth ten dollars.

The early designs were deliberately plain, because if every coin looked the same, it meant counterfeits stuck out. They also had no real faces on them, thanks to Washington, who refused to let the Mint put his bust on money. That was a thing kings did, he said, and the country had just fought a war to be done with kings. Over his dead body. (Glance at a quarter now and you’ll see how that held up.)

Making the things was its own ordeal. An engraver cut each design by hand into a tiny steel die, with even smaller chisels, squinting next to a window during the day or by candle at night, and then the image got hammered or pressed onto the blank with muscle, with horses, and eventually with steam. Slow going. The coins stayed dull for a century, until Teddy Roosevelt looked at them, decided they were hideous, and demanded better. What he got was a French contraption called the Janvier Reduction Machine, which could trace a big sculpted model, two or three feet wide, and shrink it down onto a coin-sized die without losing a line. Now Liberty could do more than stand around. The flood of elaborate designs that followed got a name: the American Renaissance of coins.

The change that made the quarters program work, though, was metallurgical. In 1965, looking to save money, Lyndon Johnson convinced Congress to pull the silver out of US coins and replace it with cheap copper clad in a thin layer of nickel. People called them Johnson sandwiches, and almost nobody cared. But it meant a quarter now cost far less than 25 cents to make.

That gap is where the Mint earns its keep. The trick is called seigniorage: produce a coin cheaply, sell it at face value, keep the difference. The Federal Reserve buys coins from the Mint at face value, banks buy them from the Fed, businesses buy them from banks, and the rest of us pay full price whenever we receive some change. The only one really profiting from this chain of sale is the Mint.

By the time Phillip Diehl became director of the US Mint in 1994, the math was souring. Rising metal prices had driven up the cost of making every coin, especially the penny, whose production cost was approaching its face value. (Diehl recommended killing the penny and was ignored. That one would take another three decades.) But the quarter still earned about 22 cents apiece, and Diehl saw a way to sell more of them. Every year people lost quarters or dropped them in jars and car consoles, and the banks had to order replacements. If he could get ordinary people, not just dedicated coin collectors, to pull additional quarters out of circulation on purpose, the Mint could sell that many more. The way to do it was to issue 50 designs worth chasing.

Canada had tried something similar and made money, but Diehl couldn’t simply order new coins; he needed an ally in Congress. He went to Delaware congressman Mike Castle and proposed releasing the quarters not alphabetically but in the order the states ratified the Constitution, an order which happened to put Delaware first. Castle became a champion. The Treasury, which disliked the idea, demanded a study, the standard Washington method for quietly burying a proposal, but the numbers came back in its favor. The program launched in 1999 with Kermit the Frog as its spokesfrog, ran five designs a year for a decade, and minted nearly 35 billion state quarters. By the end, the banking system had bought more than twice as many quarters as in the previous ten years, and the surplus demand returned roughly 2.6 billion dollars to the Treasury, almost exactly what Diehl’s team had predicted. The program worked because millions of people did, for fun, exactly what the Mint was counting on: they found the coins, liked them, and stopped spending them. Thornton came home from Savannah a convert, which is how it tends to go.

Every year the same association that runs the convention urges its members tecnically to do the opposite of what the Mint wants and slip interesting and unusual coins back into circulation, a standing liberty quarter or a wheat penny dropped into the wild for someone to stumble on. Thornton bought a 1951 quarter at the show, struck in San Francisco and never circulated, almost pure silver, for twenty dollars. Then she decided to spend it, and release it too back into circulation, just to picture whoever might pick it up next.

In this episode, Roman and historian Imani Perry follow the Webster Blue Back Speller from the early days of the United States, to the heart of Black intellectual life. Through the lives of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Roman and Imani uncover how a single object became a gateway to literacy, self-determination, and an enduring debate about what education, citizenship, and freedom should mean in America.

A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios.

South Africa wanted to be the first African nation to host the World Cup. They also wanted the tournament to be the start of a new chapter. During apartheid, the country was banned from the international sporting community. But in 2004, they were on the precipice of hosting soccer’s biggest event. South Africans gathered in the streets of Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban to await FIFA’s decision.

The vuvuzela is a two foot long injection-molded plastic horn. It only plays one note: a B flat. And it gradually became a regular feature of South African soccer. But prior to the 2010 World Cup, the rest of the world had never heard anything quite like it. Even people in the soccer world didn’t know what they were. But six years later, by the time the first game of the tournament was underway, vuvuzelas were all over. For critics, the vuvuzela was a relatively new, mass produced noisemaker. But supporters ended to think of the vuvuzela as an instrument, producing a loud, attention grabbing sound that grew out of South Africa’s rich footballing tradition.

As a youth, Saddam Maake (left) used to bring a bike horn to local football games to support his team. But instead of squeezing the little rubber bulb at the end, he’d take that off and blow into the horn. Later, he began using a large aluminium horn he called a “Boogie Blast.” The Boogie Blast was basically a long metal stick you could blow into. It was also a long metal stick you could beat someone up with, so stadiums eventually banned it. But by then, in 1989, Saddam says he met with a plastics manufacturer and asked him to make a plastic version of the Boogie Blast. This new instrument they created sounded similar.

Saddam says he coined the name ‘vuvuzela’ back in 1992. A claim he supports with photos of him blowing his many horns at football games in the 70s and 80s, and a vuvuzela in the 90s. He also recorded an album in 1999 titled “Vuvuzela Cellular.” Another company, however, popularized the noise maker. That company handed out vuvuzelas for free at football matches and partnered with some local clubs to get more of them into South Africa’s stadiums. It wasn’t long before there was more interest in the vuvuzela and sales started to grow. Soon, the instrument could be distinctly heard at games across the country.

The aggressive marketing worked: in the lead up to the World Cup the sound of South African football was inextricably linked to the vuvuzela. The instrument even appeared in national marketing campaigns fronted by prominent rugby players who’d been called in to promote the 2009 Confederations Cup – a sort of test run tournament for the World Cup. From the moment the World Cup kicked off, the vuvuzela was a constant and persistent presence. From the atmosphere in the stadiums to the jokes on late night TV, it was inescapable.

While broadcasters were trying to mitigate the noise on their end, DIY solutions were making their way around the internet. One of them involved routing your TV’s audio through your computer, and using software to remove the particular frequencies of the vuvuzela. Complaints even inspired a study from the South African Medical Journal. It measured the vuvuzela’s sound levels at up to 131 decibels. That’s as loud as a jackhammer or a jet engine. It concluded that prolonged or regular exposure could cause noise-induced hearing loss.

Despite the lack of a straightforward origin story, the vuvuzela is still considered cultural heritage – at least in the eyes of some institutions. The United Kingdom’s National Football Museum and The British Museum both have vuvuzelas in their collections. Saddam’s story is the closest thing the vuvuzela has to an actual origin story. And unlike the noise that surrounded the vuvuzela in 2010, his story is simple: he loved his team and he wanted to show his support for them.

Today, vuvuzelas aren’t nearly as prominent as they were back in 2010. A few years after the South African World Cup ended, FIFA turned around and banned them from all major tournaments. And several other major sports leagues have as well. Still, just a few months ago, the South African women’s football team won their first ever Africa Cup of Nations. When the team arrived at the airport, they were greeted by fans, expressing their national pride through songs and chants. Saddam Maake was there too, blowing his vuvuzela. There were no complaints about the noise — they just celebrated the victory.