On Thursday, January 22nd, I'll be hosting a conversation with Nate DeMayo of the Memory Palace at KQED in San Francisco.

I could not be more of a fan of Nate in his writing, which is the best in all of podcasting.

Please come see us and say hi.

Again, that's the Memory Palace live at KQED in San Francisco on Thursday, January 22nd.

We'll have a link to tickets in the show notes.

This is 99% Invisible.

I'm Roman Mars.

Happy 2026 beautiful nerds.

We are back and ready to kick off this new year with a fresh batch of mini stories.

Usually, this is the place where I tease what's coming up on the episode.

But in my attempt to rest control over minis and get them back to their fundamentals,

once again, we are continuing with this new, hopefully improved process that I mentioned in the previous minis episode.

We have three producers.

They're gathered here in a Zoom to tell me

stories that I have not heard before. I am again unprepared. So let's get started. First up is

producer Jacob Medina Gleason. Happy New Year, Jacob. Thanks, Roman. Happy New Year's to you too. So I want to

start 2026 off by talking about sports. Okay. I'm not the biggest sports fan. I'm a women's basketball

fan and that's pretty much it. But the Olympics are a few weeks away and I have an Olympics-ish

mini for you. I love an Olympics-ish mini, so hit me. Okay, so this is a story about a controversial

swimsuit. It's called the Laser Racer. This is a racing suit that Speedo launched

back in 2008. And the thing that made the laser racer so controversial is that Speedo really took

advantage of the fact that World Aquatics was pretty lenient on what could be considered fabric.

...