Mini-Stories: Volume 21

What It Covers

99% Invisible presents three mini-stories exploring American pyramids, common website typos, and the Catholic Church's bureaucratic process for verifying miracles, which can take decades and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete.

Key Questions Answered

• •Domain typo traffic: Gail.com receives 16,257 daily hits from people mistyping Gmail.com and rejects 1.2 million misdirected emails weekly, demonstrating how common typos generate massive unintended traffic that could be monetized but the owner chooses not to exploit.
• •Miracle verification costs: The Catholic Church's canonization process requires two verified miracles per saint candidate, costs tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and involves multiple investigations by bishops, theologians, and independent medical experts across years or decades to maintain credibility.
• •Light pollution ecosystem: The Luxor Casino pyramid beam uses 42 billion candle-equivalent luminosity visible from California, creating an artificial ecosystem at its apex where moths attract bats and owls nightly, and drew 45 million grasshoppers during Nevada's 2019 breeding season outbreak.
• •Typosquatting prevention: Large companies purchase common misspellings of their domains to prevent bad actors from exploiting user errors for phishing schemes or resale profits, with Google owning variations like googel.com, gooogle.com, and goog.com that redirect to the main site.