What makes The Power Broker endure 50 years on? Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with legendary author Robert Caro to explore the humanity, drama, and untold stories behind his iconic book. Recorded live from the New York Historical Society.

Roman, Elliott, and Robert Caro: Live in Conversation

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This is the eleventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brennan Lee Mulligan, a comedian and host with Dropout TV, where he’s the creator of Dimension 20 — a Dungeons & Dragons show that features incredibly complex and campaigns, with improv actors and special effects. And as the Dungeon Master, Brennan leads these stories. Season three of Dimension 20 takes place in a magical New York City, where the main villain is a fictionalized, undead Robert Moses, who shares the real Robert Moses’s passion for building roads and destroying lives through bureaucracy.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 7 (Chapter 42 through Chapter 46), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #11: Brennan Lee Mulligan

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Roman talks with The Memory Palace creator Nate DiMeo, whose new book brings his poetic history podcast to life on the page. They explore how moments of wonder and empathy shape Nate’s stories, turning forgotten history into something intensely personal. Plus, Roman shares two beautifully haunting tales from The Memory Palace that remind us just how close the past really is.

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past comes out November 19th and will be available everywhere books are sold. We highly recommend you check it out!

The Memory Palace...Book!

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As the last warmth of summer fades, Riis Beach—a hidden queer oasis behind a decaying hospital—faces a new reality. With its shadowy protector demolished, can this haven survive in the open, or will its magic disappear with the ruins?

Meet Me at Riis

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Remember when grocery shelves went bare and cargo ships clogged the California coast? That chaos wasn’t just a pandemic hiccup—it was a symptom of a supply chain stretched to its limits. With insights from Peter Goodman’s new book, discover the unlikely invention that made the modern supply chain possible—and why it’s now at risk of collapsing.

How the World Ran Out of Everything

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Every fall, a vacant Toronto storefront is possessed by Spirit Halloween, the pop-up shop haunting 1,500 empty spaces across North America. What does this seasonal invasion say about the retail apocalypse? And why are people so drawn to its eerie aisles? Explore the spooky rise of Spirit Halloween—where the scares are temporary, but the obsession is real.

Spirit Halloween

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This is the tenth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting. She’s had a long and storied career editing works of investigative journalism that speaks truth to power and afflicts the comfortable, including so she brings that perspective to her understanding of The Power Broker. Clara hadn’t read The Power Broker before and this podcast inspired her to pick it up and read along with us.

Elliott and Roman also cover the last section of Part 6 and the first section of Part 7 (Chapter 39 through Chapter 41), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #10: Clara Jeffery

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Today, we have three stories about designs meant to fool you. Camouflage meant to fool U-boats. Highways designed to fool your brain into going way faster than it should want to. And impeccably made fake signs meant to guide you to the right freeway. Three classic, favorite 99PI's completely updated, remixed, and rescored.

Trompe L'oeil

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In this bonus episode, Roman unearths the surprising story behind the 99% Invisible's name and delves into the unnoticed brilliance of everyday design—from the origins of reinforced concrete to the artistry of Japan’s manhole covers. 

This episode is sponsored by PNC Bank, where “brilliantly boring” means stability that allows you to focus on what truly matters.

Brilliantly Boring

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In the heart of Copenhagen, a former military base transformed into Christiania, a self-proclaimed anarchist commune where residents built a new way of living, free from traditional rules. But as the years passed, external pressures and internal conflicts—especially a growing drug trade—put Christiania’s radical ideals to the test, forcing the community to confront whether it can stay true to its roots or be reshaped by the forces around it.

If you want to learn more about Christiania – and hear other fascinating stories from around the world – be sure to check out Scott Gurian’s own podcast, Far From Home.

Christiania

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The unexpected story of how Alfred Nobel’s invention of dynamite—designed to build the world—was co-opted by anarchists to bring about its destruction. From revolutionizing infrastructure to arming political radicals, dynamite shaped the rise of both terrorism and modern law enforcement.

The Infernal Machine

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What started as Emily Nussbaum’s “guilty pleasure” of watching Big Brother became a deeper dive into the world of reality TV, leading to her book, Cue the Sun: The Invention of Reality TV. From its early, often morally questionable experiments with shows like Candid Microphone, to the strategy and drama of Survivor, Nussbaum traces the history of a genre that’s shaped how we see the world—and even influenced who gets elected. If you think reality TV is all fluff, this episode might just change your mind.

Cue the Sun!

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This is the ninth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Majora Carter, an urban revitalization strategist and real estate developer from the South Bronx. Growing up, she always viewed the neighborhood as a place she had to leave in order to find success. But as she got older, she began to undo some of Robert Moses’ legacy, like building Hunt’s Point Riverside Park along the Bronx River. She is a champion for bettering neighborhoods like the South Bronx, so that they are places where people want to remain—even when they have been ruined by a tyrant.

Elliott and Roman also cover the third section of Part 6 (Chapter 35 through Chapter 38), discussing the major story beats and themes. 

The Power Broker #09: Majora Carter

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Karen MacDonough had paid her mortgage for years, raised her family, and lived a quiet life in her Quincy, Massachusetts home—until one day, a group of strangers appeared on her lawn, claiming her house was up for foreclosure. What followed was a surreal discovery of “zombie mortgages,” forgotten second loans from the housing bubble era that have come back to haunt homeowners like Karen. As real estate prices rise, debt collectors are reviving these dormant debts, threatening homes across the country.

This episode is from our friends at Planet Money, a podcast about economics...possibly the biggest thing that we all collectively try not to think about, only to have it greet us at the grocery store, at the gas station, even in our homes. This episode illustrates how massive forces pull at the economy like tides and create ripple effects in our lives, like how a decade-old loan can suddenly come back to life and take everything away.

Subscribe to Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts. They also have a digital piece with further reporting on Zombie Mortgages from NPR’s Investigations Team. You can find that at npr.org/ zombie.

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Once considered the most dangerous city in the world due to drug cartel violence, by the early 2000s Medellin had reinvented itself. But gentrification is allowing criminal gangs to reap large profits from a shadow economy powered by the tourist boom.

Medellin, Revisited

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The impacts of climate disasters are often measured in terms of property damage. But in places like Phoenix, Arizona, and in hot places all over the world, climate change is wreaking a very different kind of havoc – on living things. In the final episode of Not Built for This, we reckon with the biological limits of climate adaptation.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this story is about a place that managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will actually help it survive climate change. How after more than two decades of tireless work, the residents of Hamilton City, California finally got the levee they deserved. 

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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All across the country thousands of people are living in locations that regularly flood, and many of these places will only get more flood-prone as the climate continues to change. Residents who live in these danger zones are often trapped in a demoralizing loop—flooding, rebuilding, and praying each time that the pattern doesn’t repeat. However in some neighborhoods the government is trying a different approach. They’re buying out flood-prone homes and helping residents relocate to higher ground. But what’s it like for residents to fight like hell for help, and the only help on offer means leaving the place they love?

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Insurance companies are not climate activists, but they know more about climate risk than just about anyone. And as storms get more extreme and unpredictable a lot of insurers are running the numbers on Florida and realizing that the math just isn’t working anymore. For decades, low cost insurance helped mask the risks of living in some of the riskiest parts of the country. However a climate correction is now underway. Prices are skyrocketing. And on America’s riskiest peninsula, residents are beginning to feel climate change where it hurts—in their bank accounts.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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In disasters where a lot of people lose their homes, the impacts are not confined to a single city or town. They ripple outward, cascading into the surrounding area, as the survivors are forced to go looking for new places to live. This is the story of what happened after the famous fire in Paradise, California, and where many of the survivors ended up. It’s a cautionary tale about a town caught in the cross hairs of both the climate crisis and the housing crisis, and what happened when thousands of displaced people showed up on its doorstep.

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald was used to hearing people call his home state of Vermont a “climate haven.” But last summer, he got a wake up call in the form of a devastating flood.

All throughout the United States, people are watching the places they love change in unpredictable and scary ways. Places that once felt safe are starting to feel risky. Places that already felt risky are starting to feel downright dangerous. And as the climate continues to change, people are being forced to make impossible decisions about how to live, and where to live, in an increasingly unstable and unfamiliar world.

This is a series about climate change and how we prepare for the extremely bumpy ride ahead of us. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. 

Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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This is the eighth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Shiloh Frederick. Born and raised in New York City, Shiloh is a writer and influencer who shares her love of the city’s history and architecture on Instagram and TikTok. Last year, she chronicled her rather ambitious plan to read The Power Broker in 30 days, and her viral videos about her endeavor ended up making some real change in the city.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 6 (Chapter 33 through Chapter 34), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #08: Shiloh Frederick

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This week we're highlighting a couple of series that live inside the 99pi production tent.

We’ve got a preview of a new miniseries for you called Not Built for This, created and hosted by Emmett FitzGerald. It's a show about climate change, but not in the way you might think. It's about how the complex systems that govern our lives are not designed for the tectonic changes that are coming our way. Because right now we’re all living in a world that was just Not Built for This. You can find Not Built for This in the 99% Invisible feed starting August 20th.

We're also announcing the relaunch of Roman's side project What Roman Mars Can Learn About Con Law by featuring a new episode and one from two weeks ago.

Side Projects

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When you’re watching the opening credits to a movie, it’s not just a list of names. What you’re actually seeing is intense negotiations by Hollywood stars and their agents playing out in text form. Title designers have to create something that’s entertaining to watch, while also presenting the names of all the creative people in a very particular order. It’s like a game of Tetris, to make sure everybody gets their due.

Top Billing

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The 2024 Paris Olympics are currently under way, and we thought we’d play two stories from the 99% Invisible archives about the art of the Olympics.

First up, a story about the design and iconography of the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Then, Kurt Kohlstedt tells us about Olympic poetry.

The Art of the Olympics

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From TV commercials and branded soda cans to Emily in Paris spon-con, the Olympics are once again everywhere. In the Olympic spirit, we’re bringing you four stories about the games in all their international, theatrical glory.

In the first story, Christopher Johnson introduces the obscure, non-traditional sports from a forgotten part of Olympic history. The second story, by Chris Berube, offers a glimpse into the financial strain brought about by Montreal’s host venue for the 1976 games. In Vivian Le’s third story, the opening ceremony for Seoul’s 1988 Olympics begins on an unfortunate note. The final story, by Avery Trufelman, proposes a twist on the traditional Olympic host-country format.

The 2024 Olympics Spectacular

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This is the seventh official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Pete Buttigieg, the US Secretary of Transportation. One of his major responsibilities as Secretary is overseeing the implementation of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which has contributed billions of dollars to infrastructure projects around the country.

Secretary Buttigieg was also responsible for several major infrastructure projects when he was mayor of South Bend, Indiana. And he’s talked about the importance of acknowledging and dismantling the racism built into transportation systems around the country — somewhat paraphrasing The Power Broker — and has gotten a lot of pushback for it.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second half of Part 5 and the first section of Part 6 (Chapter 27 through Chapter 32), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #07: Sec. Pete Buttigieg

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When you hear the word "river," you probably picture a majestic body of water flowing through a natural habitat. Well, the LA River looks nothing like that. Most people who see it probably mistake it for a giant storm drain. It's a deep trapezoidal channel with steep concrete walls, and a flat concrete bottom. Los Angeles was founded around this river. But decades ago it was confined in concrete so that, for better or worse, the city could become the sprawling metropolis that it is today. All these years later the county is still grappling with the consequences of those actions.

Reported by Gillian Jacobs, guest hosted by 99PI producer, Vivian Le.

A River Runs Through Los Angeles

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When you go to a concert, you might try to get there right when the doors open. Or perhaps you take your time and skip the opening act. But generally, you want to be there when the show starts. In February, everyone who went to a concert in Halberstadt, Germany, showed up 23 years late. The performance is of a piece called ORGAN2/ ASLSP. ASLSP stands for “as slow as possible,” which is how the composer meant for it to be played, and this particular day would involve a chord change. The last time ORGAN2/ ASLSP had a chord change was in 2022, and this new chord will play until the next change, in August, 2026. There is a change the year after that, and the following year, and so on, until the year 2640. The full performance is meant to last 639 years. Reporter Gabe Bullard travels to Germany to witness the chord change and to discover why such a concert is even happening in the first place.

As Slow As Possible

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It’s hard to overstate the vastness of the Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles. It spans roughly 50 blocks, which is about a fifth of the entire downtown area of Los Angeles. It’s very clear when you’ve entered Skid Row. The sidewalks are mostly occupied by makeshift homes. A dizzying array of tarps and tents stretch out for blocks, improvised living structures sitting side by side.

The edge of Skid Row is clearly defined and it wasn’t drawn by accident.  It’s the result of a very specific plan to keep homeless people on one side and development on the other. And, perhaps surprisingly to outsiders: it’s a plan that Skid Row residents and their allies actually designed and fought for.

The Containment Plan

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When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead—or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

Backfired is the latest podcast from Prologue Projects, the award-winning team behind Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice: Michael Jackson. Backfired is a show about the business of unintended consequences—what happens when solving one problem inadvertently leads to a host of new ones?

In this tale of opportunity, addiction, and good intentions gone awry, hosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes offer a definitive account of Juul Labs’ rise and fall, as well as the ubiquitous illegal vape market that sprouted up in its wake. Through dozens of original interviews, they gain access to the key players who got swept up—sometimes unwittingly—in the firestorm that reshaped the culture of nicotine.

Backfired: The Vaping Wars

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This is the sixth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Mike Schur, who created the critically acclaimed NBC comedy The Good Place, and co-created Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99, Rutherford Falls, and Netflix’s upcoming, A Classic Spy. Prior to Parks, Michael spent four years as a writer-producer on the Emmy Award-winning NBC hit The Office.

Mike also happens to be a big fan of The Power Broker, and has cited the book as his inspiration behind Parks & Rec.

Elliott and Roman also cover the first section of Part 5 (Chapter 25 through Chapter 26), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #6: Mike Schur

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After Hurricane Camille caused widespread death and destruction along the US Gulf Coast in 1969, two scientists created the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale as a way to quickly warn the public when dangerous storms were on the way. Today, we’re still using the scale and its system of ranking storms as Categories 1 to 5. But in the 55 years since the scale was created, hurricanes have become more frequent, and they have gotten bigger, faster, more devastating. There's now debate among meteorologists about whether the scale is obsolete, and it may be time for something new.

Category 6

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The leaf blower is one of the most hated objects in the modern world. They’re loud, they pollute, and… how important is a leafless lawn anyway? In a lot of towns and cities, the gas-powered leaf blower has been banned. In others, there are strict guidelines on where and when they can be used. In Los Angeles, California, the leaf blower has never gone quiet, but the war to ban them has been raging for decades.

The Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars

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For a long time, the Court operated under what was called Legal Formalism. Legal formalism said that the job of any judge or justice was incredibly narrow. It was to basically look at the question of the case in front of them, check that question against any existing laws, and then make a decision. Unlike today, no one was going out of their way to hear what economists or sociologists or historians thought. Judges were just sticking to law books. The rationale for this way of judging was that if you always and only look at clean, dry law the decisions would be completely objective.

In the late 19th, early 20th century a movement rose up to challenge legal formalism. They called themselves the legal realists. Fred Schauer, professor of law at University of Virginia, says the Realists felt that the justices weren’t actually as objective as they said they were. "Supreme Court justices were often making decisions based on their own political views, their own economic views, and would disguise it in the language of precedence or earlier decisions," says Schauer. The realists said lets just accept that reality and wanted to arm the judges with more information so those judges could make more informed decisions.
For a long time the debate between realists and formalists had been mostly theoretical. That is until the arrival of the Brandeis Brief. The Brandeis brief came during a pivotal court case in the early 20th century. And the man at the center of that case was a legal realist and progressive reformer named Louis Brandeis.

Fact Checking the Supreme Court

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In late 2018, two hundred people gathered at The Explorer’s Club in New York City. The building was once a clubhouse for famed naturalists and explorers. Now it’s an archive of ephemera and rarities from pioneering expeditions around the globe. But this latest gathering was held to celebrate the first biological census of its kind –an effort to count all of the squirrels in New York City’s Central Park. Squirrels were purposefully introduced into our cities in the 1800s, and when their population exploded, we lost track of how many there are.

2024 update: We have a number!

Uptown Squirrel

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Los Angeles actually used to have a massive electric railway system in the early 1900s, called the Red Car. Jake Berman, the author of The Lost Subways of North America, tells us about how, time after time, when North American cities seemed just inches away from having a robust, utopian future of fast, reliable, and convenient public transportation systems, something gets in the way. That thing is sometimes dysfunctional local politics, sometimes it’s bureaucracy. Sometimes it’s the way our infrastructure favors cars over mass transit, and too often, it’s racism.

The Lost Subways of North America

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This is the fifth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter for NBC News who covers misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the internet. Brandy recently finished The Power Broker, and she’s got a great perspective on what the book says about the press and its relationship to power, what has changed in journalism, and what has remained the same.

Elliott and Roman also cover the last section of Part 4 of the book (Chapter 21 through Chapter 24), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #5: Brandy Zadrozny

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In the twentieth century, the jetpack became synonymous with the idea of a ‘futuristic society.’ Appearing in cartoons and magazines, it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work. But jetpacks never became a mainstream technology, leaving many to wonder... why did they fall off the radar? 

Rocket Man

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The Howdy Doody Show is one of those pieces of 1950s ephemera that has come to symbolize mid-century American childhood. For over a decade, every weeknight at 5pm, kids all across the country would sit down in front of their parents’ tiny televisions and take in the wild west adventures of Buffalo Bob and his puppet sidekick Howdy Doody.

The show was disproportionately important in the history of television. It was the first television program to reach 1,000 episodes, one of the first shows to broadcast in color, and it pioneered new ways of marketing products to children. But in the early days of the medium, especially when Howdy Doody first started, the world of television was strange. In many ways, the story of Howdy Doody is the story of the weird, wild-west days of early TV. A story in which programmers, advertisers, artists and money men were inventing everything as they went along. Starting with what to put on television in the first place.

It's Howdy Doody Time!

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Recently we published an episode called Towers of Silence. It's about how the Parsis in India are grappling with the loss of vultures and how it changed something very intimate and meaningful for the community. It was reported by our own Lasha Madan and it is epic and it is beautiful. So first of all, go listen to that story if you haven't heard it. It's so good. 

On the one hand, it's a very specific story, it's about a unique set of circumstances that happened to a very specific community. But it also feels universally relevant. Because it's a story about death and how we choose to transition out of this world. It's about how we might react when there’s a major cultural shift that we cannot control. And importantly it is about a keystone species collapse, which is something we are on track to see more of in these times. Lasha Madan collected a ton of information about vulture conservation in their reporting but it didn't quite fit into the original story that we wanted to tell but it's so vital and interesting that we're releasing this bonus episode to cover it all.

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Mr. Yuk is a neon green circular sticker with a cartoon face on it. His face is scrunched up with his eyes squeezed tight and his tongue is sticking out of its mouth. It's the face you make when you taste something disgusting. He's the pictorial embodiment of the sentiment of yuck. Aptly enough: he was designed to be the symbol for hazardous substances, aimed at deterring children from ingesting them. The idea what that if you saw a Mr. Yuk sticker on something around the house, it meant that that something was poison.

Friend of the show, Gillian Jacobs, is a BIG FAN of Mr Yuk, who turns out to be a hometown hero of her beloved Pittsburgh, and talked Roman through the origins of the mean, green face that was meant to save children from their worst impulses.

Plus, we revisit another story about warning symbols from our archive: the quest to find a symbol that would warn future humans of dangerous radiation 10,000 years in the future.

Mr. Yuk

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Situated right in downtown Mumbai, India is an area of about 55 acres of dense, overgrown forest. In one of the most populous cities in the world, this is a place where peacocks roam freely -- a space out of time. This forest is protected by a religious community. It has survived in a relatively undeveloped state in the middle of this gargantuan city. Importantly, it’s also home to an ancient tradition in crisis -- one that is central to the lives (and deaths) of a particular population.

There’s a certain point in this forest beyond which almost no one can step -- only special caretakers of these grounds can go any further. They go by many names: khandia, nassassalar, pallbearer, corpse bearer. Their work here is holy. They carry dead bodies to their final resting place – atop stone structures that stand gray against the lush green. These buildings are called Towers of Silence.

Towers of Silence

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This is the fourth official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the U.S. representative for New York's 14th congressional district, who describes the lasting impact Moses’ highways have made on her district, and her own philosophy when it comes to political power and bringing ambitious projects to life.

Elliott and Roman also cover the second section of Part 4 of the book (Chapter 16 through Chapter 20), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #4: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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This week we're featuring an episode from The Sporkful's series on the creation of "Anything's Pastable," Dan Pashman's new pasta cookbook.

Dan talks with Roman about how this massive project came to be and all the design decisions required to put together a cookbook.

And then, in part two of “Anything’s Pastable,” Dan embarks on an epic trip across Italy in search of lesser-known pasta dishes — and to learn about the evolution of pasta more broadly. He starts in Rome, where food writer Katie Parla reveals a shocking truth about pasta. Then an Italian food historian challenges Dan’s thinking about carbonara. Finally, he heads south to meet a chef who was there when a regional specialty called spaghetti all’assassina (“assassin’s spaghetti”) was invented. All of this leads Dan to wonder: What does evolution look like in a food culture that’s so often depicted in sepia tones? And what’s his place in that process?

Preorder Dan’s cookbook today (including signed copies), and see if he’s visiting a city near you on his tour of book signings and live podcast tapings with special guests! Follow Dan on Instagram to see photos and videos from the Anything’s Pastable journey.

Anything's Pastable: Eat Sauté Love

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Hailing from central African cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, sapeurs have become increasingly recognizable around the world. Since the 1970s, sapeurs (from: le sape, short for "Société des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Élégantes") have been known for donning technicolored three-piece suits with flamboyant accessories like golden walking sticks and leopard-print fedoras, and then cat-walking through their city streets.

In recent years, Solange, Kendrick and SZA have all featured sapeurs in their music videos. The iconic British menswear designer Paul Smith did a whole spring line of sapeur-inspired suits and bowler hats.

The Society of Ambiance Makers and Elegant Persons

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A chambre de bonne is usually one small room, on the top floor of a five- or six-story apartment building, and it’s usually just big enough to fit a bed and a table. It’s affordable housing in a city where finding housing is nearly impossible. Reporter Jeanne Boëzec tells about the history of the chambre de bonne apartments, and how while cute, they are also cramped and can be unpleasant spaces for people who have to live there, a living embodiment of the gap between the rich in Paris and everyone else.

Chambre de Bonne

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This is the third and final episode in a three-part series of Roman Mars recording on-location guides to the design features and interesting spots in cities he loves. 

Roman moved to Athens, Georgia, to pursue a PhD in plant genetics, but dropped out and got into the local music and art scene instead, and started making his way toward radio.

Roman Mars Describes Athens GA As It Is

Note: This series is made possible by the all-new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

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A few years back, journalist Lauren Ober was diagnosed with autism. She then made a podcast about her experience called The Loudest Girl in the World. And she found herself imagining a fantasy world where everything is tailored to Lauren’s very specific autistic needs. And she called this magical imagined place, wonderfully devoid of overwhelming stimuli "Autism Pleasantville."

"Obviously," Ober notes, "there’s not a one-size fits all diagnosis or even definition of autism ... as the autism adage goes: 'If you know one autistic person…you know one autistic person.' But despite our wide variety of needs, I wanted to know how design is evolving to better accommodate us" -- how were ideals being handled in the real world.

Autism Pleasantville

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In the middle of the 20th century, the small town of Jasper, Indiana did something that no other city had done before: they made garbage illegal. The city would still collect some things, like soup cans and plastics, but yucky junk, like food waste, wouldn't get picked up.

This change was made possible by a new appliance: the garbage disposer – that little grinding machine at the bottom of a lot of kitchen sinks.

The Monster Under the Sink

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This is the third official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. 

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with Blank Check podcast co-host and The Atlantic movie critic David Sims as our book club guest.

Elliott, Roman, and David cover the first section of Part 4 (Chapter 11 through Chapter 15), discussing the major story beats and themes.

The Power Broker #3: David Sims

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of a lot of landmarks in pop culture, especially sci-fi and fantasy. So many franchises were born in 1984. Some came to define the genre or invent new genres. The great podcast Imaginary Worlds noticed this and produced a three-part series about 1984's Cambrian explosion of creativity that  landed on the big screen, the small screen, bookstore shelves and, of course, the toy store.

In this episode we learn about at two iconic franchises that launched in 1984: Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They came from opposite ends of the business spectrum. Transformers was a top-down marketing synergy between American and Japanese toy companies along with Marvel Comics to compete against He-Man -- another TV toy behemoth. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would eventually rival them in cultural dominance, but it began with two indie comic book creators making a black and white comic as a lark. But Turtles and Transformers both ended up wrestling with similar questions around what happens when you put the cart before the horse in creating content to sell products.

Toyetic

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Intimidating Proposition 65 warnings can be found on all kinds of products manufactured or distributed in the State of California. They can seem rather terrifying at first, but within the state, they are ubiquitous, on everyday objects from power tools to potato chips, dietary supplements, leather jackets, gas pumps, coffee tables, the list goes on. All of which raises the question: if these labels are on so many things, are they actually useful in warning us of real dangers?

572- WARNING: This Podcast Contains Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Other Reproductive Harm

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Roman Mars is on a mission to describe the cities that shaped who he is and how he thinks about design. Next up, Santa Fe. 

Santa Fe wasn’t always on the proverbial map — in fact, the Santa Fe railroad just passed it on by. A lot of care has been taken to keep Santa Fe cute and quaint over its history, with steps to preserve native architecture and historical design. The result is a mixture of structures old and new, but mostly made to look old, for better or worse.

Roman Mars Describes Santa Fe As It Is

Note: This series is made possible by the all-new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

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Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It’s delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It’s called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn’t just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world’s most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It’s a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.

The Real Book

This episode originally aired in April 2021

Roman note: I love this episode. An all time favorite. Pass it along to someone jazzy if so inclined.

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It’s been said that history is written by the person at the typewriter. But who did the person who made history depend on? Often, it’s impossible to find out. But once in a while, we get lucky, and the story was not only recorded, it’s really good.
Well that’s what this podcast is all about. “Significant Others” is a show that tells a story you might not know about a person you probably do.

For example, in this episode we explore how Benedict Arnold might never have turned on his country were it not for his wife, Peggy, who influenced his betrayal.

Head over to Significant Others to listen to the rest of the episode and to other stories like how Amelia Earhart would neither have found fame nor, possibly, disappeared over the Pacific, had it not been for her husband, George Putnam, or who is really to blame for Friedrich Nietzsche’s connection to Nazism. Listen and subscribe to “Significant Others” wherever you get your podcasts.

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What we see on screen has this way of influencing our perception of the world, which makes sense because the average American spends 2 hours and 51 minutes watching movies and TV each day. That’s a whopping 19 percent of our waking hours. Walt Hickey is a data journalist and author of a new book called You Are What You Watch. In it, Walt makes a case for how much film and television shapes us as individuals and as a society, far beyond what we give it credit for.

You Are What You Watch

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This is the second official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro.

This week, Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan sit down with New York Times political columnist Jamelle Bouie as our book club guest.

Elliott and Roman cover Part 3 of the book (Chapter 6 through Chapter 10), discussing the major story beats and themes, with occasional asides from Jamelle Bouie guiding us through the politics of the era.

The Power Broker #02: Jamelle Bouie

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White Castle has its own take on fast food hamburgers. For starters, the patties are square, with five holes in each patty. And they’re small, too –- two-and-a-half inch sliders. Just big enough to fit into the palm of your hand. And since they’re steamed on a bed of onions, everything is infused with this very specific onion-esque flavor.

Today, White Castles can be hard to find, depending on where you live. But KCUR's Mackenzie Martin, a producer at A People's History of Kansas City, says that it’s time to stop thinking of White Castle as a semi-obscure cultural punchline, because over a century ago, White Castle invented something that became so important and all-encompassing that, today, it touches pretty much every person in America. Sometimes several times a day. Something that, in other countries, has almost come to define American culture: it has a strong claim to being the first fast-food restaurant.

The White Castle System of Eating Houses

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Seen from above, Sofia, Bulgaria, looks less like a city and more like a forest. Large "interblock park" green spaces between big apartment structures are a defining characteristic of the city. They're not so much "parks" in the formal sense, with fences and gates, just open green areas growing up in interstitial spaces left behind.

But as green as it still looks today, Sofia used to be even greener.  Since the fall of Bulgarian communism in the late 1980s, Sofia has lost more than half of its green space. To understand why, one has to look back to how the city evolved and grew in the Soviet era.

Between the Blocks

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When a highway gets made, there’s a clear and consistent process for doing so. Not so, public memorials. From the Vietnam Wall to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, it’s always different. Sometimes a handful of concerned citizens get together and make it happen. Sometimes a nonprofit pushes for it, or a foundation. There’s usually a lot of activism, and a lot of fraught conversations – about design, location, the story it should tell about what happened, and who it affected. 

And how does one memorialize such a vast and distributed tragedy like COVID-19,  which was devastating physically but also divisive politically?

Don't Forget to Remember

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A few years ago, at the very start of the pandemic, Roman Mars wrote an episode of 99pi in which he simply talked about design details in his house -- realizing that he, like the audience, didn't have many other places to go.  (You should check it out. It's called "Roman Mars Describes Things As They Are"-- it’s a real time capsule and a fan favorite.) Since then, he's been thinking about and wanting to record a companion episode out in the world.

Over the next couple months, he's going to three cities that shaped who Roman is and how he thinks about design. We'll start in Chicago. 

Chicago is a design lover's paradise, from its carefully thought-out original grid to its exceptionally stellar flag design. The city is home to some of the most influential architecture in the US as well.

Roman Mars Describes Chicago As It Is

Note: This series is made possible by the all-new 2024 Lexus GX and SiriusXM. 

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Watch a skate video today, and you'll notice how similarly shaped the boards are. It’s called the “popsicle” design, because the deck is narrow in the middle and rounded off at both ends, like a popsicle stick. This may seem stupid simple, but that basic, clean popsicle shape is actually the product of a lot of experimentation and iteration. In 1989, one particular board would cement skateboard design as we know it. But to understand it, we have to go back over a decade to the mid-70s, as more and more money poured into the growing sport.

The Double Kick

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Welcome to our first official episode, breaking down the 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Power Broker by our hero Robert Caro. Robert Caro happens to be our special guest for this episode and you do not get more special than that.

On today’s show, Elliott Kalan and Roman Mars will cover the Introduction, Part 1, and Part 2 of the book (the intro through the end of Chapter 5), discussing the major story beats and themes, and then we will bring the great Robert Caro to the stage. 

Power Broker #01: Robert Caro

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Fake cities. Imitation nations. People role-playing as civilians, spies, or enemies, complete with costumes and props. It's all part of an effort coordinated and constructed by the U.S. military to prepare soldiers for war. Fake villages designed for training purposes dot the entire United States, not to mention other countries. Researchers have identified over 400 of them around the world.

Imitation Nation

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Our second and final set of mini-stories for the season: We'll be covering upside-down construction, the linguistics of filler and a fire that has been burning for decades.

Check out Lizzie No's latest album Halfsies on Band Camp.  She's on tour in 2024. Go see her and say hi for me!

Mini-Stories 18

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We're revisiting this Christmas classic from 2021. Happy Holidays!

Slovenia is a small country in Central Europe nestled between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary. It's a land of snowy white peaks, green valleys, and turquoise rivers. The country is beautiful in all seasons, but it is perhaps at its most magical around Christmastime. This nation of just over 2 million people is visited by, not one, not two, but three different "santas" every festive season. But it hasn't always been this way. Each Santa has had his moment in the spotlight—each in a different period of Slovenia’s complicated history. And in order to have a Christmas season that reflects that history and speaks to all Slovenians, you need three magical men.

The Three Santas of Slovenia

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It's the most wonderful time of the year. It's mini-stories season! Gather the kids around the fire because We have a year-end mix of short stories about a rogue architect, spooky kitchens, a hundred year old music streaming service, and the crazy way the French tried to make telling time less crazy.

Today's episode featured a story from Sound Detectives. Listen to Sound Detectives on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and go to sounddetectivespodcast.com to find coloring pages, sound terms, and more.

Mini-Stories: Volume 17

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Keeping track of numbers has always been part of what makes us human. So at some point along the way, we created a tool to help us keep count, and then we gave that tool a name. We called it: a calculator. But depending on what era you were born in, and maybe even what country, what constituted a 'calculator' varied widely.

Keith Houston wrote about the evolution of the calculator in his latest book, Empire of the Sum The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator. It is exactly the kind of nerdery we like to get up to here at 99% Invisible -- history explained through the lens of an everyday designed object.

Empire of the Sum

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Today's episode features #1 Robert Caro superfan, Conan O'Brien.

The Power Broker by Robert Caro is a biography of Robert Moses, who is said to have built more structures and moved more earth than anyone in human history. And he did it without ever holding elected office. Outside of New York City, Robert Moses wasn't exceptionally well known. Inside of New York, he was mostly accepted by the media as simply the man who built all those nice parks. But The Power Broker, which is subtitled Robert Moses and The Fall of New York, changed all that. It is a tour de force of journalism, history, and biography. Roman also argues it's really fun to read and is strongly in contention for the best book ever written.

But there is something of a catch, which can hang readers up: the book is a daunting 1200 pages long. As influential and amazing as this bestseller is, many people own an unopened copy gathering dust on their bookshelf. But that is a crime because this book needs to be read or at least discussed at length on a podcast.

Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan (Flop House, Daily Show) are starting The Power Broker book club that will run through all of 2024 as bonus episodes and in this introductory episode, Conan O'Brien joins us to talk all things Robert Caro.

Breaking Down The Power Broker

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Roman note: This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. Should be a movie. Enjoy!

The tradition of the Tomb of the Unknowns goes back only about a century, but it has become one of the most solemn and reverential monuments. When President Reagan added the remains of an unknown serviceman who died in combat in Vietnam to the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in 1984, it was the only set of remains that couldn’t be identified from the war. Now, thankfully, there will never likely be a soldier who dies in battle whose body can’t be identified. And as a result of DNA technology, even the unknowns currently interred in the tomb can be positively identified.

The Known Unknown

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The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people didn't care so much about the audio quality. They just wanted to be able to use something that they could carry around with them. The cassette’s other big advantage: it was easy to record on.

We talked to Marc Masters about his new book High Bias, about the history of the cassette. One chapter about concert bootleggers covers perhaps the greatest success story of the cassette: Grateful Dead live tapes.

Long Strange Tape

Plus we're featuring a bonus story that we produced in 2016 in collaboration with Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything about a place where cassettes were of vital importance.

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In a lot of ways, Lincoln Heights, Ohio, sounds just like any other suburb. If you walk around town, you’ll hear kids playing outside the local elementary school. You’ll hear the highway that takes commuters down to Cincinnati. At the woods on the edge of town, the birdsong is delightful. The town feels calm and peaceful - at least, until the gunfire starts. Most weekdays, it begins in the morning, and lasts through the afternoon. Sometimes it goes past sundown, and occasionally into the weekends. Once the shooting begins, it comes in rapid-fire waves throughout the day. People say it makes it hard to focus or relax, and those who work the night shift say they can’t sleep.

The noise of gunfire isn’t from street violence. It all comes from an open-air gun range that’s owned by the Cincinnati Police Department.

Home on the Range

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In the mid-1900s, people flocked to Reno, Nevada -- not for frontier gold or loose slots, but to get out of bad marriages.  The city became known as the "Divorce Capital of the World." For much of modern history, it has been relatively easy to get married, and extremely difficult to get divorced -- and for a time, this was true in the New World as well. But Reno provided the cure: The Six-Week Cure.

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Most heists target gold, jewels or cash. This one targeted illegal seeds. As the British established their sprawling empire across the subcontinent and beyond, they encountered a formidable adversary — malaria. There was a cure — the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The only problem? The Dutch and the French were also looking to corner the market in cinchona. And the trees themselves were under threat.

This week on 99pi, we feature a story from Stuff the British Stole, a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. So "grab a gin and tonic and come with us to hear how a botanical empire took off — and gave birth to a quintessential cocktail."

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For decades, society has dealt with people with dementia and other forms of cognitive decline by storing them away in unstimulating, medicalized environments. But around the world, a new architectural movement is starting to challenge that old paradigm. Designing environments where people with dementia can live as normally as possible, until the very end.

Model Village

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It’s hard to overstate just how important record album art was to music in the days before people downloaded everything. Visuals were a key part of one's experience with a record or tape or CD. The design of the album cover created a first impression of what was to come. Album art was certainly important to reporter Sean Cole, one particular album by one particular band: Devo. This is the story of Devo’s first record and the fight over the arresting image of a flashy, handsome golf legend on the cover.

Plus, former 99pi EP Katie Mingle gets the backstory of the Langley Schools Music Project LP, a haunting and uplifting outsider artist masterpiece.

This episode was originally broadcast in 2018

Devolutionary Design

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Over a decade after Elvis Presley’s death, the king of rock & roll took over headlines once again as Americans weighed in on which portrait of Elvis would be forever immortalized on a 29 cent US postage stamp. It was put to a popular vote: should the stamp feature an image of young Elvis at the start of his rise, or an older Elvis in his iconic white jumpsuit.

The resulting Elvis stamp eventually outsold every single commemorative stamp before and since.

You Ain’t Nothin But a Postmark

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Over its more than 40 year journey from conception to completion, Boston’s Big Dig massive infrastructure project, which rerouted the central highway in the heart of the city, encountered every hurdle imaginable: ruthless politics, engineering challenges, secretive contractors, outright fraud and even the death of one motorist. It became a kind of poster child for big government ‘boondoggles.’ But the full story is of course much more complicated – and really represents a turning point in how America builds infrastructure.

Subscribe and Listen to the full series of The Big Dig.

The Big Dig

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This week we have two stories featuring the devil.

An infamous "training video" teaching cops how to spot and stop "satanic crimes." And a stretch of highway with the misfortune of being officially named US Route 666.

Devil in the Details

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The Sydney Opera House is one of the most iconic and distinctive buildings in the world. It took a relative newcomer and architectural outsider to dream it up, but the saga of making this world heritage landmark a reality is a tale for the ages: a cautionary tale. And for Cautionary Tales, I turn to the brilliant Tim Harford. I’ve been dying to hear the story of the Sydney Opera House told in this way, and Tim and his team just nailed it,  and I know you are going to love it as much as I do. Enjoy.

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Brian Merchant is a tech reporter, and he'd been covering the industry for years when he started to notice a term that kept coming up. When he wrote a story that was critical of tech, he'd be accused of being a "Luddite."

Like most people, Brian knew at least vaguely what the term "Luddite" meant. But as time went on, and as Brian watched tech grow into the disruptive behemoth it is today, he started to get more curious about the actual Luddites. Who were they? And what did they really believe? 

Brian has a new book out about the Luddites called Blood in the Machine. And it explores how English textile workers in the 19th century rose up against the growing trend of automation and the machines that were threatening their livelihoods.

Blood in the Machine

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All kinds of songs get stuck in your head. Famous pop tunes from when you were a kid, album cuts you've listened to over and over again. And then there's a category of memorable songs—the ones that we all just kind of know. Songs that somehow, without anyone’s permission, sneak their way into the collective unconscious and are now just lingering there for eternity. There’s one song that best exemplifies this phenomenon— "Who Let The Dogs Out" by the Baha Men.

The story of how that song ended up stuck in all of our brains goes back decades and spans continents. It tells us something about inspiration, and how creativity spreads, and about whether an idea can ever really belong to just one person. 

Whomst Among Us Let the Dogs Out AGAIN

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In most big cities, there’s a housing crisis. And empty office buildings are creating a different crisis known to urbanists as a ‘doom loop.’ Converting an office into housing can solve both of these crises at once, using one piece of property. This solution just seems so obvious and elegant. But for all the hype around this idea, there are surprisingly few adaptive reuse projects actually underway.

Office Space

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The story of a voice training VHS tape that helped trans women at a time when other resources were hard to access.

The way a person's voice changes over time feels like a simple, and overlooked act of magic. Whether intentionally or subconsciously, our voices are products of our environments as much as they are part of us. Today we’re featuring an episode about voices from a series called Sounds Gay, a brilliant show about queer culture, community and music.

Plus, guest host Swan Real discusses the universality of voice training with 99pi regular host Roman Mars.

Melanie Speaks

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Welcome to our second episode of short stories all about what may be the original designed object: the trail. If you haven’t heard the first episode yet you should totally go back and listen. It’s a lot of fun.

Take this episode with you on your next hike!

Trail Mix: Track Two

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We deconstruct and examine what might be the original designed object-- the humble trail. We discuss how park trails are designed, what makes a good trail, and...what even is a trail anyway?

Trail Mix

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Back in January, Bloomberg News published a story quoting an obscure government official named Richard Trumka Jr. He works with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates stuff like furniture and electronics and household appliances. Basically, the agency is supposed to make sure that the stuff we buy is safe, and won't kill us or make us sick.  The Bloomberg story talked about how a growing body of research shows that gas stoves are really bad for indoor air quality. They let off pollutants like nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, and they've been linked to heart problems, cancer, and asthma. And in this story, Trumka said the government would look into it, and maybe recommend some regulations on the appliance. 

Within days, the US went batshit crazy and gas stoves were all over the news. They had become the subject of the latest skirmish in our seemingly never-ending culture war. 

Cooking with Gas

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Andrew Leland grew up with full vision, but starting in his teenage years, his sight began to degrade from the outside in, such that he now sees the world as if through a narrow tube. Soon—but without knowing exactly when—he will likely have no vision left. In this episode, Andrew takes us through the fascinating history of alternative reading technologies designed for blind people and discusses his fantastic new book The Country of the Blind, which is out today!

The Country of the Blind

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This past May, the city of Los Angeles rolled out a brand new, state-of-the art feature for bus shelters. It’s called La Sombrita. La Sombrita is a metal screen that’s intended to provide shade for the thousands of people who ride the bus every day. The shade screen is about two feet wide, ten feet tall, and it kinda looks like a curved teal metal surfboard filled with tiny holes. Right away, Angelinos were not happy. This heated conversation got us thinking about our interview with Sam Bloch about inequality and shade and we asked Sam back to get thoughts about La Sombrita, and whether the controversial shade sail could actually be a good thing for shade-starved Angelinos. 

Shade Redux

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In the 1980s, the little Christian comic books known as Chick Tracts were EVERYWHERE. You’d find them in movie theaters and bus station bathrooms, on subways, and all over shopping malls. People would slip them inside VHS rentals or library books. 

Many Chick Tracts are black and white Christian horror stories that pull from a huge cast of characters: witches, bikers, Hindus, rock and rollers, Catholics, queer people, truckers, Masons and trick-or-treaters. And at some point in the tract, the protagonist often has to make a choice: either accept Jesus as their savior, or get tossed like cordwood into a Lake Of Fire. 

Chick Tracts have left a really complicated legacy. Collectors are mesmerized by their edginess and kitsch. The Smithsonian regards Chick Tracts as American religious artifacts, and keeps a bunch of them in its vaults.  At the same time, many of these comics are filled with some ugly and dangerous messages, including homophobia and Islamophobia. So the same tracts that have been hoarded and preserved have ALSO been boycotted and banned, and condemned as hate speech.

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In Proximity is a podcast from Proximity Media about craft, career, and creativity.

Proximity founder Ryan Coogler talks all about podcasts with Roman Mars, host and creator of 99% Invisible, a sound-rich narrative podcast about architecture and design. They discuss holding pandemic meetings about the business of podcasting, Roman’s journey from science to public radio to 99% Invisible, finding the balance between being an artist and business owner plus why Roman believes a producer is the highest form of worker, collaborating on the Judas and the Black Messiah Podcast, the read-to-tape system, and Prox Recs that include a good coffee table book that will impress your friends and how to make great radio.

Listen to In Proximity on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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This week we're featuring an episode of The Last Archive

The Last Archive is a history show. Our evidence is the evidence of history, the evidence of archives. Manuscripts, photographs, letters and diaries, government documents. Facebook posts, Youtube videos, DVDs. Oral histories. This stuff is known as the “historical record,” but of course it’s not a record, in the sense of an audio recording: It’s everything.

On this episode of The Last Archive, the story of the composer Raymond Scott’s lifelong quest to build an automatic songwriting machine, and what it means for our own AI-addled, ChatGPT world.

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After World War I, in Frankfurt, Germany, the city government was taking on a big project. A lot of residents were in dire straits, and in the second half of the 1920s, the city built over 10,000 public housing units. It was some of the earliest modern architecture — simple, clean, and uniform. The massive housing effort was, in many ways, eye-poppingly impressive, with all new construction and sleek, cutting edge architecture. But one room in these new housing units was far and away the most lauded and influential: and that was the kitchen.

Many consider the Frankfurt Kitchen to be nothing less than the first modern kitchen. A few of these kitchens still exist, some in museums. And it's strange to see one there, because to modern eyes, it doesn’t appear to be high art. It just looks like a kitchen.

The Frankfurt Kitchen

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Amid the noisy bustle of Mexico City, there is a particularly iconic sound echoing on repeat in the background. This recording blares from trucks that cruise the streets all across this massive city. The crews inside are looking to buy old household items and appliances to fix and resell or to just sell for scrap. Basically, they’re scrap metal haulers, and the recording is their pitch to prospective sellers. Their pitch culminates in "o algo de fierro viejo que vendan," which basically means “or any old metal thing you’re selling.” This last bit has become the recording’s namesake: fierro viejo, literally “old iron.”

How this recording (and its subsequent remixes for live performances and otherwise) managed to achieve icon status in Mexico is a story of an unlikely alchemy: a family that, through grit, talent and a bit of luck, transmuted scrap metal into poetry, music, and joy.

The Siren of Scrap Metal

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As electronic news gathering was gaining prominence in the early 20th century, the American Bar Association began to fear its effect on court trials and adopted something called Canon 35. This condemned the use of photography, motion picture, and radio recording within the confines of the courtroom. It wasn't a law, per se, but a code of ethics that cautioned against recording technology in the trial process. Many state and federal courts followed suit...making way for illustrators. Cameras began to creep their way back into courtrooms over the decades, but courtroom artists are still constantly used in high profile cases.

Courtroom Sketch

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The unlikely battle between the creator of the New York Public Library children's reading room and the beloved children’s classic Goodnight Moon.

Goodnight Nobody

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Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta.

Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.

Train Set: Track Three

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LA might be the most extreme parking city on the planet. Parking regulations have made it nearly impossible to build new affordable housing, or to renovate old buildings. And parking has a massive impact on how the city looks. LA is chock full of commercial strip malls, where buildings sit alone and isolated in a sea of asphalt. And all of this is the result of one policy decision that has reshaped American cities for the last eighty years.

Henry Grabar's Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, tells a mesmerizing story about the strange and wonderful super-organism that is the modern American city. In a beguiling and often absurdly hilarious mix of history, politics, and reportage, Grabar brilliantly surveys the pain points of the nation’s parking crisis, from Los Angeles to Disney World to New York, stopping at every major American city in between.

Paved  Paradise

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In her new book Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), structural engineer Roma Agrawal identifies and examines the seven of most basic building blocks of engineering that have shaped the modern world: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the lens, the magnet, the string, and the pump.

Click here to get the book! Available for pre-order at W. W. Norton in the US and Bookshop.org in the UK.

Nuts and Bolts

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