99% Invisible

This is a ridiculous special bonus episode of the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker.

And today we'll be covering chapters 39 through 41. That's pages 895 through 983 in my copy of the book.

So last time on the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker, Robert Caro went into incredible detail about how Robert Moses refused to include mass transit as part of his transportation plans.

It's hard to imagine a version of the book where Mayor Impey gets a full chapter to himself as much as I love that section so much.

We covered chapters 33 and 34, which detailed the ways in which Robert Moses spent the 1940s and 50s becoming the center of political corruption and honest graft in New York City construction world.

we're especially thankful to David for his book about the epic of Gilgamesh it's called The Buried Book which is where we first encountered this story

his newest work is called Around the World in 80 Books you can find both of them wherever books are sold

We also have our own Discord server where we talk about the Power Broker.

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker.

We are finishing the book, covering chapters 47 through 50, pages 1,082 through 1,162.

When the book was released and Robert Moses reacted to it by calling Robert Caro a venomous viper, among other things.

The last line of the book was the thing that finally made everything fall into place for him.

In October, we released an episode with the great Stephen Johnson talking about his latest book, The Infernal Machine, all about how the invention of dynamite drastically changed the political landscape in the U.S.

Steven Johnson's most recent book is called The Infernal Machine.

I loved it. You're going to love it.

And she ended up opening a bunch of exercise studios and then eventually releasing the Jane Fonda workout book, which was wildly popular.

How long were you on the New York Times bestseller list for? Two years.

It was on the bestseller list for two solid years.

How long was the 99PI book on the bestseller list for?

I was pretty proud of that.

We have been taking on one of the greatest works of nonfiction writing or I would say writing period in American literature, The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

Every month, we break down 100 pages of it. And we just recorded our penultimate summary episode. We actually made our way through most of the book at this point.

And this movie, Megalopolis, there's so much about it that is so clearly indebted to a certain idea of Robert Moses, the subject of The Power Broker.

And he even published a book called The 15Minute City, where he kind of doubles down on these concepts, on this whole idea.

Carlos Moreno's book, The 15Minute City, A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, is available now.

In the 50 years since The Power Broker was published, the book has endured in ways that few biographies have.

First and foremost, it completely upended how the public viewed the former New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses.

The New York Historical Society holds Robert Caro's archives, which include his research for The Power Broker, as well as the papers for his four-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson.

Caro often says that he cut 350,000 words around a third of his initial draft of The Power Broker, partly because the publisher could not bind a book that would hold that many pages.

Well, you know, I was expecting the book wouldn't sell very many copies.

And suddenly, Joseph Heller was standing in the doorway. Now, his book, Something Happened, was published the same month as The Power Broker.

Jacobs went on to write The Life and Death of Great American Cities.

This incredible book that delivers a withering critique of the urban renewal concepts and other harmful policies that Moses championed.

This is the 99% Invisible Breakdown of The Power Broker.

It was books from 1974.

He had to keep building massive projects like the Niagara dam, which Caro barely mentions, showing the breadth of his research.

Nate has a new book out called, you guessed it, The Memory Palace. It's an anthology of some of his best stories from the show, plus a few new ones.

So you opened the book with this line, Something Moved Me Once.

Your book, The Memory Palace, you're making an audiobook of it.

The book is brand new.

Thank you so much for the book The Memory Palace.

This is historian John Martini. Martini wrote a book about this place called Sutro's Glass Palace.

So named because this pool of water used to be underneath an enormous glass structure.

In his new book called How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain, Peter's written about his findings, including one invention that really shaped the supply chain system we know and don't exactly love today.

Peter, the book is so nicely put together and entertaining and tells such a complete story.

Peter Goodman's book is called How the World Ran Out of Everything Inside the Global Supply Chain. It is a fascinating read. So go check it out.

She hadn't read The Power Broker before and this podcast inspired her to pick it up and read it along with us.

I have now read this book three times.

The book itself, your guys' podcasts, their movies, their articles. It's just a phenomenal upwelling of interest about this book, you know, which is beloved by many for decades.

Robert Caro had taken a lot of time to assemble those facts and figures, and he made it into a compelling narrative that still feels relevant today.

It's a tour de force of journalism, and it really has become the default way of thinking about these topics.

I was recently reading Ursula K. Le Guin's book, The lathe of Heaven.

She says, the quality of the will to power is precisely growth. Achievement is its cancellation.

I wondered if she read The Power Broker when she was writing the science fiction novel.

And then someone pulled out the book, Massive Change, by Bruce Mao. And on the very first page, printed on the end paper itself, is the line.