Awesome

From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974), a summary of roads and bridges. Wait for the last sentence:

Those highways and bridges were awesome. The transportation network built by Robert Moses after World War II ranks with the greatest feats of urban construction in recorded history. Possibly it outranks them all. Possibly it is history’s greatest feat of urban construction. The longest tunnel in the Western Hemisphere, the longest suspension bridge in the world, the largest and most complex traffic interchanges ever built — these were all merely segments of that achievement. Its over-all scale can perhaps best be grasped by a single statistic: mileage. The “urban” highways — controlled-access through roads within cities and the heavily populated surrounding suburbs — built in America during the quarter century following the Second World War dwarfed any urban highway or system of highways built in any country in the world any time in recorded history. In 1964, when Robert Moses completed his major highway building, there were completed or well under way in the New York metropolitan region 899 miles of such highways — 627 built by him, many of the rest, most of which were in New Jersey, built as a result of the Joint Program he worked out with the Port Authority. No other metropolitan region in America possessed 700 miles of such highways. No other metropolitan region possessed 600 miles — or 500. Even Los Angeles, which presented itself to history as the most highway-oriented of cities — which was, in fact, not a city in the older sense in which New York was a city but a collection of suburbs whose very existence was due to highways — possessed in 1964 only 459 miles of such highways. No city in America had more than half as many miles of such highways as New York. But nothing about his roads was as awesome as the congestion on them.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

David Lynch (1946–2024)

The filmmaker has died at the age of seventy-eight. The Guardian has an obituary. The Criterion Channel has a large selection of movies and extras. (But no Blue Velvet.)

From a statement by Lynch’s family: “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.‘”

I’ll footnote that for anyone who might wonder: “Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole” is from an old bit of folk poetry known as “The Optimist’s Creed.” It’s perhaps best known as the motto of the Mayflower Shops, a New York chain that served coffee and doughnuts. The Mayflower version reads like so:

As you ramble on thru Life, Brother,
Whatever be your Goal,
Keep your eye upon the Doughnut,
And not upon the Hole.

From a 2024 interview, some sobering words from David Lynch himself, who suffered from emphysema:

“Smoking was something that I absolutely loved, but in the end, it bit me. It was part of the art life for me: the tobacco and the smell of it, and lighting things and smoking and going back and sitting back and having a smoke and looking at your work, or thinking about things; nothing like it in this world is so beautiful. Meanwhile, it’s killing me. So I had to quit.”

Swinging the meat ax

Robert Moses, hacking his way through neighborhoods. From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

When he replied to protests about the hardships caused by his road-building programs, he generally replied that succeeding generations would be grateful. It was the end that counted, not the means. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Once, in a speech, he said:

You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.

The metaphor, like most Moses metaphors, was vivid. But it was incomplete. It expressed his philosophy, but it was not philosophy but feelings that dictated Moses’ actions. He didn’t just feel that he had to swing a meat ax. He loved to swing it.

Related reading
All OCA Robert Caro posts (Raindrop.io)

Joe Biden’s farewell address

The delivery was less than inspiring. But the message should be taken to heart. Two excerpts:

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.

*

You know, in his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.

We all know whom he’s talking about. They’ll be there in force on Monday.

[My transcription, omitting a couple of flubbed words.]

Robert Caro, Mongol user

I found this Arnold Newman photograph by chance. It’s from 1975 and shows Robert Caro in his office, holding a Mongol pencil in his hand.

Robert Moses, the subject of Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, was once filmed with a Mongol in his hand.

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“You just open it up and you go”

John Lamberti, an LAPD homicide detective, talking about a tool specific to his profession that he really likes using. From Dan Heath’s podcast What It’s Like to Be:

“Okay, this is gonna sound crazy, but it is my notebook. It is basic, it is unapologetically analog, and I am otherwise all in on technology, and I’ve tried talking notes digitally, but I’ve yet to find a good substitute for a pen and paper. I don’t have to turn it on; I don’t have to make sure it’s charged; I don’t have to make sure it’s connected to wi-fi; it can’t shut down and reboot on me randomly. You just open it up and you go. And everything lives in my notebook: all the details from my crime scene, notes from my witness interviews, observations that I made. It’s where you capture like the raw data of the story as it’s unfolding, and it is with me every step of the way. I don’t go anywhere without my notebook.”

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[My transcription.]

Deafness, symbolic and non-

In 1950, Robert Moses’s lieutenants began to notice that the boss was going deaf. From From Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974):

In a way, of course, Moses’ deafness was symbolic. He had, in a way, been deaf all his life — unwilling to listen to anyone, public, Mayor, Governor, deaf to all opinion save his own. But this new, physical deafness contributed in a nonsymbolic, very real way to his divorce from reality. As always, he would not attend public hearings or in any other way place himself in a situation in which he could hear the public’s views. His insulation inside a circle of men who would offer no views that were not echoes of his own further insured that no outside voices would become a part of his considerations. Now, thanks to the deafness, he was unable to hear the views, get the thinking of those administrators and public officials who were invited to lunch with him or who sat with him in conferences. Surrounded by men who would not give him the new facts and figures he needed, with no time left to rethink solutions to changing problems — most important, with no feeling that there was any reason for him to rethink — the deafness made it impossible for him to learn about the new realities even if he had wanted to.

The proof is a statement he made about golf. If there was any area in which the Robert Moses of the 1920’s had been truly expert it was in the area of recreation, in the active games which adults liked to play. But now he mentioned offhandedly that golf was not a game in which the masses were interested; it was, he said, played only by the “privileged few.” Golf was now a game played by millions in all walks of life. But Moses didn’t know this. His statement would have been true in the Twenties and he thought it was still true in the Fifties.

Because he didn’t know anything had changed.

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Some of Tom’s Typewriters

An exhibit in Sag Harbor, New York: Some of Tom’s Typewriters: From the Collection of Tom Hanks Installed by Simon Doonan. Here’s a Guardian article about the exhibit.

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[“Some typewriters” means thirty-five typewriters.]

The goods

Here is a PDF of Jack Smith’s report on the election interference case. Its concluding paragraph:

The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a President is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Office stands fully behind. Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the Presidency, the Office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.

The Contrarian

Jennifer Rubin has resigned from The Washington Post:

Jeff Bezos and his fellow billionaires accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to our democracy’s survival and capacity to thrive.

I therefore have resigned from The Post, effective today. In doing so, I join a throng of veteran journalists so distressed over The Post’s management they felt compelled to resign.

With Norm Eisen, Rubin has launched an independent effort in journalism, The Contrarian.

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