Three Fun Things for December 10, 2023

Seattle's history in videos, a thriller about incompetent spies, and a podcast about the greatest nonfiction book ever written (and rarely read).

1. Did you know the Seattle city archivist has a Youtube channel of historical videos? I learned about this incredible collection of time capsules this week, when a source sent me a brief documentary on the history of Hooverville—and, more broadly, the thousands of “shacks” homeless people constructed across the city— as a DIY form of housing at a time when the city failed to see homelessness as a housing problem.

That video (below), which documents the city’s wholesale destruction of thousands of makeshift residences between 1941 and 1942, mostly by burning, reveals first that people have been trying to make homelessness disappear by eliminating its most visible symptoms for much longer than we might imagine. Eighty years ago, it was shacks in the parts of town businesses wanted to use for profit; today, it’s tents that get in the way of commerce in places like downtown.

Second, it shows that the places where homeless people tend to end up haven’t changed much—people go, or are driven into, industrial areas and other places where they hope they won’t be noticed, like SoDo, Georgetown, and the onetime Interbay garbage dump (now home to playfields and a nine-hole golf course.)

You can look for specific stories in this video archive or spin it like a disco ball; choosing three videos at random brought me to a story about efforts in the 1970s to landscape intersection “triangles” that were previously barren; a silent color video of some City Light guys playing golf in the 1950s; and a cardiganed Steve Pool at the zoo explaining koalas to kids.

2. Slow Horses, on Apple TV

THEE Mick Jagger wrote and performed the ridiculous (but pitch-perfect) song that plays during the opening and closing credits of this twisty British spy thriller. “Strange Game” is the first TV theme by Jagger, who’s a fan of the books on which the series is based. The story is a grimy spin on standard spy stuff: A group of MI5 agents who’ve been sentenced to professional purgatory in Slough House, because of embarrassing incidents or sheer incompetence, stumble and stagger their way through cases that more often than not end up implicating the government itself. It’s a cynical take on spycraft that’s bolstered by Gary Oldman’s absolute commitment to the bit. His character, Jackson Lamb, is as loathsome as he is cunning— unshowered, undignified, and always ready to deploy a tactical fart in a closed car if it moves the plot along.

3. Two of my favorite podcast hosts, Elliott Kalan (of The Flop House) and Roman Mars (from 99 Percent Invisible) are hosting a year-long podcast about The Power Broker, a strong contender for the greatest work of 20th-century nonfiction and a bookshelf prop for anyone hoping to show off their urbanist cred on Zoom.

About 10 years ago, I read my copy of The Power Broker to death: The thing wasn’t fit to use as a doorstop, much less display proudly on a bookshelf to show off my urbanist cred. A few years ago, I bought a replacement copy, and the existence of this podcast has prompted me to dive in again. What strikes me most this time around, 100 pages into the nearly-1200-page volume, is the lack of judgment in Caro’s language. Observing his subject without tipping his hand allows Caro to build up Robert Moses, starting with his birth in 1888, as an idealist with big, world-changing dreams before eventually revealing the true subject (and subtitle) of his book: “The fall of New York,” largely at Moses’ hands.

Kalan and Mars plan to spend a year reading the book, and seem to plan to go through it in chronological order, enabling readers to get through it too, at a languid rate of about 100 pages a month. Trust me, though, if you get past the mental block of reading such a long work of history—Caro helps a lot, by providing thematic relief from chapter to chapter, but you can also think of it as three or four regular-size books—you’ll soon find that, like me, you can’t put it down.

The first episode of “Breaking Down the Power Broker,” featuring Conan O’Brien, is here.