It's the Brian Lairn Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. For the end of this holiday week,

we put together some favorite recent segments, slightly polished up, including two from our centennial series,

100 Years of 100 Things. We will look today at the 100-year history of school culture wars

from the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925 to Project 2025. Also a conversation about loneliness

and why it's not so much about how many or how few friends

we have and we'll weigh the good and the bad and the legacy of Robert Moses, the man responsible

for so much of New York City's infrastructure. We'll talk first about what he built and then a

follow-up with a segment on efforts to undo some of his more problematic work.

So let's start here with a look at a century of the man who built so much of New York.

Enjoy.

Now we continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

And it's kind of a two-for-one.

A hundred years of Robert Moses,

the iconic urban planner who designed so much of New York's infrastructure for better and for

worse. And 50 years of the power broker, the iconic book about Robert Moses, written by

Robert Carroll. Robert Moses grew up in New Haven and Manhattan.

110 years ago in 1914, he earned a doctorate in political science from Columbia.

He started out in public life as an idealist and a reformer. A hundred years ago, in

1924, Governor Al Smith appointed Moses to several positions overseeing

parks, including president of the Long Island State Park Commission. And in that year,

1924, 100 years ago, Robert Moses conceived of building Jones Beach. He talked about it in a 1959 interview, I think this is

from NBC News, in a series titled Manufacturing Intellect. Now, you take a thing like,

...