🚢Containers

An eight-part audio documentary from 2017 about how the shipping container remade trade, told from the port of Oakland: the ships, the people who work them, and the city beside the terminal.

Eight episodes, made in 2017 by a journalist who lives beside the port of Oakland and decided to find out what was in the boxes. A finished thing with a first part and a last part, which is rarer in podcasts than it should be.

I closed 📕 The Box on the flight home from Lisbon on 24 May and started this the next morning, Sunday the 25th, because I was not ready to stop. Finished on Sunday 1 June. That afternoon I was standing in 🏛️ Vellan Maritime Museum with Edith Brouwer at the container exhibition while she corrected two captions out loud. I do not think I have ever had a better-timed week of reading, listening and looking.

The book is the economics. This is the people. Levinson tells you that the cost of loading a ship collapsed. Here a retired docker tells you what his hands used to do all day and what replaced them.

• The book explains the box. The series explains the port, and the neighbourhood behind the port, and the crew who see a city for six hours.
• It is about one harbour on the far side of the world and I recognised Greywater Docks in every episode.
• About half an hour each. I walked the long way to the tram all week.

It is where the middle of 📝 Issue 40 - A box that changed the map would have come from, if issue 40 had not sent itself while I was inside a cloud in Sintra.

Listening Status: Finished, all eight

What It Prompted: 📖 Levinson on the container · 💎 Standardising the boring part is what frees the interesting part · 🔭 How the container changed ports · 🎫 Container exhibition at the Maritime Museum · 🏛️ Crane No. 4 · 🕰️ My father's repair notebooks