For the past few months I've been listening to Robert Caro's The Power Broker on audiobook (which has far and away the best narration I've ever heard - props to

For the past few months I've been listening to Robert Caro's The Power Broker on audiobook (which has far and away the best narration I've ever heard - props to Robertson Dean!) and am about 40 hours in out of 65. The book is about a NYC administrator named Robert Moses who operated from roughly 1930-1970, and is quite eye-opening in its depiction of how the sausage is made in public works projects. I greatly recommend it if you have any interest at all in the nature of power within these areas. Robert Moses was famous in his time for "getting things done", which he was certainly successful at - but to think this required him to sweep away all the corruption and graft is absolutely untrue. He turned it to his own ends and operated successfully within an amazingly corrupt system, paying off everybody he could. All of this was non-transparently funded with money from public authorities, like bridge operators collecting tolls whose capitalization and disbursement were purely controlled by him. So we know this public toilet costs $1.7 million, which honestly isn't too astonishing a sum, but another era it also probably would have cost that - you just wouldn't know it unless you dug through the records decades after everyone involved was dead. Also the toilet would have, like, displaced an entire block of ethnic minority families or something. And had an elevated highway built over it.