I'm halfway through the Audible version of Robert Caro's Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. It's a mammoth book, and well-written and researched. But it's getting a bit repetitive. Robert Moses, originally an idealist civil servant and reformer, turns into a power-hungry, morally compromised, and arrogant as hell political appointee of numerous mayors and governors of New York City and State, spanning the nineteen teens through the sixties. The book is a catalog of all the law-bending and backroom dealing that never really seems to stop. It's also hard to overstate the depth of Moses' influence on the shape, look, and demographics of the city. As the "Parks Commissioner" --among other appointed positions -- Moses built an absurd amount of parkways and roads and parks. This was often at the expense of the poor and people of color that were evicted to make room (the Riverside Park project, in order to save money, budgeted almost ten times more per mile of everywhere south of Harlem; pools in black neighborhoods were purposefully not heated because Moses thought black people shouldn't swim) though the rich and landed were also found themselves the victims of flat-out illegal land and power grabs. Moses was utterly tireless and industrious: he had a cavalcade of cars all turned into offices on wheels for him and the engineers and architects and lawyers that followed him almost everywhere he went. He operated outside the traditional bounds of legislative input and direction, because of his ability to fund his projects through tolls he collected, bonds he issued against future earnings, and other means. But I'm keeping on with the book to say that I've finished it.

I have Piketty's Capital up next on Audible. I'm also reading A Very Short Introduction to Jung. I think bfv recommended it. It puts me in a heady funk, and I'm only 50 pages in. Won't comment on the content yet, since it's so short and I haven't finished it, but will say that reading the biographies of highly prolific people makes me yearn for more self-discipline.

Sort of off-topic, but it's been on my mind a lot. What do people do in the age of distraction do to inculcate discipline?