Reading this book from the perspective of 2025, I think Robert Caro got Robert Moses wrong.1 Yes, he was obsessed with power. Yes, he ruined neighborhoods and destroyed communities with highways and slum clearance programs. Yes, he failed to treat the black citizens of New York City as having equal significance with its white citizens. He had all of these failings and it is important not to shy away from them.
Yes, Moses hoarded power. He had sharp elbows. He pushed the limits. He was also prepared, on time, organized, and ready to work tirelessly. He didnāt enrich himself or his family, but instead funneled money into getting power, so he could do more building. He built with all the limitations and blindspots of the generation he grew up in but he did build. He could be petty and attention seeking and yet he was also fantastically productive, not for just himself and his ego, but also for the people of New York.
Itās important while reading the book to pay attention to the other characters coming of age alongside Moses, people like Jimmy Walker, who are comically corrupt by todayās standards. When you do, you get the feeling that Caro is comparing Moses not to the other men and women who couldāve been chosen to lead at the time but to a hypothetical perfect public servant that never did exist and never could exist.
I first heard of Robert Moses in a City Planning Survey course that I took as a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill. The TA who taught the class had an infectious enthusiasm for city planning and so that summer I found myself reading the Jane Jacobs classic Death and Life of Great American Cities.2
So I came into the book with a sense that the problems with American Cities are downstream of the choices that Robert Moses and his disciples made to orient them towards cars and away from walking and public transportation and neighborhoods with a sense of place.
But after reading the book, I think the problem for American cities isnāt that Robert Moses ruined them, but that there have been no Robert Moseses since: civic leaders with the intellect and power to reshape cities with a new, imperfect vision of what the good life is. We know from Amsterdam and Paris that this sort of transformation is possible and yet weāve chosen to stay stuck in time, living with the same problems year after year.
The Robert Moses of 2025 would probably not favor cars over other forms of public transportation or redline minority neighborhoods. He would be imperfect in new ways that we cannot yet see or understand. But he would build.
Itās a credit to Caroās immense ability that I can read his work and come to very different conclusions about what it means. ↩
Best enjoyed this week in a sunny corner of a park
Worth your time
If youāve ever wanted to buy a life sized dinosaur, now is your chance. Someday my son is going to find out I had this opportunity and didnāt take it and will never look at me the same way again.
The Quiet Ones by Nikunj Kothari. An ode to the people that do the little things to make a company or a team effective.
I now realize that everything I lorded over other peopleāall the things I gatekept without consciously understanding that this was what I was doingāI didnāt need to do that. It really didnāt help anything. For some number of people who interacted with me, Iwas the problem. I couldāve been more tolerant or forgiving, I couldāve said āletās find out together,ā I couldāve let other people have the fun once in a while.
Iāve become obsessed with the tops of trees, in particular in the morning or the evening when the sun is hitting them. For some insect or bird or leaf that spot is the center of the world.
Letās see if I can land the plane on this one. Iām surprised that there isnāt more nostalgic fiction about growing up in evangelical Christian circles. Thereās satirical stuff like Saved but nothing that Iām aware of like The Big Sick that both pokes fun at being a child of immigrants while also on some level clearly feeling affection for it. Is this out there and I just donāt know about it?
Are we at the point where āyes, andā¦ā is overrated? If not, how long until we get there?
Something I struggled with this week: for someone like you and me, in 2025, what does it mean to live a good life? At 19, it was easier for me to articulate an answer to this question I actually believed than it is now in many ways. If you feel like you have a good answer to this, consider this me humbly requesting that you write it and share it.
Things I learned
Apparently Marie Antoinette never said āLet them eat cakeā, according to a recent Rest Is History Bonus episode. Iām a sucker forthings we think that arenāt actually so. Also from a RIH bonus episode: apparently the US now requires people to share their social media handles to get a travel visa. What are we doing here people?
China installed more industrial robots last year than the rest of the world combined. This is one of those stats that a 17 year old is going to be citing in an AP History Exam in 2084 about why China won the war for Taiwan.
This weekās episode is best paired with a hot cup of coffee and Wild Ways by Josh Ritter playing in the background. Last episode was too LLM heavy, for which I apologize. Iāve done my best to group all of that into LLM corner so as not to let it overshadow everything.
Worth your time
Uri says we should not allow 18 year olds to sign long term contracts. So, so many thoughts here.
1. I remember a conversation I had with my best friend when he was a brand new army officer out of college ROTC about all the 18 year old privates he worked with that had 19% car loans.
2. Jonathan Haidt opened my eyes to the way social media companies get teenagers to agree terms of service that they very obviously should not be able to agree to without their parents consent. I cannot believe we allow this!
3. Matt Levineās Certificate of Dumb Investment continues to seem underrated to me.
PSA: How to fold fitted sheets, via the Browser. I sent this to my wife and she very nicely said to me something to the effect of āisnāt this the same way I taught you to do it?ā š¤£
āWhen outsiders succeed, itās usually through reframing problems in āparadigm shiftsā. They benefit from not being too attached to existing theories.āFrom a thread on outsiders solving problems.
Our parenting hack of the year so far is having cut vegetables ready at the table when our kids get home from school. The percentage of vegetables consumed is up like 10x and compliance to the routine of coming in, washing hands, and sitting down at the table has risen as well. Recommended and thanks to Emily Oster for the suggestion.
Things I learned
German chocolate cake was invented in United States, via the Kroger App. Someone needs to figure out why the Kroger app has so many delightful facts in it. This is someoneās passion project! I'll buy you a nice bottle of wine if you find this person and introduce them to me.
80% of Swiss are satisfied with their lives. I am not sponsored by the Swiss government, but I am open to it if they are reading.
The Pangolin is the only mammal with scales. Peacock is the name of the males only; the female are peahens. The species is called peafowl. Via The Animal Book.
āShe does that to her family. She does that to her friends. She does that to me,ā he lamented. āShe doesnāt seem to be capable of creating her own social interactions anymore.ā
I worry a lot that the sycophancy of the agents have made me less flexible with people who (of course) are less likely to defer to me. I am not sure how to measure this, but I wish I could.
Sort of a musing, but I think we owe Blake Lemoine and apology.
I'm blatantly stealing this from Matt Holden who taught it to me, but I think about it all the time and I want a reference page to be able to point myself and others too.
When working on a team, there are three levels to work on:
Level 1: Agree on the problem to be solved
Level 2: Agree on the approach to solving the problem
Level 3: Agree on the details
Many disagreements happen when you skip these levels or give level 3 feedback when people are looking for level 1 recognition.
This is a book with a handful of big ideas:
1. There are considerable similarities between the UFO stories of the 1950s and 1960s (then current, the book was published in 1969) and the stories of fairies / angels and demons / other mythical creatures from before the space age
2. Those similarities are interesting even if you donāt believe that UFOs come from extraterrestrial life
3. Even if these phenomena arenāt real the way the Empire State Building is real, they still impact the world in real ways
4. The (then current) UFO stories are folklore in the making, which makes it interesting in its own way
Iāve never gone deep on aliens / UFOs so Iām not up on the lore, but I think most of the points above are now mainstream?
Beyond this, there were a ton of stories about weird things happening, including a series of stories from 1890s America that just seemed bizarre. The one that will stick with me is the Mystery Airship of 1896 and 1897 where (potentially?) an airship floats around the western and midwestern states, occasionally stopping and having conversations with local farmers. You can choose to believe this or not, but either way itās a fun wikipedia read.
On the whole, this increased my belief in the supernatural marginally.