Caro’s The Power Broker: a book notorious for being referred to far more often than read, and you’ll have an inkling as to why once you see a copy in the wild, given it’s about the same size and weight as a breezeblock. The institution was persuaded to take the plunge by a friend and colleague, who will be following along with the 99% Invisible podcast’s read-along, which is projected to last the whole of 2024. That’s only 100 pages per month!

(Apparently no one other than Caro had really clocked to just how much of a systematic asshole Moses actually was until this book was first published, which seems inconceivable given that cover image. Any man capable of posing for that picture in that way would seem self-evidentially to be a total and indeed totemic asshole—though perhaps this is a combination of hindsight, bias, and differing fashions in power poses across generational cohorts.)