I spent all of last year reading all of Robert Caro's books. I started with the Power Broker, and while I would have been happy to just finish that, I finished it ahead of schedule and had time to plough my way through the rest of his Lyndon Johnson books. It took me all year - I finished the last book during the first week of January, 2025. Coincidentally, 2025 is the 50th year anniversary of the Power Broker, so I got to go to a New York Historical Society exhibit where the masters process was laid bare.

While the entire exhibit was awe inspiring, some things stood out:

• Caro had a log of how many words he wrote every day. Even this prolific writer seemed to have a reasonable number of "0 (lazy)" entries in that book.
• He writes in cursive first to slow down his thinking. He talks about how one of his editors said "don't think with your fingers". This hits home for me in a world with AI, where we are unbound not just from thinking upfront about our code, but can outsource that thinking entirely to the speed of GPUs - but what is the cost to quality? A recent plane ride where I wrote code for ~10 hours without any internet, and any distractions really makes me think that it's not always useful or better to have an agent do work for us.
• On the destruction of East Tremont: "What is the cost of (one) generation of human suffering"?

All this inspired me to give myself a birthday gift - a hardcover copy of the Power Broker signed by Caro (completing my collection of all his books). A little bonus fact I discovered when picking up the book is that he is supposedly done with the last LBJ book, and it's off at the editors!!