Robert A. Caro

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.

Without accounting for the often-invisible work of others in his research, Robert Caro's new memoir is not so much inspiration as an exercise in self-celebration.

Preservationists like Jane Jacobs are urbanist heroes. But their rules can stifle.

Power and ambition in women are often hidden, buried, disguised, crushed, mocked, diminished, punished, or excoriated.

Did Robert Moses ordered engineers to build the Southern State Parkway’s bridges extra-low, to prevent poor people in buses from them? The truth is complex.

A 1974 review of Robert Caro's "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York."

An in-depth reckoning with the Gates Foundation as a discrete actor is long overdue.

On the early origins of a very American kind of writing.

My dad grew up in Robert Moses’s New York City. His story is a testament to how urban planning shapes countless lives.

Always a dealmaker, then-senator LBJ negotiated with segregationists to pass a bill that cautiously advanced racial equality.

From Seneca Village to “urban renewal,” the government has claimed Black property—rarely with the “just compensation” promised by the Fifth Amendment.

Richard Russell was a segregationist and a fervent opponent of civil rights. So why does his name still adorn the Russell Senate Office Building?

A serialized biography of Jane Grant (1892-1972), first woman reporter at The New York Times and co-founder of The New Yorker.

Why do most chroniclers of LBJ’s presidency miss the centrality and influence of the first lady?

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.

The Constitution originally provided for the selection of senators by state legislatures, but the 17th Amendment changed that, and with it, the Senate itself.

A deep dive into an archive will never be the same.

How the patron saint of progressive urban planning’s ideas and ideals were implemented – and corrupted.

New York City’s first planning commissioner lost a bigger battle against Robert Moses than the fight Jane Jacobs won.

Fifty years later, new accounts of its fraught passage reveal the era's real hero—and it isn’t the Supreme Court.