With less than a week until Election Day (though we’ll no doubt wait longer for reliable results), you may want nothing less than to dig into tiny-fonted books or New Yorker 30-pagers on the vulgar vagaries of our elected officials — but let’s amass a list of recs anyway! You can always come back to it later.

Or you can hide from our current reality with a deep dive into the Nixonian psyche with my suggestion, Being Nixon: A Man Divided (it’s more an analysis than a history, but it’s the best Nixon book I’ve read, and I’ve read many). Closer to home, The Soprano State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption might make my “New Orleans on the Passaic” jokes about my hometown’s power structures make sense (and there’s no shortage of material on ol’ Bob Menendez). Podcast-wise, Rachel Maddow’s Bag Man shed a light not just on the crimes and misdemeanors of Spiro Agnew, but on how amateurish and dowdy so many of these pol frauds turn out to be.

Books, magazine pieces, pods, American Experience episodes…let’s put together a study group at the electoral college!

(I’m sorry, I really am.) — SDB