The Ezra Klein Show

The final book I'd recommend is The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef, which is just a wonderful book for expressing a kind of mode of reasoning that really resonates with me, which is rather than, you know, soldier mindset ... you're just trying to explore and figure out what does the landscape look like?

author of the book, The Scout Mindset.

Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it's the best depiction of a postAGI future, an optimistic postAGI future where we're traveling the stars and humanity sort of reached its full flourishing.

And then finally, I would recommend Consider Phlebas by Ian Banks, which is part of the Culture series of novels. Very formative for me and I read that while I was writing Theme Park. And I still think it's the best depiction of a postAGI future, an optimistic postAGI future where we're traveling the stars and humanity sort of reached its full flourishing.

I did give out Stamped from the Beginning by Irving Mex Kendi quite a few times. For me, it was, it was a life changer for me.

I loved his previous book, Stamped from the Beginning, which I still think everyone should read, even if you've read, by the way, How to Be an Antiracist.

The argument in Stamped from the Beginning is that racist policies don't follow from racist ideas the way we normally think they do. Racist ideas follow from racist policies.

There's an argument in the book, and it's also core to the book, You Are Before It, which I love, Stamped from the Beginning, that has really influenced me.

In 2018, Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, released a book that became a sensation on the right. It was called The Virtue of Nationalism, and it sought to build a right that could withstand the challenge that liberals like Obama had posed.

Yoram Hazoni, who wrote a book called The Virtue of Nationalism.

The Virtue of Nationalism.

I would recommend Michael Pollan's latest book. This Is Your Mind on Plants. I think anything he writes is really interesting. This is about opium, coffee and mescaline, essentially.

I would recommend Michael Pollan's latest book, This Is Your Mind on Plants, which covers opium, coffee and mescaline and is really interesting.

Let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It's Dr. Suzanne Simard and the book is Finding the Mother Tree.

Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what's happening underground at the root level in a forest.

It's the book by Dr. Suzanne Simard... the work of a scientist who showed that forests are wired up in very complex and identifiable ways, with trees sharing sugars, hydrocarbons, and secondary metabolites through fungal networks.

She also wrote A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

She also wrote A Tale for the Time Being, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

like when I read A Tale for the Time Being, I was struggling with a lot of suicidal ideation and just basic depression and anxiety.

So my first book is by Andrew Solomon it's called Far From the Tree and it made a huge impact on me.

Andrew Solomon has this wonderful book Far From the Tree which is all about a variety of the horizontal identities so identities that are not passed on from parents to children. And it's all about the difficulty of navigating that when you're trying to navigate difficulty of navigating that distance that forms between parents and children.

And it is Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. It's not very long, but it really gets to the heart of who Jesus is, what he means in a political context, and what Christian nonviolence looks like in the world.

My religious book is Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman... it's a beautiful book, not very long, but it really gets to the heart of who Jesus is and what Christian nonviolence looks like.

The third book is My Promised Land by Arishafet, which mirrors Rashid Khalidi's hundreds of words on Palestine. And to me, that was helpful because it shows that the Zionist colonial project started like in the 80s and sort of confirm what Rashid Khalidi say in a lot of places. The 1880s. The 1880s, yeah.

When I think about Israel, I always think about this book written in 2013 by Ari Shavit... called My Promised Land. And I recommend this book to everybody. I think it is the single best book on what Israel is because it is a book that is better able than any other to hold both the idealism and violence at its heart.

I was looking at my notes from My Promised Land. I have, and you should take this as a compliment, 188 highlights in that book.

The first one is called A Time to Build. It's really a rehash of almost everything we've talked about today.

Yuval ... author of a bunch of great books, but most recently, A Time to Build, which I highly recommend.

Well, right now I'm reading The Director, which is by my Austrian friend Daniel Kilman. It's a wonderful book about the filmmaker W.G. Pabst, who went back to Germany in the middle of the war and made movies all the way through the war.

He read The Fraud first, because I hadn't read his in translation yet, and he said these books are the same.

Well, right now I'm reading The Director, which is by my Austrian friend Daniel Kilman. It's a wonderful book about the filmmaker W.G. Pabst, who went back to Germany in the middle of the war and made movies all the way through the war. It's very like The Fraud.

Historical fiction, this one is actually for Joe. I just started reading it actually. Marriage at Sea, which is a true story of a couple in the 1970s that gets shipwrecked by a whale.

Marriage at Sea, which is a true story of a couple in the 1970s that gets shipwrecked by a ... Something whaling related? A whale. Oh, that's great.

Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy ... anticipates many changes with social media and is very predictive about the shift from oral to literate societies.

Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy which I've been talking about a lot which is basically the way like our communication environment is such that we're like an oral society increasingly not just by the fact that we literally talk more on a podcast but that everything is back and forth in this and therefore you don't have this sort of logical contemplation of the person sitting alone in a room actually reading text and judging text on its own merits.

He's the author of the great book, How Rights Went Wrong, and he believes that America's approach to constitutional law went awry a long time ago.

you argue in the book that there's something more fundamental separating American courts from international peers and it's how we treat rights.

He's the author of a book called How Rights Went Wrong, and in it, he argued that America does constitutional law all wrong, that we do it in a way that other countries don't, in a way that is tearing our country apart.

You argue in the book that there's something more fundamental separating American courts from international peers, and it's how we treat rights.

This is what I spent the most time wrestling with in your book, which is whether or not there is value to the American effort, the effort we have in the way we treat the courts in this country to create a fig leaf of separate authority for the other, less democratic institution.

One of the central themes of James Forman's Locking Up Our Own is the way that the Black community and Black politicians have for decades been asking for these kinds of bothand solutions. Not only more police officers but also investments in jobs and poverty alleviation and mental health and addiction services.

Pulitzer Prize winning author of Locking Up Our Own, Crime and Punishment in Black America. Just an essential book for this moment.

you write, quote, For residents of the city's poorest neighborhoods, especially young people, this treatment became part of a social contract, a tax paid in exchange for the right to move.

the book was essential reading and it was utterly essential for this moment.

The second book is Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, which I have been teaching for 25 years... It is a wonderful kind of imagining of an anarchist society on a planet called Anares, and it sort of reflects on the deficiencies of both capitalism and communism as it was in the 20th century.

Now, that one is easy because I'm an Ursula Le Guin fan and hands down like dispossessed as always in my favorite work of science fiction, partly because I read it as one of the first books I read after learning English.

The third book is by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark, untold histories, wild possibilities... it is a muchneeded balm for political cynicism and despair.

I would start with a book that I carry around everywhere with me, which is Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark, which is actually a book that when one of my sons was getting very, very panicky, as teenage boys tend to do about climate change, she had me give to him and talk about with him. And it's really a book that is like a very, I think, profound meditation on hope and why it matters and how we achieve it. And that it's not airyfairy. It's just a thing we have to grasp for.

David Itzkoff's book about the movie Network, Mad as Hell.

Lionel Shriver, also a colleague of mine at The Spectator, has a book that's a couple of years old. A novel called The Mandibles, which is essentially a, imagine the Royal Tenenbaums going through a deep financial crisis and it's very entertaining and dryly witty.

A novel called The Mandibles, which is essentially a, imagine the Royal Tenenbaums going through a deep financial crisis and it's very entertaining and dryly witty.