The Ezra Klein Show

My favorite, maybe my favorite book of all time is Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. It's just like the right amount creepy and Christian and like the Christhaunted South and bizarre stuff going on, also beautifully written.

I wanted to start with Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, which I think is about the best book about the psychic distortions of our experience living especially online in the first year or two of the pandemic, having so much of our external world withdrawn, and the sort of crash course in libertarianism, lack of society, living entirely online, everything that does to our minds.

For those who enjoy science fiction, and especially if you need an audiobook for a long drive, I would recommend Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.

The first is called Noise, a flaw in human judgment. It's by Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein. In this book, he's focusing more on Noise and variability of human decisions. For example, given identical cases, a judge might make different rulings, perhaps influenced by whether his or her local sports team won or lost that weekend.

let's talk about some of your earlier work ... your book, Expert Political Judgment, from 2005, in which you concluded that the average expert on economics or politics was roughly as accurate as a dartthrowing chimpanzee.

One is Charles King's Gods of the Upper Air, which is a history of anthropology and relativism.

It's about the development of an antiracist idea in opposition to the kind of racial hierarchies that had dominated in science before the early 20th century.

Kiese is author of the awardwinning memoir, Heavy.

I read Heavy and I was angry.

I was angry at how vulnerable you were and how powerful you were.

In her recent book, Easy Beauty, Jones explores beauty in its many, many forms.

We are, of course, talking about your book, Easy Beauty, a beautiful book, but also a lot of other ideas that I think reading this really lyrical, moving text would bring up with the reader.

There's this book I love and I go back to it called Comfortable with Uncertainty. It's by the Buddhist teacher Pema Chdrn, who has also written really, really, really wellknown beloved books like When Things Fall Apart and Welcoming the Unwelcome.

It's like When Things Fall Apart. Comfortable with uncertainty. How we live is how we die. But, you know, a different kind of freedom. Welcoming the unwelcome.

The book is called On the Edge, The Art of Risking Everything.

I want to end on a part of your book I found really interesting, which is about the physical experience of risk in gambling, but in other things. You talk about pain tolerance, you talk about how the body feels when you're behind on a hand and you're losing your chips, you've talked about being on tilt, but I see it in politics too.

I would start Breakfast of Champions with Vonnegut or maybe Player Piano.

I read his first volume of his presidential memoirs, Promised Land

you wrote in Promised Land, you could see it happening

I mean, in some ways, this is, I think, Paul Seabright's book, The Company of Strangers.

The second book I would recommend is by the French philosopher about Camus The Rebel I think a lot of thinking is essentially that the nature of human existence is to be searching for meaning in a universe that refuses to give you any and that we have to kind of walk on that tight rope of wanting things to have meaning and knowing that we won't receive that from any kind of external force.

One was Behave by Robert Sapolsky.

Chasing the Scream did this for drug addiction, Lost Connections did it for depression and loneliness.

The journalist Will Storr has this great book, The Status Game.

He just published a book called The Reactionary Spirit, how America's most insidious political tradition swept the world.

And the final one, in a similar vein, is Graham Greene's book, The Quiet American. I think that one of the, one of, sometimes novels do it better than anything else. There's a novel set in Vietnam through the eyes of a sour, dyspeptic, worldweary British journalist who sees this very idealistic American who believes that America is going to be able to, you know, bring peace, justice, and virtue to Vietnam.

He has a children's book "Antiracist Baby".