The Ezra Klein Show

So I love Extra Life by Stephen Johnson. It's zooming out to say isn't it remarkable that we have basically added an Extra Life

One of my favorite books, I think, is Normal Accidents by Charles Perrault, which is Living with High Risk Technologies. And it's about like, sort of accidents like Three Mile Island.

It's called Addiction by Design.

Natasha Dow Schll, Addiction by Design.

She did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It's a kind of a presmartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit.

The first that I would recommend is a book I returned to again and again, and it's called Liquidated, an Ethnography of Wall Street by Karen Ho.

It is a fantastic and incredibly readable book. And I think that anyone who hates the culture of overwork and wants to understand exactly what they want to reject, will find this really illuminating.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates' new book, The Message, he writes of a trip he took to Israel and the West Bank in May of 2023.

the political importance of your book is you're somebody who walked in, opened your eyes, and this is what you see.

I can recommend also, you know, the book of Dory Kearns Goodwin. I like to read her history books, which are absolutely fascinating about, you know, the revivals and of Lincoln, of Johnson, of you name it. But she read also Wait Till Next Year, which is a personal story, not her biography, but a personal story about her time in Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Dodgers were still the most popular baseball team, which was part of her life.

I struggled with Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition. Not the reading it, of course. It's a joy to read, like everything Michael Lewis does, but I did struggle with its central argument.

And there were people who had that plan. Michael Lewis's book, he's following characters who saw this coming early and were trying to raise the alarms on it.

Remarkably Bright Creatures, which is this, like, lovely story about a woman who finds companionship with an octopus. ... it brought me a lot of joy.

Paul Starr's classic Social Transformation of American Medicine because I've been trying to get my attention back on the health care issue.

he has a new book out, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, which follows up his short story collection Uncommon Type, both of which are a real delight.

So I wanted to start in your earlier book of short stories, Uncommon Type.