The Ezra Klein Show

Recently, and pretty randomly, I picked up Jeff Tweedy's book, How to Write One Song... I really didn't expect it to be such a delight. I loved it.

But I will say it is my favorite selfhelp book I've read in a long time.

He's got this insistence that it can and should just be part of a balanced life, just part of a balanced day... I loved it.

by a Harvard astrophysicist named Avi Loeb in which he makes the rather controversial argument ... Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Second would be Private Government by Elizabeth Anderson. I think that's a really useful, accessible book about how we consider democracy in all of our lives except for the workplace.

And then a book that came out after I wrote my book but one by an author who I quote in the book at the very beginning when I define capitalists is Jonathan Levy and he published a book I think it was last year Ages of American Capitalism where he goes through this history of American capitalism and combines institutional legal and cultural and economic history in a way that I found enormously inspiring.

And I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy to sort of take a break from all this heavy stuff. One that I'll call out is Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, a great example of how humanity might muddle through the next couple hundred years.

I can't really point to a conventional religious text as an atheist, but I guess I would say Annie Dillard's book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. That is a book about feeling the wonders of nature and experiencing those as a way of being close to the divine.

One of them is a book called The UFO Experience, A Scientific Inquiry by J. Allen Hynek.

We read the book Native Son. Now, if you've never read Native Son, the main character in Native Son murders a woman and then puts her in a furnace.

it's a book by a guy called Timur Kuran, who's a somewhat conservative libertarian professor in Duke, called Private Truths, Public Lies.

I've gone from reading about what life is like in authoritarian countries kind of books, right? I feel like we've already passed that. Now I'm trying to be more hopeful and trying to figure out books about, like, nonviolent protest and resistance and Civil Resistance, What Everyone Needs to Know by Erica Chenoweth.

The first book makes you stronger if you do The Stoic Challenge over a couple months; you get stronger and you're not as reactive to negative things.

Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class.

The sociologist Elizabeth Currid-Halkett had this fascinating book a few years ago called The Sum of Small Things ... she finds that the things that elites currently do to signal status are they'll read The New Yorker, they'll buy local or fair trade goods, they'll listen to NPR ...

You should start by reading some of his speeches about America, which are really exceptionally interesting and profound and still tell us something about ourselves. And you should end up reading the reflections on the revolution in France, which was his deepest and fullest expression of his political views and is an extraordinarily powerful piece of writing.