The Ezra Klein Show

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.

And it also perpetuates ... this is a type of argument that ... in almost every chapter of The Unbroken Thread gets recapitulated

the second uh is a book that's on the list of the top 10 banned books from the ala called Flamer by mike corrado it's a book about a kid at sleepaway camp and i read it this summer when my kid was at sleepaway camp and you know you read it and you in that what we're talking about like do they want to ban the book or they want to ban the person and you read this beautiful tender story of a kid struggling with his sexual identity at a boy scout camp and it's so beautiful and sweet and gorgeous so just a perfect graphic novel i think

Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas wrote a book called The Wise Men, and it was a story of six people who were instrumental in building the post-World War II American order.

The second is called What's Our Problem by Tim Urban. This is one of the best nonfiction books I have read in a very long time.

another book about moments in time when inequality really changed The Great Leveler. And I would say that the takeaway of that book is the only forces stronger than those protecting great inequality of wealth are wars, plagues and total societal collapse.

And then the third one is The World For Sale. It's about the commodities market. It's about an area that has massive geopolitical as well as economic and financial consequences, and that's not as well understood as it should be.

I was reading one of the books I was going to recommend to you at the end of this conversation. It's a book called Stalin's War by Sean McMeekin. It's a history of World WarII.

The fourth one, because I'm cheating, is a book by a former housemate of mine, Elbridge Colby called The Strategy of Denial, which is essentially about this new age of great power competition and the challenge to US global leadership that China poses, what we ought to do about it, why we ought to prioritize it.

the third book a little controversial is called Shorting the Grid by meredith angwin ... the first half of the book is like the best explanation of how electricity markets actually work ... she argues that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system and that they give preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables

Beautiful Country ... was a story of an immigrant family who had come from China to live in New York and what it's like to be undocumented ... it was a memoir and a narrative tale which I often give memoirs a hard time, but this one was a real keeper.

So right at the beginning there is almost a beat-for-beat reference to the beginning of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis.

He just published a book making some of these arguments,

Politics as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

I was obsessed for my entire teenagehood with The Silmarillion, Tolkien's prequel to Lord of the Rings. It's not even a good fiction book. It reads something between a Bible and like a packet of world building notes but I was in love with it. It's a beautiful insight into how someone puts a story together. When AIs can surpass Tolkien, that's when I'll know we're really in trouble.

There's a great line that Michael Cunningham who wrote The Hours said to me at one point. He just, I didn't even realize he was saying it but I was asking him how it was possible that when he'd written a draft of the book, he had to throw away the draft, and I kind of probed him about that and didn't that feel just really awful? He said, nah, there's plenty more where that came from. And he just said it like that and that is a one sentence description of a thing that is absolutely essential to an artist which is the faith that they can keep doing it.

The second is John O'Donohue's book To Bless the Space Between Us. It is just sublime and beautiful and enchanting and reminds me of my own humanity and of other people's, of our ability to bless each other with love.

I found this incredible book, Bernard Suits' The Grasshopper.

One of my favorite books is Piers Plowman, William Langland, coming out of the 14th century.