The Ezra Klein Show

I'm going to invoke his much stranger book, The ConfidenceMan, which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief.

And it's very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time.

He's also got a new book on the subject, Co-Intelligence.

Ethan Malek, your book is called Cointelligence.

And I would just say just YouTube a few lectures of his because he was also one of these people who was both a genius, but like completely accessible as a teacher. And he has a book that I went back and looked at, which I hadn't looked at in years when he died called The Racial Contract, which I think is a very overlooked book in the canon on race and liberalism and political theory and is like a sublimely brilliant articulation of some of the sort of limitations of like race blind liberalism.

I'd also recommend Visions of Inequality by Branko Milanovic from the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War that just recently came out. It's a fabulous book for understanding how views of inequality have changed over time.

It amazes me how much better we can look at the past and Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich, another professor here at Harvard. He has just an extraordinary look using ancient DNA like Neanderthal DNA to find out things about humanity hundreds of thousands of years ago that I never would have dreamed we could have understood.

The Rabbit Listened. And I honest to God, almost cried at the end of it. It is such a beautiful book. It's by Corey Dorfeld.

Anasale has just written a book that is simultaneously pulling out the lessons of her show, but then also going deeper into the theory and the practice of talking about really hard things. It is called Appropriately Enough, Let's Talk About Hard Things.

Anastacia, your book is The Let's Talk About Hard Things.

If you're intimidated by poetry, I really recommend these. Nine Gates, Entering the Mind of Poetry, and Ten Windows, How Great Poems Transform the World.

It is called A Fortune for Your Disaster by Hanif Abdurraqib ... It is a really deep exploration ... I think it is a beautiful piece.

A more contemporary book that I love for the way that it looks at kind of scientific culture and cultural narratives around things like vaccination is Eula Biss' On Immunity and Inoculation.

I have been reading Mary Oliver's book, Devotions, which is a collection of a lot of her best work. She grew up in rural Ohio and then she lived a lot of her life on Cape Cod, and it's about the beauty of natural places and a great tribute to rural America.

author of the National Book Award winner, Between the World and Me, the Oprah Book Club pick, The Water Dancer

Andrea Wolf's The Invention of Nature, and I think people are not going to like that title for a bunch of different reasons, but it's a great biography of Alexander von Humboldt, who was a naturalist, discovered a million things, had really, really fascinating theories of nature, structured a lot of how the West understands nature today. It's a fantastic biography, just a really beautifully structured and thoughtthrough book.

The third is Kwame Anthony Appiah's book Cosmopolitanism ... I find extremely convincing, penetrating and really essential.

I wrote a book once called Deep Economy, and it was a real attempt to figure out whether the world that we're building, a world of infinite, constant growth, actually makes us particularly happy.

The third book I'll recommend is a set of essays by Freeman Dyson called Disturbing The Universe, which talks about his experiences in trying to do space travel on what I think is a pretty mad idea to get to the moons of Jupiter by exploding nuclear bombs behind a space vessel, also his times in the civil rights movement and doing all sorts of crazy things in terms of big science.

The second is a book by Reinhold Niebuhr called The Irony of American History, and it's really all about the great danger when you are powerful of believing you are virtuous and believing that might is right, and the call for humility.

The second book I'm going to suggest is a book by the architect Christopher Alexander called A Pattern Language. It's about habitat, about what makes spaces welcoming or hostile, and it's the most beautiful book.

Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, which essentially traces the same arc, with a guy named Floyd Dominey running the Bureau of Reclamation and building dams all across the West.

and he's the author of the book Trust the Plan, The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy that Unhinged America.