The Ezra Klein Show

The final is a work of fiction by Tony Tulathimutte called Rejection. I absolutely tore through it. I read the whole thing in basically a day and it just stuck with me and I really recommend it highly. It's an intense reading experience with a 1012 page granular description that left me physically paralyzed yet unable to stop reading.

When I went back to Backlash and I've gone back to that book many times, you know, I just was marking up my pages like crazy.

Obviously, you should go out and reread Backlash or read it if you haven't read it yet.

Liliana Mason is a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, How Politics Became Our Identity.

I think this gets to the core thesis of your 2018 book, Uncivil Agreement, which was very, very influential for me, which is that Americans don't experience politics through policy. They experience it through identity.

I have to recommend my podcast co-host Leah Lippman's book Lawless, which is a very accessible and pretty scathing indictment of the Roberts court. And I think a fullthroated defense of the thesis that the Republican justices, as she calls them, are just partisans in robe.

The first of these is Diana Greene Foster's Turnaway Study and I know that Annie Lowry ... did a great Atlantic piece on the book recently and we actually had Diana on my podcast, Strict Scrutiny, last month but the book is an amazing, amazing look at the ontheground tangible effects of being denied an abortion for women who want one and of getting an abortion. And you know whatever people's moral intuitions about abortion are, the data in this study about what happens to women who don't get abortions that they want, what happens to them and to their existing children because the numbers show that most people who seek out and obtain abortions are already parents trying to care for the kids they have. It's extremely damaging both to women and to their children to be denied wanted abortions and the book is fantastic.

Dorothy Roberts is a law professor at Penn and has this great book, Torn Apart, that is a searing indictment of the child welfare system.

Personally, I actually just finished a book called Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi.

Second one I want to recommend is Michael Moss's Salt, Sugar, Fat. Also a really entertaining book. And it really details the kind of path that the food industry took that brought us to where we are today in terms of our current processed food environment in the United States.

He's got a new collection of short stories out, Liberation Day, which are really interesting, chilling and more, I think, directly political, particularly when you put them all together than a lot of his other collections are.

The story Liberation Day, the opening story of the book is about... (discussion of the opening story and its relation to the SemplicaGirl Diaries).