The Ezra Klein Show

And this one is by somebody who lives out near you called Jennifer Eberhardt. And it's called Bias. And it's got the statistics. So for people who want to know, well, actually, how does this skew life in real time in the actual world? Here's the book that talks about that.

We get 1984. We get Fahrenheit 451. It's not great. So We get We by Evgeny Zamyatin.

So there's a book my grandpa gave me, The Wheelwright Shop. It was written in the 1920s by George Strutt, whose family had been building wooden wheels in England for 200 years. And like the specifics of it, it was just beautiful. Like he's like, you know, you had to know that that grove, the elm grove is too rich. It's not good for specific uses to build a wheel that will last and that your name is attached to. And that's useful to your community. You have to know how the SAP is running that year. You have to know when to quarter and when split.

There's another one, Experiences in Visual Thinking. It's like kind of a hippie, like, you know, 70s. But it is really brilliant at helping exercise the other parts of your brain that analyze problems. Like drawing and using your fingers. Like it's, I think, does it a necessary part of rebuilding parts of your brain that are not just the rote correct answer.

And the other thing, you know, I've got a three and a half year old son at home. ... So any of the children's poetry anthologies from Jack Proletsky, just that reading and language is fun. It is not academic. It is not for getting a good grade. It is joy. It is joy. And like the rhythm and the cadence and like moving it from a strictly like absolute, like rote ABCs to like the pleasure of rhyming things and just like having fun.

I have a few books to recommend, but I have to start out with my wife's book, Muppets in Moscow, which I've given you as a present about the making of Sesame Street in the 1990s, which she oversaw hundreds of artists. The making of it in Russia ... It's an amazing book.

One is The Promise of Politics by Hannah Arendt.

And the other is The Populist Moment by Lawrence Goodwyn.

And then Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank, who wrote What's the Matter with Kansas.

Destructive Creation by Mark Wilson is probably the most detailed book I read about the actual mobilization during World WarII. When you read what they did, it is shocking. It's amazing. It's really amazing.

Bad Samaritans by HaJoon Chang, which tells a story of how a bunch of developed countries managed to go into mission mode and develop their countries.

The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It's about FDR's first hundred days and really paints a picture of his style of leadership and how he was able to do so much without legislation.

There's a great book called Invisible Hands by Kim PhillipsFein, which really details the push of that ideology over 40 years.

And a famous atheist called Living with a Wild God, right? And it was just a book about a very secular person who had a lot of religious experiences, like experiences that if you went and read William James or read like a medieval Catholic mystic or something would be totally familiar.

from about 20 years ago by a physicist named Stephen Barr, called Ancient Physics and Modern Faith. That is, I think despite being a little bit dated, is still really the best overall survey of sort of where arguments in modern physics that relate to religion stand and how a reasonable person might think about it.

there's a book called After by Bruce Grayson, who's a, I think, psychiatrist or neuroscientist from the University of Virginia, who just has a good overview, I would say, from a perspective of a practicing physician, of why people take these strange stories seriously and why it might unsettle a materialist worldview.

So last year, after the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump, you wrote about Trump as a man of destiny. That he was, quote, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics. How are you thinking about that now?

My guest today is Stephen Hahn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at NYU. His book, Illiberal America, tracks this threat of American politics back to our founding and even before.

And the third book is a book by Lawrence Powell called Troubled Memory and Levy, The Holocaust and David Duke's Louisiana. It's an extraordinary story about a woman who was part of the only whole family to make it out of the Lotz ghetto and they end up in New Orleans and when Duke runs for governor she plays an incredibly important role in outing his Nazi past and helping to undermine his claims to power so it kind of links fascism on both sides of the Atlantic with an incredibly inspiring and welltold story.

And then Jason Stanley's Erasing History, how fascists rewrite the past to control the future, which is very prescient in terms of what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities right now.