The Ezra Klein Show

I would recommend Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities by Thomas Piketty at All, A Study of 50 Democracies, because all the political trends and demographic trends we've talked about on this podcast today are detailed with copious data in this marvelous compendium of studies.

I'm currently reading and really enjoying it's a Max Hastings book. He's one of my favorite military historians. It's called Operation Pedestal. ... really phenomenal storytelling about a pivotal convoy to save Malta in 1942 when it was under siege. Just an incredible cast of characters and remarkable level of heroism.

The next one is a brand new book by N.T. Wright, who's a theologian. And it's called Into the Heart of Romans. This is for your theology buffs ... it really is making a really interesting argument that the book of Romans ... has been in some important ways misinterpreted and that a more radical call to virtue.

And the next book is back to your history buffs. And it's called Manhunt, a 12day chase for Lincoln's killer. And if you pick it up, you start reading it and you realize it feels like I'm reading almost like a script for a television crime drama ... it's really good. It's very gripping read.

Kyle Chayka ... got a book coming out on January 16th called Filter World, How Algorithms Flattened Culture.

And one of the ways is in a preference for quantified mass appeal as opposed to particularistic appeal. And what I mean by that is that the way I knew about movies when I was younger is the LA Times had a movie critic and that person had their taste...

So the first one is this Japanese novelist, Junichiro Tanizaki's 1933 essay, In Praise of Shadows. This is a very small book or a very long essay in which Tanizaki kind of muses on his own taste and why he designed his house in a certain way and why he chooses food in a certain way or like installs lamps in a certain way.

The next book was Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler. And this is a biography or almost a memoir of being with the artist Robert Irwin, who is a light and space artist from California, kind of like a minimalist but in an atmospheric environmental installation way.

And the last book was The Mushroom at the End of the World, The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, which is by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. And this is an academic book, but it's almost a first person sociology of mushroom foraging, particularly Matsutake mushrooms. And then they're sold and dispersed across the world through these very strange human to human chains of economic and social value that Anna records.

I discovered that that anime was based on a Haruki Murakami novel called Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.