The Ezra Klein Show

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.

I'd start with The World For Sale, which is an extraordinary account of commodity traders who play an unseen role in the middle of the networks that deliver oil and minerals and metals that we require.

A second book I'd recommend, which picks up on a lot of the discussions we've had about networks, is a book called Nexus by Jonathan Winkler, which is a study of telegraph cables during the early 20th century.

A third book, which was published last year, which I strongly recommend, is a book on decisionmaking in China called Prestige, Manipulation, and Coercion, which is an extraordinary account of high politics in China with exceptional archival documentation.

Sheila Lyman is the author of The New Book Hanging Out, which diagnoses what she calls a quiet catastrophe.

As I was researching for the book, I stumbled upon this Reddit thread.

My first recommendation is a book by Teju Cole. It's called Black Paper, and it's actually a collection of articles and essays by Teju Cole combined with some lectures, but it's the lectures I'm really into.

My third recommendation is lighter reading, but still very wonderful and very fun, which is a novel called The Hare by Melanie Finn, a Vermont writer, published in 2021 by the wonderful small press out of Columbus, Ohio called Two Dollar Radio.

I think Jawaharlal Nehru, he was India's first prime minister and really in some sense the founder of India's democracy in some ways. I think the two deep ideas that he had, if you read his books like Discovery of India and stuff.

He has written widely on political theory and is the author of The Burden of Democracy.

I actually still think reading V.S. Naipaul's India trilogy, which is now one book. ... He actually saw the moral psychology of what's happening in various Indian social movements, I think much more clearly than many of us liberals and constitutionalists have recognized.

The second book I'd pick is a recent book by Shiv Shankar Menon. The title is India in Asian geopolitics. ... It's incredibly well written, ... it's the single best book on India's place in the world.

The third I would recommend, ... a book by Snigdha Poonam called The Dreamers. This is a book that kind of captures the craziness and the contradictory textures of this kind of young, educated India.

One is CIA director, William Bill Burns, The Back Channel, which is memoirs of an exceptional diplomat.

The second one, we just mourned the passing of Henry Kissinger, who invented shuttle diplomacy, and Martin Indyk wrote an exceptionally good book called The Master of the Game, Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.

The first is Rashid Khalidi's Hundred Years' War on Palestine, which is deservedly on the New York Times bestseller list now. And it shows the context for this moment that we find ourselves in. This didn't begin on October 7th. It's a century of oppression and colonization of the Palestinian people, and that book is fundamental.

The second is a book that is very dear to me called Return to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, which talks about a Palestinian family that goes back to the home from which they were expelled in 1948. They were expelled in 1948, but they go back to their home in 1967 when the West Bank falls under Israeli military occupation, and they're able to drive back to their home and engage with the settlers who live in that home.

The two books, one of them is called Electrifying America by David E. Nye. It is a 30yearold history book about the process by which America got electricity. And it has been very interesting to read. I read it first a few years ago and have been rereading it.

Just to sketch out what would it look like if AI really is the new electricity? What happened the last time society was transformed by a technology like this?

I would also recommend AI Snake Oil from the Princeton professor Arvind Narayanan and a PhD student at Princeton, Siash Kapoor.