The Ezra Klein Show

I did an episode on octopuses, and I immediately got all these emails from you saying, have you read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Ruin? Children of Ruin, when I looked it up, turns out to be a scifi book about an advanced civilization built by octopuses, which sold, completely sold immediately on that. And so I bought it, and I started reading it.

The second book in the series is Children of Ruin. One of the main things it's about is a society that built up around octopuses.

There's Andrei Tchaikovsky's great scifi book about octopus society, Children of Ruin.

There is such a book and it's called Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's the sequel to Children of Time and both are great biologically informed science fiction about hyperintelligent societies.

Brian Christian, who wrote a book called The Alignment Problem, which in my view is the single best book you can read on the issue of machine intelligence and the way it is difficult for our form of intelligence to interact with it.

He's the author of the book The Alignment Problem.

Brian Christian, your book is The Alignment Problem. It is fantastic.

author of the really great book on this subject, The Alignment Problem

Brian Christian, your book is The Alignment Problem. It is fantastic.

which I picked up when I wrote this book, Shut Down, about the 2020 crisis.

He's the author of the book Crashed, which for my money is the single best history of the financial crisis, and now of Shutdown, How COVID Shook the World's Economy.

and now of Shutdown, How COVID Shook the World's Economy

One is a book called Rights Talk, which is an older book from the 1990s by Mary Ann Glendon, which diagnoses some of the same problems that I diagnosed in how rights went wrong.

Marian Glendon... her book Rights Talk was incredibly influential for those who don't know her.

One is a book called Rights Talk, which is an older book from the 1990s by Mary Ann Glendon, which diagnoses some of the same problems that I diagnosed in how rights went wrong, but she's a conservative.

The final text, the third text, is called Feminist International. It was published in English last year and it's by Veronica Gago.

It's one of the most important texts to come out of the international feminist movement that culminated in the International Women's Strike in 2017.

The final text, the third text, is called Feminist International. It was published in English last year and it's by Veronica Gago. It's one of the most important texts to come out of the international feminist movement that culminated in the International Women's Strike in 2017.

The final text is called Feminist International, published in English last year by Veronica Gago. It is one of the most important texts to come out of the international feminist movement that culminated in the International Women's Strike in 2017, illustrating mass radical feminist coalitions across countries.

i read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich when i was a kid and i've reread it a couple of times ... it's a fascinating book

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich i read this one last year and it was just a fascinating inside view tome into like basically how this country really descended into one of the scariest totalitarian regimes that humanity has seen in quite a long time and on a large scale.

And then I mentioned Sam Talent before. I am currently listening to the audiobook version of his Running the Light novel, which is narrated by a series of prominent, mostly New York but national level comedians who take on each chapter and it's hilarious and dark.

I am currently listening to the audiobook version of his Running the Light novel, which is narrated by a series of prominent, mostly New York but national level comedians who take on each chapter and it's hilarious and dark.

The third book is Blindsight by Peter Watts, a depressing but fascinating thriller about an interstellar mission to an alien race that explores sentience, consciousness and intelligence, making it a chilling read for a world where machines might be intelligent without being sentient.

The idea of neurodiversity as a survival trait is something that Peter Watts also looks at the benefits of neurodiversity in books like Blindsight.

I know we both know Jonathan Haidt, who's written the kind of the preeminent book, The Anxious Generation.

In March of last year, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published this book called The Anxious Generation, which caused, let's call it a stir.

I finally picked it up off the shelf. I'm like, what the heck? Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. It's about understanding what you can influence and taking accountability for what happens.

I finally picked it up off the shelf. I'm like, what the heck? Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. It's more about understanding what you can influence and taking accountability.

I'm not going to, it would be cheating, but what I will say is that this is a great summer to revisit or to introduce yourself to the entire pantheon of Cormac McCarthy. Lots of people are familiar with The Road, but people are not generally familiar, I think, with some of his other works.

Lots of people are familiar with The Road, but people are not generally familiar, I think, with some of his other works.

Stefan Zweig's books are always amazing, especially The World of Yesterday about the lives in Vienna prior to World War I.

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Schweig... I've found myself reading twice since Trump's election. But it's just haunting and beautiful, contemporaneous. You know, Stefan Schweig was a great Austrian writer writing this, writing in the midst of World War II his kind of life story. But it's really about the collapse of the liberal order in Europe.

Moby Dick barely sold in Herman Melville's lifetime and only became this iconic work of literature over a century.

I read Moby Dick this year and it changed my life and I talk about it all the time now.

She is one of the foundational, most significant researchers in the attention field and the author of the book, Attention Spam.

You make a pretty important move very early on in the book. And you see this isn't really a book about productivity that we tend to bucket attention as a faculty of productivity and when we don't have enough of it we worry that we're not being productive enough.

While I was working on this piece, I called Gloria Mark, who is a professor of information science at the University of California at Irvine and the author of this book, Attention Span.

She wrote The Bean Trees, she wrote The Poisonwood Bible, she has won all kinds of prizes.

She wrote The Bean Trees, she wrote The Poisonwood Bible.

And then Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste.

And then Isabel Wilkerson's book, Cast.

I'm going to be really basic and I'm going to say The Power Broker by Robert Caro. Massive tome. If it takes you two years to read it, don't feel bad. But it's Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, who is the guy who destroyed New York City.

The Power Broker, which is my book is sort of in conversation with The Power Broker.

my book is in conversation with Robert Caro's The Power Broker.

You read Common Sense by Thomas Paine. You read Lincoln's speeches. You listen to Fannie Lou Hamer.

You read Common Sense by Thomas Paine.

Parable of the Sower, you know, continues to be just profoundly prescient and a beautiful must read for everyone.

Parable of the Sower, you know, continues to be just profoundly prescient and a beautiful mustread for everyone.

The second book is by Cal Newport, it's called Deep Work, and this is why I'm so passionate about attention--without your attention you can't do anything.

I've been a fan of Newport's work for years, going back to his book, Deep Work.