The Ezra Klein Show

In his book High Weirdness, Eric Davis, the historian of Californian counterculture, he describes weird things as anomalous. They deviate from the norms of informed expectation and challenge established explanations sometimes quite radically.

Megan O'Geeblin has this brilliant book God, Human, Animal, Machine which I highly recommend. And she writes in it, if you were to print out everything the networks do between input and output, it would amount to billions of arithmetic operations.

The second book is How Asia Works because if you want to understand industrial policy or what industrial policy might look like what might replace the sort of libertarian laissezfaire we could even say neoliberal policy of recent decades what might replace that How Asia Works is sort of the book that started people thinking about the alternative

I read a very good book last year called The Jesuits by a German historian called Marcus Friedrich, who studied the Society of Jesus, which is a quite successful organization that has had quite a lot of success in establishing itself as a center of scholarship and having influence in church affairs.

A second longerterm book that I like is something called Last and First Men, which is a British novel written about the 1930s by a Hegelian professor called Olaf Stapledon, who imagined what the human race would look like millions of years from now.

The third book I got a huge amount out of was a book by Anna Machin ... it's called The Life Of Dad, the making of a modern father ... it's a terrific book ...

The second book is Caliban and the Witch by Sylvia Federici. ... And Caliban and the Witch is about a pandemic followed by a labor shortage, followed by a revanchist movement to assign rigidly strict gender norms onto people that targets queer people and women especially.

And third, I'm going to recommend a little book called Can the Monsters Speak by Paul Prashaddo. He's a transgender man, and this book Can the Monsters Speak is a lecture he gave in front of this esteemed group of psychoanalysts. And what he's asserting in this book is he's trying to illustrate and challenge all the ways in which transgender people's voices are not taken seriously by the medical establishment, by the media, by the culture.

She's the author of many collections of poetry, including her most recent Ledger, which is probably the book of poetry I've gifted to others most often.

and put that in the poem which is in a different poem in Ledger I think it is.

I want to ask you to read I think what may be my favorite poem of yours which is from your book Beauty called My Skeleton.

The opening section of this book, The Beauty that came out in 2015, it starts with a run of poems whose title is all My Something or Other...

C.P. Snow's book about the two cultures, that's such a memorable phrase that, you know, to this day we have this idea of these binary ways of being in the world.

One is a book called Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.

So the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky has a book of essays, Less Than One.

And Stephan Guillenet has looked, and I put this very lightly, a lot deeper than that. Guillenet is a neurobiologist by training... and his book, The Hungry Brain, is to me the most convincing model for why obesity is rising year after year, why so many who try so hard to change their waistlines fail even after they sometimes first succeed, and why our individualized narratives around this are so cruel and also so wrong.

Guillenet's book came out in 2017. And in the past year or so, we've seen the introduction of new weight loss drugs that fit The Hungry Brain model perfectly.

Then Tchaikovsky brought out his new book, Children of Memory. And this one is about corvids, about a kind of bird. It is the single best piece of fiction I've read on what it is like the confusion, the disorientation of interacting with a problemsolving, erudite, brilliant, trained to some degree on humans, but not necessarily sentient AI.

It was a very strange read at this moment. And it made possible an episode I've been wanting to do for months.

The new book Children of Memory is built in part around extremely intelligent corvids which if I was not familiar with the term so it's a family of birds it includes crows and ravens.

Last thing, I talked a bit about a scifi story in here that I could not remember the name of. Our amazing fact checker, Michelle Harris, found it. It is Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson, and we will put a link to that in show notes.

Three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience: Soldier of the Mist is a fascinating exploration of a diary of an amnesiac soldier in Hellenic Greece.

After Atlas by Emma Newman is one I'd throw out there that's a relatively recent science fiction book in her Planetfall series and I throw it in there mostly because it has some of the most sort of bleakly plausible bad human politics going on.

Another recent book is RF Kuang's Babel which has the most astonishing examination of imperialism and language and appropriation as part of its fantasy plot.

Rachel Zofnes, who is a pain psychologist ... is the author of The Pain Management Workbook, which I would recommend to anybody dealing with chronic pain. I found it revelatory.