The Ezra Klein Show

There's a great book I'd recommend by Sally Denton called The Profiteers, which is about this company Bechtel, which helped build the Hoover Dam and became the megainfrastructure builders of the 20th century.

The book called Jim Revell's Theatrical Pickpocketing... came out in the 80s, but is still available... it's basically a very practical howto guide to do pickpocketing as an entertainment performance.

My teenage daughter and I just finished reading Babel or The Necessity of Violence, which is a novel by RF Kuang. It's a fantasy historical novel set in an alternative Oxford. It's all about themes of colonialism and translation and it's dark and it's magical and it's just a rip snorter of a good story.

There's a book by William Howell and Terry Moe, a political scientist, called Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. They basically make this argument that one of the things that creates fertile ground for populist authoritarians, which you see in many different countries but Trump represents here, is this sense that government doesn't really work anymore.

She is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and she's the author of the new book fixerupper How to repair America's broken housing systems.

Which is one of the clearest overviews of America's housing policy failures and just its housing policies that you'll find.

One of the reasons I wrote the book is that it feels to me like this is not a political conversation that gets had in the right places by the right people.

There is an economist called Bill Fishel who wrote a very influential book called The Home Voter Hypothesis which essentially says that homeowners become singleissue voters based on protecting the value of their property because it's such a major investment.

There are three political scientists Katie Einstein, David Glick, and Maxwell Palmer who have written a book called Neighborhood Defenders and a bunch of papers since then which are just a fantastic insight into the nittygritty politics of who shows up and participates.

And the last one I'm going to cheat a little bit it's the Netflix of a book so Made, which is a Netflix series based on Stephanie Lann's memoir and it's a very popular TV class around this series so it shows you how broken the social safety net is.

It's called Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, Information Ideology and Authoritarianism in China. And it really is about the sources of domestic contestation and evolution of what the Chinese Communist Party has been, how a revolutionary communist party came to embrace GDP statistics as its measure of legitimacy, and how once those numbers didn't quite add up, how under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party has embraced sort of a neopolitical turn to legitimize their continued rule.

It's called Our Missing Hearts. And it's really a cautionary tale about many of the, I think, unfortunately, real dynamics that we're already seeing as sort of a combination of concerns about the protection of American culture and traditions, and what is being taught in schools, along with the dose of suspicion of anything of Asian or Chinese origin, and family separation policies, which are unfortunately part of our history and our present.