The Ezra Klein Show

The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett.

A book that played a huge role in how I thought about Easy Beauty is Rosemary Garland Thompson's book, Staring, which is an academic work but... Love that book.

And then a book I read really recently is Claude McKay's Romance in Marseille, a story about a disabled man and love and lots of other complications.

The first is a book that was published just this spring by the British environmental historian, Melanie Challenger, it's called How To Be Animal. It's a remarkable combination of biology, genetics, zoology, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy.

Finally, a book that's not going to be published until next spring, I think March, but it deserves to have you keep an eye out for is called Evergreen. It's by the economist John Reed and the conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy.

Lyanda Lynn Haupt, who's a naturalist and an eco philosopher who has written numerous meditations on the living world, including Crow Planet and Mozart's Starling, both of which I also enjoyed.

The bone People ... is called The bone People by ... Keri Hulme. It is one of the most important touchstone books to me.

And if you want to read about that, you can get a book called Art and Energy by Barry Lord.

Margaret MacMillan's book on War... War, How Conflict Shaped Us, pretty general reader book, How Conflict Shaped Us.

by Eliza Reid, Secrets of the Sprakar. And it's about life in Iceland... So Iceland, a small country where people tend to be related in some way to one another.

I would say you could start with The Weight of Glory, a collection of essays, including one that I think is maybe especially pertinent to our time, learning in wartime, mere Christianity, and then read some of his fiction. Read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I would say you could start with The Weight of Glory, a collection of essays, including one that I think is maybe especially pertinent to our time, learning in wartime, mere Christianity, and then read some of his fiction. Read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I would say you could start with The Weight of Glory, a collection of essays, including one that I think is maybe especially pertinent to our time, learning in wartime, mere Christianity, and then read some of his fiction. Read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

N.T. Wright has a book, The Resurrection of the Son of God, that's huge and massive. You might not want to read the whole thing, but you can read sections of it.

Marilynne Robinson's novels, The Gilead, I used to say trilogy, but there are four of them now, are really beautiful in terms of looking at human dignity.

The philosopher Talbot Brewer in his book, The Retrieval of Ethics, says something like we've lost sight of how important activities are and we're just like obsessed with how important the output is and the product is.

I found this incredible book, Bernard Soot's The Grasshopper. It kind of got lost for a while and then refound and became kind of a cult favorite.

Warzel and Petersen, who are a couple I should add, published an excellent new book together called Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.

I actually think the book is even more relevant today than when it first came out almost a year ago.

You write, quote, this is the dark truth of remote work as we know it now. It promises to liberate workers from the chains of the office, but in practice, it capitalizes on the total collapse of worklife balance, end quote.

One of the original seeds of the book was that we saw a lot of people speedrunning my experience during the pandemic, and we wanted to take the time to work through this.

We also wrote that remote work could easily end up reproducing and even deepening the toxic dynamics of the office if we don't rethink management, productivity, and communication.

The first is In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff, who is also the author of the probably better known Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

It was written in the 80s. So it doesn't really concern the internet so much, but it does sort of revolve around the early implementation of computers and this idea of the anxiety that workers felt sort of being alienated from the physical nature of their jobs with technology.

The second book is The Myth of the Paperless Office by Abigail J. Sellin.

It's about what on the surface should be a really boring topic, which is paperless offices, but it has this wonderful lesson at the heart of it, which is that the companies that succeeded in a transition to a paperless office were the ones that weren't actually trying to go paperless.