The Ezra Klein Show

And then her companion book to this is Putin's World, which is the way that Putin kind of thinks about his interactions with all the other countries.

My old professor from Harvard, Richard Pipes's book on Russia under the old regime, you know, the kind of imperial thinking about the empire.

And then his book on The Formation of the Soviet Union, which Putin's always going on about, about, you know, what Lenin and the communists did to kind of create this mess that he's only just trying to rectify today.

So there's this wonderful book by two Yale scholars, Una Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, which points out that the forcible alteration of borders and the annexation of territory ... became virtually nonexistent after 1945.

The book that I remember best when I got my PhD in international relations is a book by Kenneth Waltz called Man, the State and War.

He wrote Memoirs that won the Pulitzer Prize. So think about a diplomat whose Memoirs won the Pulitzer Prize. And the first volume of those Memoirs is basically 1925 to about 1945.

As my second book, I would recommend a really fun, polemical read by a combo of authors. The End of the End of History, Politics in the 21st Century by Alex Hockerley, George Hoare and Philip Cunliffe.

And my third is a book I stumbled on when I was trying to make sense of the whole crypto craze ... it is Eswar S. Prasad's The Future of Money, on the digital future of money in the world. A really great book if you need a guide to understanding a little bit about, you know, the crypto in crypto.

It's called Andrew Henry's Meadow, it's an older book, illustrated, and the premise is this young boy who builds things... Kids love it because of the illustrations.

But recently, he's been bugging me to read a classic book in public choice economics called The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mansur Olson.

you wrote after I was tweeting about this that I should read Mansur Olsen's The Rise and Decline of Nations. And I did.

it's a very interesting, very unusual book, I think, but I think it's actually a useful one to talk about.

he made a couple of points about special interest groups ... that's what Mansur Olsen thought ... The Rise and Decline of Nations argument.

the book gets at why advanced societies become sorotic, why they become incapable of building.

India, A Story Through 100 Objects, which is by Vidya Dehejia. She's an art historian. And this is like a coffee table picture book with a little description and context for each of these amazing, often beautiful and interesting objects from India throughout its history.

the first, because I'm a big believer in our sources would be Dear Parent Caring for Infants with Respect, which is Magda Gerber's book.

one that she co-wrote, Your Self-Confident Baby, but this one is completely in her voice.

Another one, and this might be very pertinent for you if you haven't read it, Ezra, is Siblings Without Rivalry, which is by Adele Faber and Elaine Maslisch.

they talk about how this common thing that we do as parents, and it sounds, I mean, to me, I would have thought this is a good way to connect with my child... the book shows how those comparisons can be uncomfortable for children.

the third book, I kind of had a tie in my mind between The Hurried Child by David Elkin, which I just think everybody should read, especially seems now more important than ever.

the other one is Biased by Dr. Jennifer Everhart, which is all about how the mind naturally develops implicit bias.

She was determined to get to the source and the source and the source of why this negative bias against Black people. And she was so brave in her journey, looking back and figuring this out and just all these things that even her child had negative bias towards Black people and her child is Black.

He wrote a book called Willpower, a brilliant man and a brilliant scientist.

I recently read a book called The Hungry Brain, and you've used the analogy of obesity here a couple of times. It's a good way to think about how a hyperstimulating food environment parallels a hyperstimulating attentional environment.

One is called The Anatomy of a Moment by Javier Cercas, which is a novel about a particular moment in 1981 Spain as the country transitioned to democracy.

Another book I would recommend, a novel, is called Visitors, it's by Anita Brookner. It's about a young gay man staying with an old woman; it sounds simple but is transformative and incredible.