The Ezra Klein Show

My second suggestion is Jonathan Chatwin's book, The Southern Tour, which is an extraordinary account of Deng Xiaoping's tour of southern China in 1992. In the moment when, after the repression of Tiananmen Square in 1989, he revives the reform and opening up project.

And the third suggestion is poetry. It's called Context Collapse. And it is literally a poem containing a history of poetry. So it is an extraordinary longform poem in which he ... writes a delirious effort to write in poetry, a history of the form and the collapse of its context in modern culture.

His new book is Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.

Inshittification is a label I hung on both an observation about a characteristic pattern of how platforms go bad, but I think much more importantly why they're going bad now.

His latest, The Age of Extraction, How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threatened Our Future Prosperity.

Tim, one of the core tales you tell in your book is about Amazon. So walk me through the process of moving a platform from a kind of healthy, constructive platform to becoming an extractive platform.

Second book is more recent Cass Sunstein wrote a book on Manipulation that is underrated and is really good for understanding what we have allowed to happen.

The final book is a kid's book by my favorite kid's book author ever this guy called Daniel Pinkwater and last year he had a book out from Tachyon Press called Jules, Penny, and the Rooster.

I want to read you a quote from Virginia Giuffre's book, Nobody's Girl... she writes, my impression of many of these men is that they didn't know how to pursue women. Awkward and socially immature, it was as if their big brains were missing the ability to interact with other people.

Any book by her, Ann Patchett. I will just read anything she writes. She just does wonderful, beautiful modern fiction.

My husband, Mike Bender, who's also a New York Times reporter, wrote a Trump campaign book called Frankly, We Did Win This Election, the inside story of how Trump lost. I would recommend it because it's great.

An Image of My Name Enters America, which is a book of essays, sort of personal essays by Lucy Ives. I read it last year and I had so much fun.

Palimpsest by Gore Vidal. Came out a while ago. I just read it recently. It's hilarious, totally Rrated and often inappropriate and very vicious, a memoir of D.C. as I've read.

Blood by Douglas Starr. It's a history of Blood that starts with a 17thcentury transfusion and takes you through how Blood revolutionized warfare, the AIDS crisis and more. I think it's the best example of literary nonfiction I've ever read.

a book called there is no anti memetics division by a writer with the name QNTM which is about concepts that are in themselves information hazards where even thinking about them can be dangerous and I always recommend it to people working on AI risk

I wrote a book about that, called War in the Art of Governance, which looked at about 15 case studies of America's military interventions and how we always had to deal with problems of political stabilization and economic reconstruction.

I'm reading right now a book I think published two years ago by Robert Zoellick called America in the World. It's a great book about America's diplomatic history, and each chapter is short, so for those of you who like to read ten pages before bed, it's perfect.

Rationalism and Politics by Michael Oakeshott, and in particular, the essays Rationalism and Politics and On Being Conservative.

Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood, the book about the first 30 or so years of our republic.

Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese.

From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra is a really excellent kind of intellectual history of, for lack of a better way of putting it, global south or people in decolonized spaces in the 20th century coming up with alternatives to Western hegemony.

Travelers in the Third Reich by Julia Boyd... she found letters, journals, other contemporaneous accounts of basically British and Americans visiting Nazi Germany. And so what were their impressions? Did they see, and you know, spoiler alert, way too many of them did not see how bad this was going to be or were sympathetic.