One book I'd recommend is a book called Children of a Modest Star, subtitled Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crisis by Jonathan Blake and Neils Gilman, which is a wonderful reflection on how we need to imagine a form of governance that has executive authority beyond the nation state itself.
Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “This Question Can Change Your Life” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-stephen-batchelor.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.
Every entry is a verbatim quote and a link to the public post it came from. Nothing is paraphrased. If it is not on record somewhere public, it is not here.
The verdict is what they actually said: loved and liked are explicit; recommended means they told others to get it; uses means they only say they use it; read is a book on their public shelf with no verdict; mixed and disliked are kept too.
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The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is for its kind of thing.
The shading behind a date shows how dated a recommendation is, for its kind of thing. Fully green is recent. It drains a quarter at a time as the post gets older, and is empty once it reads as dated.
What counts as old depends on the thing. A laptop praised four years ago has been replaced twice; a book loved twenty years ago is probably still loved. The shading is gone after about:
Hardware, services4 years
Software5 years
Podcasts, courses, other8 years
Books25 years
Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.