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Recoding AmericaBook

by Jennifer Pahlka

Who uses, recommends or left Recoding America, in their own words: each a verbatim quote with a link to where it was said.

1 person

Francis Fukuyama
American political scientist at Stanford; author of The End of History and the Last Man and The Origins of Political Order.
recommended

One is Jennifer Pala's uh recoding America. I think she is the most insightful in a way critic of what's wrong with the American bureaucracy but she does it from a sympathetic standpoint. she understands why bureaucracy and government are necessary and how you know it could actually be reformed to do things better.

Answering The Ezra Klein Show's closing question, three books to recommend, in “Why I Can't Stop Thinking About 'The End of History'” (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/11/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-francis-fukuyama.html). Quoted from the episode's YouTube auto-captions.

2026-09-11·youtube.com ↗

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.

A dashed affiliate link, sponsored or their own label means the post disclosed a relationship. It is shown, never hidden.

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:

Stripes mean the post carries no date and the date shown is an estimate. No date at all, no shading.