You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at /ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter Book recommendations from our guests are listed at. That’s where we start but far from where we end: This conversation touches on mortality, animism, politics, old-growth forests, extraterrestrial life, Buddhism and beyond.įinding the Mother Tree by Suzanne SimardĮver Green by John W. It is also through radical changes he’s made to how he lives his life. It is not just books through which Powers has been exploring these ideas. It is about how we treat delusion as normal and clarity as lunacy. It is about how we change our minds and how we change our societies. It’s about refusing to die before we’re dead and taking seriously the gifts and responsibilities of being alive. It’s about the nature and limits of our empathy. Powers’s new book is “Bewilderment.” You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit. When I interviewed Barack Obama this year, he recommended “The Overstory,” saying, “It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it.” I haven’t walked through a forest the same way again. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should.

There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. Today we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from 2021 with the novelist Richard Powers.

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