One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels “One of the greats. . . . Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” — Stephen King “Engrossing . . . Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” — Cincinnati Enquirer Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award–winning classic, a profound and thoughtful tale of anarchism and capitalism, individualism and collectivism, and one ambitious man’s quest to bridge the ideological chasm separating two worlds. The Dispossessed is the spellbinding story of anarchist Shevek, the “galactically famous scientist,” who single-handedly attempts to reunite two planets cut off from each other by centuries of distrust. Anarres, Shevek’s homeland, is a bleak moon settled by an anarchic utopian civilization, where there is no government, and everyone, at least nominally, is a revolutionary. It has long been isolated from other worlds, including its mother planet, Urras—defined by warring nations, great poverty, and immense wealth. Now Shevek, a brilliant physicist, is determined to unify the two civilizations. In the face of great hostility, outright threats, and the pain of separation from his family, he makes an unprecedented trip to Urras. Greater than any concern for his own wellbeing is the belief that the walls of hatred, distrust, and philosophic division between his planet and the rest of the civilized universe must be torn down. He will seek answers, question the unquestionable, and explore differences in customs and cultures, determined to tear down the walls of hatred that have kept them apart. To visit Urras—to learn, to teach, to share—will require great sacrifice and risks, which Shevek willingly accepts. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he finds not the egotistical philistines he expected, but an intelligent, complex people who warmly welcome him. But soon the ambitious scientist and his gift is seen as a threat, and in the profound conflict that ensues, he must reexamine his beliefs even as he ignites the fires of change.

Recommended on 4 episodes:

What Communes and Other Radical Experiments in Living Together Reveal

“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships. Ghodsee’s new book, “Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” is an attempt to change that. The book is a tour of radical social experiments from communes and ecovillages to “platonic parenting” and intentional communities. But, on a deeper level, it’s a critique of the way existing structures of family and community life have left so many of us devoid of care and connection, and a vision of what it could mean to organize our lives differently.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber
• 📘  The Dispossessed: A Novel (Hainish Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler
• 📗  Gender and the Politics of History (Gender and Culture Series) by Joan Wallach Scott

Kristen Ghodsee June 9, 2023 3 books recommended

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How Blue Cities Became So Outrageously Unaffordable

Joe Biden’s economic agenda is centered on a basic premise: The United States needs to build. To build roads and bridges. To build child care facilities and car-charging stations. To build public transit and affordable housing. And in doing so, to build a better future for everyone. But there’s a twist of irony in that vision. Because right now, even in places where Democrats hold control over government, they are consistently failing to build cheaply, quickly and equitably. In recent decades, blue states and cities from Los Angeles to Boston to New York have become known for their outrageously expensive housing, massive homeless populations and infrastructure projects marred by major delays and cost overruns — all stemming from this fundamental inability to actually build. Jerusalem Demsas is a policy reporter at Vox who covers a range of issues from housing to transportation. And the central question her work asks is this: Why is the party that ostensibly supports big government doing ambitious things constantly failing to do just that, even in the places where it holds the most power? So this is a conversation about the policy areas where blue city and state governance is failing the most: housing, homelessness, infrastructure. But it is also about the larger problems that those failures reveal: The tension between big-government liberalism and anti-corporatist progressivism; the cognitive dissonance between what city-dwelling, college-educated liberals say they believe and their inequality-amplifying actions; how reforms intended to make government more accountable to the people have been wielded by special interests to stall or kill popular projects; and much more.

Books recommended:

• 📙  The Dispossessed: A Novel (Hainish Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler
• 📕  Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America by Conor Dougherty
• 📘  Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

Jerusalem Demsas July 23, 2021 3 books recommended

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To Understand This Era, You Need to Think in Systems

As my colleague Ben Smith wrote in an August profile, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has “made a habit of being right on the big things.” She saw the threat of the coronavirus early and clearly. She saw that the public health community was ignoring the evidence on masking, and raised the alarm persuasively enough that she tipped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention toward new, lifesaving guidance. Before Tufekci was being prescient about the coronavirus, she was being prescient about disinformation online, about the way social media was changing political organizing, about what election forecasting models could actually tell us, about the rising threat of authoritarianism in America. Tufekci attributes this track record to “systems thinking,” which she believes holds the key to forming a more accurate understanding of everything from pandemics to social media to the Republican Party. So I asked Tufekci to come on a podcast for a conversation about how she thinks, and what the rest of us can learn from it. In answering those questions, we discuss why public health experts were slow to change guidance on disruptive measures like masking and travel bans, the logic of authoritarian regimes, why Asian countries so decisively outperformed Western Europe and America in containing coronavirus, why Tufekci thinks media coverage of the vaccines is too pessimistic, the crisis of American democracy, whether a more competent demagogue will succeed Donald Trump, and much more. Mentioned in this episode: “How Zeynep Tufekci Keeps Getting the Big Things Right” by Ben Smith “Why Telling People They Don’t Need Masks Backfired” by Zeynep Tufekci “Can We Do Twice as Many Vaccinations as We Thought?” by Zeynep Tufekci and Michael Mina “America’s Next Authoritarian Will Be Much More Competent” by Zeynep Tufekci

Books recommended:

• 📗  The Dispossessed: A Novel (Hainish Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler
• 📙  Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow

Zeynep Tufekci Feb. 2, 2021 2 books recommended

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Nathan Robinson’s case for socialism

Books recommended:

• 📕  The Dispossessed: A Novel (Hainish Cycle) by Ursula K. Le Guin, Karen Joy Fowler
• 📘  Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky by Noam Chomsky, John Schoeffel, R. Mitchell
• 📗  None by

Jan. 6, 2020 3 books recommended

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