Joe Weisenthal

Products they talk about

• Moby Dick👍 Recommends

  …strong personal recommendation for classic literature that profoundly affected reader

  “I really had a hard time thinking about which direction I was going to go because I read Moby Dick this year and it changed my life and I read a bunch of sort of whaling related books. But for the... How did it change your life? Oh, God. I mean, all I do is think about whales. All he does is talk about Moby Dick. All I talk about is Moby Dick now and every single... This is true. This is true in every single story in the economy or whatever. I was like, okay, that's the Captain Ahab. So like everything I just frame into Moby Dick.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• 

  No Sense of Place👍 Recommends

  …recommending classic book about how electronic media dissolves environmental and social boundaries

  “And then another book that I recommend on the same level it just celebrated its 40th anniversary so another one that's sort of pre this moment which is Josh Meyerowitz is no sense of place which anticipates the way electronic media would like dissolve the walls between you know this is where you work and this is where you live or this is a type of conversation that's appropriate for one environment but not appropriate for here this sort of obliteration of norms from one place to another I think has a lot of explanatory power so yeah no sense of place by Josh Meyerowitz is my last one.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• Orality and Literacy👍 Recommends

  …recommending foundational academic work on how communication media shapes society

  “And then there's two books written several decades ago that I recommend to almost everyone. Walter Ong's Orelity and Literacy which I've been talking about a lot which is basically the way like our communication environment is such that we're like an oral society increasingly not just by the fact that we literally talk more on a podcast but that everything is back and forth in this and therefore you don't have this sort of logical contemplation of the person sitting alone in a room actually reading text and judging text on its own merits. He anticipated a lot of changes with social media and the phones decades ago and I think it's a lot better than reading a lot of contemporary stuff because it doesn't try to shoehorn contemporary events into a theory.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show

• The Digital Reversal👍 Recommends

  …recommending independent writer's book on how digital media restructures society

  “I truly think that the new media environment is fundamentally restructuring and altering society. So there's a fairly recent book. Andre Muir is the sort of independent journalist and writer like based in Toronto who like self-publishes his own books which is usually a huge red flag but they're phenomenal. So people should check out his book The Digital Reversal which is about the way digital media like sort of like flips a lot of things on its head but also this idea of like it seems to be happening at a faster and faster pace the sort of pace of crises.”

  on The Ezra Klein Show