NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want. “Luminous . . . Few books evoke the state of love at its apogee.” — The New York Times Book Review “The best rendering of erotic politics . . . since D.H. Lawrence. . . . The voice of Rush’s narrator is immediate, instructive and endearing.”— The New York Review of Books One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a compelling waist, and a busted thesis project. She also has a yen for Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who is rumored to have founded a secretive and unorthodox utopian society in a remote corner of the Kalahari—one in which he is virtually the only man. What ensues is an exhilarating quest and an exuberant comedy of manners: “A dryly comic love story about grown-up people who take the life of the mind seriously.” — Newsweek

Recommended on 1 episode:

Is Decarbonization Dead?

Biden passed the most ambitious climate legislation in American history. Trump just shredded it. What does that mean for the future of renewable energy in America? Where does the climate movement go from here? And is it too late for us to avert climate catastrophe? To answer these questions, I invited onto the show two climate experts: Jesse Jenkins, who is a leading climate modeler and a professor at Princeton University, where he runs the Princeton ZERO Lab, and Jane Flegal, who is the executive director of the Blue Horizons Foundation and served on the Biden administration’s climate policy team. We discuss how far Trump’s policies have set us back, the lessons the climate movement should learn from this loss and what the next wave of climate politics may look like.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress by Daniel Sarewitz
• 📘  Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back by Marc J. Dunkelman
• 📗  Energy: A Human History by Richard Rhodes
• 📙  Red Mars (Mars Trilogy) by Kim Stanley Robinson
• 📕  Mating: A Novel (National Book Award Winner) by Norman Rush
• 📘  An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Inside Technology) by Donald MacKenzie

Jesse Jenkins , Jane Flegal July 25, 2025 6 books recommended

View