Reading Lists

Building a Deep Life

  1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

  2. David Brooks, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

  3. Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart

  4. , Give and Take

  5. Adam Grant, Think Again

  6. Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in an Age of Indulgence

  7. Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

  8. Everything by Cal Newport: Deep Work, Slow Productivity, Digital Minimalism especially

  9. , How to Be a Stoic

  10. , How to Think Like a Roman Emperor

  11. Seneca, How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management

  12. Siva Vaidyanathan, Anti-social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy

History

  1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

  2. Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe

  3. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture

  4. Ajay Verghese, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India

  5. Margaret Walker, India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective

Politics

  1. Ed Burmila, Chaotic Neutral: How Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center

  2. Thomas Frank, The People, No: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy; Listen, Liberal

  3. Al Franken, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

  4. and John Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?

  5. Ron Suskind, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

Media

  1. Batya Ungar-Sargon, Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy

  2. , Hate Inc: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another

Identity

  1. , Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

  2. , The Trouble with Everything: My Journey Into the New Culture Wars

  3. , Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

  4. , Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump

  5. , The End of Race Politics

  6. Jay Caspian Kang, The Loneliest Americans

  7. , The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

  8. Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke

  9. Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men

  10. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century American

  11. Debra Soh, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths About Sex and Identity in Our Society

  12. Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women

  13. , Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism

  14. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Elite Took Over Identity Politics

Economic Class

  1. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

  2. , Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

  3. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYISM, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See

  4. Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

  5. Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap

  6. George Packer, The Unwinding: The Inner History of the New America

  7. Richard Reeves, Dream Hoarders

  8. Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

  9. Batya Ungar-Sargon, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Men and Women

Philosophy/Religion

  1. Peter Adamson, Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps)

  2. The Platonic Dialogues

  3. Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World

  4. Keya Maitra, The Philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita: A Contemporary Introduction

  5. Michael Sandel, Justice

  6. Aatish Tasseer, The Twice-Born: Life and Death on the Ganges

  7. Wendy Doniger, Hindu Myths

  8. Devdutt Pattaniak, Indian Mythology

Social Science/Business

  1. John Carreyrou, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

  2. Sanjoy Chakravorty, The Other One Percent: Indians in America

  3. David Epstein, Range: Why Generalists Thrive in a Specialized World

  4. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind

  5. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society

  6. Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Wealth

  7. Adam Grant, Originals

  8. Darrell Huff, How to Lie With Statistics

  9. Christopher Leonard, The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy

  10. Thomas Piketty, Why Save the Bankers?

  11. Lauren A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs

  12. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

  13. Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis-and Themselves

Entertainment/Fiction

  1. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Palace of Illustions

  2. Kal Penn, You Can’t Be Serious

  3. Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archives Series; Mistborn Trilogy