Tag: Ezra Klein

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: Take 2

Live & Learn18 Comments

So Stewart (Brand) gave birth to this idea that if we could show the world from the outside, if we realized what an amazing, extraordinary, unique gift that was — this tiny, little planet teeming with life, swimming around in a dead universe, as far as we know.

We still don’t know that there’s any other life in the universe, which is phenomenal, if you think about it. We still don’t know. We might be the only life in the universe. I think about that nearly every day. I think it’s the most sobering thought. I think that should be shouted from the rooftops every day.

That’s my version of seeing the whole Earth from space — getting people to understand that we might be the only life. It might all be on this one place, and bloody hell, shouldn’t we look after it a bit better, then?

Then those things make me constantly think and constantly be grateful for the fact that I’m alive. I remember reading this comment from a New York taxi driver. He’s driving, and he turns to the customer and says, “Oh, life. I’m so glad I got in.” [Laughs.]

I just love the idea that it’s like an amazing show at a theater and you managed to get a ticket to see it. I appreciate that kind of gratitude.

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

Brian Eno Portrait by Shamil Tanna @ Pitchfork.com

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn5 Comments

EK: So what does art do? Why do we like it?

BE: One of the things that happen when you are looking at art or listening to art — something connects to you, and you think, “That’s what I really like. That’s what really moves me.” … I think some of the worst writing in the world is writing about fine art, and it ought to be much simpler. One of the reasons you like it is that it doesn’t translate into words. It doesn’t turn into sentences. It hits you in some other place, some other part of your mind. […]

EK: I always think about that as being on an album called “Music for Airports” because that is both very discordant and, as I thought about it more, exactly correct. That is, to me, one of the holiest pieces of music I have ever heard. And in a way, it gets to something true about airports, which is that this is a place where human beings go to fly, where they’re forced into — I mean, I feel this when I get on planes — a confrontation with their own mortality. There’s never a time when I’m in a plane that is having turbulence during takeoff when I don’t think — in a way I usually do not think in my day — “I could die.” There are all these people, they’re going to places that are, in many cases, incredibly important to them, and the airport is this extraordinary combination of a place that is so banal — lines, and you’re waiting in line for food that is mediocre, at best, and you’re late, and your plane is late, and you’re annoyed. And then it’s also the absolute most remarkable place that a human being can possibly find themselves — something that, for most of human history, was completely unimaginable. “2/1” on “Music for Airports,” to me, is such a perfect song because it’s more true about the airport than my experience of the airport is.

BE: [Laughs.] That’s a nice way of putting it. I wanted to make flying feel like a more spiritual experience, if I had to put it into a sentence with a controversial word in it. And by that I mean I used to be very frightened of flying, and of course, I had to do it at that time in my career.

But I thought: What if you could make a kind of music that made you less worried about the idea of dying? What if you could make a piece of music that made your life seem less the center of your attention? If you could see yourself as just being one atom in a universe of complicated molecules, would that make things feel better?

— Brian Eno interviewed by Ezra Klein, from “A Breath of Fresh Air with Brian Eno” (NY Times, October 3, 2025. The Ezra Klein Show)

Sunday Morning

Live & Learn11 Comments

Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “The Sabbath”… has this line — “Six days a week we seek to dominate the world. On the seventh day, we try to dominate the self.” It’s amazing how much harder that is to do. But I can’t shake the question of, what if I did actually spend a full seventh of my life, which is what the Sabbath is supposed to be, living at a different speed? Who would I be if I knew more than how to work and not work? Who would I be if I knew actually how to rest?

— Ezra Klein, “Ezra Klein Interviews Judith Shulevitz.” The New York Times, January 3, 2023.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn56 Comments

So when I came across Carr’s book in 2020 (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains), I was ready to read it. And what I found in it was a key — not just to a theory but to a whole map of 20th-century media theorists…who saw what was coming and tried to warn us. Carr’s argument began with an observation, one that felt familiar:

The very way my brain worked seemed to be changing. It was then that I began worrying about my inability to pay attention to one thing for more than a couple of minutes. At first I’d figured that the problem was a symptom of middle-age mind rot. But my brain, I realized, wasn’t just drifting. It was hungry. It was demanding to be fed the way the Net fed it — and the more it was fed, the hungrier it became. Even when I was away from my computer, I yearned to check email, click links, do some Googling. I wanted to be connected.

Hungry. That was the word that hooked me. That’s how my brain felt to me, too. Hungry. Needy. Itchy. Once it wanted information. But then it was distraction. And then, with social media, validation. A drumbeat of: You exist. You are seen…

These are industries I know well, and I do not think it has changed them, or the people in them (myself included), for the better.  But what would? I’ve found myself going back to a wise, indescribable book that Jenny Odell, a visual artist, published in 2019. In “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,” Odell suggests that any theory of media must first start with a theory of attention. “One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious,” she writes.

When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention — what we choose to notice and what we do not — are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention.

I think Odell frames both the question and the stakes correctly. Attention is contagious. What forms of it, as individuals and as a society, do we want to cultivate? What kinds of mediums would that cultivation require?

This is anything but an argument against technology, were such a thing even coherent. It’s an argument for taking technology as seriously as it deserves to be taken, for recognizing, as McLuhan’s friend and colleague John M. Culkin put it, “we shape our tools, and thereafter, they shape us.”

There is an optimism in that, a reminder of our own agency. And there are questions posed, ones we should spend much more time and energy trying to answer: How do we want to be shaped? Who do we want to become?

— Ezra Klein, from “I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message” (NY Times, August 7, 2022)

Miracle. All of It.

Live & Learn12 Comments

For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here? And what would that change in our sense of who we are and where we’ve been dropped down?

And they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger. And I wasn’t sure where I would go with this ultimately in the book. And one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.

Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.

— Richard Powers, from Ezra Klein’s Podcast Interview titled “This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift.” (September, 28, 2021, The New York Times)

Notes: (1) The podcast and/or transcript is long but worthy.  (2) Post title Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. (3) Photo Credit