Best Of: This Conversation With Richard Powers Is a Gift

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2022

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today we're revisiting one of our favorite conversations from 2021 with the novelist Richard Powers. Enjoy! There are certain conversations I fear trying to fit into a description. There’s just more to them than I’m going to be able to convey. This is one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Overstory.” If you haven’t read it, you should. It’ll change you. It changed me. I haven’t walked through a forest the same way again. And I’m not alone in that. When I interviewed Barack Obama this year, he recommended “The Overstory,” saying, “It changed how I thought about the earth and our place in it.” Powers’s new book is “Bewilderment.” You could think of it as 'The Innerstory': It is about how and whether we see the world we inhabit. It’s about the nature and limits of our empathy. It’s about refusing to die before we’re dead and taking seriously the gifts and responsibilities of being alive. It is about how we change our minds and how we change our societies. It is about how we treat delusion as normal and clarity as lunacy. It is enchanting, and it is devastating. It is not just books through which Powers has been exploring these ideas. It is also through radical changes he’s made to how he lives his life. That’s where we start but far from where we end: This conversation touches on mortality, animism, politics, old-growth forests, extraterrestrial life, Buddhism and beyond. Mentioned: Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard Book recommendations: How to Be Animal by Melanie Challenger Rooted by Lyanda Lynn Haupt Ever Green by John W. Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Ezra Klein and this is the Ezra Klein Show.
0:23.3	Sometimes I finish these conversations and I feel I've been given a gift and this is
0:28.5	one of them. This is really one of them. Richard Powers is the author of 13 novels, including
0:35.2	famously The Overstory, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019. I love The Overstory. I loved it.
0:41.8	I've never walked through a forest the same way again. And a lot of people loved it. When I
0:47.2	interviewed him earlier this year and asked for his three bucks, former president Barack Obama
0:51.7	recommended The Overstory and he said, quote, it changed how I thought about the Earth and our
0:56.8	place in it. Health and endorsement. Powers has a new book out. Be Wildermint. And I think
1:04.3	Overstory and Be Wildermint should be understood as a couplet. The Overstory is about the world
1:10.4	beyond us. The slow, powerful life of the trees and the forests and the way all of that shapes us.
1:18.1	You could also call it the Outer Story. And bewilderment by contrast is the inner story.
1:23.8	It is about our cognition, our brain waves, the way we can live in a time of wonders, but a time
1:32.0	also of horrors, of climate crisis and mass extinction and poverty that doesn't need to be there
1:38.4	and violence, how we can live in that time and see nothing but normalcy. Sometimes see nothing
1:44.5	but ourselves. It's about the limits of our cognitive empathy and what it would take to change
1:50.1	them and what we do to those among us who aren't so limited. It is an enchanting and my God,
1:57.0	it is a devastating book. And it speaks as does this conversation we have to something I've been
2:03.6	wrestling with on the show over the past year and probably before that too. Look, if you listen,
2:09.8	you know, I don't believe in pretending that there are no limits on what our politics will accept.
2:15.0	But I also don't believe in pretending that the limits that are there are just that the boundaries
2:22.5	of our politics right now trace a compassionate society or chart a wise future. They don't,
2:29.1	they don't. Whether your concern is climate or it's poverty or it's animal suffering or it's
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