I'm wondering if you can describe the book you're reading.

Is it a doorstop, basically?

Yeah, you feel the weight of it.

You feel the weight of history on your lap as you read it.

Jordan Weissman covers the economy for Slate.

So when I asked him what he did over the Memorial Day weekend, and he said,

oh, I'm reading a 900-page book about the Great Depression, I cringed a little.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody will be shocked about why I've decided it's a good time

to read about the 1930s again. We were facing the highest unemployment rate since the

Great Depression. Officially, it's 14.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has actually suggested

it could be closer to 19 or 20 percent because of a data collection error when they were

gathering up those statistics. So the numbers are really bad, but actually they're probably worse.

Yeah. Yeah.

And actually, in some ways, that too reminds me of the Great Depression because, you know,

back then they didn't really have modern economic statistics.

And so they had to try to combat a crisis while they only had a hazy idea of just how awful it was.

They were starting to get into modern surveying techniques.

But yeah, I mean, it was, they weren't working with the same level of information that we have today.

And even now, you know, we're trying to deal with

a crisis that's moving at hyper speed and we don't quite have data to match it.

Reading about the Great Depression, Jordan sees this window of time, a time when a lot of people

saw how grim the economic reality was and struggled to figure out how to respond.

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