I'm Gilbert Cruz, and this is the book review from the New York Times. Today, we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues over on the Ezra Klein Show. It's an interview with Michael Pollan. You probably have heard of Michael Pollan. He has written several best-selling books, including the Omnivore's Dilemma in Defense of Food and How to

Change Your Mind. His latest book came out earlier this year, and it's called A World Appears,

A Journey into Consciousness. It's an exploration of what consciousness is, and the book is,

as our review says, highly pleasurable to read.

The conversation Pollan has with Ezra is also highly pleasurable.

I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you. Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh,

Oh,

Oh,

Oh, Here is the amazing thing, the deep paradox of consciousness.

It is the only thing we truly know.

The only thing we have certain actual first-hand experience

of. And yet we don't understand it at all. We don't know what it's made of. We don't know how it

works. We don't know why it exists. And the closer we look at it, the weirder consciousness gets,

the more we try to describe it, the more our language begins to fail.

I find that so delightful that something so close can remain so mysterious, that such a central

question about the universe is happening inside of us all of the time.

Now, that's not to say we haven't tried to understand,

or that we haven't learned a lot from those efforts.

In his new book, A World Appears, A Journey Into Consciousness.

The science writer Michael Pollan takes a tour of those efforts,

of those theories, of those experiments,

...