"I've been dipping in and out of this book since my early 20s. I completely respond to one of its basic notions — self-responsibility. It's about preparing for a good death, and I've found that in having a child, you're confronted by your mortality each day as the child grows and blossoms. But every single element in our Western society is a denial of death. We don't want to think about it, which compounds the terror we feel about it. This book helps one to navigate one's way through the terror."

"I loved The Big Short because it took a great approach to explaining the financial crisis to even someone who knew nothing about it. An all-star cast got together, and the movie was just done fantastically. The moments they broke the fourth wall were just amazing, to explain finance, which is really simple when you strip it down, but finance folks keep it complicated so no one gets it. Man, if society goes through that again, they just didn’t watch that. You can learn something from that movie."

"There has been no finer nonfiction written in the last century than this penetrating examination not only of a particular family and its travails (written with the complex plot of a Tolstoy novel), but also of the ways in which our society is broken, of a system that congratulates itself as democracy and yet is intractably inequitable. This book has no agenda and makes no argument; it simply reveals the truth of the country in which we live, and allows us to formulate our own call to action."

"I’m kind of old-school but I wanted to pick at least one newer anime I’ve enjoyed. Assassination Classroom has a super-weird premise. An alien with the power to destroy earth takes over a classroom of misfits at a high school and encourages them to assassinate him. It’s strange and has lots of wacky action sequences but it also hits on some of the classic motifs of classroom dramas. It’s like Dead Poet’s Society with a mysterious, capricious, gluttonous, horny alien teacher with tentacles instead of Robin Williams."

"A haze-filled dream world of a novel about the survivors of nuclear fallout attempting to rebuild their lives and society. In my head, Fiskadoro mingled with old 1960s movie themes of young women growing up in small towns, wanting to leave their hometowns behind and be somewhere, anywhere, and someone, anyone, else. Maybe they’d glimpsed a highway billboard that advertised clothes, a car, a golden future, a possibility. Maybe, thanks to the machine of consumerism, they felt they were missing out on something they hadn’t even known existed."