Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. Simon & Schuster, 304 pages, $30.00   Abundance, the much-anticipated manifesto from the New York Times’s Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, is “dedicated to a simple idea: to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need.” Beginning with a vision of the world in 2050, full of clean energy, plentiful housing, and advanced technology, they work backwards to a rallying cry for a politics that sweeps away zero-sum thinking and bureaucratic meddling in favor of…

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The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, by Christine Rosen. W.W. Norton & Company, 272 pages, $29.99 In his Life of Samuel Johnson, James Boswell recounts a conversation with his subject about one philosopher’s “ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.” It’s obvious nonsense, Boswell says, to think that we are ethereal concepts, rather than corporeal beings. But can how can we ever convincingly refute the argument to the contrary? “I never shall forget,” Boswell writes, “the…

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