From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein presents a revelatory analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world.
Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.
Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises.
Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a treatment of the way many of us think and feel now, offering an intellectual adventure story for our times.
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas is an exploration of the formation of social movements through history and the role of technology in shaping them. Gal Beckerman, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, presents a narrative that spans from the 1600s to the present, examining how the quiet conception of revolutionary ideas in small, private groups has led to significant social changes, from the scientific revolution to the suffrage movement, and from feminism to modern-day epidemiology.
This book delves into the correspondence that ignited the scientific revolution, the petitions that won voting rights in 1830s Britain, the zines that expressed women's rage in the early 1990s, and the messaging apps utilized by epidemiologists during a pandemic. Beckerman highlights the importance of secluded spaces where radical ideas can incubate before reaching a wider audience and cautions that the prevalence of social media may be undermining these productive environments. By examining the successes and failures of movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter, The Quiet Before offers insights into what current social media platforms lack and proposes ways to foster the growth of radical ideas in the future.
Persona is an acerbic thriller set in a near-future world where celebrity ambassadors and assassins manipulate the media to the point where the only truth seekers left are the paparazzi. Suyana, the Face of the United Amazonia Rainforest Confederation, expects to solidify a relationship with the United States through a secret meeting with Ethan. However, her plans are upended by an unexpected assassination attempt.
Daniel, a teen runaway turned paparazzo, aiming for his big break, witnesses the attack on Suyana. Acting on impulse, he finds himself embroiled in the dangerous game of Faces, where the stakes are as high as life and death. Suyana and Daniel must navigate the treacherous political landscape, where one wrong move could be fatal.
Our personal data has been used to spy on us, hire and fire us, and sell us stuff we don't need. In Dataclysm, Christian Rudder uses it to show us who we truly are.
For centuries, we've relied on polling or small-scale lab experiments to study human behavior. Today, a new approach is possible. As we live more of our lives online, researchers can finally observe us directly, in vast numbers, and without filters. Data scientists have become the new demographers.
In this daring and original book, Rudder explains how Facebook "likes" can predict, with surprising accuracy, a person's sexual orientation and even intelligence; how attractive women receive exponentially more interview requests; and why you must have haters to be hot. He charts the rise and fall of America's most reviled word through Google Search and examines the new dynamics of collaborative rage on Twitter.
He shows how people express themselves, both privately and publicly. What is the least Asian thing you can say? Do people bathe more in Vermont or New Jersey?
Rudder also traces human migration over time, showing how groups of people move from certain small towns to the same big cities across the globe. And he grapples with the challenge of maintaining privacy in a world where these explorations are possible.
Visually arresting and full of wit and insight, Dataclysm is a new way of seeing ourselves—a brilliant alchemy, in which math is made human and numbers become the narrative of our time.