Moreover, for Arendt, it is when everyday people lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes, that great evil occurs. So, too, when people lose the ability to imagine the perspectives of others, or as she put it in her essay “Truth and Politics,” “maki

That’s the trouble with doppelgangers: anything you might do to dispel the confusion just draws attention to it, and runs the risk of further cementing the unwanted association in people’s minds.

to be a plot against America, to use another Rothism. I am trapped in the zozobra push and pull that Roth summarizes so perfectly: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.”

If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes.

Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize.

A commodified self may be rich, but commodification still requires a partitioning, an internal doubling that is inherently alienating. There is you, and then there is Brand You. As much as we might like to believe that these selves can be kept separate, brands are hungry, demanding things, and one self necessarily impacts the other. If countless nu

The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking—but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.

We defined ourselves against each other and yet were somehow becoming ever more alike, willing to declare each other non-people.

A gulf can open up between author and reader, and hooks was making an attempt to close it. Of course, inevitably, the hooks name became its own kind of market signal, as everything in our capitalist culture does.