Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World

So much of modern history is a story of pools of trauma being spatially moved around the globe like chess pieces made of human misery, with yesterday’s victims enlisted as today’s occupying army.

Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period.

Achieving goals means setting rigorous targets and displaying relentless discipline to meet them (a.k.a. “putting in the work”). That’s how you reach your idealized body double.

We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror.

Doppelgangers in literature often embody a partitioned self, and, as Rooney writes, “doppelgänger politics is first of all a politics of self-partition,” with everything we cannot bear to see projected onto the other.

“We did change the discourse…,” a friend remarked to me the other day, and then the thought trailed off. We did. But we appear to have done it at the precise moment when words and ideas underwent a radical currency devaluation, a crash connected, in ways we have barely begun to understand, to the torrent of words in which we are swimming on those s

We’d all like to think that, wouldn’t we? The trouble is, there are just so damn many of us out there trying to be unique at the same time, using the same preprogrammed tools, writing in the same fonts, answering the same prompts. No wonder Eisenberg saying those words has become a viral meme, circulating on the same platforms where we are all comp

From a movement-building perspective, that trajectory made sense: movements that want to grow have to reach across silos and beyond the already converted.

“disaster capitalists,