Sublime

The worse reality becomes—the more, for example, foreclosures and unemployment sky-rocket—the more people seek refuge and comfort in illusions. When opinions cannot be distinguished from facts, when there is no universal standard to determine truth in law, in science, in scholarship, or in reporting the events of the day, when the most valued skill

A few days after his murder, an Egyptian Google employee based in the United Arab Emirates, Wael Ghonim, set up a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said. The page, which exposed and protested police violence, attracted almost half a million followers, then became the key source of information about protests in Tunisia, which ultimately drove

War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Chris Hedges wrote, “The enduring attraction of war is this: even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

We are, for the first time in modern history, facing the prospect of how societies would exist without reliable news – at least as it used to be understood.

This is an account of a fracture, a breaking away from the notion that the polite, Western liberal ever stood for anything at all.