Steve Wasserman is as charming as his eloquent writing, he’s a raconteur, a cultural essayist & he talks to us about Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s A Lie. He takes the reader on an exhilarating journey through the world of books, featuring personal reflections on Susan Sontag, Huey Newton, Barbra Streisand, W. G. Sebald, Christopher Hitchens and more. In thirty splendid essays, originally published in such diverse publications as the New Republic and the Nation, the American Conservative and the Progressive, the Village Voice and the Economist, Wasserman delivers a riveting account of the awakening of an empathetic sensibility and a lively mind. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of his enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, and the tumults of a world in upheaval. They include the remarkable tale of a bookstore owner who wouldn’t let him buy the books he wanted, to his brave against-the-grain take on the Black Panthers, to his shrewd assessment of the fast-changing world of publishing. Here is, as Joyce Carol Oates notes, “arguably the very best concise history of Cuba and the legendary Fidel Castro; beautifully composed eulogies for two close friends, Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens; sharply perceptive commentary on Daniel Ellsberg; a thrillingly candid interview with W. G. Sebald.
As you read this, the topic of social media is headline news once again with droves of people fleeing from Twitter/X to head over to Blue Sky and Threads. In 2019 we invited Andrew Marantz, to talk about his book, Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation. Marantz had been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naïvete and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls “the gate crashers”–the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly–from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room–and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality.Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape–the landscape in which we all now live. Marantz shows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread–from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President’s Twitter feed.
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