What I’m saying is that it’s possible things have already fallen apart, and that I’ve spent my whole life watching it. And I think the only reasonable response to this is to write about love. Our government collects our taxes and watches us die and laughs when we beg for help. We’ve seen over a year and a half of communities rising up in mutual aid because, while the people we elect to protect us don’t give a fuck if we die, it turns out that we, all of us, very much do. So I write about love, because it’s the only thing I think really matters.
The challenge for any novelist, of course, is not merely to use twins as an off-the-peg plot device, but to capture the existential experience of growing up in exact parallel to a sibling, or, in the case of identical twins, being the genetic double of another human being. As a twin myself, I’d say Renée Branum’s riddling debut, Defenestrate, gets very close to a true depiction, as Marta and Nick attempt to individuate from each other – first in Prague, and then in a midwest hospital after Nick falls from a fifth-storey window.
We’re a divided nation, but pretty much everyone acknowledges the morbid symptoms. There is less agreement on what sort of ideological paradigm will be born next, or how. Gestational metaphors are only so useful. We know where babies come from. We’re less clear on what changes the world.
In his wide-ranging, subtly ambitious new book, “The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas,” Gal Beckerman submits that the answer, or one of them, is “a group of people talking.” The people he has in mind are not party grandees in smoke-filled rooms. They’re vanguardists, visionaries, fanatics, riot grrrls—some of them political dissidents, some of them revolutionaries in the realms of art or thought. In particular, Beckerman is concerned with how these people talk—through public manifestos, through onionskin samizdat, through telegrams, through Telegram—and how the medium affects the efficacy of the message.
But Lindemann argues quite convincingly that despite people’s knee-jerk mockery of reality TV or reflexive embarrassment at being “caught” as a viewer, studying the genre gives us a better understanding of our world and ourselves. The book takes a deep dive into reality TV through a sociological lens, looking at how the genre reveals American thinking on gender, race, sex, families and more, repeatedly reinforcing Lindemann’s point with evidence from social scientists, anthropologists, philosophers and media psychologists.
like the phantom of the opera
or the kingdom of god
the golden state killer
is there inside your mind