The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
NEW YORK TIMES Editors' Choice

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic comes an impassioned critique of America’s retreat from reason

We live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the occupants of the White House. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.
 
How did truth become an endangered species in contemporary America? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and politics, Kakutani identifies the trends—originating on both the right and the left—that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.
 
With remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and points toward a new path for our truth-challenged times.

• Post-Truth (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series)
• The Truth Matters: A Citizen's Guide to Separating Facts from Lies and Stopping Fake News in Its Tracks
• Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era
• How Democracies Die
• Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition
• A Warning
• The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread
• How Democracies Die
• The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
• United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (And What We Can Do About It) (City Lights Open Media)