The Death of Truth

Michiko Kakutani, for decades the chief book critic of the New York Times, argues that the collapse of shared facts in American public life did not begin in 2016. She traces the cultural currents that got there first: postmodern relativism on the academic left, decades of manufactured doubt, the internet's habit of treating a crowd's opinion as equal to research, and a media economy that rewards the loudest claim. Short, wide-ranging, and built out of reading, from Hannah Arendt to Tom Wolfe.