> Enter Donald J. Trump and his team of advisors. For them, as she writes, lying is the point. The more blatant the lie, the easier it is to hijack reality and assert power over the truth. Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Walter Lippmann, Philip K. Dick, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy, straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and shows how the Trump team mastered it, down to the five types of tweets that Trump uses to distort our notions of what’s real and what’s not.

And she offers hope. There is meaningful action, a time-tested treatment for moral panic. And there is also the inevitable reckoning. History tells us we can count on it.

Brief and bracing, The Trouble with Reality shows exactly why so many of us didn’t see it coming, and how we can recover both our belief in reality—and our sanity.

Praise For The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time

"… a battle plan for individuals anxiously 'watching the edifice of reality collapse.'”  —The New Yorker

"Brooke Gladstone has whipped up a short stiff drink of truth. You'll be better for taking it." —George Packer, author of The Unwinding

"A spirited rampage through the hall of mirrors that is the new post-truth era.  I read this in one sitting, and at end, for a fleeting moment, felt like I had a new hammer in my hand."—Jad Abumrad, co-host of Radio Lab

Workman Publishing Company, 9781523502387, 96pp.

Publication Date: May 16, 2017


About the Author


Brooke Gladstone
is the co-host and editor of the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast On the Media from WNYC Studios, heard by well over a million people each week. She’s also author of The Influencing Machine, a comic book treatise on two millennia of media madness. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.


Coverage from NPR