Extreme conspiracies taken as fact. Uncannily lifelike AI-generated content. A democracy so divided it’s impossible to know who we can trust. How do we find our way back from a landscape rife with doubles and confusion?
Naomi Klein knows how. A legendary activist and critic described as “one of the few revolutionary public intellectuals of great integrity and vision” (Cornel West), Naomi examines this Mirror World in her new book, Doppelganger. She begins by discussing her own doppelganger, Naomi Wolf—author of The Beauty Myth and once a liberal feminist icon, now turned “an industrial-scale disseminator of vaccine-related medical misinformation”—and what being confused for the “Other Naomi” did to her sense of self. She then turns to the other doubles and sources of disorientation that we’re all experiencing, offering us not only a look at how we got here, but also a way to get ourselves out.
In empathetic talks, Naomi shows us how we can navigate the overlapping crises that have “taken humanity somewhere we have not been before, a place close but different—everything so familiar and yet more than a little off.” Author Judith Butler says that Naomi “moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times, letting ourselves be upended by what we thought we could not bear to see so that we can face and build an affirmative future.”
“Our world has changed but, as if we’re having a collective case of jet lag, most of us are still attuned to the rhythms and habits of the place and selves we left behind,” Naomi says. “It’s past time to find our bearings.”
Watch Naomi explain how to escape the Mirror World and get back to what really matters:
