The Trouble with Reality

Every week, the award winning journalist Brooke Gladstone, along with her co-host Bob Garfield, reaches 1.3 million listeners through more than 300 NPR affiliate stations with NYC Studios on the Media, a smart and witty news magazine that analyses media and how it shapes our perceptions of the world. With her front-row perch on the day's events and genius for making insightful, rapid-fire connections, Gladstone is ideally suited to explain The Trouble with Reality. Reality, as she shows us, was never what we thought it was - there is always a bubble, people are always subjective and prey to stereotypes. And that makes reality actually more vulnerable than we ever thought. Enter the elephant in the room - 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, and Jonathan Swift, she dissects this strategy straight out of the authoritarian playbook and shows how the Trump team mastered it. She analyses Trump's preferred method of communication - Twitter - and the various types of Trump's tweets including the "diversion tweet," the "trial balloon tweet/ the "deflection tweet." And she offers hope - the inevitable reckoning (history tells us we can count on it). And how we can recover both our belief in reality, and our sanity.