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 a

"A best-selling author documents how facts-shared truths-have lost their power to hold us together as a community, as a country, globally, and how belief in "alternative facts" and conspiracy theories have destroyed trust in institutions, leaders, and legitimate experts"--

Beckwith and Koukl explore the inconsistencies inherent in the relativist position, suggest specific approaches that can be used in the course of dialogue, and consider the everyday implications of relativism, especially in relation to issues such as: abortion, homosexuality, multiculturalism, political correctness, and tolerance.

If The Cloud Corporation is, as John Ashbery called it, "the poetry of the future, here, today," then Timothy Donnelly's third collection, The Problem of the Many, is the poetry of the future yet further pressed to the end of history. In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts--from a contemporary vantage--the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and Alexander the Great.

In the most rigorous articulation of his philosophical system to date, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism. In forging this new materialism, Žižek critiques and challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux, and Julia Kristeva (to name but a few), but everything from popular science and quantum mechanics to sexual difference and analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Möbius strip, the cross-cap, and the Klein bottle, Žižek brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, and Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics, and culture. --

"An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today's world, creating both opportunity and peril--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth. The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment defined by chaos and uncertainty, as one emergency cascades into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices - once regarded as radical, unorthodox or marginal - are disrupting the status quo in politics, business and culture. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the

"Donald Trump is exactly the disaster we feared for America. Hated by a majority of Americans, Trump's administration is rocked by daily scandals, and he's embarrassed us at home and abroad. Trump can't win in 2020, right? Wrong. As 2016 proved, Trump can't win, but the Democrats can sure as hell lose. Only one thing can save Trump, and that's a Democratic candidate who runs the race Trump wants them to run instead of the campaign they must run to win in 2020. Wilson combines decades of national political experience and insight in his take-no-prisoners analysis, hammering Trump's destructive and dangerous first term in a case-by-case takedown of the worst president in history and describing the terrifying prospect of four more years of Trump. Like no one else can, Wilson blows the lid off Trump's 2020 Republican war machine, showing the exact strategies and tactics they'll use against the Democratic nominee . . . and how the Democrats can avoid the catastrophe waiting for them if they