by Adam J. Berinsky ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 15, 2023
A carefully considered, largely pessimistic dive into the academic research on toxic political misinformation.
A quantitative assessment of political rumors in the U.S. and proposals to manage them.
Berinsky, founding director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab, delves into the transmission of and widespread belief in political claims that are both unsupported and tinged with “a conspiratorial edge.” QAnon conspiracies, Trump’s mantra of a stolen presidential election, and the claim that Obama’s health policy includes “death panels” are only the most pernicious. For centuries, political discourse has entailed bending, breaking, and suppressing the truth in order to shape perceptions and attract constituents. Indeed, political rumors are “nothing new in the American experience.” Drawing on public opinion surveys, Berinsky finds that rumors are “the toxic marriage of political beliefs and conspiratorial orientation.” They thrive on repetition and ripple outward from creators to believers to the uncertain and to disbelievers. Though both Republicans and Democrats trade in rumors, “more rumors are in circulation on the right than there are on the left,” and Republicans are less assertive in their denials. Although people who are more politically engaged and informed are “more likely to reject rumors of all partisan stripes,” the effects of fact-checking, a widely adopted prescription, are limited and temporary. “Lies, false narratives, and ‘alternative facts’ can...taint faith in the political system,” Berinsky warns, and he proposes a medley of responses, of mixed quality. At the top of his list is mobilizing “the power of unlikely sources”—i.e., individuals who might be damaged by speaking against the rumor. He also suggests regulating the information ecosystem (particularly online media), pressuring political elites who fail to denounce rumors, and inoculating the public through education in critical thinking skills. His conclusion: “It may be easier to make a rumor stronger than it is to make [it] go away.”
A carefully considered, largely pessimistic dive into the academic research on toxic political misinformation.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780691158389
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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by Matthew Desmond ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 21, 2023
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
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New York Times Bestseller
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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SEEN & HEARD
by Mike Pence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 2022
Disingenuous when not willfully oblivious.
The former vice president reflects warmly on the president whose followers were encouraged to hang him.
Pence’s calm during the Trump years has been a source of bemusement, especially during the administration’s calamitous demise. In this bulky, oddly uncurious political memoir, Pence suggests the source of his composure is simple: frequent prayer and bottomless patience for politicking. After a relatively speedy recap of his personal and political history in Indiana—born-again Christian, conservative radio host, congressman, governor—he remembers greeting the prospect of serving under Trump with enthusiasm. He “was giving voice to the desperation and frustration caused by decades of government mismanagement,” he writes. Recounting how the Trump-Pence ticket won the White House in 2016, he recalls Trump as a fundamentally hardworking president, albeit one who often shot from the hip. Yet Pence finds Trump’s impulsivity an asset, setting contentious foreign leaders and Democrats off-balance. Soon they settled into good cop–bad cop roles; he was “the gentler voice,” while “it was Trump’s job to bring the thunder.” Throughout, Pence rationalizes and forgives all sorts of thundering. Sniping at John McCain? McCain never really took the time to understand him! Revolving-door staffers? He’s running government like a business! That phone call with Ukraine’s president? Overblown! Downplaying the threat Covid-19 presented in early 2020? Evidence, somehow, of “the leadership that President Trump showed in the early, harrowing days of the pandemic.” But for a second-in-command to such a disruptive figure, Pence dwells little on Trump’s motivations, which makes the story’s climax—Trump’s 2020 election denials and the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection—impossible for him to reconcile. How could such a selfless patriot fall under the sway of bad lawyers and conspiracy theorists? God only knows. Chalk it up to Pence's forgiving nature. In the lengthy acknowledgments he thanks seemingly everybody he’s known personally or politically; but one name’s missing.
Disingenuous when not willfully oblivious.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 9781982190330
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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by Mike Pence with Charlotte Pence Bond
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