Naomi Klein

I write books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects.

the heat dome

The uncanniness provoked by doppelgangers is particularly acute because the thing that becomes unfamiliar is you.

A Spanish word for existential anxiety and deep gloom, zozobra also evokes generalized wobbliness: “a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on”—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life.

Here is my attempt to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, with its maze of simulated selves and digital avatars and mass surveillance and racial and ethnic projections and fascist doubles and the studiously denied shadows that are all coming to the surface at once.

The “myth” of beauty was invented, she speculated, to drain women’s power and focus—to keep them busy with mascara and starvation diets instead of free to climb the professional ladder and outcompete their male rivals. In essence, she posed the heightened beauty standards of the 1980s as a backlash to the feminism of the 1970s.

It appeared that Wolf did not want to tear down elite power structures—she wanted to enter them.

What set Wolf’s writing apart from these kinds of movement intellectuals was an apparent paucity of curiosity about the lives of women who were not her, and whose lives were markedly different from her own.

benign if twee advice

become a key node