Political fictions
by Joan Didion · first published 2001
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In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation's citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by--and for--"that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life." The eight pieces collected here from The New York Review build, one on the other, to a stunning whole, a portrait of the American political landscape that tells us, devastatingly, how we got where we are today.In Political Fictions, tracing the dreamwork that was already clear at th
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Political Fictions is my favorite Joan Didion book, particularly her essay on Insider Baseball., which together with Asimov’s Franchise anticipates 538 and all the other media on elections that ultimately disenfranchise…
on “Joan Didion has died” ↗I also thought her book Political Fictions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions was in a similar vein.
on “Why political journalists can’t stand Nate Silver” ↗…and it doesn't work well. To back this up -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Armies_of_the_Night -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_on_the_Campa... -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_Fictions (anything by Didion!) -- https://www.worldradiohistory.com/BOOKSHELF-ARH/News/The-Inf... (1971 book that predicted you'd be reading the news on the WWW around 1980 or so -- the author prepared a report…
on “Ask HN: Is HN Press?” ↗