The Cambridge Dictionary defines a doppelganger as “a spirit that looks exactly like a living person, or someone who looks exactly like someone else but who is not related to that person”. Naomi Klein’s doppelganger is Naomi Wolf, and no one would like this confusion. Naomi Klein decided to take this misunderstanding by “following her doppelganger down each of her many rabbit holes”. Naomi Klein discusses the Covid-19 epidemic, anti-vaxxers and autism, Nazism and anti-Semitism… She even delves into Naomi Wolf’s prior support for earlier conspiracies regarding ISIS, Ebola, and secret NASA programs. And deconstructs Naomi Wolf’s feminism in an interesting way. She also tries to figure out why the “Other Naomi” radically changed and chose to follow all these alternate, shadowy paths. Along the way, we learn that conspiracy doesn’t have to be consistent or based on accurate scientific knowledge, making it so powerful. This is a lengthy read, starting with a specific issue and veering off in numerous directions, making it sometimes difficult to understand the reasoning. It is worth reading to understand these crazy times we are currently experiencing. Enriching.

“In the torrent of disconnected facts that make up our “feeds,” the role of the researcher-analyst is plain: to try to create some sense, some ordering of events, maps of power. The most meaningful response in my writing life came from the loveliest of literary mapmakers, John Berger, when I sent him The Shock Doctrine in galleys. Many people have said they found the book enraging, but his response was very different. He wrote that, for him, the book “provokes and instills a calm.” When people and societies enter into a state of shock, they lose their identities and their footing, he observed. “Hence, calm is a form of resistance.” I think about those words often. Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for necessary change. But calm is the precondition for focus, for the capacity to prioritize. If shock induced a loss of identity, then calm is the condition under which we return to ourselves. Berger helped me to see that the search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and – I hope – in the minds of my readers as well. The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking – but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it.”