This was a fascinating blend of Klein's autobiography (as a "doppelganger" constantly mixed up with Naomi Wolf) and non-fiction somehow covering conspiracies, COVID, and colonialism. It doesn't necessarily feel like it overextends itself though. The "doppelganger" framing was interesting and not too heavy-handed, but unique. I highly recommend this!

Some of my favorite moments:
* For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied— a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.
* 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. Uranga writes, “In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.”
* “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period. Are the political movements Other Naomi helps lead ridiculous, unworthy of attention—or are they part of a serious shift in our world that needs our urgent reckoning? Should I be laughing or crying?
* Roth terms “pipikism,”… “the antitragic force that inconsequencializes everything— farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything”… Is it possible to escape a tractor beam like pipikism? Once an idea has been pipiked, can it ever be serious again.
* Many people have said they found [The Shock Doctrine] enraging, but [John Berger] wrote that 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.”… Calm is not a replacement for righteous rage or fury at injustice, both of which are powerful drivers for 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.
* the very concept of a public good has now become foreign. Literally foreign, in the sense that policies that ask anything of individuals—whether in the face of COVID or the climate crisis or the inequality crisis—are now cast in the Mirror World as part of a Chinese plot to impose CCP values on the West.
* The illusion of our separateness fell away [in covid]. We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by one another.
* “Conspiracy theories are a misfiring of a healthy and justifiable political instinct: suspicion.” But suspicion directed at the wrong target is a very dangerous thing.
* It was as if the quest for equality were being reframed not as the right to be free from discrimination, but as the right to discriminate. Colonialism framed as reparations for genocide.
* …the idea of our duplicates walking around stands in for the roads not taken. Who might we be if the choices that determine our lives had been slightly—or radically—different?
* “we live in a society that encourages and rewards the uncaring parts of ourselves, while making it hard to care for others… we need systems that light up our better selves, the parts of ourselves that want to look outward at a world in crisis and join the work of repair.
* We are told that the way things are is the only way they can be, because every other model has supposedly already been tried, and all have failed. But these ideas about different ways of being and thinking and living did not all fail; rather, many of them fell, crushed by political violence and racial terror. Being crushed is not the same as failing, because what was crushed can be revived, reimagined anew. For Freud, doppelgangers represented paths not taken… We could also choose to see them as reminders of roads that can still be taken, of pasts that are still pertinent to our present.