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From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds--and how she almost did, too.
As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends--until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was "on the wrong side of history," Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger--and funnier--than she expected.
In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives readers a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on "The Toxic Trends of Whiteness," following the social justice activists who run "Abolitionist Entertainment LLC," and trying to please the New York Times's "disinformation czar," she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.
Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America's sharpest journalists.
Mayim Bialik is an actor and author.
Nellie Bowles, a former New York Times correspondent and one of the builders of The Free Press (which I use as my main news source), has written a book that is poignant, funny, and very, very timely.
"Her book raises a question that Wolfe and Didion, working in the sixties and seventies, never had to face. How does a writer make use of such material in a way that takes into account the peculiar perspective – at once vividly proximate and remote – that online detritus affords?"
"The picture Nellie Bowles paints is of a politics in which sense is sacrificed at the altar of ideological purity – a country whose institutions are under the thumb of progressive zealotry."
"A wickedly enjoyable book."
-The Guardian
"A beach read of America's death throes.... Bowles's prose has a documentary sobriety that allows people to act and speak for themselves."
-The Washington Examiner
"Her strength as a guide is that the New Progressives were her tribe, and she still feels sympathy for them even if she has turned heretic."
-The Times
"A critical and very funny lens on the movement."
-Newsday
"A grand tour through the craziness that followed the killing of George Floyd and continues to this day, despite the majority of Americans shaking their heads in bewilderment."
-Tablet