Tag Archives: fake news

He Said, She Said in the Trump Era

Thursday Today’s poem is a good response to our president’s non-stop lying, gaslighting, and “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” For that matter, it’s a sharp riposte to centuries of mansplaining. Sometimes we need a witty poetic rejoinder like Wendy Cope’s “Differences of Opinion” to retain a hold on reality. […]

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Exposing Stalin-Style Fake News

Monday NeverTrumper Jennifer Rubin made a Stalin allusion on MSNBC’s A. M. Joy yesterday that caught my eye because I am currently reading a novel about Stalin’s Soviet Union during the German invasion. Vasily Grossman’s extraordinary Life and Fate (1960), resembles Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the way it captures the country at a moment […]

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Using Lit to Battle Fake News

Authors can fight back against autocratic attempts to define reality but can no longer resort to classic realism, Salman Rushdie argues.

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Trump Reality: Puerto Rico a Success

Puerto Rico hurricane disaster, like the banana plantation massacre in “100 Years of Solitude,” has all but vanished from the airways.

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Leaders Who Make Their Own Reality

What to make of Trump’s non-stop lying? Rushdie in “Midnight’s Chidren” describes what happens when “reality quite literally cease[s] to exist.”

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Swift’s April Fools Broomstick Joke

The all time master of the April Fools joke was Jonathan Swift. Here’s one of his lesser ones where he draws deep philosophical by meditating on a broomstick.

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Jonathan Swift, Master of Fake News

Fake news, which played a role in the 2016 election, may have become particularly sophisticated, but satirists have been creating fake news since at least the days of Jonathan Swift. Take, for instance, Swift’s “The Last Speech and Dying Words of Ebenezer Elliston,” which supposedly lowered the crime rate but which, for that reason, is problematic.

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