With candor and humor, Connie Chung shares the highs and lows of her trailblazing career as a journalist in her invigorating memoir, Connie.

LGBTQ+, Memoir, Nonfiction

Frighten the Horses

Oliver Radclyffe’s Frighten the Horses is a powerful standout among the burgeoning subgenre of gender transition memoirs.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

Health and Safety

Emily Witt’s sharp, deeply personal memoir, Health and Safety, invites us to relive a tumultuous era in American history through the eyes of a keen observer.

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Simon Winchester

Interview by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

Simon Winchester journeys through space and time with equal aplomb. He had already earned his stripes as a travel writer when he decided to plunge into history to tell the story of the Oxford English Dictionary and two of its principal creators. No one was more astounded than he was when in 1998, that story, The Professor and the Madman, became a bestseller.

Now comes The Map That Changed the World, Winchester’s account of trailblazing English geologist William Smith. Born in 1769 and largely self-educated, Smith worked as a surveyor, a profession that took him into coal mines and canal excavations where he noticed patterns in the exposed layers of rocks and the fossils trapped within them. From his observations, he created in 1815 a huge, multicolored map of England that detailed with great accuracy the world that lay beneath the nation’s surface.

Apart from its value to commerce, the map was an implicit assault on the Christian church’s most cherished creation myths. Smith seemed on the verge of scientific celebrity and the wealth that went with it. Four years later, however, he was in debtors’ prison, and lesser men were claiming his achievements as their own. As with The Professor and the Madman, Winchester presents The Map That Changed the World as a drama of discovery, despair and redemption, one that plays out across the lifetime of its protagonist.

Speaking from his home in Dutchess County, New York (he has another in Scotland), Winchester says he first heard of Smith while an undergraduate at Oxford. "I think I became interested in him because my tutor [Harold Reading], who I dedicate the book to, told me — and I think this is what lodged in my mind for all those 30 years — that William Smith had been very much a hero of his. After this extraordinary success of The Professor and the Madman, I was wondering if there was another character whose life trajectory was similarly interesting and which also illuminated some wider field. And I thought of William Smith."

Heightening his interest in Smith, no doubt, was the fact that Winchester had studied geology in college "24 hours a day for three years" with the intention of earning his living at it. "Immediately after leaving Oxford," he recounts, "I went down to western Uganda and worked in the mountains on the Congo-Ugandan border, prospecting for copper. I had a fascinating time, but it really wasn’t what I was most suited to, I don’t think."

In Uganda, Winchester read Coronation Everest, James Morris’ 1958 account of being a Times correspondent on a Mount Everest expedition. "I was interested in mountains," he continues, "so I thought, well, instead of working in the mountains and hitting bits of rock and sending them off to be examined, I would try to get a job going to exotic places and writing about them generally. So I wrote to James and said, ‘Can I be you?’ as it were, and he wrote back and said, ‘Absolutely. If you want to leave Uganda, come back and get a job on a local paper in Britain and keep in touch.’ That’s what I did."

James Morris underwent a sex change in 1972 and emerged as Jan Morris. "We’ve remained closely in touch and have written a book together," says Winchester. "We’re the best of friends. But it’s rather odd when your mentor goes from one gender to another."

Winchester moved to America in 1972 to work as a correspondent for the Guardian, a post he held until 1976. "During that time I began getting freelance work from magazines like Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly and the Smithsonian," he says. "Nowadays, I find that I have a far more sympathetic audience among editors in America than I do in Britain. There are so many more magazines that will print long and relatively serious pieces in America than there are in Britain. I’ve just done a big piece in the Atlantic about Roget’s Thesaurus. There’s no magazine in Britain that would spend 15,000 words on Roget’s Thesaurus. This is a country which really, in my view, respects writers. It’s one of the reasons I prefer to spend my time here."

As a travel writer, Winchester favored grand projects. His books took him through Korea, along the length of the Yangtze River and throughout the colonial remnants of the British Empire. What they did not do, he freely admits, was make money. "I never ever had had a book that really earned out its advance, I don’t think. And then suddenly I changed from writing about travel to writing about history, never having any experience of doing such a thing, and extraordinarily [The Professor and the Madman] took off."

Winchester has developed a pattern for his histories: "I try to cover the story in a chronological, linear sort of way, but I very deliberately go off in an exuberant way along all the tangents that seem valuable and interesting. . . . If I’m interested in the railway that was built where the canals used to be, then I’ll write about that. If I’m interested in fossil collections, then I would write about the nature of fossil-collecting generally."

There have been three book projects, Winchester says, that he decided to abandon well into the research stage: one on Manchuria ("because the Chinese have destroyed so much relating to the history of the Manchu people"), the second on Shanghai (after another "very good book" on the subject was published) and the third on Arctic explorer and National Geographic founder Adolphus Washington Greely (after Winchester found that a fellow writer was already 15 years into writing his own life of Greely).

"The next book I’m doing," Winchester reveals, "is a big study of the 27th of August, 1883, which is the day that the volcano at Krakatoa exploded. I want to take a look at that extraordinary day [and] the immediate aftermath. It had a great global effect." As a part of the book, Winchester says he will also weave in how the telegraph quickly carried news of the eruption around the world.

"My big dream is a book I’ve been planning to do for years," he says. "It’s to write a sort of a hymn to the joys of tramp steamers. I want to buy an 800-ton tramp steamer with a crew of six, sail it around the world for two years, picking up and discharging cargo and running it as an actual business. And I want to chronicle all this in a very romantic way. But for some funny reason, publishers don’t seem terribly keen. I wonder why that might be?"

Edward Morris reviews and interviews from Nashville.

Author photo by Marion Ettinger.

Rick Bragg

by Ellen Kanner

Arts & Culture, Pop Culture

Pop Culture Arts & Culture

Michael Lewis

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not yet in bookstores and it has already infuriated former SEC chairman Arthur Levitt. And Bill Joy, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems, is not going to be happy with it, either.

This is not because Michael Lewis has suddenly lost the sense of humor or flair for storytelling we experienced reading Liar’s Poker or The New New Thing, his book about Jim Clark and Silicon Valley. Rather, in Lewis’ eyes, Levitt and Joy have become so swollen with self-importance that they offer inviting illustrations of the status upheavals spawned by Internet technologies and radically democratized access to information. It will be no comfort to Levitt and Joy to learn that Next comes with its own megaphone — that old technology called television.

For, Next, the book, is the fraternal twin of Next, the BBC television documentary, which features Lewis as the on-camera guide to the New Internet Order. The documentary will premiere in the U.S. in two two-hour segments on A&E on August 5 and 6 at 9 p.m. ET.

According to Lewis he was "stewing" over the weird ways in which the "transformative technology of the Internet was touching people" and feeling frustrated because pursuing this idea required more work than he could possibly accomplish on his own, when the BBC came calling with promises of a research team and a travel budget.

"I don’t think I would have written the book if the BBC hadn’t come along," Lewis said during a recent call from Paris, where he and his family have lived during the two years he worked on the book and the documentary.

In Next, Lewis weaves a series of themes into the swift, sharp, often-funny narratives that comprise the bulk of the book. "The Internet creates chaos in any relationship that’s premised on an imbalance of access to information," Lewis says, describing one of his themes. "The legal profession, the medical profession and parents in relation to their children have enjoyed superior status because they have had better access to information. I found myself looking for the effects in the world of eliminating these imbalances."

A related idea, which Lewis attributes to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Andy Kessler, is that Internet technologies empower the fringe over the center. "For example, we spent a week in Finland asking the question how did a society that was basically a nonentity in Europe become a society that is now on the leading edge of technology and the communications revolution?"

Lewis’ final overarching theme is that "one day thousands of years from now, if people are still alive, they’ll look back on this period as the endgame of democracy. I don’t mean that democracy is coming to an end but that it’s becoming more and more extreme. The democratizing instinct wants to level everything."

Lewis says he struggled to embody these themes in the narrative. "What Next really wanted to be was a series of arguments about how the world is changing and how the Internet plays a part in that. But I’ve always felt the essay is a cheat. It’s harder, more challenging and more interesting if you can turn it into a narrative. So I go looking for scenes. I structure pieces of writing like a novel."

Lucky for us. Particularly in the first two-thirds of the book, where Lewis relates the stories of three teenage boys whose lives are profoundly changed by the Internet, the narratives are compelling. There is the moving story of Daniel Sheldon, a brilliant boy who is basically educating himself on the Internet, because the schools in his working class English town have failed him. There is the weirdly disturbing story of Marcus Arnold, who has become an extraordinarily popular dispenser of legal expertise via the Internet, even though he is only a teenager and has never opened a legal book. And there is the surly Jonathan Lebed, who made a killing in the stock market by trading online, often from the school library in Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and ran seriously afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the process.

It’s the story of Lebed that leads Lewis to interview Arthur Levitt in what is probably the highpoint — or lowpoint — of the book. With a sort of deadpan humor, Lewis exposes Levitt’s empty pomposity and self-satisfied platitudes in a scene that might have made Mark Twain proud.

"It was shocking," Lewis says, reflecting on his interview with Levitt. "He’d been all over television talking about this case . . . but while I’m talking to him it becomes clear to me that he doesn’t understand not only this case but also the way the markets actually work. The 16-year-old kid’s description of the world is much more persuasive than the head of the SEC’s. That was something that took me a minute to get my mind around. Here in a microcosm was what I’d been talking about. The head of the SEC’s authority was badly undermined because he didn’t know what he was supposed to know, and that information was widely available on the Internet."

Lewis delivers a similar comeuppance to Bill Joy near the end of the book. Joy, who was responsible for the technology behind Sun Microsystems, has recently become famous for an essay warning of the dangers of new technologies. This strikes Lewis as ludicrous. "I found his article completely unpersuasive. It read like the work of a charlatan to me. All of its clout as an argument came from the fact that it was written by someone everybody thinks is a genius. . . . The Internet has vaulted computer scientists to a new level, where they can now start meddling in the big questions of social philosophy. They want to be grand old men in a world that’s designed not to have grand old men. I thought it was important for that reason to hurl a stink bomb into their world."

Of course Lewis’ stink bombs usually come with a strong dose of common sense and a big whiff of laughter. "I’ve always been somebody who laughed at inappropriate moments," he says. "Humor is a natural predisposition for me. . . . Humor is my spitball."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

In his first book, the widely and deservedly praised Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis tweaked the noses of the powers-that-be at the investment banking firm Salomon Brothers and apparently provoked nary a ripple of recrimination. His sixth book, Next: The Future Just Happened, is not yet in bookstores and it has already infuriated former SEC chairman […]

The pain of a boy’s final days

by bookpagedev

Nonfiction, True Crime

Nonfiction True Crime

Ann Rule

Interview by Edward Morris

by Edward Morris

Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. When Rule was just getting started as a crime writer in the early ’70s, she worked at a Seattle crisis clinic with the soon-to-be-revealed serial killer Ted Bundy. In the decades since that coincidental meeting, Rule has become America’s top true crime writer, with 16 best-selling books to her credit.

In her latest study, Every Breath You Take, she descends into the twisted mind of Allen Blackthorne, the handsome, brilliant and self-made (right down to renaming himself) multimillionaire who instigated the 1997 killing of his former wife, Sheila Bellush. After years of threats and terror, Sheila was shot and slashed to death in front of her two-year-old quadruplets. Blackthorne was convicted of her murder in July 2000 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

"I’m always looking for the protagonist who appears to have everything in the world," Rule said recently from her home in Washington state. "The rest of us think, boy, if I were handsome or pretty and smart and charming and wealthy and popular and had love, why wouldn’t I be happy? But these people never get enough. And, in the end, many of them will kill to get what they want. If I find the right person who looks good, but under that façade is basically evil, the book’s very easy to write. I just kind of follow along with the action."

But Rule doesn’t rely on action alone to propel her stories. She also delves into the family histories of her principal characters, trying to discover why they act as they do. "When I was a little kid and my grandpa was a sheriff in Michigan," Rule says, "I was allowed to go up in the cells and visit with the women prisoners. They just looked so nice. I was always asking my grandfather, ‘Why would they want to grow up and be a criminal?’ The why of murder always fascinates me so much more than the how. I wanted to understand the psychopathology, why some people would grow up to be criminals. I found that if you can follow the family pathology back, often there are clues."

With a degree of foreboding that is chilling to contemplate, the victim in Every Breath You Take chose Rule to be her voice from the grave long before she was murdered. "Kerry Bladhorn, who is Sheila Bellush’s sister, sent me an e-mail [in February 2000] and said, ‘I’m going to try one more time to find you.’ She told me that her sister, when she got divorced 10 years earlier from Allen, had said, ‘If anything ever happens to me, please have it investigated.’ And then she said, ‘Promise you’ll find Ann Rule and ask her to write my story.’"

Rule concedes that her book would have been derailed had Blackthorne been found not guilty. "It’s always a gamble for me," she explains, "because if someone is acquitted at trial — and I try to be at every session of the trial — I really could not write about it. They could say that I was invading their privacy."

Beyond the common trait of guilt, Rule says the criminals she writes about share other similarities: "I think the lack of empathy is the first thing. . . . All of them, I would say, have deeply entrenched personality disorders. In their minds, the world revolves around them, and the rest of us are one-dimensional paper-doll figures who are put on earth to make them happy. I don’t think they attribute the feelings to us that they have themselves. It doesn’t really matter who they hurt. Yet they’re all chameleons. They fool us. They give us back whatever we might want from them, if it suits their purposes."

Rule says her authoring chores have evolved into a fairly predictable pattern: "I’m always working on three

Nonfiction True Crime

Every Breath You Take

By Ann Rule

Free Press

ISBN 9780743202961

in a sense. I’m publicizing the book that’s done. I’m writing the book that’s in the hopper, and I’m doing a little advance research on the book to come. I don’t write on two books at a time. I may stop to do an article or two in the midst of a book, but I get so immersed with the characters involved that it’s awfully hard to pull me away."

Her next book will be about Anthony Pignataro, the plastic surgeon from Buffalo, New York, who poisoned his "faithful wife of 20 years," albeit not fatally. "It took her a very long time to even believe that this man she’d always stood beside would do that to her," Rule says. "I’m going to tell the story from her viewpoint."

Beyond telling good and true stories, Rule has a more basic agenda. "The thing I hope to do, although I know it’s impossible, is put myself out of business," she says. "I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It’s a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I’ve written are about wives who just couldn’t get away. But I’ve heard from probably a dozen or more women who’ve said, ‘I’d be dead if it wasn’t for something I read in one of your books.’ That makes me feel so good."

Thanks to the public nature of trials and the media interest in them, even the most heinous killers get to tell their story. Rule believes their victims should be heard, too. "I always want to give the victim a voice," she concludes. "One of my main tasks is to let the reader know the extent of the loss and what might have been if this person had been allowed to live."

Edward Morris writes on books and music from Nashville.

True crime author Ann Rule gets to know the kind of people most of us hope we’ll never meet. The long-time chronicler of murders most foul is fascinated with the personalities of those who kill as a matter of choice. Early in her career, the author got a close-up glimpse of one such frightening character. […]

The Texas roots of George W. Bush

by bookpagedev

Environment, Lifestyles

Lifestyles Environment

The power and peril of coal

Review by bookpagedev

by Alan Prince

Last summer’s plight of nine Pennsylvania crewmen trapped 240 feet underground reminded the nation that coal mining still exists. Because nine of every 10 tons of the nation’s coal vanishes into power plants, many Americans hold the illusion that coal is no longer a major energy player, but here’s the reality: Coal produces at least half of the nation’s electricity, and we’re burning more of it than ever before. In Coal: A Human History, author Barbara Freese tells the remarkable story of how this fossil fuel has shaped and shortened untold thousands of lives, tracing the history of the substance to long-ago times in Asia and Europe when it was used as jewelry and when some folks, considering coal a form of living vegetation, suggested that rubbing it with manure would help it to grow. Freese points out that coal fueled the steam engine, which, as the waterwheel’s successor, became the pumping heart of the Industrial Revolution in England and perhaps the most important invention in the creation of the modern world. And by fueling the railroads, coal became the number one factor in converting the wilderness that was the United States into an industrial power. It also helped the Union defeat the Southern states in the Civil War.

More than a tale of history, this book is also a plea for action by governments now making energy investments that will be with us for decades. An assistant attorney general in Minnesota, where she battled coal firms charged with fouling the environment, Freese was fascinated by coal’s history but angered by its modern-day effects. She quit her job primarily to research this book. She cites estimates linking power plant emissions to 30,000 deaths annually in the United States and to as many as a million in China. Coal thus becomes a strong plea added to an ever-growing international chorus asking governments to remove risk from the act of breathing.

Memoir of a gonzo journalist

by bookpagedev

Memoir

Memoir

Oliver Sacks

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City. There he makes the occasional house call ("I like house calls. I think they're crucial.") and, time permitting, sees all comers as patients. ("I'm not snooty about seeing only certain exotic syndromes; I'm happy to see people with slipped disks, cricks in their necks or anything else.")

But for the next couple of weeks, until he sallies forth on what he calls "another neurological adventure," or until his publisher packs him off to San Francisco to promote his newest and most engagingly idiosyncratic book, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood, Oliver Sacks is enjoying a sort of scholar's idyll at Cornell. "Yesterday I met with a botanist, a class of psychology students interested in color vision and a freshman writing class," he says. "Today I'm going to witness some high-pressure physics, and then there's a Greek mythology class."

With such a wide range of interests and the ability to write in interesting ways about any or all of them, it's no great surprise that Sacks succeeds in Uncle Tungsten at taking the seemingly dull topic of chemistry and turning it into a great adventure. In Uncle Tungsten it's Sacks' own boyhood enthusiasm for all things chemical that provides the narrative energy. Sacks writes with intelligence, passion and even humor about key personalities and turning points in the history of chemistry and topics ranging from metals and minerals to photography and spectroscopy. ("I've been investigating the campus with my pocket spectroscope!" Sacks exclaims at one point in our conversation. "I'm delighted to find that in my room here at Cornell there are four sorts of light.")

Sacks grew up in an exceptionally accomplished Anglo-Jewish family. His grandfather invented the Landau lamp, a crucial safety innovation in coal mining. Both of his parents were doctors. His Uncle Dave—the Uncle Tungsten of the title—was an inveterate experimenter with metals and lightbulbs (his nickname came from the tungsten his light bulb factory used for filaments). His first cousin was Abba Eban, former Israeli foreign minister.

While the chapters Sacks devotes to describing his family and homelife do not dwell on his inner life, he does reveal himself in bits and pieces: that almost from birth he was expected to become a doctor and that, eager to begin his training, his mother had him dissecting human fetuses by the age of 11, which horrified him; that his Uncle Tungsten and his more eccentric and intellectually forbidding Uncle Abe, rather than his parents, shaped and abetted his growth as a boy chemist; that he was sent as a child to a boarding school outside of London during World War II, and was abused by a tyrannical headmaster.

Overriding the darker moments is Sacks' unalloyed enthusiasm for the discoveries of science. Who else, for example, could rhapsodize so insightfully about the development of the periodic table? ("The feelings that all the elements could be elegantly and economically related to one another in terms of their physical and chemical properties and that they fell into natural groups and that there was also this mysterious periodicity as one went up in atomic weight was the most exciting thing I'd ever encountered," Sacks says. "It gave me strong feelings of cosmic order."

Sacks says he was a scribbler, a keeper of journals, from way back. Relying on the early journals and reconducting his old—often stinky and explosive—experiments, Sacks has sought to re-create here his boyhood adventures in chemistry. For him Uncle Tungsten is "a mixture of the reminiscent impulse and perhaps a pedagogic one. I would like to imagine that there are other 10 and 12 and 14-year-old boys and girls who find resonance and excitement in such discoveries. I want to retrace a journey into wonder."

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

I reach Oliver Sacks at a hotel in Ithaca, New York. Normally, the celebrated neurologist and author of such marvelously readable science books as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat lives, writes and practices medicine in New York City. There he makes the occasional house call ("I like house calls. […]

Anthony Bourdain

by Alden Mudge

Biography

Biography

History made in a hurry

Review by bookpagedev

by Edward Morris

CBS News’ Bob Schieffer relives his life on deadline From James Meredith’s fiery admission to the University of Mississippi in 1962 to the recent take-down of Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, Bob Schieffer has worked at the wellsprings of America’s political history. It’s often been history made in a hurry. The veteran CBS News correspondent had the unenviable job of deciphering the voluminous Starr Report while he was on camera live. Later, he did the same with the convoluted Supreme Court opinion that gave George W. Bush the presidency. His new book This Just In is a breezy, story-a-page account of what it’s like to become famous while covering the famous. It is also a keen appraisal of the changing nature of news and reporting.

“There’s just so much news now,” says the affable Texas native, speaking by phone from Washington. “All of us are just pounded from all sides [with] this 24-hour news cycle. It’s difficult to break through this great maw of facts and figures and get people’s attention with something that’s really important.” Schieffer believes the assassination of President Kennedy marked the dividing line between old and new journalism. “That was the first time for many people to see reporters working,” he points out. “You saw those live television pictures of reporters jostling around in the Dallas police headquarters, pushing and shoving. You saw that a lot of times gathering the news is not an orderly process. It gave people real questions about our methods, and I think it raised questions about our credibility.” (Schieffer was a police reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram when Kennedy was shot and had the strange experience of giving Lee Harvey Oswald’s mother a ride into Dallas to see her imprisoned son.) Nowadays, Schieffer observes, reporters are accustomed to doing a lot of their work in public, frequently with warranted trepidation. He says he had to do his summarizings of the Starr and Supreme Court documents the moment he got them because “people will turn on CBS to see if we know anything about this story. If we’re not on the air talking about it, people will turn away from us and go to somebody who is. And once they turn away from you, they never come back.” One of Schieffer’s complaints about modern TV journalism is that it places no premium on good writing. “So much of television reporting these days,” he says, “is what I call behind-me television’ that is, the anchor switches to a reporter who’s on the scene and the reporter says, Dan, in that building behind me . . .’ or Dan, the flames behind me. . . .,’ and that’s the start of it. Then he interviews three or four people who’ve wandered by or maybe some spokesman from the police department, and then he throws it back to the anchor.” This Just In has a wealth of gossipy, good-humored tales about such eminent talking heads as Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr and Roger Mudd. Schorr, now a commentator for National Public Radio, was such a relentless news hound that Mudd once dreamed he boarded a plane and found Schorr sitting in every seat. Of Cronkite, Schieffer says, “Of course, Walter is my hero. But he could just drive you nuts calling you up at 6:15 and asking you how much oil there was in the world. I mean, who the hell knows? My favorite was not a question asked of me but to Hugh Heckman, who worked on the evening news. One day [Cronkite] turned to him and said, Hugh, how long is Greenland?'” It troubles Schieffer that government officials in all branches and at all levels have learned how to divert and manipulate the press. “Government is so much more sophisticated in its press relations than it was 40 or even 20 years ago. Everybody has learned how you have talking points,’ how you try to have a couple of things you want to say. Everybody has a public relations strategy. This is all relatively new.” None of these roadblocks, however, appear to have blunted Schieffer’s journalistic enthusiasm. He still talks with the eagerness of a cub reporter and notes at one point that it was he who broke the news that Lott would be stepping down as majority leader. “If there’s a lesson in this book for young journalists,” he tells BookPage, “it’s that one reason you might want to be a reporter is that it’s so much fun.”

Maya Angelou

by Ellen Kanner

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Nonfiction Politics Memoir

How to Stand Up to a Dictator

Maria Ressa

By Sarojini Seupersad

Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.