It’s not news that the society is fractured into tiny bits. Nor is it a big revelation that the media themselves have been atomized almost infinitely. But it is the combination of those phenomena — complicated by the especially American obsession with identity — that have converged to paralyze our politics. American Manifesto borrows from history, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and literature to understand the dynamics, and to prescribe six steps citizens must take to preserve Truth, Justice and the American Way.
About Bob Garfield
Bob Garfield, co-host of public radio’s weekly, Peabody Award-winning On the Media has been a globally prominent media and advertising critic for three decades. He is also the founding co-host of Slate’s podcast on language, Lexicon Valley, and Amazon Channels’ The Genius Dialogues. On weekends, he’s on a sporadic national tour with his one-man show, Ruggedly Jewish.
A heroic multimediocrity, Bob has been a columnist or contributing editor for the Washington Post Magazine, The Guardian, Advertising Age, Civilization and the op-ed page of USA Today. He has also written for The New York Times, Playboy, Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, Wired and the Mainichi Shimbun and been employed variously by ABC, CBS, CNBC and the defunct FNN as an on-air analyst. As a lecturer and panelist, he has appeared in 37 countries on six continents. He wrote a shitty episode of a short-lived NBC sitcom, Sweet Surrender, and co-wrote a song recorded by Willie Nelson. (Long story.) He is a five-time New York Times worst-selling author.
Praise for American Manifesto
“In the vast, bland American wasteland of homogenized, regurgitated media, there is a lone, heroic taco truck. Bob Garfield is that taco truck. Nourishing. Defiant. Also very smart and very brave. American Manifesto is his spicy masterpiece.” –Alec Baldwin
“Short, specific, and droll. It is very much worth reading, for ideas about the next stage in the world’s recovery from failed, weak, and in other ways troubled media systems.” –James Fallows, The Atlantic
“Bob Garfield speaks truth not just to power, but to the dangerously disempowered. Unflinchingly direct yet courageously sympathetic, his American Manifesto deconstructs the most infectious media virus of all time. Here is the vaccination that our collective immune system so desperately needs.” –Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock and Team Human
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