At what point are we doing more and worse than stewing in deeply partisan television content, chomping on the social media chum that has been algorithmically hurled at us, wading through digital slop, dodging deepfakes and seeing, through warped glasses, useless shards of the shattered truth?
At what point have we altogether exited reality?
That seems to be where we’re headed. And with each passing day, I come to believe that the E.T.A. is much sooner than we thought.
Look only at the past week. On Tuesday, President Trump spent part of an exchange with journalists at the White House essentially assuring them that he was alive. I know how absurd that sounds — he was there in front of them, blustering and babbling — but this is an era of epic absurdity, and for the three previous days, the internet had been ablaze with assertions that the president was dead and that any images or Truth Social posts to the contrary were counterfeit.
“Trump’s critics have speculated about his health for as long as he has been in national politics,” Katie Rogers acknowledged in The Times. “But there had never been a conspiracy wave as feverish as this one.” It was fed by an evidently expanding population of skeptics and nihilists who don’t trust what’s right before their eyes, a growing number of instances in which they’re sure they’re being tricked, and ever more technologically sophisticated sleights of hand. People increasingly feel that they inhabit a hall of mirrors. They’re right.
Just ask Trump’s vice president. “If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed because he didn’t do a press conference for three days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about,” JD Vance wrote in a post on X. It’s so hilariously and characteristically disingenuous that Vance sought to pin the rumor-mongering on mainstream journalism, when the bulk of it crowded the digital bazaars where he and his ilk have bought and peddled such junk as immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, making Rottweiler roti. But his larger (and inadvertently confessional?) point is valid: We can barely comprehend how many fictions are being sold to us, and we’re in a constant struggle to determine which merchandise we can safely purchase.
Trump himself reflected on that in other comments to journalists on Tuesday. He was asked about a video of a black bag being thrown out of a White House window; perplexed by it, he said that it was “probably A.I.-generated.” (The White House press office separately confirmed that it was real and had to do with maintenance work.)
Trump went on: “One of the problems we have with A.I., it’s both good and bad. If something happens, really bad, just blame A.I. But also they create things. You know, it works both ways. If something happens, it’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame A.I.” How deeply philosophical. How vertiginously high-minded. And how chilling. Photographic images of war crimes? A.I.! Recordings of shakedowns of foreign dignitaries or corporate leaders? A.I.!
“New Way to Reject Reality” was the headline that CNN’s Brian Stelter used in his newsletter on Wednesday to describe Trump’s musings. My stomach knotted as I took in those words. “New way” — meaning there are already so many existing ways. “Reject reality” — a phrase underscoring how far we’ve traveled from mere political spin, which is to Trump’s loopy fantasias as the horse and buggy is to a Waymo taxi.
“The War Against Reality” was how Derek Thompson recently titled a section of his newsletter devoted to the Trump administration’s “mass cancellation of inconvenient data.” Thompson ticked off Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job-growth numbers displeased him; the administration’s dismissal of hundreds of experts working on the National Climate Assessment; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reconfiguration of the C.D.C. to his conspiracy-minded liking.
Thompson could also have mentioned the purge of Justice Department lawyers who had the temerity — the gall! — to regard the melee at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as anything other than a heartwarming outpouring of ardent patriotism. Or the canning of the Defense Intelligence Agency official who dared to contradict Trump’s insistence that the bombing of Iran’s uranium enrichment sites was a completely devastating, history-changing success. “The White House is trying to program reality as if it were reality TV,” Thompson wrote. What Trump is pioneering, he added, is “choose-your-own-reality governance.”
Trump’s erasure or inversion of unflattering facts extends not only to the sacking and smearing of truth tellers, but also to the elevation of proven liars. If your fibs flatter him, they and you are gold. And he has been known to spread A.I.-generated hallucinations himself. In July, on Truth Social, he reposted a video with fake footage of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office. I suppose he’s just getting with the program, although maybe he’s leading the way; here in North Carolina, where I live, Republicans recently created a fake photo of Roy Cooper — our former governor, now the likely Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat — wearing a Bernie Sanders T-shirt. It was an attempt, as a social media post from the state party made clear, to rebrand Cooper as “Radical Roy.”
We’re facing the profoundly dangerous convergence of a leader determined to distract and deceive us and a social and political landscape primed for distraction and deception. Have we dealt with anything quite like this before? The existence of the shorthand IRL to designate that an event or relationship is occurring In Real Life, and not just online, suggests both the unreality of cyberspace — the fog and the fakery of it — and the significant amount of time we spend there.
“America has stacked the deck in favor of virtual reality over our material reality,” Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote last week in a guest essay for Times Opinion that bemoaned “the shrinking terrain of real life.” Shrinking or vanishing? And what in God’s name takes its place?
For the Love of Sentences
This is one of the occasional politics-free weeks in my journalistic prose roundup. Here we go:
On ESPN.com, David Hale contrasted the anticipation of college football with the arrival of it: “During the long, dark months between the end of one season and the beginning of another, we tell each other stories, because we need something to fill the void. We dress those stories up, calling them things like ‘way too early’ rankings, preseason predictions or scalding hot takes, and we sustain them with statistics, data and historical perspective.” But then, he added, “Week 1 comes along and college football delivers us a heaping dose of the truth, exposing our deceptions to the world like the kiss cam at a Coldplay concert.” (Thanks to Peter Mann of Atlanta for nominating this.)
In The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., Luke DeCock explained that on Week 1, Texas Christian University didn’t defeat an honest-to-goodness football team (University of North Carolina, now coached by Bill Belichick) so much as “a football stew, a bunch of parts and pieces thrown into a pot to simmer in hopes some magical flavor would emerge at the hands of a celebrity chef.” (Brad Kutrow, Charlotte, N.C.)
In The New Yorker, Ruby Tandoh sized up a judge on “The Great British Bake Off” (a.k.a. “The Great British Baking Show”) who personifies intimidation: “When he is of a mind to, Paul Hollywood can entwine seven strands of dough into an ornamental wreath with the dexterity of a concert pianist. The rest of the time, he will handle your bread like he is airport security. He flips it upside down, knocks on its bottom, interrogates it with sausage fingers. He squeezes a crumb with accusatory zeal. Underproofed. He raps a crust against a hard surface. Overbaked. When he is done, he dusts his hands and sheaths them in his denim carapace.” (Peggy Shults, Overland Park, Kan.)
Also in The New Yorker, Sam Knight visited Sotheby’s: “Even today, when people complain that much of the excitement of live bidding has disappeared, salesrooms at the major auction houses retain a singular atmosphere of politesse and extortion. Money is present like sin in church: Sometimes its presence goes unsaid; sometimes it is the only thing being said.” (Jerome Buttrick, Oakland, Calif.)
And Sloane Crosley questioned parenthood as an adequate criterion for a certain literary undertaking: “Having a child qualifies you to write a children’s book the same way that using a toilet qualifies you to be a plumber.” (James Joska, Carmichael, Calif., and Candace Davis, Seattle, among others)
In Switchboard, Celia Aniskovich described the wisdom — the religion — received by those who’ve graduated from Hot Dog University, an actual place for hot dog vendors. “They all know the cardinal rule, taught by their P.H.D. (that’s Professor of Hot Dogs): no ketchup,” she wrote. “Unless you still ride a tricycle (and can prove it), you’re pregnant (we don’t argue with cravings), or it’s your wedding day (and we’d better see the dress).” She added that the school itself, which is “a little ‘Ted Lasso,’ a little ‘Abbott Elementary,’” tells “a story about failure and second chances, hustle and hope, and the deeply American belief that a sidewalk, a spatula and a dream might still be enough.” (Dick Chady, Chapel Hill, N.C.)
In The Times, Seth Kugel prepared a distraught traveler for a complicated answer to his question about a canceled flight: “Grab some carrots, because we’re about to go down an airline ticketing rabbit hole.” (Barbara Ryan, San Diego, and Kay Stine, North Charleston, S.C.)
And in Wirecutter, Hannah Morrill traveled back to 1996: “I’m in the aisles of Staples — no limits, no budget and no parents in eyeshot. My cart is loaded with slabs of loose-leaf paper, packs of unsharpened pencils, a row of yet-to-desiccate markers. There’s no subject I can’t conquer, no friend group I can’t infiltrate, no style trend I can’t master.” She added: “In all the days since, and through all my life’s small and large moments — from first sips of morning coffee to the literal birth of my children — I’ve yet to top that boundless optimism of back-to-school shopping.” (Susan Dawkins, Clyde, N.C.)
To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.
What I’m Doing, Writing and Watching
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This academic year at Duke, I’m hosting an “Independent Thinkers” series of conversations with public figures who sometimes challenge the orthodoxy of the political party with which they’re affiliated or don’t fit tidily into any party at all. For the first of these events, on the evening of Sept. 30, I’ll talk with Kody Kinsley, who was North Carolina’s secretary of health and human services under Gov. Roy Cooper; there are more details here. On the evening of Nov. 10, I’ll talk with Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California; please watch this space or check my website in coming weeks for more about that.
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I spent the last chapter of the summer catching up on the entirety of “Breaking Bad,” which I’d never seen, and my storm of reactions — some negative, most positive — includes the following three. One: Watching it in a condensed rush like that, as opposed to its originally intended week-by-week schedule, underscored its tendency to repeat itself and get stuck. If, during the fourth season, I’d had to spend one more second amid the prostrate quasi-corpses in the drug den of Jesse Pinkman’s living room, my brain would have melted more than any of theirs had. Two: While I’m wholly on board with the greatness of Bryan Cranston’s performance as Walter White, it’s Aaron Paul as Jesse who blew me away even more. Few actors do rage and grief as piercingly raw as his. Three: I almost didn’t watch the final two episodes. I had to take a long pause and then will myself forward. For me, the series in its homestretch went from necessarily dark to gratuitously, unbearably sadistic. I realize the whole moral of the story is how small evils beget titanic ones and criminality metastasizes out of control, with collateral tumors that can’t be foreseen. But I didn’t need quite so much hellfire.
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How deep of a hole does the Democratic Party find itself in, and what’s the route out? To varying degrees, that was the subject of this recent edition of The Conversation in Times Opinion — I assumed Gail Collins’s past role as Bret Stephens’s online sparring partner — and of an earlier round table I hosted with two smart political analysts.
On a Personal Note
I’ve never attended a reunion of my college class at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — I’m bad in crowds and shy about those sorts of things — but I’m back on campus at least once every few months. For the past four years, I’ve lived less than five miles away.
I stand in quadrangles that I first laid eyes on 43 years ago, when I was 17. I amble past dormitories where my 18-year-old self partied with abandon. I stride down a path where my 19-year-old self, on a first date, stole a kiss. I come upon the movie theater that occasionally had midnight shows, the restaurant with the fluffy biscuits, the arboretum with the precious late-summer shade.
So many memories, so very clear. But what I feel as they fill me isn’t a longing for the heedlessness and headiness of youth. It’s relief, because what I recall most vividly about my college years is how much I distrusted the future — how bad I was at living with the sheer uncertainty of it — and I now know that it was indeed navigable and manageable, with as many unexpected highlights as feared hardships. I now understand that many of us are sturdier than we imagine. We can reasonably contemplate our tomorrows with as much hope as dread.
I’m not talking about politics, and it wasn’t politics that put my stomach in knots back then. It was an awareness of all that could go wrong in a life — or at least fail to go right. And it was my talent for sorrow, which sometimes rivaled my capacity for joy. Rivaled but didn’t exceed it, and only sometimes: That’s what I learned over the years and then decades to come. And when I return to the terrain of my youth, I embrace and say a prayer of thanks for that education.
A rather famous alumnus of my alma mater, Thomas Wolfe, wrote that you can’t go home again. I think you can and you must, because if you have the ability and the agency to do so — if you’re still that vital, still in the game — going home is a reminder that you survived it, traveled far beyond it, had an adventure unlike whatever you’d scripted, for better as well as for worse. It reacquaints you with the necessary truth that the uncertain future needn’t be a torment. It’s more a riddle, stippled with possibility.
Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter. Instagram Threads @FrankBruni • Facebook
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