Greylock Together Book Group

As for March, we decided to vote on a selection from the category of Media/Fake News.  The choices are the following:

1. The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time, Brooke Gladstone (96 pp)— Drawing on writers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Philip Dick and Jonathan Swift, Gladstone (NPR’s “On the Media”) writes about the vulnerability of reality in the age of Trump in which lying is the point.

2. Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era, Daniel Levitin (314 pp) — Winner of the 2016 Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction — The fundamental ,lessons in critical thinking that we need to know and share now.

3. The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote, Sharyl Attkisson (304 pp) — This investigative reporter shares her inside knowledge, revealing how the Smear takes shape, who its perpetrators are, exposing their tactics and their access to those who are corrupting the political process.

4. Lies Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, Ari Rabin-Havt and Media Matters for America (258 pp) — an investigation of the history of organized misinformation in politics and how it has crippled legislative progress on issues such as gun control, climate change, abortion, immigration, etc.

5. The Influencing Machine, Brooke Gladstone (208 pp) — written in comic form.  NPR’s “On the Media” Brooke Gladstone guides us through the complexities of the modern media.