The Great Wave

An urgent examination of how disruptive politics, technology, and art are capsizing old assumptions in a great wave of change breaking over today's world, creating both opportunity and peril--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Truth.The twenty-first century is experiencing a watershed moment that might well be defined by the military acronym VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), as one emergency has cascaded into another, underscoring the larger dynamics of change that are fueling instability across the world.Since the global financial crisis of 2008, people have increasingly lost trust in institutions and elites, while seizing upon new digital tools to sidestep traditional gatekeepers. As a result, powerful new voices--once regarded as radical, unorthodox or marginal--are disrupting the status quo in politics, business and the arts. Meanwhile, social and economic inequalities are stoking populist rage across the world, toxic partisanship is undermining democratic ideals, and the internet and AI have become high-speed vectors for the spread of misinformation.Writing with a critic's understanding of cultural trends and a journalist's eye for historical detail, Michiko Kakutani looks at the consequences of these new asymmetries of power. She maps the migration of ideas from the...