Reality Fact truth
not sure i need this category, disambiguation?
Rove (b2) pities the reality-based journalist
factcheck.org is a site vs a concept
no merri
see correction
literacy crit think educ
see fact data empirical
see alt fact post truth earth 2
---
see earth 2 ~ empirical fact eg job numbers, stock mkt record, crime border drop #
---
05/23/24
---
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/10/researchers-warn-that-social-media-may-be-fundamentally-at-odds-with-science/
researchers Warn That Social Media May be ‘Fundamentally at Odds’ with Science](https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/10/researchers-warn-that-social-media-may-be-fundamentally-at-odds-with-science/)
Social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. Read more at TechCrunch
no lnx
a special set of editorials published in today’s issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason.The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards.
In an incisive (and free to read) opinion piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the basic disconnect with what scientists need and what social media platforms provide is convincingly laid out.
“Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces,” they write. “It is debatable whether social media platforms that are designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users are the most productive channel for convincing skeptical publics that settled science about climate change or vaccines is not up for debate.”
The most elementary feature of social media that reduces the effect of communication by scientists is pervasive sorting and recommendation engines. This produces what Brossard and Scheufele call “homophilic self-sorting” — the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they’re preaching to the choir.
“The same profit-driven algorithmic tools that bring science-friendly and curious followers to scientists’ Twitter feeds and YouTube channels will increasingly disconnect scientists from the audiences that they need to connect with most urgently,” they write. And there’s no obvious solution: “The cause is a tectonic shift in the balance of power in science information ecologies. Social media platforms and their underlying algorithms are designed to outperform the ability of science audiences to sift through rapidly growing information streams and to capitalize on their emotional and cognitive weaknesses in doing so. No one should be surprised when this happens.”
“But it’s a good way for Facebook to make money,” said H. Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals.
Thorp, who also wrote an editorial on the topic, told me that there are at least two distinct problems with the way scientists and social media interact these days.
“One is that, especially with Twitter, scientists like to use it to bat things around and openly air ideas, support them or shoot them down — the things they used to do standing around a blackboard, or at a conference,” he said. “It was going on before the pandemic, but now it’s become a major way that kind of interchange happens. The problem with that, of course, is that there is now an enduring permanent record of it. And some of the hypotheses that get made and turn out to be wrong, overturned in the ordinary course of science, get cherry picked by people who are trying to undermine what we’re doing.”
“The second is naivete about the algorithms, especially Facebook’s, which put a very high premium on disagreement and informal posts that spread disagreement. You know, ‘my uncle wore a mask to church and got COVID anyway’ — that’s going to beat out authoritative info every time,” he continued.
As Brossard and Scheufele point out, the combination of these things puts scientists “at a distinct disadvantage…as some of the very few participants in public debates whose professional norms and ethics dictate that they prioritize reliable, cumulative evidence over persuasive power.”
Sadly, there isn’t much anyone can do on the science side. Arguably the more they participate in the system, the more they reinforce the silos around themselves. No one is arguing that we should just give up — but we really need to acknowledge that the problem isn’t just a matter of the science community being less effective communicators on social media than peddlers of disinformation.
Thorp also acknowledged that this is only the latest phase of growing anti-factual tendencies and politicization that goes back decades.
“I think people tend to get a little more emotional about this without recognizing it’s a very simple thing: The political parties aren’t going to take the same position — and when one of those positions is scientifically rigorous, the other is going to be against science,” he explained. That the Democratic party is more often on the side of science is true enough, but it has also been on the other side with GMOs and nuclear power, he pointed out. The important thing is not who is for what, but that the two parties define themselves by opposition.
“That’s a political party coming to the realization that it was more politically useful to be against science than to be for it,” he said. “So that’s another thing scientists are naive about, saying ‘we’re not getting our message across!’ But you’re up against this political machine that now has the power of Facebook behind it.”
Brossard and Scheufele make a final parallel in the defeat of Garry Kasparov by Deep Blue — afterwards, no one called for special training to outplay supercomputers, and no one blamed Kasparov for not playing well enough. After the shock wore off, it was clear to everyone that we’d turned a corner not just in chess but in the possibilities of computing and algorithms. (Kasparov’s own views have evolved as well, as he told me a while back.)
“The same understanding is now here for scientists,” they write. “It’s a new age for informing public debates with facts and evidence, and some realities have changed for good.”
==
aha: bannon is just latest extension of rove's dismissal of reality-based journalism?
alt rt trolls win by owning the libs, often by making outrageous claim they know to be false to provoke an emotional reaction in weak woman-y snowflakes.
recall early graphic of blogs red/blue but red more insular/echo
flood the zone bannon/ troll it is a deliberate strategy to overwhelm correction [by lamestream media, fake news?!] and thus moderation; you cannot trust news nor gubmint thus civil society erodes and --> authoritartian/fascism strong MAN/strict FATHER to fix, maga
soc media co attempt to tamp down BS evaved by misspell or vol/forved migrsation to gab etc that prides self on lack of moderation [censorship]
flood the zone with shit/disinfo might originally been troll tactic to deflect accurate critiques/blame and rubber glue inverse crypto bizarro mirror world --> Earth2; but always hype fear about THEM enemy threat to all that's good, grift for $ to fight the evil
amplify/accelerate --> radicalization; enemy // target // tyrant
aha echo is the opposite of correction,[WELL THERE'S A SORT OF CORRECTION BUT IN THE WRONG DIRECTION BY A SMALLER AND SMALLER SUBSET OF WACKOS THAT IS IRONICALLY GETTING LARGER AND LARGER AND FINDING/MAKING EACH OTHER [[CRAZIER]]; and algo gives incremental DOSE of crazy that builds on previous slightly less crazy:--> earth2 delusional break from reality is phase shift/level up/ tip pt? doom spiral?
12 21 an salon https://www.alternet.org/2021/12/tucker-carlson/
the TV was talking to me. I was in the midst of a delusion that the news anchors on CNN were operatives of a shadow government run by the Clintons. Every time I crossed the living room of my father's dingy basement apartment, their heads followed me and the news anchors interrogated me about my role in the Russia investigation. I believed "Russia investigation" was really code for a global conspiracy to enslave humanity through mind control. President Donald Trump and the Republicans were secretly working to overturn this shadow government and end the deep state programs. Targets of torture like me would be set free.
I turned the channel to FOX News. They repeated over and over that Hilary Clinton was a criminal. Even though I was a Democrat and had voted for Bill Clinton twice, I mailed in the form to join the Republican Party. Then I faxed evidence to the Russian consulate and sent a letter to the CIA offering to cooperate in the investigation.
What I didn't know I was that I was in the advanced stages of untreated paranoid schizophrenia. I was experiencing a psychotic break from reality.
It all seemed so real.
When I was eventually treated, my psychiatrist explained to me, "With paranoid schizophrenia it's just like "The Bourne Identity" — there are people for you, people against you, and somebody always has to be the villain."
I know what you're thinking — thank God they have medication for these people.Now, I wonder, is the average American so different from me? Are we all susceptible to paranoid thoughts, conspiratorial thinking and bias when executive function in the frontal lobes and our ability to reason are disabled by fear?
Terrified by a global pandemic, there are people who believe Bill Gates is an evil mastermind who engineered the coronavirus, with plans to depopulate and microchip the world's population, while profiting in the process. Antivaxxers refuse to take a vaccine they think will alter the structure of human DNA. Our brains seek to impose order. Conspiracy theories can provide answers to people who feel overwhelmed. But ideally the frontal lobes should step in to challenge strange thoughts by asking the question: Is what I am perceiving based in reality?
Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, Co-Director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychosis Program, states that there is no generally agreed-upon definition on what constitutes a delusion. From a psychiatric or biological perspective, delusions are driven by excessive amounts of the neurotransmitter dopamine. There is a biological basis to them, and treatment can correct this abnormality. A person with such delusions (e.g., somebody with schizophrenia) is expected to respond to being treated with an antipsychotic medication which blocks dopamine. In other words, one can take a pill and think rationally.
However, many people can't do that if their delusional thinking is part of a worldview that is more an ideology. According to Dr. Freudenreich, when people create their own insular groups — where delusional ideas are never corrected, but simply bounce around in an echo chamber — it is much harder to fight those types of delusions.
Policy divides are now often framed as a battle between good and evil.The most obvious consequence of overheated partisan rhetoric is that someone with an untreated psychiatric illness can go on to commit an act of violence against a person or group that they believe is a perpetrator of their suffering. This is rare. More common is the normal person who goes down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole and finds a world that makes sense to them.
On January 6th, 2021, incited by President Trump and believing the election had been stolen, a mob attacked the Capital building. Some in the crowd showed up for the "Storm," which is a QAnon conspiracy theory that posits that Trump was planning mass arrests of a secret cabal of satanic pedophiles and coup plotters, headed by Hilary Clinton and George Soros. Capitol police described the scene as being like fighting a medieval battle.
Social dynamics can propagate conspiracy-based thinking that mimics biologically triggered delusions. But there is no medication that will stop mass violence fueled by conspiracies.
I was a forty-six-year-old filmmaker when I suddenly began to have paranoid thoughts that people were following me. When I lost my day job due to bizarre behavior, I lost my excellent health insurance. I was dumped into America's broken mental health care system that offers substandard psychiatric care to patients on Medicaid, while spending vast amounts of taxpayer money. Misdiagnosed and neglected at the county hospital, I got sicker and sicker … until the TV started talking to me.
Years of my life are now gone. I try not to be bitter that I ended up unemployed, bankrupt and almost homeless, when all I needed was proper medical care. Every day I am grateful that I didn't wind up living on the streets or locked up in prison, like so many people with schizophrenia.
It's easy to mock people who think Bill Gates wants to put a microchip in them with the coronavirus vaccine. But it's much harder to separate conspiracy theorists' larger existential fears from our own. We're approaching the second year of a global pandemic, which is causing mass anxiety and depression. The internet routinely displays images of future roads in major cities as gushing rivers due to climate change. Billions of fish were boiled in the American Northwest and Canada during an unprecedented heatwave this summer. If someone's mind starts spinning with their wildest fears and finds solace in a conspiracy theory, can you really blame them?
Television is a powerful medium. CNN and FOX News repeat the same headlines, the same phrases, over and over in the same news day. Back then, these read to my unhinged mind as coded speech; to the unsuspecting public, it is more akin to propaganda. When I was psychotic, I thought a shadow government had a ministry of propaganda and they colluded across networks. I worry about living in a country where the two major political parties are always at war, unable to get anything done, and the public is fed a delusional world by networks and social media companies competing for viewers.
People with paranoid schizophrenia see patterns that don't actually exist. Just like conspiracy theorists, they are constantly scanning the news for pieces of information to connect the dots about unseen forces controlling events. Both groups believe they are being persecuted by others. I had grandiose beliefs that I was at the center of every news story on TV. My mind was looking to cast a villain to account for the symptoms of a brain disease. The media handed me a culprit to blame. [q or trump sent me]
Dr. Anthony Fauci has complained about the extraordinary divisiveness surrounding the public health crisis created by the pandemic. The current battle is over masks and vaccines. FOX News paints the Democratic Party as a threat to democracy that has invented domestic enemies, such as the unvaccinated, to desperately cling to power. News anchors across CNN repeat the phrase "viral blizzard" to warn the public and scare the unvaccinated about the new variant. Fear mongering is psychologically destabilizing to the most normal person. But this media environment can be toxic to someone with an untreated psychiatric illness. I wish politicians and their media allies would stop contributing to the collective unraveling of the American mind.
CNN anchor corners Trump trade advisor as he rattles off several lies about the economy President Donald Trump’s Trade Advisor Peter Navarro had to take… |
==
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-milton-mankoff/the-reality-based-community-and-trumps_b_13351438.html
no link
The Reality-Based Community And Trump’s Orwellian Dystopia
By Dr. Milton Mankoff
Back in 2004, journalist Ron Suskind interviewed a top aide to President George W. Bush, later identified as Karl Rove. As Suskind reported:
“The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” ... “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
The quote was chilling, because it implied that the most powerful government on earth was confident it could be guided, not by empirical evidence, but by its ideological inclinations. Reality, of course, does matter and Rove and his boss learned, both in Iraq and when the economy collapsed in 2008, that there are costs to denying it. Happily, for them, those costs were primarily borne by those who had little choice but to live in the reality-based community: soldiers and civilians in Iraq; US homeowners and workers.
Rove’s confidence US Administrations could “create reality” was not entirely naïve, at least in the short-term. For over a century, legitimate analyses of impediments to objectivity (examined in depth by psychology, neuroscience, and post-modernist philosophy, and depicted in the arts) have penetrated our culture, reinforcing the view that “knowledge” is frequently subjective. Ideological appeals often are strengthened by “emotional reasoning,” by which our feelings alone validate what constitutes a fact.
Professional journalism, often viewed as a powerful countervailing force to ideology and propaganda, has failed. As practiced on network television, where most people seek news, “objectivity” is not defined by a search for verifiable facts and accurate interpretations, but “even-handedness.” News presenters believe they are being “objective” if they allow each side equal time to express themselves. Interviewees are almost never challenged and virtually any reply to a rare follow-up question will be accepted. Journalists have become mere stenographers. (The glaring exception to “even-handedness” is Fox News, which explicitly tailors journalism to be in sync with Republican Party ideology at the expense of accuracy).
The internet (including social media), television news’ chief rival, works in the opposite direction. Users reinforce their pre-existing ideology by typically choosing to increase exposure to partisan political news and views. Thus, as with television journalism, the internet does not induce many to challenge their own biases.
Karl Rove was a cynical political visionary, but Donald Trump’s surreal road to the White House is that vision’s nightmarish embodiment.The term “truth,” which once indicated a claim supported by incontestable facts, has, because of Trump, been re-defined. Sometimes it means “truthiness,” coined by Stephen Colbert, signifying phenomena which feel true though not supported by fact (e.g., gun ownership saves lives). Oftentimes, however, assertions are almost impossible to believe (e.g., Obama founded ISIS). Almost.
Trump has set a likely unbreakable record for a President-elect by having made hundreds of baseless claims since last year. Yet, polls indicated voters perceived Hillary Clinton, though actually far less prone to tell blatant lies, less honest. For this to be comprehensible, truth has had to be re-defined as communicating whatever one honestly believes, even if it may not, or, almost certainly, could not be true.
Facts are “trumped” by beliefs, when the purveyor of false information is not viewed as disingenuous.Hillary Clinton’s far greater factual accuracy, even if accepted, was irrelevant, because she was thought to be consciously lying about her emails, and a willing Wall Street puppet. Oddly, Trump’s refusal to release his taxes, or disclose his business with Russian oligarchs tied to Vladimir Putin, was never perceived by his supporters in the same light.
In addition to making truth dependent upon honest conviction, not the weight of objective evidence, we have also witnessed fabricated online stories gone viral. In some instances, this has been done for profit. Macedonian teenage entrepreneurs, for example, created tales accepted by credulous Trump supporters, such as that Pope Francis endorsed Trump. Others, primarily right-wing sites, have had clear-cut political motives: Conservative Daily Post falsely claimed the FBI confirmed evidence of a “huge underground Clinton sex network”; Cathy O’Brien, employing John Birch Society rhetoric about the Illuminati, accused the Clintons along with Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush of using mind control to make her, her daughter, and countless others, into sex slaves, to facilitate their diabolical quest for a New World Order. Before the internet, these concoctions would have reached a small audience. Now they can be directly accessed by millions and further amplified via apolitical social media, because fact-checking is difficult, even if one is motivated.
Most ideologues who spread fake news may have had no direct ties to Donald Trump. But, Stephen Bannon, who will be chief strategist in the Trump Administration, does. Breitbart News, which Bannon served as executive chairman of from 2012 until joining the Trump campaign in August, has published both real and fake news.
Laura Ingraham, who has been mentioned as a possible Press Secretary in the coming Administration, is another disturbing figure. She owns an online publishing company which operates LifeZette. a “news” site which has trafficked in conspiracy theories, including one accusing Clinton of being responsible for the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. A video produced by LifeZette, Clinton Body Count, which made this accusation among others, was viewed 14 million times. Perhaps her talents would be wasted in a position that requires only obfuscation, not invention.
When Karl Rove mocked the “reality-based community” he was prophetic. But, he was no George Orwell, whose dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four coined the term “double-think,” the dominant political discourse in Oceania, the super-state he imagined, which foreshadowed the Age of Trump:
“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”
Follow Dr. Milton Mankoff
Stephen Colbert’s
at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner he ironically stated that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” During the George W. Bush era, comedians like Colbert and Jon Stewart tackled what Stewart referred to as “bullshit mountain.” Less clearly a partisan project, the satire of Stewart and Colbert was directly aimed at the way that concepts like truth and reality had become politically polarized.
And they had a lot of work to do. Back in 2008, we learned that the Bush administration made 935 false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq war. In a 2006 interview, Colbert explained how important it was for him in the Bush years to defend the concept of truth:
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?
While Colbert imagined his battle as a fight to rescue the truth, such efforts started to be more and more aligned with party politics. Around the turn of the millennium it became increasingly possible to connect fact-aversion to the GOP. Partisanship was no longer driven by political differences on how to deal with reality; it was divided over what constituted reality itself.
Chris Mooney has documented the allergic reaction the Republican brain has to truth. Focusing on attitudes toward science, Mooney points out that “politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.” Mooney found that Republicans didn’t only deny the scientific facts behind climate change; they also resisted facts connected to economics and American history.
It’s important to remember this recent history, because without it we can’t make sense of the new war on facts. It’s not just that our president lies with impunity, it’s not just that his team refers to “alternative facts,” and it’s not just that he labels any critical news coverage “fake;” it’s that caring about facts is now seen as a political problem.
A recent study by the Duke Reporters’ Lab shows that, in addition to a partisan difference in the frequency of lying, there is a partisan division over the very idea of fact-checking itself.
The researchers logged 792 statements mentioning fact-checkers and coded them as positive, negative or neutral. While a majority of citations (68 percent) were neutral, they found a dramatic divide in the source of negative comments. The study noted 71 accusations of bias against fact-checkers. Conservative websites were responsible for 97 percent of them.
The study shows that conservative sites take a hostile, negative attitude toward the practice of fact-checking. In some cases the tone is hardly subtle. In one example, they cite Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online, who noted that Hillary Clinton’s record with the truth was far from spotless. “Even PolitiFact, the hackiest and most biased of the fact-checking outfits, which bends over like a Bangkok hooker to defend Democrats, has a long list of her more recent lies.”
Goldberg seems pleased that Politifact has a list of Clinton’s lies, but at the same time he feels compelled to denigrate the fact-checking operation that produced the list. In fact, the Duke study shows that even when conservative sites are happy to reference fact-checks that bolster their ideological perspective, they often still find a way to denigrate their sources.
The Daily Caller’s Evan Gahr offers another example of a conservative politicizing and discrediting fact-checking: “WaPo fact checker Glenn Kessler’s initial defense of his incomplete column also proved an interesting testament to the combination of sloth and liberal bias that is common at his paper.” Gahr openly discredits fact-checking as a partisan enterprise.
As Alexios Mantzarlis explains, “conservative pundits have long been critical of fact-checking.” But clearly these new attacks are taking the conflict over the truth to a whole new level.
Are these new attacks on facts a sign of the destruction of our democracy? There seems little doubt. When the party in power is closely tied to a systematic attack on truth the prospects for a healthy democracy are not encouraging.
Hannah Arendt in her famous study of totalitarianism stated that, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists.”
For Arendt the mark of totalitarianism was the pervasive nature of ideological thinking. Under that scheme the mind is simply closed to correcting information and it holds to an ideologically consistent view of the world — one that is understood as true despite an absence of supporting evidence.
Many have wondered whether the election of Trump suggests that the United States has moved from a democracy to a totalitarian, possibly even fascist, regime, but it may well be that the Trump era attacks on truth exceed Arendt’s theories of totalitarianism and truth. In the Trump era, the battle isn’t over truth versus reality. The battle is over whether or not we as a nation agree that truth even matters at all.
As Brendan Nyhan explains, “social science research suggests that Mr. Trump’s alternative version of reality may appeal to his supporters.” According to Nyhan, “Partisan polarization is now so extreme in the United States that it affects the way that people consume and understand information — the facts they believe, and what events they think are important.”
But the Duke study adds another layer to the battle between fact and fantasy. Their research shows that the words “fact check” are now perceived to have a liberal slant. Again and again the researchers found moments when conservative media referred to fact-checking in a negative way, regardless of the nature of the facts checked.
In one example from the Weekly Standard, fact-checking was referred to as “the liberal media’s latest attempt to control the discourse.” The entire article suggested that fact-checking was a liberal scheme designed to make conservatives look bad.
This partisan breakdown over the inherent value of fact-checking is of significant concern. Even though Hillary Clinton had many of her “facts” checked on the campaign trail and despite the reality that the most high-profile assault on a U.S. fact-checking organization came from lefty Rachel Maddow, the Duke study shows that there is a conservative push to demonize fact-checking as nothing more than partisan attacks.
According to the researchers in the Duke study, “This partisan divide has serious consequences for the nation’s fact-checkers. Their credibility hinges on whether they are perceived as independent.” They explain that the major fact-checkers describe themselves as “dispassionate and nonpartisan” (Washington Post) and as an “independent, nonpartisan news organization not beholden to any government, political party or corporate interest” (PolitiFact).
This new assault on fact-checking is simply the latest step in a long-term right-wing attack on the neutrality of the media. Since the Nixon era, conservative writers and Republican politicians have accused the mainstream media of having a liberal bias.
Now it is not just the media, but also the fact-checkers who are accused of a liberal bias. This development, of course, is not surprising given the way that fact-checking has become a recognized form of political journalism and now that it has increased public visibility.
But what I find even more ironic in this new attack on truth is the way that some of the very best fact-checking comes from comedians. Political satirists like Stewart and Colbert have dedicated their careers to functioning like watchdogs to politicians and the media.
Stewart loved targeting the lies of Fox News, which gets it right only 17 percent of the time. In one of his best takedowns he did a vine that offered viewers 50 Fox News lies in six seconds.
Colbert decided to coin the term “trumpiness” to describe what has happened to truthiness in the Trump era: “Truthiness has to feel true, but Trumpiness doesn’t even have to do that.”
To show that satire goes after all forms of deception,
on the way that the mainstream media was biased toward Clinton during the primaries. He explained that after the first debate every single poll had Bernie Sanders winning, and yet the media reported that Clinton had won.
Recently John Oliver used his satirical comedy show on HBO to seriously tell the public the truth about coal.
Here's last night's story on coal, coal miners, and the coal industry. https://t.co/8HCX8bFgYS
— Last Week Tonight (@LastWeekTonight) June 19, 2017
Sophia A. McClennen is professor of international affairs and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University. Her latest book, co-authored with Remy M. Maisel, is, Is Satire Saving Our Nation? Mockery and American Politics.