Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 167

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News," by Kevin Young:

When friend is merely a verb, not a person; when apocalypses too are computer based and costly, like Y2K, then turn out to be mostly paranoia, or worse, marketing; when you can fall in love not with television or through television but on television through a series of dates you couldn’t really afford in a rented mansion that seems specifically designed for reality TV, is a set really, a soft-core porn palace, and then wonder why it doesn’t work when the cameras are off; when your first instinct at the sign of national tragedy is to tell your phone, not tell someone using that phone: then you have become as fictional as the world that you’ve created.

I thought I’d nearly finished this book—filled with hoaxers and impostors, plagiarists and phonies—but as soon as I had sent a draft to my publisher, elated and relieved, Rachel Dolezal raised up her faux-nappy head. Now I have to take time to write about her too? 

I can’t decide if Dolezal, the woman revealed to have been merely pretending to be black, lecturing as such and even leading her local Oregon NAACP, is the natural extension of what I’ve been saying all along, or a distraction from this book’s larger point: that quite regularly, faced with the paradox of race, the hoax rears its head. It turns out, I now know, it rears its rear too.