Jeanine Cummins’s novel, American Dirt, appeared early in 2020, drawing initial excitement and laudatory reviews. Soon, the book came under attack, with accusations and recriminations revolving around the issue of cultural appropriation. Critics questioned Cummins’s legitimacy and ability to write a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a vicious drug cartel. Protests followed and a host of publicity events and television appearances were canceled.

At the time of my first trial, however, “sink or swim” was the reality, and I accepted it unquestioningly. Accordingly, I was assigned a veritable “slam dunk” case involving an undercover drug “buy and bust” with two defendants, the brothers Calvin and Reginald Smith. All I had to do was call the undercover narcotics agent, have him testify to his dealings with the defendants at their meeting in a JFK Airport hotel, introduce into evidence the drugs the defendants had given him, and then call a government chemist to testify that the drugs seized were indeed illegal narcotic substances.

At Dawson’s federal trial that summer in 1967, Dawson’s wife greeted every person at the courthouse doors like it was a party and she was the hostess. One of the feds’ witnesses, a housing developer, testified that he gave Dawson $1,750 in cash. Shortly afterward, the city installed water and sewer facilities at one of his developments. Dawson actually testified under oath that his word was the law in Cohoes but denied taking any kickbacks.

William Schreiber earned the 2019 Rising Star Award from the Women’s Fiction Writers Association for his novel, Someone to Watch Over. The book was adapted from his original screenplay, which has won or been nominated for many competition awards, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ prestigious Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting, as well as numerous Best Screenplay awards at film festivals throughout the country.

My goal was to try not to think. When I was away, I was a good enough father through texts. I would wait to hit send once the wheels left the tarmac. I don’t know why I would procrastinate until a single column of cell signal remained. By the end of the year, though, I was taking seven pills a day just to freeze the frame of my decline. Grief can bleed you into white nothing. Colin soon became symptomatic.

In his new book, Multiverse, Robert Mercer-Nairne transports us to a dystopian 2024, where the U.S. government is failing its citizens and the economy has collapsed. Each of the three political parties believes it has the solution: The dominant Rationalists look to science for answers; the Moralists and their leader President Dukes believe citizens have strayed too far from God and should use religion as their compass; while the Nationalists and their leader Milo Meadows III use drastic measures to gain power in Washington.

Later, she learned he was born into a family of movie stars and media darlings, and his entire life had revolved around fame and fortune. His parents raised him in the social media world, with every achievement, or failure, being broadcast to the galaxy. Although they loved him, they simply didn’t have time for Milo in their busy schedules, as they so publicly claimed in each broadcast, so he was raised by nannies and assistants and guarded by Moshe. Now, he lived and died through the adoration of his fans on the holoscreen.

Drugs and alcohol played an active part throughout Stone’s work. This reflected his own experiences with intoxicants of one sort or another. It also found expression in the idea that mind-bending drugs and distorted perception might lead to a higher truth or to abject tragedy. “It’s a mess when everybody’s high,” he writes in “A Higher Horror of the Whiteness.” “I liked it better when the weirdest thing around was me.”

We might talk about what makes a great American. Great ones we’ve known. Teachers would be thick among them, and older people of integrity we’ve been lucky to know. My grandfather. My parents. Artists are my heroes, too. I’d talk about Berger, and Merwin’s poem “Thanks.” We’d stay up late. I’d plug in the porch lights.The pie would be pretty great. And after we caught up on her last ten thousand years — Say what you want about global warming, she’d laugh, but I was pretty excited at first, when that last ice sheet started to go away — she might ask what I’ve been up to.

Here’s what, I believe, neither Huxley, nor Orwell, nor any of us saw coming: It’s not a matter of government using technology to enslave the people. It is a matter of technology using the government to harness people’s loyalties, monies, and energies. It is about the creation of a vast, quiet sea of smiling economic slaves. Technology has proven itself more of a powerfully uniting force than government. The Trump/Never Trump divide is real and is full of unforgivable (and unforgiven) vitriol that promises to last into the next decade.