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by Michael Shellenberger

Just a few weeks ago, I was lamenting the absence of any new nonfiction book that I really wanted to read. Many new books of late should have been long articles and were joyless to read.

Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable. It offers one of the most important defenses of liberal democratic civilization and truth ever written.

People accused me of hyperbole when I called Matt Taibbi the greatest living American heir to George Orwell. But it’s true, he is. I strive for truthful, specific compliments, and that’s what it was.

Now, A Heretic’s Manifesto establishes O’Neill as the greatest living British heir to Orwell. For that reason, I was thrilled to interview him for this podcast and to publish two chapters from it, “I’m Afraid We Have To Talk About Her Penis” and “The Infantilism Of Totalitarianism.”

I hasten to add that neither reading those two essays nor listening to this podcast is a substitute for reading A Heretic’s Manifesto. I beseech you: stop whatever you’re doing right now and buy his book.

As with Orwell, the topic O'Neill is addressing, incipient totalitarianism, is urgent.