A SHORT HISTORY OF STUPID

Alain de Botton meets Russell Brand in this glorious rant about everything that drives you mad about the modern world.

Recently, overwhelming mutual despair at the faltering quality of public debate and the apparent death of logic and reason has driven writers Helen Razer and Bernard Keane to the desperate act of befriending each other. Over many long rants against the state of the world and the way people write about it, govern it and behave in it, they decided that Never Have Things Been So Bad. What is Stupid? Stupid is the rejection of the discomfort of intellectual rigour in favour of the mentally comfortable and convenient. Razer and Keane skewer everything that has made them want to shoot the TV lately: climate change denial, vaccination denial, fanaticism, paternalism, moral panic, New Ageism, the War on Terror, conspiracy theories, the internet, the mental health industry, conspicuous compassion, postmodernism and the cult of 'I'. A Short History of Stupid is angry, funny, savage, smart, provocative, infuriating and incendiary. It has echoes of de Botton in that it is conversant with the history of thought, but it is a lot more disrespectful. It is as rude and as inflammatory as O'Rourke and as penetrating and unforgiving as Hitchens. It is funny, but it is also at once a provocation and a comfort for those with like minds. Above all, it will inspire debate, reassure the terminally frustrated and outrage the righteously Stupid. It is a book whose time has definitely come. Helen Razer is a contributor to The Age and The Australian, and is now a columnist on dissent with Crikey and gardening correspondent for The Saturday Paper. Helen has produced four previous books of humorous nonfiction. Bernard Keane has been Crikey's correspondent and politics editor in Canberra since 2008, writing on politics, media and economics. He is the author of the ebook War on the Internet and an incessant torrent of analysis, reportage and commentary on politics and public policy for Crikey.