I’d argue that books and reading (can) open us up to the wider world. While it’s counter-intuitive, social media seems to be making us smaller.

In a recent blog post, I shared about my subscribing to a real newspaper—in this case—The New York Times.

I am reading Witold Szablowski’s book about dancing bears after reading the review that appeared in last week’s Times’ Book Review section.

A fascinating book about how humans often hearken for things they shouldn’t, but do, because it supposedly makes their lives easier.

A book about “the good-ole days” of authoritarian rule.

The book’s introduction starts this way:

The guy with the wacky hair and the crazed look in his eyes did not appear out of nowhere. He was already known to them. Sometimes he said how great they were, and told them to go back to their roots: if need be, he threw in some highly unlikely but madly alluring conspiracy theory. Just to get them to listen. And to give them a fright. Because he’d noticed that if he scared them, they paid him more attention.

Who is Witold Szablowski talking about? Donald Trump? No, actually, authoritarian leaders in Eastern Europe. The people he alludes to in “Regime-Change Land” are Poles, Serbs, Hungarians, and Czechs—all of them with long histories of falling for men who always over-promise and time after time, they under-delivered, and much worse.

Szablowski, a Polish journalist (and award-winning one at that), tells stories about gypsies and dancing bears but maybe better—people in places that were once under authoritarian rule (in countries with names like Bulgaria and Cuba), but are now free. Yet, they hearken back to a time in the past, flush with nostalgia.

Kind of like our own “make America great again” flourish and following a man with malicious designs and an authoritarian bent.