Beginning a decade or so ago, Naomi Klein began to notice a pattern: People kept confusing her with the increasingly unhinged Naomi Wolf and associating her with Wolf’s often conspiratorial statements and writings. The first time this happened, she was in the bathroom: She heard two women several stalls over complaining about something she, Naomi Klein, had said—except it wasn’t something she said; it was something Naomi Wolf had said. From then on, wherever Klein went, she would bump into people who would confuse her for her double. Online and in person, in grocery store lines and at conferences, Klein was asked over and over again to explain the statements she (or rather the other Naomi) had made. For many, the disorienting effects of having a double moving around the world could be dispiriting, to say the least, but for Klein it was a good reason to write a book. As Laura Kipnis writes in our Fall Books issue, “Klein uses the ego-rattling effects of acquiring a weird shadow self as her launching pad for a compelling and far-reaching political detective story.” What does Klein finds through all of her detection? That in our increasingly polarized world all of us have our share of political doppelgängers, haunting our thoughts and expressing even more extreme versions of our views. “Tracking the other Naomi’s transformation from liberal feminist media darling to inflamed anti-vaxxer and mascot of the far right,” Kipnis writes, allows Klein to do something far more than just recount a case of mistaken identity: It lets her tell the “story of a country in the midst of its own identity crisis.” Her “doppelgänger problem,” Kipnis concludes, ends up being “a portal to some of the most catastrophic issues currently facing us: the international rise of the authoritarian right, the uncertain future of American democracy, the social schisms accelerated by Covid, and the nature of identity itself under digital capitalism’s designer jackboot.” Read “Naomi Klein’s Quest to Understand Her Double”