Madeleine Schwartz Recommends Bruna Dantas Lobato, Uwem Akpan, Maeve Brennan, and More
I’ve spent much of my career reporting outside the United States, but in recent years, many of my interviews have ended the same way: with questions to me about what is happening at home. The world is watching the changing politics in the United States carefully, out of fear, out of desperation and in some cases out of a sense of regret that the US has not learned from its peers abroad.
The vast literature of writing about the US from journalists and novelists abroad often returns to the same themes, consumerism, brokenness and cruelty. While we at The Dial were putting together our essay collection, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump, we found that many of our writers described the country as a strange mix of consumerist conquest and confused idealism.
“American tourists still feel to me like a liberation army that got stuck in its pattern of conquering and inventorying and now, almost a century in, has grown cumbersome, bloated, unhelpful,” writes Francesco Pacifico in his essay from Rome. I was reminded of the French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s own take on the American approach to consumerism. “The microwave, the waste disposal, the orgasmic elasticity of the carpets: this soft, resort-style civilization irresistibly evokes the end of the world.”
