AGE OF GRIEVANCE

From Frank Bruni, longtime columnist for the New York Times and four-time bestselling author, The Age of Grievance is an examination of the way that grievance has come to define our popular culture and our politics, on both the right and the left.

What makes this moment the age of grievance? One could argue that America is a nation born of grievance, arising from the revolt of royal subjects given an unfair shake. And across the nearly 250 years of its existence as a country, grievance has been the engine of necessary change. Yet our current culture has taken grievance to the far extreme, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni argues. Grievance run amok is what escalates disappointment with the results of a presidential election to the conviction that the process was rigged, the prize was stolen, and the victor is illegitimate. Grievance unchecked is the gateway to the conspiratorial thinking so prevalent in America now. Grievance makes centrism unfashionable, compromise unthinkable, common cause impossible. We're a culture in self-pitying, self-righteous crisis, seen everywhere from Samuel Alito's Roe v. Wade decision, to Marjorie Taylor Greene's zealous extremism, Tucker Carlson's fearmongering, the crusading January 6 mob, and even escalating celebrity feuds such as Will Smith's shocking slap mid-Oscars broadcast. How did we get here? What does it say about us? And where does it leave us? The Age of Grievance examines these critical questions and charts a path forward for a nation that's growing tired of outrage. Frank Bruni has been a prominent journalist for more than three decades, including more than 25 years at the New York Times, the last 10 of them as a nationally renowned Op-Ed columnist who appeared frequently as a television commentator. He was also a White House correspondent for the Times, its Rome bureau chief and, for five years, its chief restaurant critic. He is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. In July 2021, he became a full professor at Duke University, teaching media-oriented classes in the school of public policy. He continues to write his popular weekly newsletter for the Times, which has more than 200,000 subscribers, and to produce occasional essays as one of the newspaper's official Contribution Opinion Writers.