Summer of Our Discontent: Thomas Chatterton Williams with Jonathan Haidt

The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams joins #1 New York Times-bestselling social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (The Anxious Generation) for a searching conversation about the evolution, paradoxes, and taboos of American social justice movements in the years since 2020 — and Williams’ bracing new book, Summer of Our Discontent.

In this sharp and unsettling work, Thomas Chatterton Williams — among the most incisive social critics of his generation — examines a culture transformed by the upheavals of the pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and the rise of punitive social media. He traces how well-intentioned movements reshaped journalism, education, the arts, policing, and even the language we use to make sense of the world — often in ways that have unintentionally frayed the shared civic fabric that once held us together.

In this reading and conversation, Williams and Haidt — two of today’s most fearless and provocative thinkers — wrestle with the aftershocks of the summer of 2020, the threats to liberalism from both left and right, and what renewal might require.

“Mass insanity broke out among America’s elites in the summer of 2020, with devastating consequences for America’s knowledge-creating institutions. Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the few intellectuals who stood firm and made the case with great courage for liberal values and the free exchange of ideas.” — Jonathan Haidt

“Thomas Chatterton Williams uses a fiercely probing intelligence, instinctively dissatisfied with absolutist explanations, to explore without ideological blindfolds what happened in one momentous summer.” — Adam Gopnik