Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays

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These impossibly cheerful essays on the routine horrors of the present era explain everything from the resurgence of measles to the fiasco of the presidency.

In Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, acclaimed Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri offers perfectly logical, reassuring reasons for everything that has happened in recent American politics that will in no way unsettle your worldview.

In essays both new and adapted from her viral Washington Post columns, Petri reports that the Trump administration is as competent as it is uncorrupted, white supremacy has never been less rampant, and men have been silenced for too long. The "woman card" is a powerful card to play! Q-Anon makes perfect sense! This Panglossian venture into our swampy present offers a virtuosic first draft of history — a parody as surreal and deranged as the Trump administration itself.

"One of the difficulties of being alive today," she notes, "is that everything is absurd but fewer and fewer things are funny." Written with devastating wit that reveals a persistent, perhaps manic optimism about her benighted country, Petri's essays have become iconic expressions of rage and anger, read and liked and shared by hundreds of thousands of people. Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why shows why she has emerged as the preeminent political satirist of her generation.

[B]rilliant and wry...Petri hilariously roasts the last five years in American culture.... A stress-reducing belly laugh, and assurance that creative writing's role in interpreting culture hasn't been lost in these uncertain times. Booklist (starred review)

[A] superb and stinging collection of new and previously published pieces...Acidic and spot-on, Petri's work captures the surreal quality of Trump's tenure as perhaps no other book has. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Alexandra Petri makes me fall off my sofa laughing at things that would ordinarily send me into a suicidal depression. The miracle satirist for an unsatirizable era. Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic

Alexandra Petri is an American humorist and newspaper columnist at the Washington Post. She lives in Washington DC.