A personal obsession can displace all other urgent work

Evidence

The very fact that I refer to her with any kind of code speaks to the absurdity of my situation. For a quarter of a century, I have been a person who writes about corporate power and its ravages. I sneak into abusive factories in faraway countries and across borders to military occupations; I report in the aftermath of oil spills and category 5 hurricanes. I write books of Big Ideas About Serious Subjects. And yet in the months and years during which this text came into being—a time when cemeteries ran out of space, and billionaires blasted themselves into outer space—everything else that I had to write or might have written appeared only as an unwanted intrusion, a rude interruption. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 5

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Klein frames the absurdity of her own situation against planetary crisis—doubling as rhetorical setup for why this book matters.