Andy Borowitz on Our Age of Ignorance

The writer and comedian talks with David Remnick about “the intellectual deterioration” of American politics, the subject of his latest book.
Andy Borowitz on left and book cover on right
Photograph by Howard Schatz / Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster

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Not only are we living in a time where people are proud of their ignorance, the writer and comedian Andy Borowitz argues, but some of our most educated politicians are now playing down their intelligence as a strategy to get elected. Borowitz, the author of the long-running satirical column The Borowitz Report, examines this phenomenon in his new book, “Profiles in Ignorance: How America’s Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber.” “When Trump was elected, a lot of us supposedly knowledgeable people were taken by surprise,” he tells David Remnick. “But the more I researched the past fifty years, the more likely and plausible—and maybe even inevitable—his election was, because he actually had a great deal in common with his forebears.”