Morning After the Revolution

Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History

By: Nellie Bowles

Narrated by: Nellie Bowles

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From former New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles, a look at how some of the most educated people in America lost their minds—and how she almost did, too.

As a Hillary voter, a New York Times reporter, and frequent attendee at her local gay bars, Nellie Bowles fit right in with her San Francisco neighbors and friends—until she started questioning whether the progressive movement she knew and loved was actually helping people. When her colleagues suggested that asking such questions meant she was “on the wrong side of history,” Bowles did what any reporter worth her salt would do: she started investigating for herself. The answers she found were stranger—and funnier—than she expected.

In Morning After the Revolution, Bowles gives listeners a front-row seat to the absurd drama of a political movement gone mad. With irreverent accounts of attending a multiday course on “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” following the social justice activists who run “Abolitionist Entertainment LLC,” and trying to please the New York Times’s “disinformation czar,” she deftly exposes the more comic excesses of a movement that went from a sideshow to the very center of American life.

Deliciously funny and painfully insightful, Morning After the Revolution is a moment of collective psychosis preserved in amber. This is an unmissable debut by one of America’s sharpest journalists.

©2023 Nellie Bowles (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“A wild ride”–New York Post

“A wickedly enjoyable book.”–The Guardian

“A beach read of America’s death throes.... Bowles’s prose has a documentary sobriety that allows people to act and speak for themselves.”–The Washington Examiner

Brilliant skewering of both sides of the culture war over the past 8 years

Loved hearing this from the author. Alternately serious and hilarious, Nellie dishes it up to both sides but is especially strong on the failings of the Left that have left so many of us feeling politically homeless, caught between anti-abortion right wingers who acknowledge the importance of biological sex and the woke gender ideologues who deny it. As someone with “lived experience” of the institutional acid that is Tema Okun’s white supremacy culture list, I particularly appreciated Nellie’s story of how it came to be gospel in institutions large and small. This is just one of many strands covered by Dispatches. Enjoy!

A great listen

A reminder of the time I and my peers lost our minds. A necessary reminder of recent events (especially the ones I wish to forget).

Excellent!

Well written, well read! Great book detailing an experience of shunning and cancellation at the NYT

Details of what we have lived through

It's hard to know all the important details of the recent past and here they are. It's important to remember how microscopic all this has been. The levels of infighting from otherwise political allies.

And for what? I laughed through most of it. The parts on San Francisco tho, they made me deeply sad. This is a great American city, what are we doing? And why are we doing it? The details are staggering put side-by-side.

I'm very glad I listened to this book.

Must read

Great breakdown of a spiraling movement. Relatable for anyone that stood by the left for most of their life and finally took a closer look recently.

Chef’s kiss!

Nellie’s writing is crisp and funny, and her narration is excellent. As a fellow native San Franciscan, I particularly loved the chapter on our city. Everyone should read or listen to this book.

Great book, well read

Really well written and argued analysis of the past few years in American pop culture and history

awakening from "wokeness"

Timely and perspicacious. That this gem of a book was narrated by the author herself made the chapters especially personable. I now intend to read more from Nellie Bowles; she merits attention.

Brilliant book!

This book is well written and puts a complex political movement into perspective without editorializing or passing judgement.

Fascinating from page one

Brave, unflinching and deeply entertaining Ms Bowles captured the energy of a very specific and very strange time. I was swept up from page one.