A deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America’s slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world.
ON COURAGE: HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT IN AN AGE OF FEAR
by Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer
Mariner Books, June 2026
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident?: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump’s Age of Fear,” Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America’s age of fear. ON COURAGE is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope.
Step into the room where the world’s new dissidents—ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists—are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance.
ON COURAGE simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It’s a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.
Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, founder of the nonprofit journalism newsrooms The Markup and Proof News, and a New York Times contributing Opinion Writer. She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for her work at The Wall Street Journal and ProPublica.
Ami Fields-Meyer is a writer, political strategist, and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He served in the White House from 2021 to 2024, including as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris and as a member of the President’s technology policy team. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Newsweek. He is a graduate of Emory University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
