Mirror Worlds

Lucky is the writer upon whom misfortune smiles, especially when it’s a relatively minor misfortune from which a lot of narrative mileage can be wrested. Take, for instance, the “personal-branding meltdown” that has recently befallen Naomi Klein. A prolific writer and activist, Klein became notable at a youthful age for having written a mega-best-selling anti-branding manifesto, No Logo, in 1999, which naturally led to her becoming a massive brand herself, a twist of fate about which she’s both amusing and astute. But fate proved to have a further irony up its sleeve: Beginning in the 2010s, Klein would also spend more than a decade being chronically mistaken, online and off, for the increasingly unhinged writer, conspiracy theorist, and former feminist Naomi Wolf—both being attractive Jewish public intellectuals named Naomi, and current attention spans being what they are.