News Summary

• After a week of government shutdown, it is obvious the U.S. is irreparably broken, says Julian Zelizer.
• “A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy,” Orwell wrote in his diary while he was working on the book.
• Zelizer: Today, facts told as fiction are not nearly as popular as fictions presented as facts.
• Two plus two does not equal five and never will, Zelizer says, as Orwell warned in “Orwell: 2+2=5”