Every race has a dark horse, running at long odds. In this year’s race for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film, the dark horse is GasLand (2010), a film by Josh Fox that takes on almost everyone in the Oil and Gas Industry, including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton over the use of “fracking” — hydraulic fracturing — to extract natural gas from vast deposits all over the United States.

In his new book, The Great Derangement, Matt chronicles his cross-country travels, and finds that, with distrust of the government at new heights and cynicism about the media and their role even higher, the country is “flipping out.”