Film director Oliver Stone and American University history professor Peter Kuznick have produced “The Untold History of the United States.” The project consists of a book released on October 30 and a documentary series that is scheduled to begin airing on Showtime on November 12.

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.”