It is no exaggeration that we are currently a world at war, fighting on multiple tangible and intangible fronts, in new and different ways we can barely fathom. One such crucial existential battle involves our grasp of established facts.

In December 2011, co-founder of Spy magazine and bestselling author of Evil Geniuses: Unmasking America, Kurt Andersen, wrote an essay for Vanity Fair, observing that American fashion, art, music, design, entertainment evolved considerably every 20 years or so, but in our time, popular style has been “stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating…