Noam Chomsky's Media Control was the first analysis of society and politics that I consumed that wasn't based in a partisan consensus. In describing propaganda and how it has been used throughout the twentieth century, he admonishes the Clintons just as much as the Bushes. Media control, Chomsky tells us, doesn't serve any party in particular, but the beneficiaries of capitalism. This was a radical insight to a much younger me who was struggling to understand why the American Dream wasn't turning out the way I was told it would.