On UnCertainty:
The Uses of Doubt in Dangerous Times
October 2026
We live in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty mean for our ability to act?
While politicians, CEOs, and pundits reflexively invoke “uncertain times” to explain everything from pandemic responses to climate inaction, journalist and theorist Natasha Lennard offers a radical intervention. Lennard demonstrates how our obsession with uncertainty masks the violent certainties that dominate our fracturing world.
On Un/Certainty applies philosophical insight to political practice, offering readers not just analysis but hope—and conceptual tools with which to act. The book tackles contemporary flashpoints through an original philosophical lens, demystifying our constant talk of crisis, polycrisis, and omnicrisis. Lennard examines the way entrenched conceptions of gendered experience are weaponized to harass the most vulnerable. Dissecting the discourse around borders, she reveals their enforcement to be a site of paranoid vigilance and violent property logics, which threaten millions of lives. Lennard addresses head-on the limits to traditional forms of political persuasion and demands that we think anew about how to build more liberatory forms of life.
Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and placing his work alongside thinkers rarely put into conversation, Lennard contends with the nature of certainty, identity, and ideology as we struggle into the future.
“An invitation to rethink what we know, and how we know it. Lennard challenges conventional understandings of crisis, borders and gender, revealing how deeply entrenched certainties shape our perceptions of the world.” – Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
“On Un/Certainty seeks to name and so unseat 'pernicious certainty in action,' and call for a different paradigm around the truths we take for granted–specifically as they pertain to what pundits are calling the polycrisis...Lennard’s got a knack for making the heady feel approachable, even to a layperson. This promises to be a most topical intervention for the thinking human. (Bonus: it’s slim enough to take on the subway.)” – Most Anticipated Books of 2026, Lit Hub
“For penetrating and revolutionary insights, not only into “the news” per se but also into our hell-world’s basic epistemic workings and (especially) their impermanency, I always look to Natasha Lennard. At the same time as demonstrating almost every day—for well over a decade now—what a precious thing journalism can still be, Lennard has become this century’s most illuminating political reader of Wittgenstein and our most invigorating public philosopher of antifascism.” – Sophie Lewis, author of Femmephilia
“We are snowed under by known unknowns. Thank heavens for Natasha Lennard then, here to talk us through the expectations we place on words and walk us out of the numbness induced by their mindless repetition.” – Quinn Slobodian, author of Hayek's Bastards
“I can think of no better guide to the perplexing present than the brilliant Natasha Lennard. This luminous book, unflinching in its moral clarity, upends conventional thinking about thinking itself, and emboldens its lucky readers to question and resist today’s most pernicious shibboleths and lethal certainties.” – Astra Taylor, author of The Age of Insecurity
“Sometimes an essay arrives that sends a gust of fresh air into the stuffy present from an unexpected angle. What does it mean when people say they feel assailed by uncertainty and insecurity? A sign hovering over a conjuncture of seemingly ubiquitous instability, this trope has never been investigated – until now. Making surprising use of Wittgenstein, Natasha Lennard here enjoins us to think anew, and closer, about the meanings of uncertainty on the fronts – racism, transphobia, genocide – that define our age. Hers is a vital contribution to the hard work of making any sense of what’s going on.”– Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline
“Fascism attempts to destroy the capacity to think. Natasha Lennard restores it here with lyric philosophy.” – Hannah Zeavin, Associate Professor of History, UC Berkeley
“Amidst inflationary talk of uncertainty and crisis, Lennard makes a bracing case, instead, for the critique of pernicious certainties. A brilliant provocation to further thought. A hinge book.” – Adam Tooze, author of Crashed
“While doubt and uncertainty can be fear-inducing, the entrenched certainties on which society rests are far more dangerous, according to this stimulating treatise from journalist Lennard…Her energetic challenges to the status quo are timely and intellectually robust. This is sure to spark conversation..” – Publishers Weekly
Being Numerous:
Essays on Non-Fascist Life
April 2019
An urgent challenge to the prevailing moral order from one of the freshest, most compelling voices in radical politics today Being Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and the ghosts in our lives. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that the personal is political, and situates as the central question of our time —How can we live a non-fascist life?
“Pulsating with energy and acuity, Being Numerous tackles urgent, fundamental questions: What are the sources of our oppression? Do we want to be free? While assessing the forces aligned against our collective liberation (some of which are inside our heads), Natasha Lennard never loses hope. An inoculation against apathy and nostalgia, this is an essential, provocative collection for our confounding times.”
– Astra Taylor, director of What Is Democracy?
“Compassionate and merciless, Natasha Lennard’s writing is proof that moral philosophy must not be left to the mealymouthed centrists whom the discipline seems to incubate like eggs. Centrism, fascism’s PR department, emerges as the true antagonist of this scrappy collection, and Lennard punches it right in the face. Being Numerous is a manual for how to be kinder by being crueler.”
– Andrea Long Chu, author of Females: A Concern
“Natasha Lennard is one of the most brilliant and compelling thinkers of our time. She breaks binaries and uproots ideology in elegant prose. Being Numerous demands the attention of any and all who feel the urgency to build the next world.”
– Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching
“Natasha Lennard views politics through the lens of theory, and writes theory with passion and fire—her essays on suicide, violence, sex and antifascism are the work of a dazzling intellect grappling with the most pressing issues of our time.”
– Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
“I am always thrilled to read work by Natasha Lennard. Her combination of theory and hard reporting is as rare as it is essential. Questions about liberalism and anti-fascism that dominate our political moment are tackled here with theoretical sophistication, serious reporting, and an inimitable style.”
– Sarah Leonard, coeditor of The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century
“Natasha Lennard’s lucid writing about militant social struggles from the inside is in some sense the simplest thing: these are the contemporary forms of what people have long done against intolerable conditions and intransigent powers. And yet engagement with them is so disallowed in the present that Lennard’s fidelity to investigation and insight feels hard-won, heroic, and deeply honorable. This is committed journalism at its finest: forbidden, formidable, ferocious.”
– Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings
Violence: Humans in Dark Times
April 2018
Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers–including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry–to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. To bring out the best of us, writes Evans, we have to confront the worst of what humans are capable of doing to one another. In short, there is a need to confront the intolerable realities of violence in this world.
In Violence, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard have created, alongside their interview subjects, a kaleidoscopic exploration of the concept of violence, in terrains expected and not, in prose taut and unexpectedly gorgeous. Their philosophical rigor provides the reader with an intellectual arsenal against the violence of the current moment.
– Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
The purpose of the work is to challenge humanity to create more meaningful solutions when it comes to these kinds of violence–or at least to name violence without inadvertently inciting even more anger. . . . passion roars through every chapter . . . This book delivers on what it promises, which is an achievement.
– Alison Gately, The Los Angeles Review of Books
If you wish to read the intellectualization of violence, Violence is a phenomenal anthology. . . . Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard, the interviewers and the ‘authors’ of the anthology, have done a remarkable job in bringing together perceptive and intelligent contributors from various fields to scout the reaches of violence. Their piercing questions brought out brilliant responses from the interviewees.
– L. Ali Khan, New York Journal of Books
The range of interviews with leading academics, to filmmakers and artists, is impressive, at once immediate and relevant, but also profoundly philosophical. More essentially, though, the conversations underline the need and suggest ways to resist and organize in a visionary way, in the extraordinary times we live in.
– Razia Iqbal, BBC News