# On Courage *On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear* (Mariner Books, June 30, 2026) is a handbook for Americans facing an authoritarian turn, by investigative journalist Julia Angwin and writer Ami Fields-Meyer. It opens with a wargaming exercise in which nearly every scenario let an authoritarian president act without meaningful legal limits. It then draws on interviews with dissidents, activists and theorists around the world to lay out strategies for individual dissent and for building dissident communities. The tactics it covers are nonviolent: boycotts, layered encryption, crowdsourcing evidence of retaliation, and exposing a regime's internal contradictions. ## Why it's on the map The book treats past dissidents as working models for the present. One of them is the Soviet writer [[Andrei Sinyavsky]], whose essay *[[Dissent as a Personal Experience]]* supplies the book's lesson that a dissident "does not consider himself guilty," along with his account of choosing his life as a writer over his safety. > [!note] Stub > This is a short entry that hasn't been fully written yet. ## Related pages - [[Dissent as a Personal Experience]] · [[Andrei Sinyavsky]] - [[The Power of the Powerless]]