How to Be a Dissident

A short, argued guide to dissent that asks what the people who refused authoritarian conformity had in common, and what an ordinary reader can borrow from them.

Beckerman moves from Socrates to Ai Weiwei and pulls ten qualities out of the lives he examines, including pessimism, humor and recklessness. The book combines intellectual history, biography and cultural analysis, and addresses how integrity is kept up under modern pressures to conform. It runs 208 pages in a pocket-sized trade paperback published by Crown in April 2026.

Gal Beckerman is a staff writer at The Atlantic and holds a PhD from Columbia University. His earlier books are The Quiet Before, a New York Times notable book, and When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone, which won the Sami Rohr Prize. Here he turns from the history of how movements organize to the character of the individuals inside them.