Are you weary of contemporary American politics and taking refuge in dystopian fiction? In a recent New Yorker essay, historian Jill Lepore, after surveying dystopias old and new, gives no direct advice but effectively tells us, “Don’t.”

You may already have heard that Orwell’s best-known book has done well lately, but Lepore found a similar phenomenon from the previous administration. Late in her article, she reports, “In the first year of Obama’s Presidency, Americans bought half a million...