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“One Battle After Another,” the name of Paul Thomas Anderson’s invigorating political thriller, would also make a fine title for the history of humankind. Whenever I catch myself wishing I’d lived in a calmer era, I’m oddly soothed by asking, Like , when?

Every generation scuffles for something: suffrage, equality, autonomy, decent health, fair pay, even the right to keep on fighting. When Thomas Pynchon published his 1990 novel “Vineland,” a decades-spanning saga about a band of dope-smoking militant hippies from the ’60s to the Reagan Era, he seemed resigned that the counterculture had lost the struggle to free America’s soul, writing that after Watergate, “the personnel

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