A dispiriting, but not doom-mongering, consideration of where memes and like-chasing got us.
A timely study of the internet’s toxic effects on American society.
This book by an Atlantic staff writer argues that the past decade has transformed, for the worse, the way we think about engagement with each other. The impersonality of the internet has eroded our civility—Garber recalls getting death threats even for small-stakes criticisms of TV shows. Yet crucially, it’s also preserved and even intensified our appetite for narrative. So, thinking of “performance as an American cultural script,” she considers the ways the internet motivates us to be the heroes of our own story. Social media lets us star in our own heavily stage-managed reality show; AI chatbots encourage us to pursue friendship and even romance without the messy uncertainty of fellow humans. This depersonalization has more serious consequences, Garber notes. It fuels conspiracy theories like QAnon, where followers await every new cryptic plot twist, and blurs the lines between fact and fiction. It also sanctions inhumane acts: Consider how red-state leaders have shuttled immigrants to blue states solely to score political points (or, more precisely, likes), or how Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of health care CEO Brian Thompson made him a kind of folk hero. This warping of reality, matched to needless harm to everyday Americans, finds its apotheosis in the “carnivalized cruelty” of the Donald Trump presidency. But Garber doesn’t let Trump swallow the narrative; he’s just one example of how language and intention have grown fuzzier and more weaponized now. Anybody who spends time online will sympathize with Garber’s insightful, well-curated considerations. But as for what to do about it, she can only shrug, offering no policy or legislative redresses, only a plea that we approach the internet “wisely.” Now that we all consider ourselves the smartest person in the room, who’s taking that note?
A dispiriting, but not doom-mongering, consideration of where memes and like-chasing got us.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780063415690
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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