A lucid case that algorithms, amplifying our deepest vulnerabilities, now serve their creators’ bottom line.
How consumers are paying the price.
Sylvain, a professor of law at Fordham University and a former senior adviser at the Federal Trade Commission, details how our laissez-faire approach to regulating the internet has produced serious harms alongside enormous benefits. He maps the situation with clarity and common sense. From optimistic founders who believed community engagement could change the world to market- and click-driven companies that monetize nearly every online action, Sylvain assails online services that “employ service features and sycophantic AI models that seize on consumers’ deepest vulnerabilities and push them into feelings of self-doubt and depression.” He adds that “the president and many of his allies in Silicon Valley, including leaders at Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, have been eager to lift regulatory burdens on innovation.” The online world has become a collection of marketplaces for sex, weapons, and influence, and questions of liability loom large. Companies have argued in court that consumer-facing services are constitutionally protected platforms for free speech, but debate centers on how free the internet’s marketplace should be. Free to cause harm? And who gets to decide? The author presses readers to confront how benefits and harms might be balanced. Regulatory structures have failed to keep pace with rapid technological change, and granting special free-speech status to platform companies has “caused consumers harm and imposed social costs that businesses never have to internalize.” Sylvain sees this situation as unsustainable, observing that both the political left and right—more often the right—continue to misunderstand the realities of social media. Rather than focusing narrowly on content, he urges policymakers to “look beyond the content that brings people to online platforms and, instead, at the incentives that drive the companies to design their services.”
A lucid case that algorithms, amplifying our deepest vulnerabilities, now serve their creators’ bottom line.Pub Date: March 17, 2026
ISBN: 9781967190126
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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