Linn’s examination of how screens have taken over childhood is a must-read for any parent.
An eye-opening and disturbing exploration of how marketing tech to children is creating a passive, dysfunctional generation.
In 2004, Linn, a psychologist specializing in childhood development, published Consuming Kids, a landmark study on how corporations develop marketing campaigns specifically aimed at young people. In the ensuing years, there has been a seismic shift in technology, with a flood of smartphones, tablets, and interactive apps, and children are connecting to the online world at younger ages. Some companies are even marketing screen-based games for babies. Lego, once seen as a toy that encouraged creativity and innovation, now comes with apps that direct what the child should do, and stuffed toys can now sing, dance, walk, or talk at the push of a button. “The more a toy can do, the less a child needs to do,” writes the author. “And the less a child does with a toy, the less useful that child’s play is to healthy development.” One of the book’s hardest-hitting chapters examines “pester power,” encouraged by marketers in order to place an emphasis on brands, which allows for the sale not just of individual toys, but entire product lines. Brand addiction is a sure path to profitability. The nadir of cynicism is when researchers profile teens to determine their psychological weaknesses so they can target advertising at them. Linn recounts numerous horror stories about manipulation, but she is proactive in her advice. “Postpone getting your child a smartphone until at least eighth grade,” she writes. “When it comes to raising children, smartphones are probably the most pernicious of all tech devices.” Read books with them, or go outside to play. Put down your own devices so you do not set a bad example. Set limits on screen time, and don’t yield to nagging for more stuff. In other words, be an active and involved parent.
Linn’s examination of how screens have taken over childhood is a must-read for any parent.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62097-227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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SEEN & HEARD
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