A wealth of eye-popping information presented in a buoyantly irreverent style.
O’Hearn, a tech-industry insider, exposes the unseemly underbelly of social media.
In this entertaining and edifying “collection of shards and shreds and conspiratorial diatribes,” the author takes readers on an expert tour of the “amusing, dreadful world of social media.” O’Hearn worked at a tech startup—he gives it the fictitious name Cutlet—where he was charged with leading “algorithmic recommendation systems, push notification infrastructure, and personalized social feeds.” He was involved in all kinds of user manipulations—the blatantly dishonest engineering of user engagement. (“The users of Cutlet were my avatars, my puppets. I was a social scientist carrying out experiments. I was free to manipulate the app’s small audience without anyone knowing who I was, what I was doing, or what I was trying to accomplish.”) The author details his own misdeeds with impressive candor and discusses “social media iniquity” in more general terms; his biggest target is the “Instagram underworld” and the ways in which the popular app tricks its users into buying ad space. O’Hearn thoughtfully considers the deleterious impact of the internet—which, in his view, “robs life of meaning” (especially in the case of its youngest users)—and the “purely nihilistic” cosmos of social media influencers. This is a wide-ranging assemblage of essays written with verve, insight, and technical authority; as a software engineer, the author is uniquely positioned to explain, in extraordinary and largely accessible detail, the nuts and bolts of the internet. Additionally, he supplies a fascinating treatise on screen addiction and the ways in which its awful effects can be mitigated, such as the aggressive limitation of screen time for younger users. This is a startling read—humorous, but often discomfiting and always deeply informative.
A wealth of eye-popping information presented in a buoyantly irreverent style.Pub Date: March 2, 2025
ISBN: 9798992468113
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Luscious Ventures
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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