8 New Books We Recommend This Week
March 11, 2021
Sometimes a book sells itself: Oh, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel is a mournful allegory about artificial intelligence and the challenges of human connection? Sign me up, please! (But even if you’re on the same page, do make time to read Radhika Jones’s lovely review of the book; you’ll be glad you did.) Other times a good review makes all the difference. That was the case this week with Mary Roach’s wonderful take on “This Is the Voice,” by John Colapinto, an in-depth nonfiction book about the larynx. Trust me, you’ll want to read it after you read the review.
A Critic of Technology Turns Her Gaze Inward
Sherry Turkle is best known for exploring the dysfunctional relationships between humans and their screens. She takes on a new focus herself in her memoir, “The Empathy Diaries.”
Empathy, as Sherry Turkle thinks of it, is “the ability not only to put yourself in someone else’s place, but to put yourself in someone else’s problem.”Credit.Justin Kaneps for The New York Times
By Casey Schwartz
Published Feb. 26, 2021Updated March 1, 2021
In the spring of 1977, when Sherry Turkle was a young professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Steve Jobs came to visit. While he toured the campus and met with her colleagues, Turkle was cleaning her apartment and worrying over the menu for the dinner she had agreed to host.