Essential reading for today’s online citizenry, featuring dense but vital research.
An activist for digital literacy examines major social and political issues of the day and offers potential solutions.
Boghosian begins her nonfiction work on the current digital landscape by mapping what she calls our “digital, global ecosystem of mutually accepted realities,” examining the technological and cultural forces that she says have put democratic norms under siege around the world. Drawing on in-person interviews (mostly with guests on her long-running civil-liberties radio show Law and Disorder), and a broad range of academic and news sources, she tracks how misinformation, weakened civics education, and invasive corporate practices are shaping public life, online and off. In a strong indictment of education practices, she links the decline in political literacy to the rise of militarized school structures and a public that’s increasingly vulnerable to fakery. A second section, appropriately titled “Democracy in Tilt,” explores how new media ecosystems—often aided by “trillionaire overlords” and policy-shaping think tanks—have amplified hate speech, spread conspiracy theories, and eroded faith in democratic institutions. She doesn’t shy away from concrete examples, as when she discusses the “false flag” conspiracy theories that appeared in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting. She also presents startling stories of U.S. government failings; passages about outdated technology can be chilling, as when she tells of a U.S. airbase where ballistic missiles still ran on floppy disks. The final section turns to remedies, profiling the European General Data Protection Regulation, Estonia’s digital governance, and the role of librarians as “cyber hygienists.”
The author offers a checklist of best practices for media literacy and privacy protection, but even with such solutions, the need for vigilance feels daunting. Her research is impressively comprehensive, giving the book an immediate feeling of authority. Over the course of the book, the sheer range of her examples effectively shows the scale of the problem, making this an excellent primer for readers discovering terms such as “digital literacy” for the first time. However, this exhaustive approach can sometimes work against the flow of her storytelling. Many of her case studies are built on compelling individual stories, but they start to feel truncated after a while. A profile of a neo-Nazi and his journey to running an anti-hate nonprofit, and a story of a lawyer’s fight against a jealous ex’s use of revenge porn, ultimately feel like rushed footnotes, rather than fully fledged narratives that support the points that Boghosian wishes to make. Readers who’ve has some exposure to these topics may find some of the material familiar, and the author tends to return repeatedly to generic calls for “discernment and prudence” when it comes to evaluating digital information. Still, Boghosian brings a methodical and even tone to every section, allowing the evidence of political maneuvering and hate speech to speak for itself; she also shows an impressive knack for connecting disparate threads. The result is a valuable, well-researched resource that will be a wake-up call, and a sobering experience, for many readers.
Essential reading for today’s online citizenry, featuring dense but vital research.Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9780807010846
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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