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The Myth of Technological Neutrality

Michael Toscano

The status of crank is rarely remitted in the span of ten years, but that is what has happened to me. I spent two decades, from 1999 to 2019,...

The Real Digital Divide

Michael Toscano

I was recently invited to lunch at an elite club in New York for work. When I made the mistake, unbeknownst to me, of pulling my dumb phone out...

The Courage to Be Right

Michael Toscano

There is tremendous pressure to be wrong these days. It takes a lot of character to be right. Much about First Things—a magazine I have read devotedly since my...

Sarah Huckabee Sanders Against Smartphones

Michael Toscano

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, appears uncowed by Big Tech. Inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s new book Anxious Generation (which I reviewed favorably in American Affairs), on May 6, Sanders sent...

The World that Google Wants to See

Michael Toscano

If Big Tech companies have observed anything about human nature in their rise to economic, political, and cultural dominance, it is that Homo sapiens prefer artificial, digital experiences to...

Recovering Our Memory

Michael Toscano

Being executive director of a think tank that monitors the health of marriage and family in America requires me to be intimately familiar with grim news. To keep my...

Polar Rescue

Michael Toscano

Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Futureby jean m. twengeatria, 560 pages, $32.50 The sexual revolution began...

Ensnared in the Web

Michael Toscano

About ten years ago, I acquired a deep suspicion of smartphones and social media. Riding a late-night L Train back to my Brooklyn apartment, I looked up from my...

Workism Isn’t Working

Michael Toscano

Workism is a new word, and it’s a good one. It captures the spirit of our elites, who from childhood are raised to be workers for work’s sake. Work...

Miyazaki’s Reality

Michael Toscano

Miyazakiworld: A Life in Artby susan napieryale, 344 pages, $30 Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the...

The Allure of Sustainability

Michael Toscano

An energetic graduate of Wesleyan College, class of 2013, no longer proud of her achievement-packed résumé, cuts off contact with her mother, flies to Hawaii, lives in a hut,...