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, in New York City, where I watched social media and smartphones change the early adopters. My reading of Neil Postman and Marshall McLuhan convinced me that . . . . Continue Reading »

The real digital divide is between those who can get a break from their devices and those who cannot. Continue Reading »

Much about First Things is worthy of admiration, perhaps nothing more so than the courage of its writers and editors to simply say what is right in public. Continue Reading »

We have to take risks like Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders and fight Big Tech all the way up to the highest court in the land. Continue Reading »

The promotion and crafting of a distorted virtual reality by tech companies should concern us all.  Continue Reading »

We have no hope that we can raise the next generation to be entirely innocent of Silicon Valley’s tyrannical devices, but if we can teach them to treasure the world of books, we will keep alive in them the world of memory.  Continue Reading »

The sexual revolution began not with the Boomers but with their elders. How would it have been possible, after all, had not biologist Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903–1967), a member of the Greatest Generation, followed the advice of Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) to stop experimenting with rabbits and . . . . Continue Reading »

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 book and observed about a dozen fellow riders, all in their twenties or early thirties, all hunched over, the blue light of their handhelds . . . . Continue Reading »

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 is their priority, their imperative, their strategy, their solution, their delight, their governing ­philosophy. Being masters who toil, they . . . . Continue Reading »

Miyazakiworld:  A Life in Art by susan napier yale, 344 pages, $30 Never-Ending Man, a documentary that recently enjoyed a limited release in the United States, shows an exchange between the animator Hayao Miyazaki, seventy-eight, and a group of young programmers from an artificial intelligence . . . . Continue Reading »