Think you're impervious to the predatory ways of ad-tech? That you'd be the last person to get sucked into an algorithmic doomscroll of influencers? Well, have a kid in today's landscape, and I guarantee you will be shocked by how easily you bend to the internet's ironclad grip on our brains.
Wait, hear me out! I say this not to shame but to relate, wholeheartedly. As a parent in the digital era, it is humiliating how quickly I have been willing to buy up technologies that promise to smooth the rough patches of early childhood. That wildly expensive robo-bassinet? Woops. Online courses from Trump-adjacent "sleep experts"? Guilty!
But a new memoir from New York Times critic-at-large Amanda Hess offers a different approach to navigating our fraught relationship between parenting and tech. This exploration takes us through some of the darker origins of popular parenting apps and birthing trends, while Hess investigates her own journey as a pregnant person and, eventually, mother of two. The result is part memoir and rigorous reporting, an unexpected blend of piercing analysis and vulnerability.
I spoke with Hess ahead of the publication of Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age. Whether you're a parent or not, I wholly recommend you sit with this one.
—Inae Oh
