Nicholas Carr writes about the human consequences of technology. His books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and the forthcoming Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, have been translated into more than twenty-five languages. He has recently been a visiting professor of sociology at Williams College, and earlier in his career he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association. He writes the Substack newsletter New Cartographies.
A New York Times bestseller when it was first published in 2010 and now hailed as “a modern classic,” Carr’s The Shallows remains a touchstone for debates on the internet’s effects on our thoughts and perceptions. A second edition of The Shallows, updated with a new chapter, was published in 2020. Carr’s 2014 book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, which the New York Review of Books called a “chastening meditation on the human future,” examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and artificial intelligence. His latest book, Utopia Is Creepy, published in 2016, collects his best essays, blog posts, and other writings from the past dozen years. The collection is “by turns wry and revelatory,” wrote Discover.
Carr is also the author of two other influential books, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2008), which the Financial Times called “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and Does IT Matter? (2004).
Carr has written for many newspapers and magazines, including The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Nature, Politico, MIT Technology Review, and The New Atlantis. His essays, including “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and “The Great Forgetting,” have been collected in several anthologies, including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best Technology Writing. Before launching New Cartographies in 2024, he wrote the popular blog Rough Type for twenty years.
In addition to speaking at many professional and academic events, Carr has appeared as a commentator on television and radio programs, including NPR’s All Things Considered and OnPoint, the PBS NewsHour, MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CBS Sunday Morning, and the Colbert Report.
Carr was born in Ohio and reared in Texas, Michigan, and Connecticut. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. In the early 1980s, he was a founding member of the universally unnoticed punk band The Adrenalin Boys. He now lives in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, approximately halfway between the graves of Robert Frost and Herman Melville.
Photo: Scott Keneally.