Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr is a New York Times-bestselling author whose work examines how technology influences people's lives, minds, and relationships. His books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," have been translated into more than 25 languages. His new book, "Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart," will be published in January 2025 and is now available for preorders. A New York Times bestseller when it was first published in 2010 and now hailed as “a modern classic,” "The Shallows" remains a touchstone for debates on technology’s effects on our thoughts and perceptions. A new, expanded edition of "The Shallows" 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,” explores the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His 2017 book, "Utopia Is Creepy," 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 the widely discussed and debated "Does IT Matter?" (2004). Carr has written for many newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. 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. He has been a visiting professor of sociology at Williams College in Massachusetts and 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. Since 2005, he has written the popular blog Rough Type. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University. More information about Carr's work can be found at his website, nicholascarr dot com. [Author photo by Scott Keneally.]