With the intense heat and the wildfire smoke, we’ve been spending more time than normal indoors lately. This is terrible news for our climate, but good news for our reading lists! This round-up is heavily weighted towards non-fiction (with a clear attention economy/stolen focus bent!), but I have a couple of dark suspense novels lined up (Lisa Jewell’s None of This Is True and Lucy Foley’s The Paris Apartment) to carry me through these dog days and into (hopefully) cooler temperatures. (You can check out a few previous book review posts here, here and here.)

The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, subtitled How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has gotten a ton of both positive and negative press recently. The book’s essential thesis is that we’ve moved from a play-based childhood to a phone-based childhood, much to society’s detriment. Parents overprotect their children in the real world – no playing outside in the front yard on your own because you might be kidnapped! – whilst at the same time handing them a smartphone with unrestricted access to all of the horrors humans can dream up. He also argues that social media in particular has contributed to (caused?) most of the dramatic increases in depression, anxiety, eating disorders, suicidal ideation and more mental health issues seen in pre-teens and teenagers in the Anglosphere.

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