new york review of books vs new york times book review

The New York Times Book Review

Weekly review of books by ''the new york times'' / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

Can you list the top facts and stats about The New York Times Book Review?

Summarize this article for a 10 year old

The New York Times Book Review ( NYTBR ) is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. [2] The magazine's offices are located near Times Square in New York City.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

• Seen & Heard

‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

• Seen & Heard ‘Caretaker’ Authors Talk Book With Kelly Clarkson

• Seen & Heard Memoir by Actor Nicole Maines Coming This Fall

• Awards Winners of the 2024 Edgar Awards Are Revealed

• Profiles George Takei Tells His Story, This Time for Kids

Our Take On This Week's Bestsellers

Our Verdict

More Seen & Heard

Featured Interviews

• podcast Episode 370: Alexandra Tanner

• podcast Episode 369: Guest Host David Levithan

• podcast Episode 368: Darcie Little Badger

• podcast Episode 367: J. Drew Lanham

• podcast Episode 366: Best April Books with Julia Alvarez

The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews

Featuring 325 reviews of fiction, nonfiction, children’s, and YA books; also in this issue: interviews with Colm Tóibín, Amy Tan, George Takei, and Bianca Xunise; and more

The Kirkus Star

One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.

The Kirkus Prize

The Kirkus Prize is among the richest literary awards in America, awarding $50,000 in three categories annually.

Great Books & News Curated For You

Be the first to read books news and see reviews, news and features in Kirkus Reviews . Get awesome content delivered to your inbox every week.

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Small Island

The trouble with reality.

The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

by William Egginton

Outsider’s Outsider

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

by John Szwed

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024

Sounding for Harry Smith: Early Pacific Northwest Influences

by Bret Lunsford

‘An Archaic Country,’ Dark and Bright

The Body of the Soul

by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Time & Task

Iraq’s twenty years of carnage.

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War

by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

Wounded Tigris: A River Journey Through the Cradle of Civilization

by Leon McCarron

‘Diabolical Fame’

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

by Roger Lewis

Who Should Regulate Online Speech?

Social Media, Freedom of Speech and the Future of Our Democracy

edited by Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone

Every Creeping Thing

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 30: 1882, Supplement to the Correspondence 1831–1880

edited by Frederick Burkhardt, James A. Secord, and the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project

In Search of His Vocation

Finding Time Again

by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Ian Patterson

The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts

by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, and with a preface by Jean-Yves Tadié

The Cost of Our Debris

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles

by Jay Owens

Social Progress & the Courts

The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?

by Gerald N. Rosenberg

The Party Line

The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, the Metropol Hotel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War

by Alan Philps

Nefer’s Mission

by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy

Morning of Departure

Covid and governance: an exchange, finally, no more fees, issue details.

Cover art Nathanaëlle Herbelin: Oiseaux, Version 2 , 2022 (HV-studio/Nathanaëlle Herbelin/Xavier Hufkens, Brussels) Series art Joana Avillez: Letraset , 2024

Subscribe and save 50%!

Read the latest issue as soon as it’s available, and browse our rich archives. You'll have immediate subscriber-only access to over 1,200 issues and 25,000 articles published since 1963.

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

The Anxious Generation wants to save teens. But the bestseller’s anti-tech logic is skewed

There’s no doubt about the mental health crisis facing young people. Jonathan Haidt blames our devices – which oversimplifies the problem

I n the introduction to his new book The Anxious Generation , titled “Growing up on Mars”, Jonathan Haidt tells a fanciful piece of science fiction about a child conscripted into a dangerous mission to the red planet that will deform the young person as they grow. The journey is undertaken without the parents’ consent. The ham-fisted metaphor is that technology companies have done the same to children and teenagers by putting smartphones into their hands.

Haidt, a New York University professor of ethical leadership who researches social psychology and morality, goes on to argue that smartphones ignited a wildfire of anxiety and depression in gen Z around the world, by granting them “continuous access to social media, online video games, and other internet-based activities”. He says there are four foundational harms in this degradation of youth: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

“This great rewiring of childhood, I argue, is the single largest reason for the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s,” he writes.

The Anxious Generation has squatted atop the New York Times bestseller list for four weeks now and garnered florid, positive reviews – it hit a nerve . But it has also sparked fierce debate over the effects of our now ubiquitous devices, the causes of mental illness, and just what to do about the kids. Haidt’s critics argue that he took advantage of very real phenomena – depressed and anxious children, overattachment to technology, disconnection from other humans – to make a broad indictment of smartphones, when it’s not as simple as that.

We can split The Anxious Generation into two parts: the first details the supposed digital destruction of childhood around the world, while the second recommends ways to fix it.

There is, in fact, a crashing wave of teenage anguish. Studies in Haidt’s book and elsewhere show an alarming surge in teenage depression, anxiety and suicide attempts from 2010 to 2023. This is happening at the same time as widespread social media and smartphone adoption. The psychologist Jean Twenge, an associate of Haidt, asked in 2017 on the cover of the Atlantic: “ Have smartphones destroyed a generation? ” In the fall of 2021, a “national emergency in child and adolescent mental health” was declared by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the Children’s Hospital Association.

But as the University of California, Irvine, psychology professor Candice Odgers asked in her critique of The Anxious Generation in Nature , “Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?”

The answer, per Odgers, is no. Blisteringly, she accuses Haidt of “making up stories by simply looking at trend lines” and says his book’s core argument “is not supported by science”. Haidt makes the basic error of mistaking correlation with causation, she says.

In a review of 40 previous studies published in 2020, Odgers found no cause-effect relationship between smartphone ownership, social media usage and adolescents’ mental health. A 2023 analysis of wellbeing and Facebook adoption in 72 countries cited by Odgers delivered no evidence connecting the spread of social media with mental illness. (Those researchers even found that Facebook adoption predicted some positive trends in wellbeing among young people.) Another survey of more than 500 teens and over 1,000 undergraduates conducted over two and six years, respectively, found that increased social media use did not precede the onset of depression.

For Haidt to draw such a sweeping conclusion as “teens troubled, ergo smartphones bad” from such unsettled science is wrong, Odgers argues. He engages in post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning: after this, therefore because of this. The irony is palpable –Haidt himself has argued in his own academic research that “moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction” that follows a judgment already made. His fellow scientists now say his book falls into the same trap in pronouncing that immoral technology has corrupted the youth of today. The Oxford psychology professor Andrew Przybylski told the tech newsletter Platformer : “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right now, I’d argue he doesn’t have that.” The Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said Haidt’s book was fomenting moral panic about social media reminiscent of the debate over video games and real-world violence.

“Overall, as has been the case for previous media such as video games, concerns about screen time and mental health are not based in reliable data,” Ferguson noted in a 2021 meta-analysis of more than 30 studies that found no link between smartphone or social media use and poor mental health or suicidal ideation.

Responding to social scientists’ critiques of his book on the New Yorker Radio Hour, Haidt said, “I keep asking for alternative theories. You don’t think it’s the smartphones and social media – what is it?”

Haidt was making an appeal to ignorance, a logical fallacy: an alternative is absent, ergo my hypothesis is correct. Simply because there are no other explanations for the deterioration of the mental health of teenagers on the bestseller list right now does not mean his book is right – a drought of certainty does not mean the first idea we find is water. And scientists and doctors have, in fact, put forward ideas that compete with his , or else acknowledged smartphones as part, but not all, of the problem.

What’s more, The Anxious Generation barely acknowledges the effect of school closures during the pandemic had on kids and teens’ mental health and development, the Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz pointed out on her podcast . The Anxious Generation includes graphs showing that adolescent mental health grew even worse beginning in 2020, but Haidt insists that the pandemic was only an accelerant to an already raging fire caused by smartphones.

“The mess is not because of Covid. It was baked in before Covid. Covid didn’t actually have a long-lasting impact,” he said in a podcast interview with a fellow NYU professor, Scott Galloway.

A rebuttal in the language of a TikToker: be so for real. Studies definitively say that school closures due to the coronavirus pandemic caused and continue to inflame mental distress among children and teenagers. These disruptions hindered students’ social and emotional development, academic progress and physical health, multiple researchers have found, without equivocation . Worse still, studies have found that these measures did little to limit the spread of coronavirus as much as they hurt young students, an ineffective tradeoff.

Haidt needed to substantively contend with the problems caused by lockdowns and school closures, which are correlated with the worst period of teen suffering in the last 15 years, to give real, current solutions to the mental health crisis among youth. He offers little in that regard.

I f the first part of Haidt’s book – teens suffering, phones to blame – reads as sensational generalization, the second half is full of recommendations you have probably heard before, because Haidt cites nationwide professional associations of doctors and authorities.

The Anxious Generation proposes four solutions to the epidemic: “No smartphones before high school. No social media before 16. Phone-free schools. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence.” With the exception of age-gating policies, these are not unreasonable things. Schools have seen remarkable results when they ban smartphones . Many educators are in favor of such prohibitions. Teenagers do struggle with appropriate use of social media , and many say it makes them feel worse about themselves. Allowing children playtime free of surveillance does not seem beyond the pale. Parents limiting children’s phone use before bed and in the early morning, as Haidt advises, is decent counsel.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry goes a step further, advising that parents themselves should attempt to model the habits of screen time they wish to see in their children.

That same organization that declared a mental health emergency among young people offers a measured approach to technology and teens in general: “Screens are here to stay and can offer many positives,” its website reads. But Haidt can see none of these positives in smartphones or social media, an unrealistic attitude. He rightfully points out that social media can be a nightmare of compare and despair, of the fear of missing out. The other side of the same coin is that it forms aspirational and inspirational communities, and outlets for creativity. Smartphones are likewise tools of productivity for young people: in 2012, squarely in the years that Haidt says the ruination of childhood began, Reuters reported that more than a third of surveyed American teenagers were doing homework on their phones. “Influencer” has become a derisive term, but the job of creating content for social media has minted a generation of young business owners . And how do you think the teenage students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school organized a global movement against gun violence?

Children have always inhabited worlds that seem foreign and foreboding to their parents – the internet is one such place. It is unsettling and unfamiliar to those who did not grow up with it. What The Anxious Generation does successfully is smooth on a salve over the hurt of being disregarded by a loved one in favor of a phone. It provides an answer to the painful parental question of “Why is my child ignoring me? Why are they spending so much time online and alone in their room?”

But the question of teen mental health is complicated and resistant to any single explanation. And overlooking all that smartphones can be for teens and adults – maps, digital cameras, novels, encyclopedias, Walkmen and whatever else Haidt dismisses as “other internet-based activities”– is a reductive understanding of our devices as mere gaming and gabbing machines. In 2024, these devices contain our lives .

I was reminded of Haidt’s book on the subway the other night. A woman asked her daughter in the seat next to her a question. Her daughter did not answer; she was staring at her phone playing a game. The woman’s smile faded. They did not speak for another minute. Then the daughter handed her mother the phone and looked her in the eyes: it was the mother’s turn in the game. The woman looked at the phone and laughed at something the young girl had done, some funny misstep or a clever move. They both smiled. Though only an anecdote, it did remind me of the possibility of connection, both online and off.

• Social media
• Smartphones
• Mobile phones
• Mental health
• Parents and parenting

Most viewed

Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

Read Like the Wind

2 books that capture new york.

A stroll around the city with a great stylist; a comic novel of love and real estate.

• Share full article

By Sadie Stein

Dear readers,

I don’t make any special claims for New York except that it’s the city I know best. Well, that and the fact that people really do talk a lot about real estate, a subject that somehow manages to be tedious and thrilling, crass and impersonal all at once.

The other day, I cried on the subway. This in itself wasn’t a big deal; if you live here long enough, the law of averages dictates that at some point you’re going to sob on an uptown 2 train while people studiously avoid your eyes or, occasionally, glare at you with faint irritation. It has always felt to me like a safe place to cry — a sort of international waters.

Of course, on this occasion, I ran into someone I’d known slightly since kindergarten. We ignored the fact that I was weeping and talked vaguely about real estate and our plans to skip an upcoming reunion. I got off two stops early for both our sakes, bought a large pineapple juice and thought about E.B. White.

“Here Is New York,” by E.B. White

Nonfiction, 1949

“On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” begins this essay. White grew up in Mount Vernon and is probably as associated with New England as any place, but no one has ever captured the city the way he does. I feel silly recommending it, but if one person picks it up who hasn’t before, then it’ll have been worthwhile. “Here Is New York” has nothing to do with glamour; it’s the opposite of glamour. “It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”

It’s not just that White is one of the best American prose stylists (although he is) or that his work is steeped in unfussy humanity. What makes his love-hate letter to New York so lasting is its matter-of-factness — and his acknowledgment that luck is a young person’s game. For a while, I used to give a copy of the book to any friend who was moving away. Once, I even gave one to a family of French tourists in Central Park; I wonder what they thought about that.

Read if you like: “One Man’s Meat,” “Little Fugitive,” Dawn Powell Available from: Bookstores, libraries or Central Park proselytizers, or online via Yale University’s CampusPress

“After Claude,” by Iris Owens

Fiction, 1973

Crying on the subway? That’s just a Tuesday. But laughing — now, that’s an event. One of the only books that’s ever made me laugh out loud, by myself, while commuting, is “After Claude,” Iris Owens’s sublimely bitchy tale of a woman, Harriet, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, a breakup, a bunch of downtown sofas, a few spiritual awakenings, an unrelenting barrage of insults and a rainbow of caftans. Is our deluded heroine being unceremoniously evicted by a sleazy Frenchman who has no interest in being with her? Depends who you ask. And frankly, Harriet doesn’t care what you think. “If there’s one thing on this earth that irritates me, it’s when a dumpy, frigid, former nymphomaniac assumes that my tongue is hanging out, thirsting for marital bliss.”

Read if you like: “The Goodbye Girl,” “The Sullivanians,” Renata Adler Available from: New York Review Classics , Internet Archive

Why don’t you …

Hide your demons? Not long ago, a kind friend who knows me very well went to the Edward Gorey house in Yarmouth, Mass., and brought me back a souvenir: a model of the creature who stars in Gorey’s macabre and bizarre (redundant when discussing Gorey) “Black Doll: The Silent Screenplay.” This object — featureless, armless, sort of anthropomorphic — is terrifying. I’ve hidden it in my closet and I swear it’s giving me nightmares.

Let fate decide? A rather less unsettling gift is a massive 1978 compendium called “The Quotable Woman,” which a friend found at a book barn. It’s a rather arbitrary collection of quotes; I like to open it at random when I wake up. And this morning? “To-day it is spring!” —Sarojini Naidu (1879-1949). (It was!)

Be perverse? I know that this newsletter is landing in your inbox on 4/20, but I don’t care. Reading about someone’s gonzo stoner experience is kind of like being a designated driver: Nothing is nearly as funny as you think. By all means, try to change my mind — but it won’t be easy. (Sorry; I’ve been spending a lot of time with “After Claude.”)

Thank you for being a subscriber

Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations .

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here . Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here .

Friendly reminder: check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online.

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .