A writer of books, essays and ephemera
Nicholas Carr writes about technology and culture. His new book, Utopia Is Creepy, collects his best essays, blog posts, and other writings from the past dozen years, providing an alternative history of our tech-besotted time. Offering “an uncompromising portrait of the internet” (New Scientist), it is a “bright, fun, telling book” (Kirkus) that is “by turns wry and revelatory” (Discover).
In 2014, Carr published the acclaimed book The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us, which examines the personal and social consequences of our ever growing dependency on computers, robots, and apps. His previous work, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and a New York Times bestseller.
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 calls “the best read so far about the significance of the shift to cloud computing,” and Does IT Matter? (2004). His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.
Carr has written for The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Wired, Nature, MIT Technology Review, and many other periodicals. 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. In 2015, he received the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity from the Media Ecology Association.
Carr is a former member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors, was on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school. Since 2005, he has written the popular blog Rough Type. Earlier in his career, he was executive editor of the Harvard Business Review. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American Literature and Language, from Harvard University.
In the early 1980s, Carr was a founding member of the universally unnoticed Connecticut punk band The Adrenaline Boys.