with intense eagerness since 2012! a channel of the los angeles review of books

"Maciak’s willingness to defend screen time refreshes, as when he contends that FaceTiming or watching television with loved ones provides a form of intimacy. Readers will want to tune in to this." ~Publishers Weekly

Avidly Reads Screen Time: Order Now!

What happens when screen time is all the time? In the early 1990s, the phrase “screen time” emerged to scare parents about the dangers of too much TV for kids. Screen time was something to fret over, police, and judge in a low-grade moral panic. Now, “screen time” has become a metric not only for good parenting, but for our adult lives as well. Avidly Reads Screen Time is a funny, insightful work of cultural criticism and history about how we define screens, and how they now define us. From Mad Men to iCarly, Vine to FaceTime, binge-watching to doom-scrolling, Phillip Maciak leads us on a sometimes heartwarming, sometimes harrowing tour of the media that brings us together and tears us apart.

Avidly Reads: A Series of Short Books About How Culture Makes Us Feel

Avidly Reads at NYU Press

“It is a truth too rarely acknowledged that there is nothing better than being both smart and fun: how lucky for us, then, that Avidly Reads books are both. " — Naomi Fry, Staff Writer at the New Yorker

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