• A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
• A New York Times Critics’ Best Book of 2021
• First Place, National Jewish Book Award, Memoir
• New England Society Book Award, Contemporary Non-Fiction
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For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own.
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In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her path-breaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn, Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother’s secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father—and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle’s intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT... READ MORE
Reader’s Guide For The Empathy Diaries
Great for book groups, classrooms and individual readers
Click here for Reader's Guide
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is a specialist in how technology changes us psychologically and socially.
Her new book is on our relationships with chatbots —Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. It will be published by Little, Brown and Company on September 29, 2026. It captures the seductive, beguiling nature of our new faux companions, tracing their effects throughout a human life—from childhood to parenthood, from work to love and more. She warns that these machines are quietly reshaping us - teaching us to avoid risk, sidestep difficult conversations, deny grief, and relinquish skills that make us human: empathy, resilience, the ability to navigate uncertainty. MORE
Sherry's Recent Thoughts
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW:
The Empathy Rules
MIT announced that all instruction, would be in person, with vaccination and regular testing. In context, I found this anxiety-provoking. READ MORE
THRIVE:
Coming Out Of the Pandemic With Fresh Eyes
Arianna Huffington interviews Sherry Turkle READ MORE
MEDIUM:
I Went to Paris to Mourn My Mother
Like Proust and his madeleine cake, the taste of pain d’épices still reminds me of my initial grief. READ MORE
TIME MAGAZINE:
The Pandemic Essay
The Pandemic Made Us Strangers to Ourselves
READ MORE
Sherry Turkle in the Media
New Yorker:
Sherry Turkle's Plugged in Year
The sociologist has critiqued our digital addictions. Now, like the rest of us, she’s been trapped behind her screens. MORE
Financial Times:
Why was I asked To make Steve Jobs dinner?
The psychologist on difficult parents,
the dangerous seductiveness of the digital — and taking
on sexism in academia MORE
Clear + Vivid:
with Alan Alda
Sherry Turkle movingly—and candidly—weaves together events in her own life with her dawning understanding of the way technology can weaken human connections.
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