Love Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now? Readers share 100 books like Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now...

It’s hard for me to overstate the importance this book played in my understanding of college-aged American adolescents. I loved the clarity, organization, and simplicity of the writing here. Bringing in time-tested wisdom from philosophers, ancient faith systems, and cross-cultural perspectives gave me the sense that I was reading about principles and values that will endure far beyond our fleeting cultural moments.

I loved the contrast of wise maxims against trendy and misleading slogans that create a more brittle and distressed generation of young adults. I loved the mix of psychological research, historical anecdotes, and individual college students’ stories, all profiled seamlessly in the book. The sections that look back at historical forces that led to the helicopter and then bulldozer parenting were particularly fascinating.

I love that this book takes a compassionate look at the difficulty of Gen Z without being too harsh or alienating the young adults who… show more.

You can’t stay married if you’re dead. Don’t die. Read this book. 

There’s a reason TIME Magazine included the central text of the world’s most prolific recovery organization on its list of Best 100 Nonfiction Books of All Time: the book that gave AA its name likely has saved more lives than any other singular narrative in the past century.

AA not really for you? Reading Alcoholics Anonymous does not mean joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The themes co-authors Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith discuss – and the Twelve Steps of Recovery in particular – have near-universal relevance to anyone attempting to break the grip of alcohol or drugs.

More than eight decades after its publication, the book offers timeless truths that captivate addicts via ironclad identification. 

Therapist Beverly Berg offers tools for the partners of recovering addicts, who often struggle with reestablishing trust, closeness, and compatibility.

Employing strategies of mindfulness, attachment theory, and neurobiology, Berg helps readers rebuild emotional stability with partners, improve communication, lay boundaries, and take tangible steps toward reigniting intimacy. 

Much of the book's material is drawn from Berg's successful Conscious Couples Recovery Workshop, which is as close to a roadmap as I feel exists for partners trying to move forward post-addiction. Berg has over three decades in her field, and the exercises she adapts to this narrative effectively address common issues faced by couples in recovery.

Whereas my book lays out the gory personal details and gut punches, Berg brings a well-explained, semi-prescriptive approach to an oft-ignored topic.

That two of my “best books” involve the 12 Steps of Recovery is no accident. They are a prescription to personal progress that can be parlayed into marital wellness. 

While Alcoholics Anonymous is the most influential recovery book ever written, the secondary text of the adjacent yet unaffiliated Narcotics Anonymous may be the most impactful. 
It Works, How & Why lays out the organization’s 12 Steps – which mirror those devised by its predecessor, Alcoholics Anonymous – in a deeper, more descriptive fashion than perhaps any other tome (it also uses more modern, accessible language, given its 1993 publication). With matter-of-fact language and easy-to-grasp metaphors, the text fleshes out what the 12 Steps are, what they aren’t, and why they are so vital to longstanding recovery from addiction.

From a certain angle, metaverse platforms are the quirkiest example of the social media revolution, where grassroots creators express themselves online to gain fans, influence, and (on the very high end) a full-time income.

Deeply and thoughtfully reported by someone who started her own journalist career in social media, Taylor’s book is a must-read on the rise of the social media revolution, from the early 2000s era of blogging (when I got my own start) to the video sharing powerhouse of TikTok—and evolving to a broader ecosystem forecast to be half a trillion dollars in value by 2027.

Levy is the great Silicon Valley insider-reporter, a tech fan who gets close to the action while remaining clear-sighted and critical about his subjects: inevitably, his weighty book about Mark Zuckerberg’s rise and subsequent travails was indispensable for my own work.

Like the film and its topic, Levy’s book is partly inspiring, frequently troubling, but overall offers an insightful vision of how and why Facebook defined and shaped the first part of the new century. It’s also a reminder of how, if anything, The Social Network was overly nice in its depiction of Facebook’s founder.

To balance out my list is Divided We Fall by David French, who recently became The New York Times’s newest conservative columnist.

So, yes, he’s a moderate conservative—and his book actually stands out to me among polarization books because it does a particularly good job of articulating both conservative and liberal perspectives on various issues, and both sides’ reasons for frustration and anger.

I also especially appreciate French’s discussion of the “law of group polarization”—the tendency for people’s opinions to become more extreme when we confer with like-minded groups—French and I agree this is a key cause of US polarization. And true to the title, the book includes descriptions of potential secession scenarios—not pleasant to read but perhaps a wake-up call for some readers.

I found incredibly compelling the argument of how important humility and the willingness to admit what we don’t know are to democratic, liberal thought.

That we have become a society that rarely listens to ideas that challenge our own or that disrupt what we think we know to be true–is hugely dangerous. 

As Lynch explores, more information has not led to greater certainty or confidence in the answers we find. What we are experiencing is not only a crisis of truth, but one of trust.

I loved this book, as it describes one of the biggest problems of our day and age: that we are both superconnected and no longer connected at all. By that, I mean that we are constantly digitally stimulated.

We are in touch with friends, colleagues, and strangers, but because of that, we are too tired to truly connect to the important people around us and even with ourselves.

Philip Napoli is a leading media policy expert and was one of the first people to identify some of the problems that emerge when news gets distributed online through social media algorithms.

I love this book because it provides a great narrative of how we got to this point, but also some fantastic suggestions for how policymakers can respond. It’s quite readable for an academic book, and worth checking out.