Empathy Diaries

Growing up in post-war Brooklyn, Sherry Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father - and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy was a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. She learned friendship at a Harvard/Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the anti-war movement, mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and fought for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections.