New Book Releases | September 29, 2026
We often turn to books for comfort, but the best medicine they can provide lies in their ability to help us understand what ails us—challenging unquestioned assumptions, expanding our minds, exposing discrimination and corruption, and offering new avenues to address our most pressing issues and care for one another.
All four of this week's books are likely to make us uncomfortable—in productive ways. Each hits local bookstore shelves and are available online today.
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Unless otherwise noted, all descriptions of the books below come from the publisher.
The American Way of Killing: The Invention of an Epidemic by Malcolm Gladwell, published by Little, Brown and Company
Malcolm Gladwell’s most urgent book yet: a provocative investigation of America’s epidemic of gun violence.
The United States has far more homicides than any of its peers around the world. Why?
In this groundbreaking book, Malcolm Gladwell explores the American “peculiarity”—how the world’s wealthiest country came to suffer from a problem typically only seen in the world’s poorest countries.
Drawing on original interviews, archival and social science research, and his trademark insight, Gladwell approaches the American paradox through a series of stories. What can we learn from the miracle of a young gunshot victim in Washington, D.C.? How have the legal troubles of a seventeenth-century English knight influenced American attempts at gun control? Why would a European police chief be baffled by the graduation ceremony at any American police academy?
In a sweeping narrative, Gladwell travels from a shooting range in North Carolina, to the South Side of Chicago, to an old plantation house in Alabama, painting a picture of a country that does not understand its most pressing social problem, and as result, does not understand how to fix it.
"Part of Gladwell's allure is his uncanny ability to shift perspective and scale … to shuffle between different worlds … drawing parallels and contrasts. It is a thrilling technique." —The Guardian
Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle, published by Little, Brown and Company
From the author of prescient bestseller and classic Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle, comes an urgent warning about how our ever-increasing reliance on human-like AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy, caring, and the very qualities that make us human.
If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots that speak to us in a human voice offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists. As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones.
When we talk to chatbots in these roles, as intimate machines, we accept as sufficient what machines can offer: the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. We redefine human capacities for care, solitude, and intimacy in terms of what machines can do. Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls the new culture of chatbots artificial intimacy, our new AI.
Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle’s decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture, Artificial Intimacy evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots. They can organize our calendars, plan our travel, or analyze our stock picks, all with an efficiency that outstrips what a person might do.
And then, they promise to be more—to be our “perfect” companion. They will always be there for us, listen to us, and support us—and ask for nothing in return. But these intimate machines, warns Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed, and lonely than ever before. More than that, we become less equipped to reverse course—machine relationships do not offer practice for getting along with people.
Artificial Intimacy is unique in how it traces our new habit of talking to machines through the lifecycle—from children’s earliest attachments to how we face death. But technology, by offering to do everything, teaches us that we neither need nor have the capacity to take risks, have hard conversations, struggle through uncertainty or insecurity, or rely on our own faculties and judgment.
Turkle has spent decades studying how digital technologies isolate us from one another. Now, in her long-awaited follow-up to Reclaiming Conversation, she offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for reclaiming our humanity in the age of AI.
"Sherry Turkle, our wisest guide to digital life, has written her most urgent book yet. Artificial Intimacy will help you avoid the profound but often hidden threats AI poses to you and your relationships. Read it and share it with all the humans you know." —Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows
Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your Wallet by Lindsay Owens, published by Viking
A searing exposé of the new tools of corporate profiteering and a field guide to the deceptive tactics companies are using to cheat consumers out of their money—and how we can get ahead of them—from a leading voice in economic policy and executive director of a corporate watchdog think tank.
Everywhere you turn, Americans are getting ripped off: Online ticket sellers hide behind exorbitant extra fees. Landlords use software to band together and organize artificial rent hikes. Ride-sharing apps spike their fares when it rains. And car companies install software that reports your driving behavior to auto insurance companies so that they can hike your premiums. Surveillance pricing, algorithmic price fixing, and other high-tech forms of price gouging are the latest frontiers in corporate profiteering—and they’re gutting the American economy and your wallet.
In Gouged, economic expert and veteran consumer advocate Lindsay Owens takes us inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made, uncovering the tricks, traps, and grifts corporations use to jack up the price you pay at checkout. From data collection to drone surveillance, modern technology provides companies a staggering arsenal of sophisticated tools to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible, resulting in record profits. Drawing on original reporting, shareholder meeting transcripts, and rigorous economic analysis, Owens takes aim at Big Tech behemoths, airlines, health insurance companies, and others to pull back the curtain on how price gouging is coming for almost every line item in your household budget, from doctor visits to rent, groceries to diapers, and even your summer vacation.
Gouged arms us with the essential knowledge we need to first recognize, and then sidestep, the traps that corporations try to conceal from us. In a world where price gouging has become ubiquitous, Gouged is necessary reading for anyone looking to stay an informed consumer, save money rather than surrender it to greedy CEOs, and stand up for fair prices in America.
“Ever have the sneaking suspicion that you’re paying more for something online than you should be, or than your neighbor is? You probably are. And you should be outraged. Lindsay Owens tells us how we got here and what we should do about it. Required reading for all American consumers and policymakers.” —Rana Foroohar, author of Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World
Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City by Anand Giridharadas, published by Knopf
From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation.
In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.
At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.
