Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age

Hess, Amanda

Paperback

Biographies GeneralGeneral ParentingGeneral Sociology

Publisher Price: $19.00

ISBN10: 0593470346
ISBN13: 9780593470343
Publisher: Vintage
Published: May 5 2026
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.74
Height: 0.95 Width: 5.13 Depth: 7.96
Language: English
The debut memoir from beloved New York Times critic Amanda Hess chronicles the convergence of parenthood and technology.

Second Life is a tender, perceptive account of pregnancy and early motherhood--and a stylish confrontation with the demented landscape of digital parenting content. --Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

As an internet culture critic for The New York Times, Amanda Hess had built a reputation among readers as a sharp observer of the seductions and manipulations of online life. But when Hess discovered she was pregnant with her first child, she found herself unexpectedly rattled by a digital identity crisis of her own.

In the summer of 2020, a routine ultrasound detected a mysterious abnormality in Hess's baby. Without hesitation, she reached for her phone, looking for answers. But rather than allaying her anxieties, her search sucked her into the destabilizing morass of the internet, and she was vulnerable--more than ever--to conspiracy, myth, judgment, commerce, and obsession.

As Hess documents her escalating relationship with the digital world, she identifies how technologies act as portals to troubling ideologies, ethical conflicts, and existential questions, and she illuminates how the American traditions of eugenics, surveillance, and hyper-individualism are recycled through these shiny products for a new generation of parents and their children.

At once funny, heartbreaking, and surreal, Second Life is a journey that spans a network of fertility apps, prenatal genetic tests, gender reveal videos, rare disease Facebook groups, freebirth influencers, and hospital reality shows. Hess confronts technology's distortions as they follow her through pregnancy and into her son's early life. The result is a critical record of our digital age that reveals the unspoken ways our lives are being fractured and reconstituted by technology.

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