Filterworld is out! Reviews, podcasts, Q&As

Pick it up this week!

Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, an author and staff writer for The New Yorker. This is my personal newsletter, where I share my columns and publish original essays. Subscribe here.

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The book

The hardcover book is beautiful! You can see some more glamour shots here. I love seeing it on shelves, in stores or at home, so please send them to me if you see them. Here are Filterworld and The Longing for Less new paperback version in the window at my favorite bookstore, McNally Jackson!

If you want your book to get on bestseller lists, the first week is often your best shot: Then, all the pre-orders and launch purchases count toward the total. That is to say, if you plan to buy a copy of the book, please do it now! Head to your local bookstore or order it online. And if you have picked it up, it really helps to rate the book highly and leave a review (even very short helps) on Amazon, Goodreads, or your preferred digital cultural marketplace. The algorithm book has to survive the algorithms.

Tour events

My DC and NYC events are over, and were so much fun, but I still have stops in Boston, LA, and SF in the coming week. I’d love to see you there

1/19 (tonight!) — Boston at Harvard Bookstore at 7 PM, talking with designer, artist, thinker Oliver Munday.

1/23 — LA at Skylight Books at 7 PM, talking with podcaster, columnist, consultant Chris Black.

1/24 — SF at Book Passage Ferry Building at 5:30 PM, talking with novelist, newsletterer, olive-oil producer Robin Sloan.

Coverage

The press around the book has been absolutely fantastic. It’s great to watch the message resonating with readers; when a book comes out, you actually get to see how it is interpreted and the directions other people take it in. Here are some highlights.

Podcasts / Radio:

The Ezra Klein Show: Ezra took this in a fun self-improvement direction, figuring out how we can be more intentional cultural consumers. It’s a conversation on how we discover our own tastes and why digital platforms can make it harder to really experience a work of art.

Fresh Air: It was a huge career highlight to be on Fresh Air last week, interviewed by Tonya Mosley! We walked through the themes of the book, how algorithmic feeds choked the internet, and why fiddle-leaf figs are so ubiquitous.

Big Technology: Alex Kantrowitz and I discussed the strengths of algorithmic feeds and how they helped build the internet, even as they’ve become so overwhelming as to be much less useful now. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

How Long Gone: A totally off-the-wall talk on my favorite chat podcast with “bicoastal elites” Chris Black and Jason Stewart. We talked wfh, why everywhere shouldn’t be one place, romantasy dragon erotica, running with your dog, Washington DC, and I’m sure other stuff I’ve forgotten.

Text Q&As:

British GQ: On the benefits of doing an algorithm cleanse.

Esquire: On the importance of human curation.

Inc.: On small businesses navigating algorithmic recommendations

Reviews: As a practice, I don’t read all of my reviews right away — or ever. But these two were very nice to read and have such great critics grappling with the ideas in the book.

New York Times review by Alexandra Jacobs:

“Unlike the cascade of content from strangers on the internet, “Filterworld,” as a proper book will, evokes less transient impulses than genuine, lingering feelings: depression about our big-box corporate dystopia; admiration for Chayka’s curiosity and clear writing style; dismay about the electrical engineering graduate — electrical engineering! — who can’t get astrology out of her timeline and regrets being influenced to buy a pair of leg warmers. (“I just want to know if what I like is what I actually like,” she tells him, plaintively.)”

The Atlantic review by Megan Garber:

“The book is a work of explanatory criticism, offering an in-depth consideration of the invisible forces people invoke when talking about “the algorithm.” Filterworld, in that, does the near impossible: It makes algorithms, those dull formulas of inputs and outputs, fascinating. But it also does something that is ever more valuable as new technologies make the world seem bigger, more complicated, and more difficult to understand. It makes algorithms, those uncanniest of influencers, legible.”

Also, I loved this tweet from Evan Osnos, a journalist whose New Yorker pieces truly helped me realize that magazine writing was something I wanted to do.

Thanks for reading! If you picked up Filterworld, please let me know what you think, tag me on Instagram, etc. I’ll have more updates on the book soon, and eventually, back to thoughts that may not even be about algorithmic feeds.