Phone Rules - by Luc Rinaldi (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Award-winning investigative journalist Luc Rinaldi offers insights, inspiration and practical advice to reset our relationship with our phones so we can raise healthier and happier kids and re-engage with life.

Everyone knows it: humanity is hooked on smartphones. Worldwide, our chronic overuse of these devices is obliterating our ability to focus, polarizing our politics, flattening our culture, ravaging our well-being and turning us into a lonely, sedentary, sleep-deprived species. And yet we can't imagine living without them. What are we to do?

Our usual tricks--the digital detoxes and app blockers and screen-time limits--aren't working, and meaningful systemic change seems out of reach. Stymied by the scale of the problem, we begrudgingly allow our phones to distract us, delight us and pull us back in.

Rinaldi offers a path out of this paralysis. Beyond diagnosing our self-destructive relationship with our smartphones, he offers solutions for people perpetually tethered to their devices, parents rearing digital natives, children navigating their first phones and everyone in between. Rooted in fascinating research and sympathetic profiles, Phone Rules shows us not only what is at stake, but paints a picture of what we stand to regain.

Review Quotes

"This book is twice as useful and three times funnier than you're expecting. It should automatically come bundled with every smartphone. A thinking-person's guide to digital sanity in our messed-up times."
--Amanda Ripley, New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World

"Rinaldi offers a compassionate roadmap that challenges the terrible norms we have when it comes to having a smartphone. He understands, deeply, that much of the time our phones use us; depleting our cognitive capacity and compromising our most precious relationships. This guide coaches the reader through the science of our phone addictions, and introduces us to the civic leaders and designers pushing back on them from around the world. Rinaldi is candid about the challenges of updating one's relationship to their phones, and candid about the clunkiness. After reading this book, I turned my phone off and it felt good."
--Vass Bednar, co-author of The Big Fix

"Parents, kids, all of us: we need simple tools to disengage from addictive tech and re-engage with the world around us. This book gives you them. Read it and get your life back."
--Daisy Greenwell, co-founder of Smartphone Free Childhood

"Charming, gripping, and wise, Phone Rules delivers a course of common sense, actionable fixes for our screen-addled lives. Rinaldi's prose is as fascinating as it is enjoyable. His insights will prompt you to take back control of your one beautiful life."
--Michael Harris, author of The End of Absence and Solitude

About the Author

LUC RINALDI is an award-winning investigative journalist who covers technology and mental health. He is a contributing editor at Toronto Life and Maclean's magazines as well as a contributing writer for The Walrus, and his work has appeared in The Times, ABC, CBC and elsewhere. He is a frequent guest speaker at colleges and universities, and has taught magazine feature writing at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada's foremost journalism school. He lives in Toronto with his wife and son.