
Searches
Selfhood in the Digital Age
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Narrated by:
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Vauhini Vara
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Anastasia Davidson
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By:
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Vauhini Vara
About this listen
From the author of The Immortal King Rao, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a personal exploration of how technology companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection • A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: Esquire, Foreign Policy, Lit Hub, Electric Literature
When it was released to the public in November 2022, ChatGPT awakened the world to a secretive project: teaching AI-powered machines to write. Its creators had a sweeping ambition—to build machines that could not only communicate, but could do all kinds of other activities, better than humans ever could. But was this goal actually achievable? And if reached, would it lead to our liberation or our subjugation?
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, had long been grappling with these questions. In 2021, she asked a predecessor of ChatGPT to write about her sister’s death, resulting in an essay that was both more moving and more disturbing than she could have imagined. It quickly went viral.
The experience, revealing both the power and the danger of corporate-owned technologies, forced Vara to interrogate how these technologies have influenced her understanding of her self and the world around her, from discovering online chat rooms as a preteen, to using social media as the Wall Street Journal’s first Facebook reporter, to asking ChatGPT for writing advice—while compelling her to add to the trove of human-created material exploited for corporations’ financial gain. Interspersed throughout this investigation are her own Google searches, Amazon reviews, and the other raw material of internet life—including the viral AI experiment that started it all. Searches illuminates how technological capitalism is both shaping and exploiting human existence, while proposing that by harnessing the collective creativity that makes humans unique, we might imagine a freer, more empowered relationship with our machines and, ultimately, with one another.
*Includes a downloadable PDF of images from the book
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2025 Vauhini Vara (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
One of the New York Times’ Nonfiction Books to Read This Spring
One of Esquire’s 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2025
One of Foreign Policy's Most Anticipated Books of 2025
One of Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
One of Electric Literature’s 48 Books by Women of Color to Read in 2025
“Readers will be profoundly moved by this remarkable meditation.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Tragic, funny, and relatable, [SEARCHES] is by turns absurd and insightful, engaging with the ethics of algorithms, surveillance, and privacy in a meaningful way. . . . A must read.”—Library Journal, starred review
“Vara’s essays are beautifully written and profoundly researched, but what sets them apart is their profound vulnerability. Her use of experimental forms . . . pushes the limits of the genre without ever compromising her circumspective, confessional approach. An original essay collection about loss, technology, morality, and identity.”—Kirkus, starred review
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Wow! More dark secrets from another corporate leader in the "Big Pharma" gang...
- By Desert Doberman on 04-15-25
By: Gardiner Harris
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Audition
- A Novel
- By: Katie Kitamura
- Narrated by: Traci Kato-Kiriyama
- Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.
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Bizarre, reader was annoying
- By Judith ashton on 04-15-25
By: Katie Kitamura
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A History of the World in Six Plagues
- How Contagion, Class, and Captivity Shaped Us, from Cholera to Covid-19
- By: Edna Bonhomme
- Narrated by: Veronique Olin
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
A History of the World in Six Plagues shows that throughout history, outbreaks of disease have been exacerbated by and gone on to further expand the racial, economic, and sociopolitical divides we allow to fester in times of good health. Princeton-trained historian Edna Bonhomme’s examination of humanity’s disastrous treatment of pandemic disease takes us across place and time from Port-au-Prince to Tanzania, and from plantation-era America to our modern COVID-19-scarred world to unravel shocking truths about the patterns of discrimination in the face of disease.
By: Edna Bonhomme
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When the Tides Held the Moon
- By: Venessa Vida Kelley
- Narrated by: Lee Osorio, Joel de la Fuente
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Benigno “Benny” Caldera knows an orphaned Boricua blacksmith in 1910s New York City can’t call himself an artist. But the ironwork tank he creates for famed Coney Island playground, Luna Park, astounds everyone, especially the eccentric sideshow proprietor who commissioned it. Benny’s work earns him an invitation to join the show’s eclectic crew of performers—his first welcome in the city—and share in their astonishing secret: the tank Benny built is a cage for their newest exhibit, a living, breathing, in-the-flesh merman stolen from the banks of the East River under a gleaming full moon.
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The Immortal King Rao
- By: Vauhini Vara
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 15 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government. In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.
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it didn't have a resolution.
- By Cooper Travis on 06-24-22
By: Vauhini Vara
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Poets Square
- A Memoir in Thirty Cats
- By: Courtney Gustafson
- Narrated by: Courtney Gustafson
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
When Courtney Gustafson moved into a rental house in the Poets Square neighborhood of Tucson, Arizona, she didn’t know that the property came with thirty feral cats. Focused only on her own survival—in a new relationship, during a pandemic, with poor mental health and a job that didn’t pay enough—Courtney was reluctant to spend any of her own time or money caring for the wayward animals.