This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Over the last 30 years, tech companies, the upstarts of the business world back then became the business world.

Microsoft is rated the most profitable company on the planet by some rankings.

Apple and Alphabet, which owns Google, are way up there as well.

Tech companies have amassed incredible power.

Their impacts on privacy, on mental health, on journalism, on just about everything,

we're only beginning to understand it now.

One of the sharpest voices on the evolution of the tech industry, and often one of the funniest,

is the journalist Kara Swisher. She knows better than anyone how the internet came to define so much of our lives.

And since the 90s, she's been influential and even feared in Silicon Valley, and she's just

published Burn Book, a tech love story. It begins with Kara Swisher's time at the Washington Post

where we first met.

I thought of you immediately some weeks ago when Tom Schells, the legendary Washington Post TV critic died.

Amazing guy.

And it's my memory. It is my memory from a million years ago in the Washington Post newsroom when I was a child in the

style section. Am I not crazy that you worked right close to him? I was there. Yes, I was. I sat right

next to him. I mean, Shales had an office next to Mary Hedar. And so it was this sort of style editor. And so,

yeah, so Shales, I love Shales.

What a guy.

What a guy.

What a guy.

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