570 – Author Judith Newman on To Siri with Love

Judith Newman is the author of To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines. She writes about entertainment, science, business, beauty, and popular culture for a wide variety of publications, includingThe New York Times, Vanity Fair, Prevention, AARP, and National Geographic. As a book reviewer, she writes the column “Help Desk” in The New York Times Book Review, and reviews regularly for She is a contributing editor for Allure and Prevention, and has been widely anthologized and won numerous awards for her journalism.
To Siri With Love was inspired by a 2014 article in the New York Times inspired by her autistic son’s relationship with Siri; it became one of the most emailed pieces in the newspaper that year. She has also co-authored several books, including The Girl: A Life In The Shadow of Roman Polanski. Earlier, Miramax published her memoir, You Make Me Feel Like An Unnatural Woman: Diary of a New (Old) Mother,about becoming a mother late(ish) in life. She graduated Wesleyan University and has an MA from Columbia’s Literature Department. She and her husband live in New York City with their twin sons and a lot of chaos.