When: October 14, 2026 · 7:00 PM EDT
Where: All Souls Unitarian Church · New York City
Type: In person + livestream
Join Jon Kabat-Zinn and Sherry Turkle for a special live event celebrating the launch of Sherry’s new book, Artificial Intimacy. Together, they’ll explore how artificial intimacy is reshaping our relationship, attention, and what it means to be human in a hyperconnected world.
Followed by an Exclusive Book Signing with Sherry
Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines
Sherry Turkle’s long-awaited follow-up to Reclaiming Conversation asks an urgent question. As AI chatbots offer themselves as our best friends, our therapists, even our lovers, and ask for nothing in return, what happens to our capacity for real empathy, real care, real connection? Turkle traces our new habit of talking to machines across an entire life, from a child’s first attachment to a device, to how we face our own mortality.
Sherry will be signing books after the session. Available on livestream for those who can’t join us in person.
This is not a casual evening. It’s a profound conversation, the third in a series that Sherry herself has called the situation humanity finds itself in as a “break the glass moment,” time to take action and look deeply at our epidemic of loneliness already living inside our homes and our kids’ pockets.
The event will be hosted by Steve Stein of WisdomFeed Publishing. This is WisdomFeed’s first event live “in real life” in New York City.
This is the third session of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast with Jon and Sherry. The first two conversations, on the intersection of digital living and mindfulness, were so profound that we decided to bring the third in person, in celebration of Sherry’s new book.
Followed by an exclusive book signing with Sherry. Meet Sherry in person and have your copy signed.
About the book
Artificial Intimacy is Sherry Turkle’s long-awaited follow-up to her bestseller Reclaiming Conversation. She’s the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and author of Alone Together and The Empathy Diaries. Little, Brown publishes the book September 29, 2026.
Meet The Speakers
Visionary minds shaping a more human tomorrow
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. A leading expert on humans’ relationship with digital objects, she is the New York Times bestselling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries. Turkle is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and the Harvard Centennial Medal, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
Jon Kabat-Zinn is the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and founder of the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School, work that has shaped how modern medicine thinks about the mind and body together. He is a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most influential voices in bringing mindfulness into mainstream medicine, education, and everyday life.
Steve Stein
Steve Stein is the founder and curator of WisdomFeed Publishing and BetterListen!, a digital audio publisher since the cassette era and a founding member of the Audio Publishers Association. For four decades he has recorded and worked directly with the defining teachers in mindfulness, psychology, and wellness, including Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marion Woodman, Ram Dass, James Hillman, Mariann Williamson, Alan Watts and more. He is the host of the StreetSmart Wisdom Podcast, where this conversation began.
RESERVE YOUR SEAT HERE
