Private Matters: in defense of the personal life

The Story

Today we enjoy more privacy than ever before, yet the encroachment of the media, computer data gathering, and electronic surveillance in our lives undermines our sense that we have privacy at all. Although privacy is essential to our capacity to love and create and think, it can be used for the wrong reasons. The same condition that sustains intimacy, creativity, and freedom can also be invoked as an abusive kind of secrecy. In Private Matters, Janna Malamud Smith explores this paradox through various prisms: the bedroom, the psychiatrist’s couch, the biography, the presidency, the media, women and their bodies, and post–9/11 policy. More pertinent than ever before, this modern history of privacy offers important insights into the role of this increasingly elusive and fragile virtue.