Johann Hari’s book on the attention crisis was prompted by his godson’s addiction to his screens and his inability to focus and by the author’s own struggles with attention and distraction.
Hari is a British-Swiss journalist who has written books on depression and the war on drugs and has given hugely popular TED talks on addiction and depression. He was involved around 2011 in a controversy about plagiarism and anonymous Wikipedia edits but he has acknowledged his ethical failures.