July 2026 – mathewingram.com/work

July 31, 2026

Marmot researchers set up an OnlyFans to get funding

Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle. For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado. Marmots — soccer ball-sized rodents — are easily tagged and captured, highly social and vocal, and don’t move vast distances, all of which makes them an ideal species to study over time. And since 1962, generations of “Marmoteers” have observed these animals to learn about everything from their social behavior to their communication to how they’ll adapt to climate change. (via SFGate)

Meet the man who has made more than six million edits on Wikipedia

Steven Pruitt spends his evenings identifying errors that most people never notice and making fixes that hardly anyone ever thanks him for. He toils at a desk in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by books—the kind of working clutter that suggests a long relationship with paper rather than a fetish for screens. And yet his work is necessarily digital; after dinner, and sometimes late into the night, he uses his desktop computer to correct dates, clean up syntax, standardize categories, and occasionally write entire biographies of people on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. Pruitt is forty-two, and works full time as a records-management contractor for the federal government. After graduating from the College of William & Mary, in 2006, he moved back in with his parents and in recent years, he helped his mother care for his father. Pruitt has made more than six million edits to Wikipedia and created more than thirty thousand articles. He is widely regarded as the most prolific Wikipedian in the world. (via The New Yorker)

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July 30, 2026

Should we be worried about the Hugging Face hack?

In case you don’t follow this sort of thing as closely as some, the headline refers to a recent incident in which two of OpenAI’s leading-edge AI models gained unauthorized access to – in other words, hacked – an open-source model known as Hugging Face and extracted information from it (there are also reports that it used a second service as a staging point for the attack). As if that’s not bad enough, in order to accomplish the hack, the OpenAI models gained unauthorized access to the internet without anyone knowing, until a significant amount of time had elapsed. The attack was first reported by Hugging Face on July 16th as an unauthorized intrusion into its open-source model’s database by what it described as an unidentified agent – one that the company said was clearly part of an autonomous AI system. Here’s how Hugging Face described it:

“Earlier this week, we detected and responded to an intrusion into part of our production infrastructure. This one was different from anything we had handled before in one important way: it was driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system – and we detected and dissected it largely with AI of our own. We identified unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials used by our services. The intrusion started where AI platforms are uniquely exposed: the data-processing pipeline. A malicious dataset abused two code-execution paths in our dataset processing to run code. From there, the actor escalated to node-level access, harvested cloud and cluster credentials, and moved laterally into several internal clusters.”

According to the company, the campaign was run by an agent framework whose identity it could not determine, and that agent or web of agents executed “thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services.” In case you’re wondering where the name Hugging Face came from, the company is a New York-based entity founded by several French entrepreneurs to develop an AI-powered chat service for kids, and got its name from an emoji known as “hugging face.” The company open-sourced the chat software and then created a database of machine-learning tools and libraries for others to use as a resource for working with AI. Hugging Face also developed its own large-language model similar to ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, known as BLOOM. Ironically, perhaps, the company used AI to detect the intrusion, saying its attack-detection software used LLM-based “triage over security telemetry” to spot anomalies.

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July 29, 2026

He impaled himself on a pole and then hiked down a mountain

David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.Then he rolled over. Something wasn’t right. Mr. Cifaldi, 32, had impaled himself on the pole. He immediately went into nurse mode: Mr. Cifaldi is a wound nurse at St. Vincent Regional Hospital in Billings, Mont.The pole was jutting at an angle into his left lateral muscle, below his armpit, and out through his back. He wasn’t in pain, there was no blood, he was able to take deep breaths and could feel the trekking pole through his skin. He was two to three miles from the summit of Granite Peak, elevation of about 12,800 feet. Hoping to avoid an expensive lift off the mountain via helicopter, he walked around and found he wasn’t lightheaded and told his friends, “I think we can get out of here.” (via the NYT)

Harp therapist plays music for lemurs, rhinos and fish at Canberra zoo

Most musicians would be disappointed if their performances were met with silence. But not Alison Ware. Every fortnight, the Canberra harp therapist performs for some of her most attentive audience members — rhinos, lemurs, lions and a school of Amazonian fish at the National Zoo and Aquarium. For the past five years, Ms Ware has been volunteering at the zoo, using music as a form of animal enrichment. Armed with several different harps of varying sizes, she moves between enclosures, carefully adapting her performance to suit each animal. Alison spends time watching each animal, adjusting the tempo, tone and volume of the music as she gauges their response. Some animals wander over to investigate. Others simply settle where they are. But Ms Ware’s audience extends beyond furry and feathered animals. Even the aquarium’s South American pacu often swim toward the music as Ms Ware plays. (via ABC.net)

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July 28, 2026

Con artist Fat Leonard fleeced the Navy, now wants a pardon

Wearing an extra-large tan prison uniform, the man who seduced legions of U.S. Navy officers with prostitutes and bribes shuffled into a visiting room at a remote federal penitentiary on the Pacific coast. He squeezed his hulking frame into a tiny plastic chair. In an exclusive interview, Leonard Glenn Francis — the con man better known as Fat Leonard — revealed for the first time how he bamboozled U.S. authorities in 2022 by escaping house arrest and fleeing to Mexico, Cuba and Venezuela before he was caught and returned to the United States 15 months later.Federal officials have never fully explained how Francis, a defense contractor who once played a critical role supporting Navy operations in Asia, absconded from home detention in San Diego nearly four years ago, despite warnings from prosecutors that he was “an extreme flight risk.” By court order, the 350-pound maritime tycoon was supposed to be under 24-7 surveillance as he awaited sentencing for bribery, fraud and conspiracy. (via Washington Post)

Actor Cary Grant took LSD multiple times and started a trend in Hollywood

I was struck by the public enthusiasm for the use of substances like LSD and mescaline in therapy—as manifested not just in scientific studies, but in newspaper articles and even television specials. (My favorite is this remarkable 1957 broadcast which shows a woman taking LSD on camera, then uttering memorable lines like “I’ve never seen such infinite beauty in my life” and “I wish I could talk in Technicolor.”) Above all, I was surprised by the public response to the Hollywood actor Cary Grant’s reveal that he was regularly using LSD in psychedelic therapy sessions. In a series of interviews starting in 1959—the same year he starred in North by Northwest—Grant went public as an unlikely advocate for psychedelic therapy. It was the surprisingly positive reaction to Grant’s endorsement that most struck me. As recounted in my book, the journalist who broke the story was overwhelmed by phone calls and letters. “Psychiatrists called, complaining that their patients were now begging them for LSD,” he remembered. “Every actor in town under analysis wanted it.” (via Nautilus)

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July 27, 2026

A paranoid techie, a homemade bunker and a shocking death

It was late afternoon on September 10, 2017, and Bruce Leshan was at home repairing a crack in his car’s windshield in Bethesda when he heard a scream. “Get out!” the voice cried. Leshan looked up and noticed smoke coming from the house up the hill. As he rounded the corner, racing up Danbury Road, the home came into view: a modest white Cape Cod, its eaves exhaling brown volcanic plumes. Leshan went to the front door and tried to push it open, but it wouldn’t budge — something was obviously blocking it from within. Word began to spread that someone had died and then a county fire investigator made a startling discovery. Squeezing past the furnace amid a tower of junk in the basement, something caught his eye: There was a hole in the concrete floor. Below it, investigators soon learned, stretched an extensive network of tunnels and bunkers — long, twisting hallways of bare rock that would end up revealing the bizarrest of internet-era fables, and one with a ghastly ending. (via The Washingtonian)

Japan tried to get people to eat lettuce by putting an actor’s face on the package

Heads of lettuce packaged in transparent plastic film with the face of Tatsuya Fujiwara printed on it have been flying off the shelves of Tokyo supermarkets lately, as well as going viral on social media. Lettuce is a staple of Japanese cuisine, but data shows that more than 60% of Japanese throw away the humble vegetable in the summer, when it is at peak supply but whiters faster due to hot weather. In an attempt to combat food waste, Japanese food giant Ajinomoto teamed up with a produce cooperative and asked actor Tatsuya Fujiwara to lend them his face. “I was asked, ‘The lettuce is in crisis, so could you lend us your face?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ and it turned out to be a job where I literally lend my face. Why, though… I will be waiting for you at the vegetable section,” Fujiwara announced on X. The marketing effect was instant, and lettuce that would have probably been thrown away started flying off the shelves. A limited supply of 10,000 heads of lettuce wrapped in Tatsuya Fujiwara’s face went on sale this month. (via Oddity Central)

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July 24, 2026

Mom (or dad) keeping watch

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July 24, 2026

Australian duo sailed a raft with an outhouse to Kangaroo Island

An old school toilet is not a typical mode of transport on which to hit the high seas but that did not deter friends Alex Craig and Paul Graham from giving it a go. The duo crossed the stretch of ocean between Cape Jervis and Kangaroo Island on a homemade barge complete with an outhouse and a barbecue. The apparent brazen act of Aussie larrikinism was actually a solution to a problem. “Alex has a block over on Kangaroo Island and he needed a site toilet,” Mr Graham told 891 ABC Adelaide. “The portaloos were way too expensive so we just made one.” The journey, which took place in May 2025, took four hours to complete. “It was treacherous,” Mr Graham said. The journey typically takes 45-minutes aboard the SeaLink ferry from Cape Jervis to Penneshaw. “We were being adventurous,” Mr Graham said. “And a little bit of ‘we’re not paying for the ferry’ because to take the toilet over was more than $2,000, plus building it.” (via ABC News)

Switzerland adds solar panels to train tracks to create miles of power generation

The space between railroad tracks doesn’t usually do much of anything. But in a tiny village in Switzerland, Swiss inventors have spent the last year proving it can be used to generate clean electricity. In April 2025, Swiss startup Sun-Ways installed 48 solar panels along a 330-foot stretch of active railway in Buttes, Switzerland. It is the first removable solar power plant on a working rail line anywhere in the world. The patented panels were designed to sit between the rails and can be easily removed whenever crews need to do track maintenance. Now, just over a year into their three-year pilot project, the results are in: More than 11,000 trains have rolled directly over the panels at speeds up to 55 mph, and the installation has remained stable, safe, and productive. Since May 2025, the 330-foot-long installation has produced more than 16,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity despite a month-long pause for snow. (via Good Good Good)

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July 23, 2026

Harvard astrophysicist believes we’ve been visited by aliens

Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has been doing interviews all week because of his take on 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object that has captured public fascination. The astronomy community generally agrees it’s a comet — potentially the oldest one ever seen. But Loeb has repeatedly pointed to what he contends are unexplained anomalies. Over the past eight years, has gained worldwide notoriety for advancing provocative notions, propelling him ever deeper into the pop-culture zeitgeist. Three weeks before this interview, he’d flown to a NASCAR event in California in which a race car, emblazoned with Loeb’s face, was dedicated to the interstellar object. Earlier in 2025, he landed on the front page of The New York Times. A recent Loeb appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience racked up a combined audience of 6.4 million and just last month, the Trump Administration appointed Loeb to lead a scientific advisory council on UFOs — or unidentified aerial phenomena, in government parlance. (via Popular Mechanics)

Jeremy Bentham coined almost as many words as Shakespeare and may have invented jogging

Have you ever wondered who coined the words ‘maximise’ and ‘minimise’? Like many prolific writers, Bentham sometimes had to create his own terms to describe concepts he explored. Ranging from the common ‘international’, to the rare ‘scribblatory’, Jeremy’s words infiltrate our language in their very own literary panopticon – you never know when a Bentham original slips in. Bentham appears to have been a regular jogger—or, as he put it, ‘circumgyrater’. According to the journalist George Wheatley, who stayed with the eighty-one year-old Bentham in March 1831, before both breakfast and dinner Bentham would take ‘a few turns in the garden, which … he calls circumgyrating’, which Wheatley described as a ‘trotting or taking up a kind of trotting step’. Bentham started studying Latin at the age of three, and by twelve years old, he was enrolled at Queen’s College in Oxford to follow in his father’s footsteps and study law. (via University College)

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July 23, 2026

It’s the end of reading as we know it! It’s the new Dark Ages!

If you read The Atlantic, or you follow a lot of writers on Substack — or virtually any other writing-focused website or form of social media — you will already know what this post is about: The Atlantic published a piece recently entitled The End of Reading, the subtitle of which stated that “the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.” The piece begins with a lyrical description of the famous Library of Alexandria, which King Ptolemy the First intended to be the repository of all human knowledge at the time. The king reportedly paid scholars to live and work in the library, we are told, and the collection was available to anyone “eager to study, an encouragement for the entire city to gain wisdom,” according to a visiting Greek writer. Eratosthenes allegedly calculated the circumference of the Earth there, and Zenodotus edited the earliest manuscripts of Homer’s epic poems. The library eventually disappeared, The Atlantic tells us — in part because Julius Caesar set it on fire, and then the temple housing some of the manuscripts was sacked in the 4th century, but also for other reasons:

Contemporary historians tend to dismiss the importance of these dramatic incidents in favor of a more mundane cause of death: negligence. Maintaining the collection was an enormous expense. Humidity, mice, and insects slowly ate away at the papyrus scrolls. Scribes had to continually copy old texts before they deteriorated and became illegible. Eventually, the challenges of maintaining the library became greater than the will to preserve it. “It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages,” the classics scholar Roger Bagnall has written. The fact that the library was allowed to die showed that the dark age had already arrived. Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again.

“The darkness is gathering again.” In other words, welcome to the new Dark Ages! If this seems a little over-the-top to you, you aren’t the only one. And what kind of evidence does The Atlantic produce to justify this apocalyptic pronouncement? Americans (who are “once members of a proudly literate society,” according to the magazine, although that could definitely be debated) read much less than they used to, we are told. In a study by the National Endowment for the Arts, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022, and a study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. The decline “cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels,” The Atlantic says, and even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen “a collapse” in their reading habits over the same period.

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July 22, 2026

They thought she was a vampire so they dug up her casket

A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis at the age of nineteen, indicated that she would lead a notorious afterlife. Indeed, no story from the life of Mercy Lena Brown has survived at all, though round-ups of weird history or the dark side of Rhode Island sometimes call her “New England’s Last Vampire.” Illness spreading in her family after she died in 1892 gave root to a story that she was feeding off the life-force of her remaining relatives. This story convinced members of her community of Exeter, observed by the medical examiner, to exhume her body and cut out her heart and liver two months after her death. We do not know anything about Mercy as a human being. The only reconstruction of the nineteen years she lived comes from timelines and assumptions. (via Contingent)

Is there really cocaine in the Library of Congress? The answer is yes

The Library of Congress has more than 170 million items, and they’re definitely not all books. And no, I’m not just talking about old-timey letters and other historical documents. There’s also a lot of…stuff. What kind of stuff? A topographical map of the Grand Canyon made of chocolate, for one. The LoC also plays host to Carl Sagan’s old whiteboard, a 160-year-old wedding cake, and at least one packet of cocaine. Contrary to popular belief, the cocaine in question didn’t belong to Sigmund Freud — but it’s still his fault that it’s there. This story starts in the 1880s, when a young Freud was getting super into cocaine. He wasn’t the only one: The medical journal The Lancet basically couldn’t keep up with all the new research being published on cocaine (probably because researchers were also on cocaine). Freud sent a vial to his fiancée and wrote a monograph called “Über Coca” (On Coca, which, again, he very much was) hyping cocaine’s “promise.” Among many potential uses for cocaine, Freud briefly noted that it might make a good local anesthetic. (via Popular Science)

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July 21, 2026

He lost his arms at two but grew up to run a 1,300-acre farm

A devastating farm accident when he was just two and a half years old became the beginning of an extraordinary journey of resilience, determination and self-belief. After losing both his arms in a grain auger accident on his family’s Ohio farm in 1972, Detwiler refused to let his disability define him. He taught himself to perform everyday tasks using only his feet, eventually managing a 1,300-acre corn and soybean farm. Through his YouTube channel Harmless Farmer, he shared his daily life with millions, proving that limitations often exist only when people stop trying. Because the accident happened so early in life, he later said he had little memory of ever having arms. Through years of patience and practice, he learned to eat, write, brush his teeth, dress himself, cook meals and drive vehicles using only his feet. Those same skills later extended to farming, where he mastered operating tractors and combines, fuelling equipment, repairing machinery, welding and maintaining heavy farm equipment. (via Times of India)

This rare genetic condition could hold a clue to the prevention of cancer

Nestled in southern Ecuador’s network of Andes mountains is the town of Piñas, whose 8,000 inhabitants live in houses scattered across a valley. This remote town is home to an unusually high number of people living with Laron syndrome, a rare genetic condition that prevents the body from growing taller than 1.2m (3.9ft). María Luísa Romero and her twin sister, María del Cisne, both have the condition. Living with Laron syndrome can be challenging, the sisters say. But researchers believe it may provide an unexpected advantage – the incidence of diseases such as cancer and diabetes among Laron patients is lower than in the general population. They hope that studying this could lead to the development of treatments to prevent cancer. Those who have Laron syndrome, also known as growth hormone insensitivity, are unable to use the growth hormone that their body makes. The genetic mutation  is named after paediatrician Zvi Laron, who identified it while treating patients in Israel, 60 years ago. (via the BBC)

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July 20, 2026

Who buried $10M in gold coins found by a California couple?

The dream of discovering buried treasure came true for a California couple who found a real pot of gold while walking their dog. The largest such hoard ever found in the U.S. is comprised of 1,411 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth an estimated $10 million in today’s market. The coins are now known as the Saddle Ridge Hoard, after a feature on the couple’s property. Both the location of the land and the couple’s identity are being kept secret. According to an interview given to the coin company that will market the hoard, the discovery was made on a path they had used for years. Spotting the side of a rusted can barely emerging from a hillside, they dug it out with a stick and carried it home. Subsequent trips to the site turned up several more treasure-filled cans. Most of the coins are $20 gold pieces, known as double eagles. All of those were made at the San Francisco mint, founded in 1854 to process the nuggets that prospectors were finding in the newly discovered California gold fields. (via National Geographic)

The famous Stanford prison experiment didn’t show what everyone thinks it did

It’s true that Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. But it’s not true that it’s depicted in all introductory psychology textbooks. I’m the author of one such textbook. One of the questions I’m frequently asked about the book by professors who teach from it is, “Why don’t you include Zimbardo’s prison experiment like all other textbook authors do?” Here’s why. I read carefully the original report on the experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues, and I also read a methodological critique of it by Ali Banuazizi and Siamak Movahedi After reading both, and thinking carefully about them, I decided that I could not in good conscience present the experiment with its usual interpretation. I decided to omit it completely (a decision I made also concerning many other research studies that in my mind were poorly conceived and improperly interpreted). In the years since then, I have found some new evidence that validates my original decision. (via Psychology Today)

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July 17, 2026

How a suburban mom wound up working for a Mexican cartel

As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in rural Mexico. The next day, she arrived at a gated community in a small city, sore and exhausted. Waiting for her was a stranger with a similar story. Like Anderson, Nicole Burns was from the region of South Carolina known as “the Upstate,” and like Anderson, she was also fleeing the police. It was May 2020, and both women had become key cogs in a vast drug network that South Carolina’s attorney general — in the largest narcotics-conspiracy investigation in state history — would later prosecute in a 103-person indictment called “Prison Empire.” For years, Mexican cartels had worked with South Carolina Department of Corrections prisoners to distribute meth, heroin, and cocaine. To sell the product outside prison walls, the inmates turned to women like Anderson and Burns. (via The Cut)

Anthony Burgess said Clockwork Orange was inspired by real events but it was all a lie

In April 1944, Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess’s wife Lynne was working in London. Returning home from work after midnight, she was approached by four U.S. soldiers in civilian clothing, who grabbed her purse and tried to pry the golden wedding ring from her finger. One soldier “was prepared to break or even cut the finger,” according to Burgess. Lynne screamed for help, but none arrived; her yells were silenced by punches to her body and kicks were the last thing she recalled as she fainted to the ground. She happened to be pregnant at the time and lost the child. The attack inspired an early passage in A Clockwork Orange, in which a gang terrorizes a young couple in a cottage by physical assaulting the husband and raping the wife. This is the account you will read — or a slight variation thereof — if you open almost any non-fiction biography, newspaper article, book, or encyclopedia on Burgess and his famous novel. The only issue with the story is that none of it is true. (via The Memory Hole)

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July 16, 2026

He’s been pulled over hundreds of times in his banana car

A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise than a tradition. After 15 years, he has learned that driving a giant banana attracts attention. Especially from cops. Braithwaite figures he spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. Often officers wanted photographs. Other times they invented reasons to start a conversation. The whole thing began in a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite, a hot-rod enthusiast, had become bored attending car shows. Then he watched an episode of the show “Top Gear” featuring bizarre custom-built vehicles, including a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch. For the next month, his brain worked overtime. (via Cowboy State Weekly)

Her work was cited by Stephen Hawking and she turned down a $1M job offer

At just 12 years old, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski began making a Zenith CH 601 XL single-engine aircraft from a kit. The project took nearly two years to complete, with Pasterski doing much of the work herself. By the age of 14, she was already flying the plane all alone — years before she was legally old enough to get behind the wheel of a car. During her time at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy she became a semifinalist for the US team at the International Physics Olympiad. She also interned at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Blue Origin. Pasterski completed her physics degree in just three years, graduating in 2014 with a perfect 5.0 GPA. After MIT, she joined Harvard University for a PhD under theoretical physicist Andrew Strominger. NASA reportedly approached her with a job offer. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also wanted her to join Blue Origin, his private space company. Brown University is widely reported to have offered her an assistant professorship worth about $1.1 million. (via The Economic Times)

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July 16, 2026

Kids need to explore the world and that includes social media

I’ve written a number of times about what has become conventional wisdom – spread primarily by academics like Jonathan Haidt – that phones and/or social media are evil, and that they cause teenagers in particular to develop anxiety, depression, etc. and therefore should be regulated. Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation has either directly or indirectly led to laws against teen use of social media in Australia, the UK and Canada, and many other countries are reportedly considering similar legislation. As I’ve tried to point out in previous newsletters, all of this has come about despite the fact that there is virtually no concrete evidence in the psychological literature of any causal link between phones or social media and teen rates of depression, anxiety, or suicide – in fact, in some cases the exact opposite. Candace Odgers, a leading researcher in this area, has said in a review of Haidt’s book that his views are “not supported by the science,” and a meta-analysis of the research found the correlation between teen use of social media and rates of depression to be “indistinguishable from zero.”

Odgers is one of the most prominent researchers to take issue with Haidt’s interpretation of the science in this area, but she is far from the only one. A recent piece in The Atlantic looked at the views of another prominent psychologist – someone who at one point was a close colleague of Jonathan Haidt’s, but has since diverged from him to the point where he said he now believes Haidt’s views are diametrically opposed to the truth. The psychologist in question is Peter Gray, who is perhaps best known for exposing the Stanford prison experiment as a fake. He also wrote a book entitled Free To Learn that was published in 2013, and argued that one of the biggest contributors to anxiety, depression, and other mental challenges among young people is their more regimented upbringing compared to previous generations, and in particular, a lack of free-form play time. Here’s how his thesis is described in the Atlantic piece:

Gray’s academic work defines play as a self-directed activity done only for its own sake. This, he came to believe, enables kids to figure out how to solve their own problems, nurture their own relationships, make their own rules, and manage their own disappointments. But he says that our society has spent the past 70 years or so interfering with that process. We’ve made it harder and harder for kids to do anything: They’re kept indoors for greater portions of the day and given less unstructured time; they play organized sports supervised by adults; they don’t go anywhere alone. Gray grew certain that this loss of independence has been harmful to their mental health.

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