If Shakespeare had an editor
Is social media harming teens? Yes and no
Over the past decade or so, The Atlantic has published a series of articles warning of the harm that social media and smartphone apps are doing to teenagers. These articles have had headlines like “The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood,” “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks,” “The Dangerous Experiment on Teen Girls,” and “Get Phones Out of Schools Now.” These articles have one other thing in common: they were all written by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a co-author of the 2019 book The Coddling of the American Mind.
Now Haidt is out with a new book (whose themes will be familiar to readers of his Atlantic articles), The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. After 2010, there was a sharp increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicide among young people, Haidt writes; rates of depression and anxiety in the US, for example, rose by more than 50 percent over the following decade, a figure that rises to 130 percent for girls between the ages of ten and nineteen. Haidt says that similar patterns arose around the same time in other countries, including Canada, the UK, and Australia. And he says that they were caused by smartphones and social media. Giving young people smartphones in the early 2010s was “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children,” he writes in The Anxious Generation, adding that we may as well have sent “Gen Z to grow up on Mars.”
Haidt wrote last year, in another of his Atlantic essays, that smartphones and social media “impede learning, stunt relationships, and lessen belonging,” and that they have created an environment for children that is “hostile to human development.” In his view, governments, schools, and other organizations should take a number of steps in response, including banning social media for children under sixteen and removing smartphones from schools. All children “deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults,” he writes. And he notes that last year, Vivek Murthy, the US Surgeon General, issued a public advisory warning that social media can create a “profound risk” of harm to the “mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”
Note: This was originally published as the daily email newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer
Continue reading “Is social media harming teens? Yes and no”This is Mick Jagger at 75 after heart surgery
I’m dying at the age of 49 but I have no regrets about my life
From the Washington Post: “Last month, I found out I have Stage 4 uterine leiomyosarcoma, a rare and aggressive cancer. Doctors say I may have just a few months to live. Treatment could buy me a little extra time, but not much. My disease is advanced and incurable. My prognosis has left me shocked, sad, angry and confused. I wake up some mornings raging at the universe, feeling betrayed by my own body, counting the years and the milestones I expected to enjoy with my family. I am leaving behind a husband and 14-year-old daughter I adore, and a writing and teaching career I’ve worked so hard to build. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my life, and in addition to the horror, a surprising feeling has taken hold: I am dying at age 49 without any regrets.”
He lived in a hotel room for five years and it only cost him $200 but then he went too far
From the New York Times: “On a June afternoon in 2018, a man named Mickey Barreto checked into the New Yorker Hotel. He was assigned Room 2565, a double-bed accommodation with a view of Midtown Manhattan almost entirely obscured by an exterior wall. For a one-night stay, he paid $200.57. But he did not check out the next morning. Instead, he made the once-grand hotel his full-time residence for the next five years, without ever paying another cent. Now, that deal could land him in prison. The story of how Mr. Barreto, a California transplant with a taste for wild conspiracy theories and a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, gained and then lost the rights to Room 2565 might sound implausible — another tale from a man who claims without evidence to be the first cousin, 11 times removed, of Christopher Columbus’s oldest son. But it’s true.”
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Continue reading “I’m dying at the age of 49 but I have no regrets about my life”Nothing ever ends poetically
The rise and fall of Steve Jobs’s greatest rival
From Every.to: “In 1981, journalists from around the world gathered at NASA’s headquarters to watch as the Voyager 2 spacecraft became the first man-made object to reach Saturn. In the aftermath of this historic event, the main attraction wasn’t NASA’s staff. It was fellow journalist Jerry Pournelle. Pournelle had something none of them had ever seen before: a portable computer, the Osborne 1, the first mass-market personal computer in history. Just six years earlier, when the Altair 8800 was unveiled, Steve Jobs recognized that the future of computing lay in the consumer market, not the hobbyist. But Jobs was not alone. He stood alongside someone who would go on to become a frenemy of sorts: That man was Adam Osborne, Jobs’s first true rival.”
Here’s why the state of Oklahoma is shaped like a panhandle
From JSTOR Daily: “More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico. Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.”
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Continue reading “The rise and fall of Steve Jobs’s greatest rival”Feeding the sheep and lambs
The different types of drunk people
Harvard removes human skin binding from book
From the BBC: “Des Destinées de l’Ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. In 2014, scientists determined that the material it was bound with was in fact human skin. But the university has now announced it has removed the binding “due to the ethically fraught nature of the book’s origins and subsequent history”. Des Destinées de l’Ame is a meditation on the soul and life after death, written by Arsène Houssaye in the mid-1880s. He is said to have given it to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, a doctor, who then reportedly bound the book with skin from the body of an unclaimed female patient who had died of natural causes. Harvard said it was looking at ways to ensure “the human remains will be given a respectful disposition that seeks to restore dignity to the woman whose skin was used”.
Plastic manufacturing companies deceived the public about recycling
From The Guardian: “Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report. “The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. Plastic, which is made from oil and gas, is notoriously difficult to recycle. Doing so requires meticulous sorting, since most of the thousands of chemically distinct varieties of plastic cannot be recycled together. That renders an already pricey process even more expensive. The industry has known for decades about these existential challenges, but obscured that information in its marketing campaigns, the report shows.”
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Continue reading “Harvard removes human skin binding from book”Easter weekend with Quinn
The eight winds cannot move me
DNA tests reveal the true prevalence of incest
From The Atlantic: “In 1975, a psychiatric textbook put the frequency of incest at one in a million. But this number is almost certainly a dramatic underestimate. The stigma around openly discussing incest, which often involves child sexual abuse, has long made the subject difficult to study. But widespread genetic testing is uncovering case after secret case of children born to close biological relatives—providing an unprecedented accounting of incest in modern society. The geneticist Jim Wilson, at the University of Edinburgh, was shocked by the frequency he found in the U.K. Biobank, an anonymized research database: One in 7,000 people, according to his unpublished analysis, was born to parents who were first-degree relatives—a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.”
When sword fighting with rapiers led to a moral panic in Elizabethan London
From JSTOR Daily: “Rocco Bonetti, founder of a highly controversial sword-fighting school in Elizabethan London, was detested by the local English fencing masters. He was challenged outside his school by a local named Austin Bagger, who not only stabbed him in the hands and feet, but trod on him afterward to show his contempt. Bonetti died of the wounds. At the time, London was swept up in the moral panic surrounding the adoption of the rapier. Long, slender, and razor-sharp, the rapier was usually paired with a second weapon, a small, left-handed parrying dagger, rather than a shield. The dagger evolved into striking, creative forms—sawtoothed blades that could be used to capture and control the opponent’s sword, or “trident” daggers that split into three at the press of a spring.”
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Continue reading “DNA tests reveal the true prevalence of incest”Would love to know what happened here
In the 1930s she sailed around the world solo in a tiny wooden boat
From Atlas Obscura: “It was the spring of 1938, and a woman sailing on the Bay of Bengal was dreaming of snow. Maybe it was the burn blisters on her skin or the escape from the Indian Imperial Police that had made the adventurer Aina Cederblom sentimental. After two and a half years of sailing solo through Asia, she was ready to head home to Sweden—at least that was the 39-year-old’s plan. Fate had other ideas. During the early 20th century, Aina Cederblom kept popping up in unexpected corners of the world, from Greenland to India to the Philippines. By the 1930s, Cederblom and her solo sailing adventures were well-known throughout Europe. Newspapers reported about how she went missing in Greenland’s glacier-filled waters, hid from the police in Tibet, and was shot at in the Black Sea. Yet, the memory of her achievements has almost disappeared.”
The longest bus route in the world used to run from London to Calcutta and took 50 days
From Vintages: “The bus service from London, England to Calcutta, India is considered to be the longest bus route in the world. The service, which was started in 1957, was routed to India via Belgium, Yugoslavia and West Pakistan – a route known as the Hippie Route. According to reports, it took about 50 days for the bus to reach Calcutta from London. The voyage was 32, 669 km long and was in service until 1976. The cost of the trip was £85 and this included food, travel and accommodation. The trip was equipped with reading facilities, separate sleeping bunks for everyone, and fan-operated heaters. There was a kitchen with all equipment and amenities. There was a forward observation lounge on the upper deck of the bus, and it took time to spend at major tourist destinations along the way, including the Taj Mahal on the banks of the Ganges. Shopping was also allowed in Tehran, Salzburg, Kabul, Istanbul and Vienna.”
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Continue reading “In the 1930s she sailed around the world solo in a tiny wooden boat”Shock therapy helps depression but scientists don’t know why
From Quanta: “Electroconvulsive therapy has a public relations problem. The treatment, which sends electric currents through the brain to induce a brief seizure, has barbaric, inhumane connotations — for example, it was portrayed as a sadistic punishment in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But for patients with depression that does not improve with medications, electroconvulsive therapy can be highly effective. Studies have found that some 50% to 70% of patients with major depressive disorder see their symptoms improve after a course of ECT. In comparison, medications aimed at altering brain chemistry help only 10% to 40% of depression patients. Still, even after many decades of use, scientists don’t know how ECT alters the brain’s underlying biology.”
How birdwatching’s biggest record threw its online community into chaos
From The Guardian: “In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild. Such a record had previously been unthinkable, but with new technology facilitating rare bird sightings, improved DNA testing identifying a growing number of bird species, and public listing platforms making it easier to keep track of and share findings, more super-birders are inching towards the five digits. Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him. The mystery birder seemed to have uploaded a backlog of thousands of species he had seen over several decades, listing more than 9,000 birds.”
This ancient Japanese tradition of female freediving is dying out
From Nautilus: “On the last day of fishing season, Ayami Nakata starts her morning by lighting a small fire in her hut beside the harbor. The temperature outside hovers around freezing and she changes into a wetsuit. For an hour and a half, Nakata takes minute-long plunges into the frigid water, free-diving 20 feet down to the rocky seabed and kelpy shore, and picking up any abalone, sea cucumbers, and turban shells. Nakata, 44 years old and a mother of five, is an ama diver: a freediving fisherwoman harvesting shellfish and seaweed according to an ancient Japanese technique. She’s been diving for seven years, but her profession is slowly dying: Climate change has depleted the shellfish along Japan’s coasts, and younger generations have lost interest in the craft, abandoning coastal villages to pursue careers in big cities. Women like Nakata are left to question whether they’ll be the last to embody this way of life.”
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When the Eiffel Tower was first built many Parisians hated it
From JSTOR Daily: When construction of the now-iconic Eiffel Tower began in 1887, many Parisians were less than enamored by the project-in-progress. In fact, some were outright hostile towards it. But perhaps the Eiffel Tower’s greatest rejection came from the people who held the most authority on what worked aesthetically for the city and what didn’t: Parisian artists and writers. To them, the Eiffel Tower, spindly and bare like a skeleton, posed an unforgivable threat to the city’s sacred reputation as a lush, beatific urban ideal for nurturing creative minds. Unlike the Lost Generation of the 1920s, their spiritual descendants, the late-nineteenth-century intellectuals didn’t feel “inspired” by the looming presence over their city. The unusual structure hadn’t yet achieved its modern status, which William Thompson describes as “the acknowledged foremost universal symbol of Paris and France.”
Driving with Mr. Gil: A retiree teaches Afghan women the rules of the road
From The New York Times: Bibifatima Akhundzada wove a white Chevy Spark through downtown Modesto, Calif., on a recent morning, practicing turns, braking and navigating intersections. “Go, go, go,” said her driving instructor, as she slowed down through an open intersection. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” Her teacher was Gil Howard, an 82-year-old retired professor who happened upon a second career as a driving instructor. And no ordinary instructor. In Modesto, he is the go-to teacher for women from Afghanistan, where driving is off limits for virtually all of them. In recent years, Mr. Howard has taught some 400 women in the 5,000-strong Afghan community in this part of California’s Central Valley. According to local lore, thanks to “Mr. Gil,” as he is known in Modesto, more Afghan women likely drive in and around the city of about 220,000 than in all Afghanistan.
This kind of elevator has no doors and never stops moving
From Why Is This Interesting: “A cyclic elevator runs on a continuous loop, with two columns of small, doorless, closet-sized chambers in constant motion, one going up and one going down. A rider steps into a moving chamber to ride the elevator, and steps carefully off when the desired floor is reached. It doesn’t require much more dexterity than riding an escalator, but the consequences of failure are gruesome to imagine. Cyclic elevators are commonly called “paternosters,” a name that reflects their resemblance to a string of rosary beads. When praying a rosary, one recites the “Our Father” prayer, or “Paternoster” in Latin. The development of the paternoster elevator roughly coincided with the conventional elevator in the second half of the 19th century. Paternosters never became as ubiquitous as conventional elevators, and as the public became more familiar with conventional elevators, many paternosters succumbed to disrepair, disuse, or were converted into normal elevators.”
He built a fantasy castle in his backyard without plans because he felt like it
Acknowledgements: I find a lot of these links myself, but I also get some from other newsletters that I rely on as “serendipity engines,” such as The Morning News from Rosecrans Baldwin and Andrew Womack, Jodi Ettenberg’s Curious About Everything, Dan Lewis’s Now I Know, Robert Cottrell and Caroline Crampton’s The Browser, Clive Thompson’s Linkfest, Noah Brier and Colin Nagy’s Why Is This Interesting, Maria Popova’s The Marginalian, Sheehan Quirke AKA The Cultural Tutor, the Smithsonian magazine, and JSTOR Daily. If you come across something interesting that you think should be included here, please feel free to email me.