I have published and commented on several studies on the effect of spending hours each day focused on social media on the mental health of users, particularly young people. Personally, I don’t use social media, so I am not really knowledgeable about what it is like to do that. What I do see happening is that kids are spending much less time playing together outdoors, and I don’t think that is a positive trend, and I do think more consistent rigorous research needs to be done on the effects this trend is producing. There is no question that social media and the weaponization of lies is producing negative changes in our culture but that is a different issue than leading the young to commit suicide. Here is a good article on both sides of the argument about the effect on the young.
The Zoomer tween in their natural habitat. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty
The kids are not all right — and the device you are probably reading this on is to blame.
By Haidt’s account, smartphones and the addicting social media apps we download onto them have lured the world’s youths away from those activities that are indispensable to healthy child development — such as outdoor play, face-to-face conversation with friends, and sleep — and trapped them in a digital realm that saps their self-esteem, drains their attention spans, and forces them to put on a perpetual, high-stakes performance of their own personalities.
Smartphones have even hurt kids who don’t use them much, according to Haidt, because they’ve restructured communal life in […]
Hannah Natanson and Lauren Tierney, Education Reporter | Senior Graphics Reporter - The Washington Post
Stephan:
This is a tragic report on the effect the Great Schism Trend is having on the education of the young. To me, the main takeaway is that like everything else in this trend, the result is going to be that children in Red states are going be less educated, and less factually knowledgeable than children in Blue states. The long-term implications of this and everything else in The Great Schism Trend will be an inferior quality of wellbeing for those who live in states controlled by the TCP/Republican Party. Frankly, if I had young children, I would move to a Blue state.
Three-fourths of the nation’s school-aged students are now educated under state-level measures that either require more teaching on issues like race, racism, history, sex and gender, or which sharply limit or fully forbid such lessons, according to a sweeping Post review of thousands of state laws, gubernatorial directives and state school board policies. The restrictive laws alone affect almost half of all Americans aged 5 to 19.
Since 2017, 38 states have adopted 114 such laws, rules or orders, The Post found. The majority of policies are restrictive in nature: 66 percent circumscribe or ban lessons and discussions on some of society’s most sensitive topics, while 34 percent require or expand them. In one example, a 2023 Kentucky law forbids lessons on human sexuality before fifth grade and outlaws all instruction “exploring gender identity.” On the other hand, a 2021 Rhode Island law requires that all students learn “African Heritage and History” before high school graduation.
This kind of story gets no coverage except in a few environmental/ecological websites like EcoWatch, but it is a very big deal. It is telling us that our technologies and cultural patterns are destroying earth’s matrix of life. It is long past time we awakened to the realization that all life is interdependent and interconnected and that fostering wellbeing is the only safe road into the future.
New video footage released on April 11, 2024 shows that bleached corals on the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef extend to greater depths than has been reported during the current mass bleaching event. Credit: Australian Marine Conservation Society / Facebook screenshot
The Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) has released video footage showing that the southern portion of the Great Barrier Reef is suffering from deep-sea coral bleaching, reported The Guardian.
The footage shows that the bleaching extends at least as far down as 59.1 feet — the deepest reported during this mass bleaching event, a press release from AMCS said. Some of the corals have begun to die in the face of record marine heat waves.
“I feel devastated. This bleaching event is the worst I have seen. It’s a severe bleaching event,” said Dr. Selina Ward, University of Queensland’s former academic director of the Heron Island Research Station, in the press release.
Ward reported extensive coral bleaching at all 16 southern Great Barrier Reef sites she had visited, saying it was […]
Well, today one of criminal Trump’s trials has started. His worshipper’s and Trump himself constantly wail that he is being mistreated and victimized. In fact, as this report spells out in detail no person in American history has had so many special and exceptional treatments. Any other defendant would long ago have been sent to prison. What starts today is going to have an enormous effect on the legal system of the United States — for good or ill.
Criminal Donald Trump appears in court for his first arraignment, on April 4, 2023, in New York. Credit: Steven Hirsch
A firebrand politician named Donald is about to stand trial. Just a few days before jury selection, he goes on TV to slam the charges as baseless and biased.
“The FBI and the Justice Department,” he insists, have “targeted” their political opponents in a burst of partisan persecution.
The rhetoric sounds familiar, but this is not a story about Donald Trump. It’s about a man named Don Hill, a former Dallas City Council member who was facing bribery charges 15 years ago.
The telltale clue that this isn’t about Trump is what happened next: The judge, upset by the attempt to taint the jury pool, slapped the politician-turned-defendant with criminal contempt and ultimately sentenced him to 30 days in jail for violating a gag order.
Today, Trump routinely spouts invective far more inflammatory than anything Hill said. He denigrates prosecutors. He lies about his cases. He vilifies the
I have become evermore concerned that AI is going to destroy humanity because we are not taking the steps we should to control it. Greed and a lust for power are devouring us. But there is still a chance if we can awaken to making fostering wellbeing our first priority. This is the best article I have read about what is going on, and what needs to be done to save us. Read it carefully.
President Joe Biden hands Vice President Kamala Harris the pen he used to sign a new executive order regarding artificial intelligence during an event in the White House on Oct. 30, 2023. Credit: Chip Somodevilla / Getty
Just over 10 months ago, the U.S. Senate started considering what the nation should do about the rise of artificial intelligence. I was there, testifying in front of the Senate hearing that kicked off months of frenzied AI focus on Capitol Hill, alongside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and IBM’s Christina Montgomery. We answered question after question on how to regulate AI and what was at stake.
The overwhelming, bipartisan sense of the room was that the United States needed to address AI policy, urgently. Yet so far not one major piece of AI legislation has reached the floor.
At the time, Democrats and Republicans agreed that the Senate had been too slow to act on the explosive rise of social media, and the clear […]
