Smartphones
Story Stream
Phones Are Making Parents the Anxious Generation July 26, 2024
The moment a baby is born, a parent is too. There is suddenly a new (screaming) person in the world. But just as suddenly, there’s a new you, too. (Also possibly screaming.) You have a new relationship in your life, and a whole new definition of who ...
You Don't Need a Smartphone July 23, 2024
I didn’t have any friends in high school, but I did have a phone. It was 2010 and I begged my mom to get me an iPhone for Christmas. She said no at first, but then on Christmas morning there was a little white box under the tree. Opening it was a rit...
Haliey Welch, Our “Hawk Tuah” Girl of the Year July 18, 2024
In the sweltering heat of a Nashville summer, a 21-year-old woman named Haliey Welch uttered two words that would change her life: "hawk tuah."The phrase, delivered with a twangy Southern drawl as part of a crude joke about oral sex, ricocheted acros...
The Coming Divergence of Tech and Culture July 15, 2024
We are, as an advanced twenty-first century American society, increasingly devoid of awe. There is little that can surprise or excite us; we are weary of the gadgets, wary of artificial intelligence, and prepared to legislate, if possible, the poison...
Simple Steps to Combat Smartphone Addiction July 04, 2024
I am writing this essay on the fifth floor of the New York Society Library: an eighteenth-century subscription library housed in an early twentieth-century townhouse on East Seventh-Ninth Street. I am writing on the fifth floor because the wood-panel...
We Need to Calm down About Screen Time April 03, 2024
“You stare at a screen. That’s all you do every night. No one wants to talk to you, and they get annoyed whenever you call.” Pete Etchells wrote those lonely words in a miserable teenage blog in 2002, just before 10pm on a bleak December night. He’s ...
Will the Phone-Free Movement Work? April 01, 2024
On the issue of kids, smartphones, and social media, a vibe shift is happening, and it’s happening on the left, right, and in the center. Here’s a survey of recent anti-phone discourse on the topic in politics and culture in recent weeks and months: ...
Unplugged March 27, 2024
Along with about 15 other Oxford graduate students, I recently spent four days at an academic retreat in Rome. Although we stayed at a scenic villa with stunning views of Lake Albano, it would be wrong to brand the trip as a “vacation.” It was a stud...
Blaming Tech for Teen Troubles March 27, 2024
Jonathan Haidt opens The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids' use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It's an absurd comparison...
Steeped in Fragility March 26, 2024
In 2018’s The Coddling of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt contended that kids are inherently “antifragile”—that is, they benefit from adversity. But instead of “preparing the child for the road, not the road for the child,” paren...
How Phones Warped Gen Z March 25, 2024
It’s hard to believe sometimes that smartphones and social media haven’t been around forever — but for one generation, they have. Gen Z doesn’t know a time when they weren’t ubiquitous. This cohort also happens to be the generation with the worst men...
Kids’ Phone-Based Existence Is ‘Inhuman’ March 22, 2024
“Suppose that when your first child turned ten, a visionary billionaire whom you’ve never met chose her to join the first permanent human settlement on Mars … Would you let her go?”“Of course not,” writes Jonathan Haidt.But the social psychologist ar...
The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood March 14, 2024
Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from...
There’s a Therapist Under Ocean Blvd March 11, 2024
Abigail Shrier’s new book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up opens with an epigraph quoting Lana Del Rey’s song “Born to Die.” Lana’s lyrics (sometimes love is not enough / and the road gets tough / I don’t know why) are perhaps apt as an an...
It's Obviously the Phones March 06, 2024
A year ago, I published an opinion essay for the New York Times that changed the trajectory of my career. It was about how fewer Americans are having sex, across nearly every demographic. For any of the usual caveats — wealth, age, orientation —the d...
