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A growing body of research complicates the question of social media’s effects on teens. But that hasn’t stopped many adults from perpetual worrying about its presumed perils.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Jack Smith’s backup option Trump can’t bluster his way through court. The gross spectacle of murder fandom

Grown-People Lore

More than half a decade has passed since the psychologist Jean Twenge asked, in a viral Atlantic feature, whether smartphones had “destroyed” the generation we’ve since anointed as Gen Z. In the intervening years, asking that question has become a popular pastime, a way to fill the uncomfortable silences between other societal crises (of which there have been plenty). Yet despite the years of hand-wringing over the presumed perils of young people’s use of smartphones—and social media, in particular—a growing body of research complicates the equation.

Said equation was never exactly straightforward in the first place. Even last month’s high-profile advisory on social media and youth mental health, from the U.S. surgeon general, acknowledged both negative and positive effects of young people’s connectivity through digital platforms. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany put it in a recent article, “The results have continually been mixed: Screens are ubiquitous, and they’re personal.”

If the science is so tough to pin down, why is the panic so widespread? Blame that common menace of seemingly unsolvable equations: too many variables.

Consider the research on smartphone use by adults. In terms of mental-health correlates, studies have found a similarly mixed bag as they have for kids and teens. Such uneven findings point toward the need to ask more, and perhaps different, questions about the technological, sociocultural, and material factors behind people’s reported states of mind, and perhaps hone in on areas of overlap. The takeaway might then evolve from “social media causes anxiety and depression” to, for example, “social-media content featuring people having rewarding experiences such as fun and friendship can worsen symptoms of anxiety.” But though that logic is true across the board, when adults are the research subject group in question, such nuance is likelier to enter the picture than when observers are probing the trouble with young people today—a conversation rife with conflated correlations and causations.

Then there’s the X factor of what I’ll diplomatically call “grown-people lore.” Those of us old enough to remember navigating jobs and social lives before everyone carried around a tiny pocket computer are wont to idealize that now-improbable-seeming before time, often forgetting that it came with its own inconveniences and anxieties. We also forget the panics that pervaded adults’ conversations during our coming-of-age, which may have differed in their content but otherwise echoed the tenor of current social-media debates. (In my late-1990s preadolescence, for instance, there was much angst over the potential impact of music lyrics on young people’s mental health, and serious debate as to whether the work of artists such as Marilyn Manson increased teens’ susceptibility to violent behavior.)

Nostalgia colors perspective, and all but certainly shapes widespread hypotheses of the clear and present dangers young people face. Because of this, adults across generations, and in every day and age, have demonstrated a knack for neglecting to apply the lessons of prior eras’ panics to the present moment. Today’s Gen X and Millennial parents fretting about their children’s social-media use may or may not be comforted to learn that, according to some studies, the overconsumption of TV and video games that marked many of their late-20th-century childhoods likely had a comparable impact on their tender, developing brains—for better and for worse.

This is not to diminish the real risks of excess social-media use on young people. A pronounced spike in teen mental illness neatly aligns with the dawn of the smartphone age—or, as the social psychologist and Atlantic contributor Jonathan Haidt calls it, “the transition to phone-based childhoods.” Parents and teachers see the ramifications firsthand: shortened attention spans, distractibility, strained interpersonal relationships, and, yes, elevated rates of depression and anxiety disorders, especially among girls.

Many young people are wary of tech dependency too. Their concerns, however, show a wider scope of analysis than those addressed in today’s social-media-dominated discussions, revealing a desire to find paths to a peaceful coexistence with digital tools, and also reflecting real introspection, wisdom, and resilience. This generation may indeed face hazards that their predecessors did not. But the evidence certainly seems to suggest that they’re far from a cohort “destroyed.”

Related:

No one knows exactly what social media is doing to teens. Get phones out of schools now.

Today’s News

Politico reported that former President Donald Trump raised more than $2 million at his first major campaign fundraiser of the season, hours after his arraignment in Florida, according to a source familiar with the campaign.   The Southern Baptist Convention voted to uphold the expulsion of two churches for having women pastors.    A fishing boat carrying migrants sank off the coast of Greece. At least 78 have died, and more are feared missing.  

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: French people are fighting over giant pools of water, Marion Renault reports.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Focus Features

Asteroid City Is Wes Anderson at His Best

By David Sims

I am here, hat in hand, to admit that I underestimated Wes Anderson. I’ve enjoyed the filmmaker’s work for many years—his methodical aesthetic, the subject of a thousand weak parodies, might be the most recognizable in moviemaking right now. But in the past decade or so, I struggled to excavate much deeper meaning beneath Anderson’s fine-tuned flair, and began to worry that he was disappearing inside his own eccentricities. Isle of Dogs and The French Dispatch, in particular, seemed like charming, flimsy confections. His new film, Asteroid City, is a vigorous rebuke to that very critique. It pairs his inimitable visual elegance with an impassioned argument about the power of storytelling. And it’s a reminder that Anderson remains one of cinema’s best.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Saturn’s frozen moon just got a lot more interesting. Summer vacation is moving indoors. The owners who run teams for the money

Culture Break

Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Read. Blood Meridian, one of Cormac McCarthy’s many novels that depicts worlds not built for you and me.

Listen. The podcast If Books Could Kill delves into the airport best sellers that we can’t escape.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If you’re interested in further exploring the panics and preoccupations of yesteryear, I have two podcasts to recommend: You’re Wrong About (which busts common cultural myths about American life) and You Must Remember This (a series on 20th-century Hollywood and the sensibilities that surround it). Specifically, check out the May 2018 You’re Wrong About episode on the satanic panic of the 1980s and the current, ongoing You Must Remember This series “Erotic 90’s,” which explores the decade’s attitudes toward sex and women, and their treatment in cinema.

— Kelli

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Paris is currently gearing up to host the Summer Olympics from July 26 to August 11, 2024. The French capital is already a top travel destination, but the number of tourists isn’t yet back to pre-covid levels. In 2022, 33 million people visited the city, down from 38 million in 2019, and the sporting event may just be…

Read more...

About 10 years ago, the critic James Wolcott suggested that Martin Amis (who died last month at 73) retire from writing novels and instead commit himself full-time to giving interviews—which were always funny, and crackling with insight and pleasure, even when the book he was selling was a bit of a stinker. I’d happily trade in Lionel Asbo for a dozen more Amis interviews. In one of these conversations, Amis explained that Vladimir Nabokov was the most hospitable of novelists, always offering you a nice drink and his finest chair. By contrast, Amis said, reading James Joyce’s work, with puns whose appreciation requires a knowledge of Old Norse and the names of minor Irish rivers, was like arriving at an entryway rigged for pratfalls, with mousetraps snapping at your feet as you struggled to find the light switch, only to discover that no one was home.

I have wondered where on this spectrum of hospitality one might find Cormac McCarthy, who died yesterday at 89. Had he taken Wolcott’s proposed form of literary early retirement, we would have been deprived of two great books—The Passenger and Stella Maris—and gotten essentially zilch in return, so arid and gnomic were his few public utterances. He was Joycean, by way of Faulkner, in his total unwillingness to spare the reader looking up an obscure word. (My copy of Blood Meridian has a slip of paper in it, with a list of words I had to look up and have never used since: weskit, anchorite, thrapple.) Like Joyce, he used such words, especially Germanic ones, without inhibition, although the effect was totally different. The McCarthy voice was timeless—not in the pedestrian sense of “will be read for generations,” but in the unsettling, cosmological sense that one could not tell whether the voice was ancient or from the distant future. The diction contributed to this effect, as the words were seemingly so unplaceably antique that it was as if he had excavated them from some prehistoric riverbed, where they were laid down like fossils from the earliest days of human speech.

He was equally unsubmissive to other human sensibilities: Harold Bloom, who thought Blood Meridian the best novel by a living American, wrote that he had needed a few false starts to get through the book, because the torture and death were so unrelenting. I first read Blood Meridian while sitting next to a cairn of stacked bones, the remains of victims of genocide in the Cambodian countryside. In such a setting, nothing in the book felt far-fetched. McCarthy’s middle romantic period, in particular the Border Trilogy, was humane, even tender at times, but it could also be overtaken by violence, unannounced and no doubt for many readers unwelcome. No one, however, could claim that the horrifying turns defied reality. And no matter how awful the turn, in any of his books, it always seemed tragically inevitable in the world McCarthy had made.

To me, reading McCarthy was like reading the work of some advanced alien intelligence. (His final novels suggest the existence of such a force.) Does an alien intelligence make you feel welcome? Does it mess with you, and set malicious little traps? McCarthy didn’t labor to comfort a reader, nor were his books elaborate pranks at the reader’s expense. The worlds depicted in Blood Meridian and The Passenger are not built for mortal humans like you and me. They are built instead as arenas of combat for godlike figures with little interest in providing temporary solace to the humans who pass through their worlds. These superhuman characters have plans and battles whose schedules are measured in millennia, and they regard the rest of us with only peripheral attention. The subject of his inhuman novels is ironically most humane: how to live and die as a mortal being, while in the crossfire of gods and demigods on a battleground that preceded human existence and will continue long after we are all gone.

On any given page of McCarthy, one is likely to find an unlucky minor character getting scalped, or tipsily holding court in the French Quarter. The Passenger will be the book for which McCarthy is remembered, I suspect, because unlike in Blood Meridian, these mortal bystanders are not inarticulate, spitting cowboys. When the Kid, the ragged mortal at the center of Blood Meridian, meets the demigod poised to kill him, he says, “You ain’t nothing”—an act of humane insolence so awesome that one wishes to build a statue to him, on behalf of our species. The characters of The Passenger talk back to the gods more eloquently. “The horseman it would seem has chalked my door,” writes one such character, the sublime John Sheddan, in a letter sent from his deathbed to the protagonist. “I have never thought this life particularly salubrious or benign and I have never understood in the slightest why I was here … More time would change nothing and that which you are poised to relinquish forever almost certainly was never what you thought it to be in the first place.” These are not the most comforting words I have read about death, but they seem as likely as any to be true.