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Are we moving too fast for America’s national pastime? Hanna Rosin asks staff writer Mark Leibovich whether the changes MLB is making to the game could help him fall in love with baseball all over again.

Interested in the changes baseball’s making? Read Mark’s article on how Moneyball broke baseball — and how the same people who broke it are back, trying to save it.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hanna Rosin: Okay, first question: Can you just list for me some rituals that baseball players do?

Mark Leibovich: Um, you know, spitting into their hands and rubbing their hands together, staring into space, slapping their chest, Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves, tipping their hat, balancing their hat, looking to the right field grandstand, looking to the left field grandstand, crossing themselves.

They invent new ones all the time. It’s completely dynamic. A pitcher might tug at his cap and wiggle his leg when going into a motion.

Rosin: Do people lick their bats?

Leibovich: Apparently Yasiel Puig does.

Rosin: Eww.

Leibovich: Yeah. But no, I think that’s a pretty rare thing. And sounds unsanitary too.

Rosin: And what do these rituals have to do with baseball?

Leibovich: Nothing, except that they have been there forever—and players have always had rituals. Oh, this is a big part of the problem in baseball. This is why the people in charge have moved to make it faster.

Rosin: That is my friend Mark Leibovich, a staff writer at The Atlantic who gets all the best assignments.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: I’ve known Mark for enough years to see all the fan gear faded. Red Sox hat, Red Sox T-shirts with holes in them. Red Sox socks. I’ve even seen a picture of little Mark at the game with his dad.

Leibovich: Oh my God. The first spring-training game—like, my friends and I would rush home from school to listen to the game on the radio.

Rosin: His love of this game…it was deep.

Leibovich: Every year, my birthday party was all my friends coming, and we would play a game of pickup baseball at the intersection near the little cul-de-sac I grew up on.

But it’s not necessarily like little 7-year-old Mark here. Mean, if you had seen me, I guess I would’ve been in my late 30s. They had these scintillating couple of playoff series where the Red Sox finally came back. I mean, you know, those are some intense sports-watching things.

I mean, this was the culture of my youth, and that is just gone.

Rosin: And is it gone? Because life is just so fast now.

Leibovich: I think that’s part of it. I think baseball has gotten much slower. I mean, games literally took, you know, two and a half hours when I was a kid. Now, you know, as of last year they took three hours, 10 minutes or so.

Rosin: So it’s the two things moving in opposite directions. It’s like: Just as we were speeding up and getting faster, baseball just got slower.

Leibovich: You have these two things moving in opposite directions—baseball getting slower, and our brains getting faster and our attention spans shrinking.

And all of this was moving in a direction antithetical to enjoying baseball.

Rosin: It’s funny;. when you put it that starkly, it actually makes me a little sad. Like we just have no room for anything slow in our busy lives anymore.

Leibovich: Yes. I mean, it’s funny ’cause we have these conversations, and it’s like, “Oh, baseball is to blame. It’s these self-indulgent ritual-doers who are Velcro-ing and un-Velcro-ing their batting gloves all day.” Maybe this is just our problem. I mean, there are a lot of slow, reflective things we don’t do anymore.

Rosin: So, Mark: When you set out to write about baseball, you thought that the sport was dying. And then, it did something to save itself...maybe. What did baseball do?

Leibovich: They have initiated a set of rules [in Major League Baseball]. One, and most importantly, to make the game go faster. And two: certain rules to make there be more action and offense. Less waiting around in baseball; more fun to watch.

Rosin: Got it. So just like: faster everything. More exciting.

Rosin: What’s one thing they did?

Leibovich: Well, the big thing is a pitch clock.

A pitch clock is a new tool that has appeared in every major-league ballpark this year. In which there’s this big clock in the outfield and also behind home plate—

Rosin: —like a literal clock.

Leibovich: A literal clock. It counts down from 15 seconds.

A pitcher now has 15 seconds to pitch the ball, or 20 seconds if there’s someone on base. And the batter has to be in the box ready to hit by the eight-second mark. So there are only eight seconds left. The batter has to be ready.

Rosin: And what else did they do?

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Bigger bases

Leibovich: One of the things they did was they made the bases bigger, which, you know, people can understand. It’s a bigger base now. What that does is it encourages stolen bases. It makes running bases a safer thing, ’cause you have more of a safe haven to grab onto, or slide into.

They’re reducing pickoff throws, which took forever. And things like that. So they’re encouraging more offense.

Rosin: This isn’t technical baseball language, but it does feel like a real vibe shift.

Leibovich: It very much is. And it’s hard to explain, but when you’re actually watching a game, there is urgency.

Urgency: It is not a word that anyone would ever associate with baseball in recent years.

Now, you sit and you watch—and people are not screwing around. And you sort of internalize that as a viewer or a listener, and you say, “Wait a minute; things are happening faster. I better pay closer attention. I better not check my phone as closely.”

And so the whole vibe is, yes, maybe less relaxing. But ultimately more satisfying, because more is happening, and it’s happening faster.

Rosin: And why did they make all these changes?

Leibovich: Well, part of it is just: Baseball was falling further and further behind things like football and basketball and other sports that are a lot more compelling.

They go much faster and, frankly, are more national spectacles. Like everyone gathers to watch the Super Bowl.

So I actually went to a World Series game last fall between the Phillies and the Astros. And I drove up to Philadelphia. And, you know, it was a World Series game, and it was a no-hitter. The Astros pitchers—four of them—combined to no-hit the Phillies. This was historic, or theoretically it was historic.

No one really noticed. No one remembers it. And this is a World Series game—the likes of which are routinely being outrated on TV by early-season NFL games.

I mean, as our culture speeds up, as brains speed up—you know, cell phones and computers and attention spans. Just the whole culture has sped up. Baseball has slowed down.

And finally, they sort of decided to, all at once, just get very tough and say, “Okay, there is now a clock in baseball.” Lo and behold, it has already shaved 25, maybe 30 minutes off of games in the first couple of months in this season.

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Theo Epstein

Rosin: So. Who is the main architect of speeding baseball up?

Leibovich: There are a few of them. But probably the best known is a guy named Theo Epstein, who is this legendary figure in baseball.

He was the youngest general manager in history. He was named general manager of the Boston Red Sox at age 28. He is known for bringing the first World Series championship to Boston in 86 years. He then left the Red Sox and went to the Chicago Cubs—who had an even longer World Series drought—and he delivered after 108 years.

So he sort of has this legend attached to him. And he left the Cubs a couple of years ago, and he joined Major League Baseball as a consultant.

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Moneyball

Rosin: Isn’t Theo Epstein associated with the whole “Moneyball revolution” in baseball?

Leibovich: Yes. He did not pioneer it. Billy Beane of the Oakland A’s is given credit for that. But Theo Epstein is known as the chief disciple who applied some of these new theories in baseball and actually won World Series with it for the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs.

Rosin: Tell me if this is right. This is what I understand about Moneyball. Okay. I read the book; I saw the movie. So Moneyball was a revolution that, as I recall, was supposed to modernize baseball. Like, instead of tracking one set of statistics about players, they tracked a different set of statistics about players. Which turned out to be the actual critical factors in winning a game, and allowed teams with fewer resources to beat rich, fancy teams.

But also what I understood about Moneyball was that it was supposed to have fixed baseball.

So didn’t we fix baseball?

Leibovich: You know, very interesting terminology here, and we’re gonna try to make it not complicated. It fixed baseball for teams trying to win baseball games—i.e., the Oakland A’s, right? Who have less resources and did more with less.

The innovations we’re seeing now? It’s not about winning baseball games. Because the commissioner of baseball [Rob Manfred] and now Theo Epstein, his consultant—they work for all of baseball. They work for the fans; they work for the interests of entertainment.

So it has nothing to do with a competitive advantage between the Oakland A’s and the New York Yankees. It has everything to do with the entertainment attention span of someone watching a Disney movie or playing a video game or watching the Super Bowl or something like that.

Rosin: Moneyball fixed one set of problems, but then created another set of problems.

Leibovich: Well, they created a blueprint for teams to do better with less resources—but it was a terrible thing to watch. I mean, it created more walks, more strikeouts, slower action. So yeah: I mean, it solved one problem. It created any number of problems if you are a consumer of entertainment.

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Mental-Skills Coaching

Rosin: You know, I get why they need to move faster. One of the things that you wrote about from the slow era, which I really appreciate, was this mental-skills coaching. I was surprised and maybe happily surprised to learn that they teach baseball players how to meditate in real time while they’re on the field.

Leibovich: In a sense, yes. I mean, that’s been part of the 21st-century revolution in baseball, and in the service of giving baseball players and teams a slightly better competitive advantage. They have taught mental skills, imaging, little mini-meditations, visualizations, things that you do. Because sports, especially baseball, is a big mind game, right?

You need to put yourself in a very relaxed state, or a state that puts you in a good position to succeed.

Rosin: That seems so nice and enlightened, and that’s what we tell our children to do when they’re stressed out. That’s what we tell everyone. Like, we’re all supposed to slow down and meditate.

Leibovich: Yeah; it might be nice. But it also gets introduced into the culture, which by and large introduces more time and dawdling into the culture of baseball. So David Ortiz, Nomar Garciaparra, Robinson Canó: They have these rituals where they take their deep breaths, and they clap, and they sort of see the field.

And then the owner of the Seattle Mariners told me this: He was teaching his son’s Little League team, and all of a sudden half the Little League team is trying to imitate Robinson Canóby stepping out during the at-bat and doing his little ritual. And so: “Sorry, we gotta wait for Jimmy over here to do his little Robinson Canó–like ritual.”

And then John Stanton, the owner of the Mariners, said to me, “Look, we have just taught an entire generation of kids that it’s okay to pace around the mound for however long and waste all this time.”

And I guarantee you, it would be a lot more interesting to watch Johnny try to dunk like LeBron James or kick a soccer ball like Messi or something than it is Johnny from Seattle trying to imitate Robinson Canó between the 2-and-1 and 2-and-2 pitch.

And so, again, in a very crude way: The pitch clock sort of disrupts all of that all at once.

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Juan Soto

Rosin: You know what: We haven’t talked about how the players feel about all of this.

Leibovich: Hmm.

Rosin: You talked to Padres star player Juan Soto about the pitch clock. Let’s listen to that.

Leibovich: Do you think the clock is a good thing? Like, did the times of the baseball games used to bother you? Or did you ever get impatient, sort of waiting for pitches to come and stuff, just watching a game when you’re playing in it?

Juan Soto: I feel like if you enjoy the games, you gotta give them time to think. And to see, look around and look at everything. I mean: I know for fans sometimes it gets boring. But for baseball players, they will never get bored.

Leibovich: So you were never bored at a baseball game.

Soto: No, never. Never. It’s never too long. It’s never too short. I’m just enjoying the game.

Rosin: What was your impression of what he was saying there?

Leibovich: He was saying like, “Look; this is my life. This is my job. This is what I love to do. I don’t care if you’re bored.” I mean, I’ve had many, many people I interviewed for this story say that a million different ways. Like: “I can’t worry about whether you’re entertained or not. You know, I’m gonna get fired if I lose this many games. Or if my batting average dips below  2.0, whatever.”

No one was saying, “Oh look—the ratings from last night’s game were higher than the night before. Oh, ticket sales are up around baseball. We are being more entertaining.” No one cares about that, huh? Nor should they.

Rosin: So, the players feel one way—and we, the fans, feel another. So I guess that’s why Padres star Manny Machado, in his very first pitch-clock game, was like, “No, thank you.”

After the break: Can Mark learn to love baseball again?

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Rosin: You’ve been to a pitch-clock game.

Leibovich: The first pitch-clock game.

Rosin: Ooh!

Leibovich: Well, the first spring-training pitch-clock game.

Rosin: You were in a box, sitting with all these guys, right?

Leibovich: It wasn’t a box. It was actually a couple of rows up from the field in a spring-training game, with, basically, the orchestrators of this from Major League Baseball. One of them was Theo Epstein. Another guy was Morgan Sword, who is basically the director of on-field operations for Major League Baseball, who has been putting this all in place.

Rosin: And what were you guys talking about?

Leibovich: Well, mostly we were watching the game. I mean, this is like the first day of school for Morgan and Theo. This is this thing they had been envisioning and trying to put in place for months, and even years. And this was the first game in which it was actually happening

Rosin: And were they nervous, like on edge? What was the vibe?

Leibovich: Morgan was extremely nervous. He was a basket case, and usually he’s pretty chill. So yeah, that was pretty glaring.

Rosin: Why was he a basket case?

Leibovich: He was a basket case because he had been thinking about everything that could possibly go wrong. First of all, he’s being scrutinized. Everyone in baseball is watching to see how this first pitch-clock game is gonna go off. But he’s also spent so much time talking to umpires, talking to players, talking to managers, talking to game officials, talking to clock operators. You know, it’s basically starting up a whole cabinet department within baseball that didn’t exist before.

And so obviously on Day One, you’re gonna be nervous.

—

Leibovich: So what’s your experience as a fan been during this interregnum for you? What about your son?

Theo Epstein: Yeah. I mean, my son—my 15-year-old—I can’t help but notice his lack of desire to sit through a three-and-a-half-hour game, really.

Rosin: So who is that?

Leibovich: That was Theo Epstein. He was telling me about what his personal experience is as a baseball fan during this time when he is not affiliated with the team.

Rosin: And he’s saying his son is bored? Like, can’t watch baseball anymore?

Leibovich: Yeah.

Epstein: And especially during the pandemic, I noticed so much of his life existed through gaming. Interacting and doing commerce and everything else, like all through the computer. And Fortnite—it’s like a 10-, 15-minute game. Obviously, it’s a bit of a cliché that the Gen Z generation grew up on their phones.

Leibovich: Yeah. The patience. it’s not a cliché; it’s brain chemistry. It’s real. It is very real.

Rosin: So it’s not just about our attention span. I guess what he is panicking about is that he’s got these sons who should be baseball fans, but they can barely pay attention for more than 10 seconds.

So it makes you feel like the future of the sport is not—

Rosin: Yeah. So this is a multitiered problem, right? So not only are older former fans’ brains adapting to a faster life and moving away from baseball; there’s also this new generation that doesn’t even see what the fuss is about to begin with, and aren’t exactly reading Moneyball and reading George Will columns and watching Field of Dreams to see what the fuss is about.

Rosin: Yes. It’s actually pretty cool that you were present at the creation of new baseball—the new era of baseball.

Leibovich: I’m glad. I’m glad you appreciate this. Because this was a momentous day. And of course it was also a very mundane day, but yeah: It felt momentous.

Rosin: Right. The first-ever game in the new era of baseball. Like, was it more fun? Did you like it? Did time move faster?

Leibovich: So the game was very crisp. It was 3 to 2; I think Seattle won. Basically, all these executives, they were rooting not for the Mariners or the Padres. They were rooting for this game to be very, very fast. ’Cause they knew everyone was looking at this as like, Oh, this is the new baseball. We want it to work.

And yeah, it was very enjoyable.

I was very glad that the game took less than two hours and 30 minutes. I know Theo Epstein was; he wanted to go take a nap. The person to my right wanted to catch a flight back to New York or wherever he was going.

Rosin: So people were living their lives. I gotta catch a flight, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. And it fit into their busy lives.

Leibovich: Much more so.

Rosin: Hmm. I can’t really tell if you, Mark Leibovich, were into the game. Like, you know when you’re into a game.

Leibovich: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I’ve seen you be into a football game.

Leibovich: Yeah. Have you ever seen me be into a baseball game?

Rosin: No.

Leibovich: See, if you had known me 30, 25 years ago, you would’ve totally seen me be into a baseball game. But baseball just left me.

Rosin: You used the word enjoyable? Enjoyable is like a dead word. Were you into the game? Personally, I prefer just fast games; I like watching basketball, I like watching soccer. I want to maybe get on board with faster baseball.

Leibovich: Yes.

Rosin: And so I guess I’m wondering where you are. Like, are you on board with faster baseball? Like when you were there, were you like, Ah, this is gonna work?

Leibovich: Yeah. I saw a minor-league game a few years ago that had a clock, and I was like, Yeah, this is it. This is totally it. I was watching an NBA playoff game with my wife and my daughter Nell, who said, “You know, there’s something really nice about a game that you know is gonna last two hours and 20 minutes.” There’s a clock on the NBA game. And if you’re a soccer fan, it’s gonna take two hours. The commissioner of baseball himself, Rob Manfred, said to me, “Look, what in your life do you really want to do for more than two and a half hours at a shot?” Even people sitting up in the front office, or the commissioner of baseball, would be like: Wow, do we really have to watch this for more than two and a half hours?

Rosin: Yeah. Like the people who are supposed to be…

Leibovich: Management, managers, commissioners. Things like that.

Rosin: I guess I just have to accept that this is where we are now.

Like, we are just not people who have patience for a three-hour pastime. We just don’t have it.

Leibovich: Right. But here’s the thing: Games literally did not take three hours in 1969. They took much less, like two and a half hours. Or probably less than that. I don’t know; maybe people then would have had less patience. But again, these two things are moving in opposite directions.

Rosin: Let’s say we shaved enough time off baseball that it lasted the same amount of time as it did when you were a kid.

Leibovich: Right.

Rosin: Do you think you could ever feel about baseball the same way you felt when you were a kid? Do you actually feel like you could feel the same way?

Leibovich: I mean, look: Can you feel the same way about something as a 50-something-year-old as you did when you were 7 or 8?

I mean, you have a much less mature brain when you’re a kid, for better or for worse. You see the world much more clearly, much more innocently. With much less sense of proportion, and so forth. So, I don’t know, and maybe my fandom growing up is shaped by nostalgia. Now that I think about it and talk about it, I would think so—because right now I associate it with good times for my youth.

Rosin: So it feels like where we are this summer is that we—the fans—really want baseball to change. The players are somewhat resistant. The rules are in place. Do you think that this will save baseball?

Leibovich: I think it will help baseball. I think early results are that it has helped baseball.

If you go by the actual shrinking time of games, if you go by the ratings and the ticket sales and so forth, the first few months of the season have been very encouraging. The larger point is, you know: Is this putting a Band-Aid on a larger sort of existential problem that baseball is ultimately not going to be able to deal with?

Rosin: All right. So now that you’re done with your reporting, and there are no legends inviting you to sit in their boxes with them and talk to Juan Soto, are you gonna go to any games?

Leibovich: Yeah. I mean, again, a lot of it comes down to…

Rosin: Was that like “Yeah,” or was that like “Yes”?

Leibovich: Yes. And I’ll tell you what probably the decider will be. I mean, I’m parochial. I care about my team, the Red Sox. The Red Sox were not supposed to be good this year. They’re kind of mediocre, but they’re an entertaining team, and I have cared about them. So I have watched. If they completely implode, I’ll probably stop watching. So like Juan Soto and him wanting good numbers, I want my team to do well. And I will probably drop off. But if I do go to a game this year, I’m thrilled that it’s not gonna go past 11 o’clock.

Rosin: Right. So it’s love, but it’s conditional love.

Leibovich: Totally.

Rosin: Like, they’ve won you back, but conditionally.

Leibovich: Hundred percent.

Rosin: I think where I’m at is: I still would rather see a Washington Spirit game. But if somebody, say a child—anybody’s child—asks me to go to a game, I won’t recoil in horror. I’ll be like, “Yeah, okay, sure. I’ll try it.”

Leibovich: Here’s what I’ll say to you. And it’s very intimate. But I’m gonna invite you to a game. We both live in Washington, and so we’re gonna go. And whoever wants to join us can join us. And hopefully, the recoiling in horror will not transpire. And if it does, we can just leave.

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Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by A.C. Valdez. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Our fact-checker is Michelle Ciarrocca. Thank you also to managing editor Andrea Valdez. Our podcast team includes Jocelyn Frank, Becca Rashid, Ethan Brooks, Kevin Townsend, Theo Balcomb, and Vann Newkirk. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

If you like it, tell some Red Sox fans or some Yankees fans; whatever. Tell all the fans.

Sign up for Kaitlyn and Lizzie’s newsletter here.

Lizzie: Nathan has recently discovered his green thumb. If you read our last newsletter, you’ll remember that I had the responsibility of spritzing Nathan’s living-room seeds so that they could continue sprouting while he and Kaitlyn were away for a weekend. Well, through this process, in which I would say I played a major role, the seeds are now thriving—so much so that some of those seeds have taken up residence in Nathan and Kaitlyn’s backyard, where Nathan has built a raised wooden garden bed with his own two hands.

I’m not officially a farmer, but having been to a farmers’ market or two, I know that the beginning of summer signals an impending bounty of produce. To mark the occasion, and bring good health to Nathan’s fledgling seeds, Kait decided to host a garden party. I think the idea was that we’d nondenominationally bless the crops by eating tiny sandwiches and drinking pre-batched cocktails near them, and simultaneously honor the work of indie agriculturalists like Nathan. Whereas Claire’s Queen’s Jubilee last year was an explicitly British take on the garden party, this one was much more vegetal.

Kaitlyn: I like that Lizzie says Nathan has “discovered” his green thumb, suggesting that it’s been there all along. And maybe it has! His relationship with his first-ever set of baby plants does seem fairly instinctive and affectionate. He supplements their innate bond with hours and hours of garden YouTube. Average night in the past month: We’re watching sports or Bravo or whatever on TV; I get up from the couch to get a seltzer; then I come back and we’re watching a guy speaking very rapidly and enthusiastically about soil.

I don’t like to help in the garden. It reminds me of my first “job,” which was to move carts of potted mums from one greenhouse to another for no apparent reason. (The job title was literally “moving mums.”) But I want to be supportive, and of course I want to someday enjoy bundles of delicious, fresh vegetables. I’ve learned enough about the concept of intention-setting from Instagram to feel that it would help Nathan’s efforts if all of our friends came over and stood near the garden bed and thought, Green.

The party prep, then, was easy. All I did was think green. I made green sandwiches with tarragon mayonnaise, cucumbers, sprouts, etc. I looked up “green punch” and Martha Stewart suggested a chartreuse base—unfortunately that stuff is made by monks and they don’t make a whole lot of it, so we went to plan B, which was limoncello and basil. I texted my mom, a renowned theme-party planner and former Sunday-school teacher, and asked for some ideas. “See who can string beans the fastest,” she said. I didn’t know what this meant. She explained: “Embroidery needle, heavy thread, and a bunch of beans to stab into a string. Onto the thread.” We didn’t do that, but we did take her suggestion to make a huge dirt cake (pounds of pudding, two family-size packages of Oreos, gummy worms, you get it).

Lizzie’s Leek. (Courtesy of Lizzie Plaugic)

Lizzie: My contributions to the party were a batch of mojitos, banana cream pudding, and a croquet set that my parents unearthed from their basement. The mojitos were the worst part of it all because I had to juice 30 limes to get two cups of lime juice. And because I have several small wounds on my knuckles from grating my skin off with a microplane, the marathon lime-squeezing session was punctuated by searing pain. Plus, I really overshot the mark when purchasing the limes, and still have about 30 left in my apartment.

I had planned on getting to Kaitlyn’s early to help set up, but by the time I got there, the yard was already primed for a crowd: Little pyramids of sandwiches were perched on the floral-tableclothed table, next to pitchers of “cuke water” and punch, and buckets of canned drinks on ice. On the concrete part of the yard, there was a message in colorful chalk: WELCOME TO THE GARDEN. Surrounding the message like a halo were drawings of various vegetables—carrots, lettuce, broccoli, and the like. Kait explained that everyone was supposed to use the provided chalk to add their favorite vegetable to the drawing. My first thought was radishes, but they were already taken, so I drew peas, which, while not necessarily my favorite vegetable, are probably the easiest to draw.  

Then Nathan showed me his seed-planting station, where guests were encouraged to select a seed from one of the four paper pouches displayed on the table (snow peas, leeks, Chinese broccoli, and serrano peppers) and plant it in one of the compartments of the black plastic plant tray. I chose leeks. The seeds looked like those charcoal bits that sometimes escape into your Brita pitcher when you replace the filter. I made a little indent in the soil and dropped three seeds in. As soon as I dropped the seeds, though, I couldn’t see them anymore, so I mostly just hoped they were safely nestled underground. If they don’t make it, I’ll never look at a leek the same way again.

Kaitlyn: Lizzie labeled her leek “Lizzie’s Leek.” I can’t wait to eat it with her.

For some additional context about the gardening aspect of the garden party, it’s important for readers to know that there was an absolutely violent flash thunderstorm the night before. Water came down the chimney. The cat panicked. Nathan bolted outside, then came back in sopping wet, hands in the air. The baby radishes had all flopped over from the force of the raindrops. There was no telling which other plants would be drowned. The past month’s work was being washed away by an act of God and there was nothing we could do except sit there and also watch the Mets lose. “Don’t tell anyone I cried about the plants,” Nathan told me. I wouldn’t do that because he obviously didn’t.

But thank goodness for the power of positive thinking. I told Nathan over and over: Nature is resilient; the plants are designed to live. I didn’t actually have any idea what I was talking about, but what do you know: In the morning, the radishes were standing back up and everything was all right. Green!

Showers had brought flowers. I’d even say that the perennials in the yard looked more lush than ever. So did the trees, which grow hard little green apples that you can supposedly eat despite the prevalence of heavy metals in Brooklyn soil. The squirrels were out and fighting loudly with one another. We had “God’s Coloring Book” on the playlist, and a big bowl of snap peas to munch on with Matt and Lizzie while we waited for our guests.

Lizzie: As people started to arrive, Nathan gathered a few of us for a tour of his crops. Small green sprouts were lined up in neat little rows inside the raised bed, punctuated by pink flowers. It looked like something out of a children’s book!

Getting to this point in his gardening journey had required Nathan to take several trips to Home Depot. He told us a story about buying approximately 400 pounds of soil there one day and accidentally loading it into the car of some unsuspecting couple (the result of a communication error with the freelance guys-with-a-van in the Home Depot parking lot). The wife said to the husband, upon seeing Nathan hauling pounds of soil into their car, “I told you to lock it.” Nathan said the couple were actually angry, which to me seems like a pretty useless reaction to a situation that’s basically slapstick comedy. It’s not like Nathan was insisting they keep his soil in there and drive him home. He said he even offered to give them a bag of his dirt as a peace offering, but they said something like “We have our own.”

A green array for a green party. (Courtesy of Lizzie Plaugic)

Kaitlyn: Someone breaks into your car to put something into it? Cry me a river. For the past week, someone has been repeatedly breaking into our house to take things out of it. The first time they came, Nathan was insulted because they stole our friend Leo’s bike and apparently didn’t want Nathan’s. The second time, they stole Nathan’s bike. This situation is ongoing. I think we’re all just hoping that whoever has figured out how to get into our home starts to feel guilty about it, because we’re so clearly clueless and defenseless.

Anyway, Russell and his girlfriend, Molly, came with a box of cupcakes and asked me quietly whether Nathan would be open to any gardening tips, because Molly in fact runs a small farm. They didn’t want to make the offer if it would be perceived as rude. “No, no, Nathan loves to learn,” I told them. Molly produced some rare sea-plantain seeds from an island off Maine from her purse and headed over to the planting area.

I was thrilled by everyone’s commitment to the theme. Many wore outfits featuring a lemon print, and Mariya had shorts with tomatoes on them. Rachel arrived in a green silk dress—she said she was dressed as a cucumber. Stephanie came out with a big white cake that was wearing a crown of parsley. When she cut into it, it was as green as a cucumber!

Lizzie: The party was exactly what you want from a party. I flitted around from conversation to conversation, discussing all the hot topics of the day: vegetables, sweating through your shirt in the summer, Daria, “dry acupuncture,” the Vanderpump Rules reunion, “It’s Pablo-matic,” Ghia’s new mystery flavor.

For a while we also talked about teeth. Claire and I showed Brandon photos of what teeth look like under veneers (Bat Boy nubs) because he hadn’t seen them before. As the conversation drifted toward dentistry in general, Brandon said he was pro-Tend, the stylish dental boutique for young people, because he can make same-day appointments and go there at 8 p.m. We laughed at the idea of “Tend After Dark.” Ashley said she prefers her old-school dentist, where the teeth-cleaning process can be painfully thorough. Claire told us her theory of “Pangea teeth,” which is when your top teeth and bottom teeth begin their lives as, I guess, a mono-tooth, only to be broken up into the standard two rows of teeth that most humans are familiar with. As supporting evidence, she showed us how her top and bottom teeth fit together like puzzle pieces.

Galen and Claire also told a riveting story about abandoning a ski slope mid-ski because of injury, climbing back to the top, and persuading someone in charge to let them take the ski lift the wrong way, down to the bottom of the mountain. They said they were eventually permitted to do this, on the condition that a “ski ambassador” chaperone them—and not only that, but the ambassador sat between them on the lift, presumably so they wouldn’t try any funny business.

In need of a simple party activity? Try chalk. (Courtesy of Lizzie Plaugic)

Kaitlyn: I missed the veneers conversation, but I’ve seen the photo Lizzie is talking about, and it is really scary. She shows it to people fairly often. (Does she have it saved on her phone?) The thing is, I don’t think they actually shave your teeth down that much. I think that’s just one of those fake pictures from the internet. (I’m speaking as someone with two veneers, though I don’t talk about it with Lizzie for obvious reasons.) If I had been over there while she was spreading this misinfo I might have intervened.

Honestly, most of the party was a blur for me because as host, I was obsessed entirely with everyone else’s experience. At times, I wondered whether there were enough activities. Should we have strung beans? Should we have done the Mr. Potato Head craft my mom suggested? (Stick cut-up vegetables onto a potato with toothpicks.) Or the other potato craft? (Carve shapes into a potato, creating a “stamp,” then make art with it.) But no, everyone was enjoying themselves. They loved croquet.

In the early evening, as the crowd thinned out, I was able to relax. I talked to Ashley about our upcoming trip to her hometown and she said she’ll take us to “the Ditch,” where she sat on the ground and gossiped as a teen. Can you imagine Ashley—who is always immaculate and has never forgiven me for making her sleep in an Econo Lodge eight years ago—hanging out anywhere called “the Ditch”? This cracked me up. I’m so excited to see it.

The late stage of a party is the best. You get to go around to the people who are your true favorites but who you had to let alone for most of the day because they do fine without you. Nathan was like, “Did you see? Sea-plantain seeds!” We went upstairs to check on the cat, who was snuggling with Tamar on the couch. She’d gotten back from France just 15 hours before. She was not going to fall asleep, she insisted. “I’m just sitting and watching the videos they pick out for me,” she said. “Who is ‘they’?” Nathan asked. “The government.” (I believe she was looking at her algorithm-recommended Instagram Reels.) She gave me a magnet shaped like a basket of baguettes and an Annie Ernaux book with the British cover. We took her back down to the party so she could say honestly that she hadn’t fallen asleep.

Pretty soon, the punch and the mojitos were gone, and all that was left were the cheapest bottles of wine and like two gallons of soft, warm pudding.

Lizzie: A garden party ends when everyone has eaten enough dainty sandwiches and herbal cakes and starts craving a cheeseburger. By 8 p.m., the yard had cleared out. When we left, Nathan was crouched down next to his garden, maybe checking to see if the magic of the party had resulted in any growth spurts. Or just enjoying the time alone.

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a couple swipes at Apple’s Vision Pro during an all-hands meeting yesterday (June 8) where he also laid out the company’s AI strategy and assured staff that the metaverse is not over.

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Mark Liu says chipmaker is negotiating subsidies with German government as it considers first facility in Europe.

Last month, the surgeon general released a lengthy advisory calling attention to social media and its effects on the mental health of teenagers. Historically, a warning from the surgeon general pointed a big neon sign at an issue that we might not be sure how much to worry about: cigarettes, AIDS, drunk driving. But people are already worried about social media—and they’re acting on those concerns. School districts are suing social-media companies for “knowingly” harming children. Legislators are grilling tech-company founders in hearings. Pundits are calling for age-restricting access to apps. Everyone just wants to do something, anything, to get this under control.

This is all understandable. Teenagers have become more anxious and more depressed. A notable rise in depression started in 2012, about the time many high schoolers got smartphones. Many parents who had teenagers during that period saw these changes in real time: A child who might have been ruffled by school social dynamics suddenly couldn’t escape them, and her mental health tanked.

The problem is real. But is it as real as the problems caused by cigarettes or drunk driving? We don’t know yet. Researchers have only started to understand who is vulnerable and what we can do to protect them. In this conversation, we talk with Kaitlyn Tiffany, who covers tech for The Atlantic and has been tracking the unfolding research into the effects of social media in detail. We won’t tell you whether to worry a lot, or not at all. We’ll just step away from the urgency for a moment to tell you what experts know, what they are guessing at, and how you might proceed in all that frustrating uncertainty.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this is Radio Atlantic. So last week I was talking to a friend of mine who shared this fantasy she has of shipping her kids to a tech-free island where there were no phones, no tablets, no video games, no computers, not even a television. Now, I’ve parented three teenagers. And I’ve had this fantasy myself many, many times.

And like all fantasies of frustrated parents, it’s useless. Like you can practically hear the teen eye rolls in the background. This episode is my attempt to be useful to address the problem of teens, their phones, and their mental health from a place of facts and research and actual knowledge.

So this week I'm going to talk to staff writer Kaitlyn Tiffany, who writes about tech and online culture, and who knows that this issue is both urgent—laws are being considered right now—and annoyingly hard to pin down.

Kaitlyn Tiffany: Obviously, in eight years of writing about social media, I would not ever argue that it’s unfair to criticize these tech companies or that there’s not a ton to criticize, but it just seems counterproductive to constantly just be blaring the sirens rather than saying anything specific.

Rosin: Oh my God, I’m so glad to hear you say that. The word I keep writing down every time, almost every time I read about teens and social media, is broad. Like I’ve, I, I’ve moved away from hysterical, which is what I used to write down, but I still feel intellectually like it’s just too broad.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: And part of why I wanted to talk to Tiffany now is that it’s not just parents who are trying to crack this. It’s teachers, the teens themselves, but also legislators. There is a real hunger to do something. Pass something now, and last week gave that a big push forward.

Archival: Today, the U.S. surgeon general released sobering new figures on teen social-media use and its effects on their mental health. Dr. Vivek Murphy says social media’s effect on the mental health of young people isn’t fully understood yet. It is a main contributor to depression, anxiety, and other problems in the nation’s teenagers.

Rosin: So Tiffany, what exactly did the surgeon general say last week?

Tiffany: So the surgeon general released this 19-page advisory about social media that basically identifies it as a quote public-health challenge, but also emphasized that there’s a lot of research that needs to be done before people can say that social media is, quote, unquote, safe. So that’s kind of an interesting approach. He’s not saying that we need to prove that it’s dangerous. He’s saying we need to prove that it’s not dangerous.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: And he’s drawing attention to possible risks of harm, especially for adolescents in, like, specific developmental stages. So younger preteen girls—11 to 13— boys, 14 to 15 years old, but also acknowledging there are these known, quote, unquote, evidence gaps. So was the most harmful thing that you’re losing sleep? Is the most harmful thing that you are not seeing your friends in person, et cetera? But the headline, yeah, is kind of like, Everyone pay attention to this.

It could be really bad.

Rosin: Right. Okay, so here is kind of a big question. What do we know about social media and kids at this point?

Tiffany: What we know is that through the process of doing hundreds of studies, researchers have somewhat narrowed down to some really pertinent questions about when and under which circumstances social media would be bad. It’s not in all circumstances, and it’s not for everyone. I know that is very confusing, but that is pretty much what we know.

Rosin: Yeah it creates this funky moment where legislators wanna do something now. And I bet the surgeon general’s report will just make that more intense. But the research doesn’t have enough nuance right now. Like in order to know what to do, you kind of have to know more precisely what the problem is, but the research isn’t quite there yet.

Tiffany: Right.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So maybe we should talk about how we got here.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I’d say there are three pretty significant moments we should touch on. A lot of researchers, or people who are interested in this topic, point to 2012 as being sort of the saturation point where the iPhone had been out long enough that young kids were starting to have them. It was also the year that Facebook acquired Instagram, which ballooned its growth, led to it launching on Android and becoming sort of a part of everyone’s daily lives.

Rosin: So the image we have of a teenager walking around with a phone, looking at whatever they’re looking at [on] Snapchat, Instagram, that started in 2012?

Tiffany: Yeah. Or, you know, became sort of the mass phenomenon by 2012. I remember somebody in my high school having an iPhone in 2007, but he was like the only person that everybody would, like, line up to play with it. It wasn’t normal yet.

Rosin: Yeah, 2012 was exactly the year that my then-preteen daughter got a cellphone, and that everybody suddenly had one in middle school.

Okay, let’s back up, because I didn’t ask you an important question: Are you interested in naming your generation? Just because a lot of this conversation is often framed as generational battles, so I’m curious to understand where you intersect with social media.

Tiffany: Oh yeah, sure. I’m a Millennial, so I did not have social media until, like, the very end of high school. My senior year, I got a Facebook account, and then I guess I wasn’t on Instagram until I [had] almost graduated from college because I didn’t have a smartphone right away.

Rosin: I just think it’s important to locate people in where they are. It’s like, are they the alarmed parent generation or are they the teenager? Are they somewhere in the middle?

Tiffany: Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Okay, so then it’s just everybody’s walking around with cellphones and then what happens?

Tiffany: Yeah, so, the next significant turning point is in 2017, where there is a bit of a backlash, I think partly driven by interest in some tech personalities talking about how they don’t let their kids use screens. But then actually sort of—

Rosin: Is that really—that’s, that’s one of the things that did it?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: That’s really funny.

Tiffany: I think it comes up a bit that, like, Steve Jobs didn’t think kids should use technology like that. But yeah, 2016, 2017, there’s more concern about should kids be spending the whole day looking at their smartphones. And The Atlantic actually published a really big piece by a researcher named Jean Twenge where the headline was “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

Rosin: [Gasps] That is such an Atlantic-y headline. That’s actually one of the reasons I really wanted to talk to you, because I remember, I remember reading that story. I just remember having a huge resistance to it. Even though, you know, I wrote for The Atlantic, just thinking, like, Wow, that’s throwing the gauntlet down.

That’s, like, a really big question. I mean, I know it had a question mark after it, but it was like, have smartphones destroyed a generation?

Tiffany: Yeah. And it’s like, and we think the answer is yes.

Rosin: Right, right. All right, so what did Twenge argue in that article?

Tiffany: Yeah. So she was talking about these numbers that she’d been seeing, which come out regularly, from this survey that the National Institute on Drug Abuse conducts, asking adolescents about how happy they are and how they spend their free time. And she was noticing this correlation between spending a lot of time looking at screens and also expressing unhappiness and depression and suicidal ideation. That was the first thing that really concerned her. And then she was also pulling out these more specific data points, like a decrease in [the] number of teenagers who were driving or going out on dates or who had ever had sex. And there was the trend line showing that people were saying “I often feel left out of things,” or “A lot of times I feel lonely,” or “I get less than seven hours of sleep per night.” Those were concerning to her as well.

Rosin: So just to be perfectly clear, the headline says, has X caused Y, but what the data did was put X next to Y, right? It was just like in these last few years, teenagers have gotten smartphones. Also, in these last few years, there’s been this marked shift in a lot of markers of wellness. It was “an elbow in the data,” like that it was unmissable because it was such a sharp turn.

So it’s like, we see the sharp turn. Also, there were cellphones. There’s no causality there, right?

Tiffany: Yeah, yeah, so she’s talking about CDC surveys that were not specifically intended to look at how social media might affect teen mental health. They were, you know, sort of general as of like teen behavior and psychology.

And then she was creatively reading them and presenting a very legitimate hypothesis. But then, social-science researchers were presented with the challenge then of seeing whether that would bear out. So right after her article came out, there’s a huge balloon in the amount of research that was conducted. But, yeah, the first step would’ve just been like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s give it a whirl.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. So basically that’s what I thought. Basically what’s happening between 2017 and now is, like, Cool hypothesis. Let’s test it out in lots of different formats. Let’s road test it here and there, and let’s just see, like, does it hold up? So what were the dynamics that researchers started to hypothesize?

Tiffany: So around this time, the initial question that people had was about screen time overall. So the next notable moment would have come in 2019, when researchers from Oxford published this study that was looking for correlations between digital-technology use and well-being.

And once they found this small correlation, they then sort of set it up against some other things to provide context to readers, which is pretty innovative I guess, because it allowed the study to travel pretty far, because rather than saying, Oh, the association between technology use and well-being is negative 0.049, which is probably meaningless to most people, you can say that the association between technology use and well-being is smaller than the association that’s been found between well-being and binge drinking or smoking or even having asthma or wearing glasses. And it’s only very slightly larger than the association between well-being and eating potatoes.

Rosin: Oh, this is the potato study, right?

Tiffany: Yes. The iconic potato study.

Rosin: The Great Potato Study. I remember that study, and I remember headlines like “Screen Time Is About as Dangerous as Potatoes,” and I remember finding it also totally unsatisfying because it was like, “Oh, you know, it’s ruining a generation.” “No, it’s totally cool. It’s fine. Like, there’s no problem. Don’t worry about it.” It was like neither of those answers seemed correct or were satisfying.

Like, you could see as a parent that something historically monumental was happening and you couldn’t quite put your finger on it. And just from my perspective, like, I neither wanted to be completely, totally alarmed, nor did I want to be like, “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,” you know?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the value of the potato study is that it was sort of like resetting the table a bit—like the objective, you know, when the researchers talked about the study after it was published, was to kind of acknowledge that screen time as a category is just like too broad to study in a meaningful way, because people use screens for so many different things, you know? They use them to harass and stalk people, or they use them to, like, do a yoga video. They use them to research their homework. They use them to, like, mindlessly scroll through TikTok. Like, it would be impossible to get a meaningful answer at, like, a high level about how screens as a blanket category affect people’s lives.

Rosin: Right, right. It’s useful to have a reset so that we can start narrowing in on what the problem actually is, because there is an actual problem, right? Like, depression is rising. It is a real thing. I mean, I’ve looked at the same data set that these researchers are concerned about, and they’re right. It’s really stark. Like, look at rates of depression and suicidality among teenage girls, and it’s incontrovertible that something is happening. So we’re worried about something beyond just, you know, We hate Mark Zuckerberg.

Tiffany: Yeah. I mean, the legitimate worry is that there are obvious and measured increases in depression among young people. There was a big CDC trend report that came out earlier this year that was looking at the data from 2011 to 2021.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: So in 2011, 28 percent of teenagers said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and in 2021, that number had jumped to 42 percent.

And they saw big jumps in the percentage of high-school students who experienced, quote, persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, a jump in the percentage that considered suicide, as well as they started measuring for the first time the percentage that said they’d experienced poor mental health, including stress and anxiety and depression in the past 30 days. That number was 29 percent. And for female students, 57 percent said they experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and 69 percent of LGBTQ students. So those were kind of the dramatic top-line numbers that were widely covered and alarming.

Rosin: Yeah, and I guess we can all imagine there are lots and lots of reasons why young people would feel hopeless or in despair. But I also will say I’ve had many conversations with fellow parents who would describe it as night and day, like what their child was like before they were deep in social media all day and all night and had no escape from it.

And what they were like after that was their reality. Like people can truly narrate, you know, Okay, my child was like this. They would go in their room and draw; they would read a book; even if they had a bad time at school, they could escape from it. And then all of a sudden that wasn’t possible. It became like it totally occupied their psyche.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely.

Rosin: So, okay, so let me summarize so far. So you had the Twenge article, which was like a boom in one direction, and then you had the potato research, which was a boom in the other direction. And it just sort of flipped-flopped back and forth. There’s hysteria. There’s the bounce back from hysteria. And hopefully, what I’m hoping is that, since 2012, researchers start to get more specific.

Like they start to narrow in on who’s vulnerable and what kinds of behaviors are vulnerable.

Tiffany: Yeah. I think once you get past the Oxford study in 2019, you’re at a point where you’re saying it’s not yes or no, and we’re done talking about screens. That’s pointless. Let’s talk specifically about social media, and let’s pull the data out into more specific segments so that we can be talking about specific populations, because it’s also a waste of our time to say, Screens do X to everyone all the time.

Rosin: Okay, so you and I have had this really lovely clarifying academic discussion, but the world doesn’t necessarily have patience for our lovely little academic discussion, because there is this growing urgency for regulatory or legislative intervention, and it’s kind of becoming hard to resist.

Tiffany: Yeah, so I think the question of, like, regulatory or legislative intervention has been much more urgent and frequently asked in the last couple of years, since the Facebook files were leaked by Frances Haugen. To time stamp, this was in the fall of 2021. Frances Haugen, who was an employee at Facebook, leaked a huge batch of documents from the company to a bunch of journalists. And in the Facebook files, the most dramatic revelation was this collection of slides presenting internal research that Facebook had done where teen girls expressly said, Instagram makes me feel bad about myself or causes all of these problems for me in my emotional life.

And the thing that was sort of missing from a lot of the conversation around those slides was that they were conducted not scientifically, like admittedly not scientifically, not for scientific purposes. So there’s a pretty big contrast between that and the sort of like decades of studies proving that cigarettes cause cancer.

But the takeaway from the Frances Haugen leak was that meme of, like, “Facebook knew”—like, Facebook knew it was doing this.

And so that was kind of transitioned quite smoothly and quickly into this comparison to Big Tobacco, which is super common now.

And I get why people use these metaphors. I just, like, worry about how literal people take them sometimes, because cigarettes do not have societal benefits and people died horrifically of lung cancer. That is simply not the same thing as the questions that we have about social media.

Like, tobacco is bad for everyone. Full stop. If you smoke cigarettes, that’s bad for you, and there’s no debate about that. And social media can be bad for some people in certain circumstances, but it also would be pretty ridiculous, I think, to argue that it has no benefits whatsoever.

Rosin: Right.

Tiffany: And it’s not as simple as saying: “Drop the cigarette; it’s gonna kill you.”

Rosin: Mm, this is so helpful. I already understand so much more than I did, you know, half an hour ago when we started this conversation. For me, this is important and satisfying because almost everything I read in the popular media, like, nothing feels specific enough to me. So that’s basically what I’m looking for. It’s, like, Oh, we’re about to enter this era where we’re gonna haul people up to the Hill and make all this legislation.

But before I know how to think about all that legislation or if I think it’s the right thing to do, or not the right thing to do, I just feel like I need to understand a little better what the problem is and, like, who, who we’re targeting and what the research shows and just understand it a little better.

Tiffany: Yeah, definitely. If there are big policy changes now, it will be hard to, first of all, prove what kind of effect they have and, second of all, reverse them if they don’t work. So, the stakes are really high; we should definitely figure out what we’re doing.

Rosin: Okay, that brings us to now. So let’s you and I do it. Let’s get into specifics. What concrete things do researchers actually know? And what directions are they pointing in now?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think there are still questions that remain to be answered, and hopefully some of those will come as we’ve had more time to do, like, longer studies. There’s one that’s being done right now that started in 2016 that’s looking at the same group over a period of 10 years. So you can maybe identify specifically cause and effect, but there’s been some smaller-scale ones that I think pretty convincingly prove that there are these windows of acute vulnerability for teenagers, and specifically for young girls between 11 and 13 and boys between 14 and 15.

But for girls it’s even more apparent, and there are pretty clear relations between specific mental-health outcomes. So as social-media use goes up, the satisfaction in their appearance goes sharply down, in a study that came out last year. So those things are starting to be repeated more clearly, which also gives important clues as to the mechanisms of how social-media use would affect somebody’s mental health, because, like, in that case, that’s obviously an issue of, like, of body image and social comparison, which is about the platform itself.

Whereas, you know, some other studies have wondered, maybe it’s not anything that they’re doing online. Maybe it’s just the fact that being on your phone means that you sleep less or go outside less, or hang out with your friends in person less. So if that’s the case, you know, that becomes maybe more of an issue of parenting than if it is specifically about the content they’re being served or about the sort of basic structure of the app. Like, that’s really good to know and is important to act on. I think it is obviously still difficult to say, like, “What are you gonna do about the fact that Instagram makes girls feel bad about the way that they look?” That’s a pretty broad problem with a lot of cultural history and baggage, but it’s at least, like, something to focus on.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. It’s funny; a lot of this is, like, it sort of ends up in a commonsense realm.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: I have my parent hat [on] now. So, like everything else, it requires knowing the child, and, whether it’s a teacher who knows the child or a parent or friends, it’s like there are young girls whose brains are still developing, who are just past puberty, who are maybe self-conscious, and social media can exacerbate, it sounds like, existing dynamics that girls have struggled with forever.

And so if you know that there’s a kid who’s just especially vulnerable to those dynamics, and let’s say you notice them up all night or not sleeping or really fixated on these things.

Tiffany: Yeah, I think that’s right.

Rosin: Like, as a parent, I’ve definitely had the instinct of, like, Get off your damn phone. But it seems like if you’re actually looking for vulnerability, it’s a little more precise than that.

Tiffany: Yeah. And I think it sounds kind of hokey to be, like, “Just talk to your kids.” But these do seem to be things that kids are pretty articulate about.

Rosin: Mm-hmm. So the dynamics they’re talking about with young girls, are they just the dynamics of time immemorial? Like do they ever get into, you know, is it scrolling that’s the problem? Is it scrolling for X number of hours? Is it your close friends, or is it looking at pictures of the Kardashians?

Like, what have they ever, like, homed in on sort of, what is the behavior that leaves you feeling vulnerable? Like, is it passive or active? Is it posting pictures or just looking at other people’s pictures?

Tiffany: Yeah, there was a period where there was a lot of interest in that distinction between active and passive use: people sort of arguing that there might be a difference in terms of how social media affects you, whether you’re actively messaging people and posting stuff. And that might be good, whereas passively scrolling and, you know, just seeing things that make you feel bad would be worse.

But it kind of came down to these aren’t meaningful distinctions, because there’s good active use and there’s destructive active use and there’s good passive use. You know, I spend a lot of time scrolling on my phone, because I am reading The Atlantic, which is passive use, of my phone.

And there’s bad passive use, which would be like when you’re scrolling and you don’t know why and you didn’t wanna be, and it makes you feel bad.

Rosin: Got it. So it’s not as mechanistic as what you are doing. What matters is who you are at the moment that you’re doing it, and what your orientation towards it is. Like, if you happen to be in a moment of distress and you’re in a certain age, it doesn’t matter if you’re using it actively or passively; social media is gonna amplify your distress.

Tiffany: Yeah, and there’s been some more recent research that suggests that it could matter how you think about social media as well. So if you feel like social media is fun—it’s where I connect with my friends; I use it for the X reason and then I stop using it, because I’m in control—like, in those situations it can be related to positive outcomes, as opposed to negative outcomes.

Negative outcomes are more tied to feeling, like, I have no control over this and I’m spending so much time doing it and I don’t want to be.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay. That’s important too. So that is, that’s actually, there’s another parenting lesson in there. If you can somehow orient your kid towards a feeling of control, like, Use this in a way that benefits you and don’t let it use you. Again, very commonsensical, but maybe that’s—that gives you another tool, like, I’m not just yelling at you because you’re on your phone. I’m trying to understand how you are orienting yourself and managing the time that you’re on your phone and whether it’s serving you or it’s making you feel worse.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: Yeah. So despite the research being incomplete and the questions being thorny and philosophical, there are going to be things proposed. So what do you know about the things that have already been proposed?

Tiffany: So there are state laws that have been passed or proposed in many states already that would make it so that minors can’t be on social media without parental permission.

Rosin: That’s age-gating, right?

Tiffany: That’s the age-gating solution, yeah, that a lot of pundits have been sort of advocating for, for the past couple of years, including Frances Haugen. I think those will face a lot of challenges, including, like, in enforceability and just, like, First Amendment issues. A lot of free-speech-issue groups would say that it’s not productive to just prohibit young people from speaking in public.

I think just, like, personally, it just seems very punitive, even if that’s not how people, like, mean it to come off to kids. Like, how else are they gonna receive it? And it’s just a more dramatic measure than I think people are giving credit for. Because you can say, like, “Hey, well, we age-gate other things.You can’t drive until X age. You can’t drink until X age. Why not say you can’t have an Instagram until X age?” But you are in effect yanking something away from millions of teenagers, some of whom might be like really, I don't know, emotionally dependent on it. Or even just like creatively dependent or like really enjoy using it and it’s not harming them.

And it, it just seems really—it’s really dramatic and really abrupt and something that should only be considered if there’s, like, absolutely a rock-solid evidence base in my opinion.

Rosin: Interesting. I also don’t know how you would measure this at all, but it does create a sense of distrust between generations, because you could make the argument as a parent that smoking is inherently bad. You can’t smoke as a kid. Drinking is, you know, you’re just not ready to drink; you’re not ready to drive a car.

But I, but I don’t know that a kid would fully get on board with the idea that you’re not ready to use any social media at all. Like, they could understand, okay, there are some dangers out there and we should talk about it and sort of watch for vulnerabilities, but like, an N-O? I don’t know.

Tiffany: Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Rosin: Yeah. Okay, so is there, are there other proposals that you’ve seen that seem interesting or dangerous?

Tiffany: Yeah, I think the FTC is trying to, like, be a bit more creative about how to limit Facebook and Instagram’s ability to profit off of targeted advertising towards teens, which some people would maybe think of as being productive, because it eliminates a little bit of their profit motive to keep teens on the app all the time.

You know, I’m pro-privacy. I think that’s a good idea. It’s pretty complicated in that it’s not just about what Facebook does, but yeah. I mean, I think that’s a good thing to aim for for sure.

Rosin: Now, how would that address the original problem we discussed, which is depression?

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: Like, I feel like a lot of this is sort of like setting up a, a kind of, like, Rein those guys in. But the problem we started out with was that social media was making kids distressed.

Tiffany: Yeah. I guess this gets at why it’s so important for the research to identify the specific problems and the specific mechanisms, because, like, if the main way that social media is causing depression or anxiety in teens is because it’s preventing them from getting enough sleep and it’s preventing them from seeing their friends in public, just purely hypothetically, like then what you could, like, deduce from that is that, like, okay, maybe these products are just too addictive, and our kids are being sort of coerced into staying on them for too long.

And it’s not about the content; it’s just about purely how much time they’re taking away from things that make them happier and healthier. So in that situation, it’s a little bit more obvious why reducing Instagram’s incentive to, like, keep kids on the app and to, you know, get more data from them that they can monetize and serve them more ads, like, Instagram would be more incentivized to focus on adults and not serve as many ads to kids. And, and you know, personally I don’t think, like, Instagram is just, like, ruthlessly driven to extract all monetary value from children. Even as, again, I don’t wanna be in the position of, like, defending a corporation, but that’s sort of the logic and that’s sort of the reason why you have to get more specific.

And if the answer is that the main way that Instagram causes depression is through negative social comparison and like poor body image instigated by seeing all of these images of models, like, no, probably privacy protection isn’t gonna solve that problem. We’d have to come up with something else.

Rosin: You know, we talked about this; it’s hard to talk about, but like, we get stuck in a moment or sort of, like, in the same way we get stuck in a musical moment. We get stuck in a kind of social-media moment.

And meanwhile, like, people have moved along. They’re using different platforms; they’re kind of navigating it much more deftly, say, than the generation or even the two years before them.

Tiffany: Yeah, I always sort of, like, marvel at my younger sister’s levels of adjustment and happiness. But, I guess, I mean, this is not scientific at all. This is just like a personal pet theory based on nothing except anecdotal experience, but, like, they are a little bit more squarely in this demographic of concern. I think two of them would be considered Gen Z? And my understanding from, from watching them or talking to them is, like, they really experienced very little strife around social media because it felt pretty natural to them, you know? They post goofy—like, ugly, sometimes—pictures of themselves. And, you know, that’s, like, funny and fun for them. I sometimes wonder if there is, like. a kind of narrow band of people, like maybe around my age or a little bit younger, who were forced to adapt to these things in real time, in the middle of puberty, which made it maybe more fraught than if you had just always thought of Instagram as something that existed and something that you were gonna one day use.

Rosin: You know, that is such a good point. It’s anecdotal, of course, but we do talk about his research as if these teenagers are fixed in time. Like there was only this one band of teenagers, but maybe they got the onslaught and then as time went on, people got more adjusted. Like, they themselves changed and maybe caught up with things.

So maybe the teenagers we’re legislating for are not the same teenagers we studied. And the problems of the earlier set of young people, they just might not be the same as the problems of teenagers now.

Tiffany: Yeah, because, like, I did have a lot of anxiety around Instagram in my early 20s when I first had it, and have gone through periods like, you know, during breakups where Instagram is like absolutely a toxic minefield for me in many ways, including, like, all of the body-image stuff we’ve been talking about. But, but I—I sometimes do, yeah, just think like, Huh, maybe there’s something about, like, kind of always having this and sort of deciding how to use it yourself and just be like, “Well, it exists; it’s part of life.”

Rosin: Yeah, no, I mean, there’s a, there’s actually a really good lesson in there, because what you’re describing about your sisters is they use it; like, it exists. They know the name of it; their older sister used it. Lots of people use it. It’s not this new, crazy thing.

And so they just do with it what they want, you know? And they kind of like make it work for them. Like, every once in a while it’s gonna get you down, but if you can use it how you wanna use it, then sure, why not?

Like, it must seem absolutely absurd. These discussions about, like, End it tomorrow. It’s like, why? You know, I’m just posting dumb pictures of my friends.

Tiffany: Yeah.

Rosin: You know, at so many stages of this, I’ve just wanted to push it away and not think about it. But the truth is, like, the depression rates keep rising. Like, there is something at the heart of this. I don’t know that we’ve made all the connections properly yet, but there is something there that we should keep paying attention to. What do you think the next few years are gonna look like? Like, what’s the best-case and worst-case scenario for how we rein this in, now that the surgeon general has said, “Time to do something about it”? Like, I bet if you look back in history, it’s like, the surgeon general issues a report, it’s a symbolic moment, and the culture around things changes. What is the best case and worst case for social media?

Tiffany: I think worst case would be what we were talking about, just really dramatic measures like a blanket age-gate that isn’t based in evidence and there’s kind of no way to undo it and no way to see what effect it has for 10 years. I think that's the worst-case scenario.

I think best-case scenario would be kind of where we are, like, watching people sort of chip away at the problem, find these specific places where we can intervene, whether that’s educating teenagers, educating parents, or whether it’s putting pressure on Facebook to do things like share data with researchers, which they can be pretty stingy about.

I think, like, that would be really productive. I think, like, part of the issue that we keep running into with this is that there’s not, like, a great headline and there’s not a silver bullet. So it is sort of just, like, the boring answer of like, Well, we need to keep learning, you know?

Rosin: Right. That would be the sexy Atlantic headline.

Tiffany: Yeah. Real nerds here.

Rosin: It would be like, Let’s figure out how social media is affecting the mental health of teenagers and put into place small measures to ameliorate it.

Tiffany: Right?

Rosin: I would totally, totally read that article.

Tiffany: Yeah. And start over from scratch in two years, once we are no longer even using any of these platforms we’ve been talking about.

Rosin: Right. That’s the subhead.