The firm is struggling to stop climate misinformation spreading on its platform, BBC investigation finds.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What do you think about the Supreme Court decision in this term’s affirmative-action cases?

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com

Conversations of Note

The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the use of race in admissions at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina was released today. Here’s an excerpt from Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion:

The entire point of the Equal Protection Clause is that treating someone differently because of their skin color is not like treating them differently because they are from a city or from a suburb, or because they play the violin poorly or well. “One of the principal reasons race is treated as a forbidden classification is that it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit and essential qualities.” But when a university admits students “on the basis of race, it engages in the offensive and demeaning assumption that [students] of a particular race, because of their race, think alike … at the very least alike in the sense of being different from nonminority students. In doing so, the university furthers “stereotypes that treat individuals as the product of their race, evaluating their thoughts and efforts—their very worth as citizens—according to a criterion barred to the Government by history and the Constitution” …

While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is “inherently unequal,” said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.

And here is an excerpt from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment enshrines a guarantee of racial equality. The Court long ago concluded that this guarantee can be enforced through race-conscious means in a society that is not, and has never been, colorblind …

Today, the Court concludes that indifference to race is the only constitutionally permissible means to achieve racial equality in college admissions. That interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not only contrary to precedent and the entire teachings of our history, but is also grounded in the illusion that racial inequality was a problem of a different generation. Entrenched racial inequality remains a reality today. That is true for society writ large and, more specifically, for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC), two institutions with a long history of racial exclusion. Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal. What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality …

Society remains highly segregated … Moreover, underrepresented minority students are more likely to live in poverty and attend schools with a high concentration of poverty … In turn, underrepresented minorities are more likely to attend schools with less qualified teachers, less challenging curricula, lower standardized test scores, and fewer extracurricular activities and advanced placement courses. It is thus unsurprising that there are achievement gaps along racial lines, even after controlling for income differences …

Students of color, particularly Black students, are disproportionately disciplined or suspended, interrupting their academic progress and increasing their risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. Underrepresented minorities are less likely to have parents with a postsecondary education who may be familiar with the college application process. Further, low-income children of color are less likely to attend preschool and other early childhood education programs that increase educational attainment. All of these interlocked factors place underrepresented minorities multiple steps behind the starting line in the race for college admissions.

Don’t Break Up With Your Friends

Here at The Atlantic, Olga Khazan describes a pattern she has noticed in multiple female friendships:

First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.

Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”

What’s more, she writes, “advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for ‘how to break up with a friend,’ as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend ‘you don’t have the capacity to invest’ in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.”

Khazan argues for a different approach:

You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends … The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.

American Spoilsports

In an attempt to attract a younger fan base, professional sports leagues are touting their commitments to social justice. Ethan Strauss argues that the attendant politicization carries a cost:

America is composed of many societies and cultures. Among these cultures is a cohort of people who believe that sports serve a higher purpose, if not a massively important societal function. Kenny Chesney’s red state-rooted song “The Boys of Fall” is a good example. It’s an ode to football, from the high school level on up, that’s deeply emotional and totally without irony.

This game really matters to a lot of people, even if the New York Times so often portrays it in a negative light. As is true of sports generally, it binds the young to the old, and directs men, especially, towards a form of combat engagement that doesn’t raze cities. It’s a spiritual experience, an endeavor with almost mystical properties.

Back before sports became a massive industry, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens, his famous work on the importance of “play” in culture generation. In it, Huizinga coined the term “magic circle” to describe the space where we suspend normal rules in favor of a temporary artificial reality, e.g. a game. In Huizinga’s construction, we are under a spell when participating in this reality. Those who break the spell are called “spoil-sports,” a term that’s endured to this day. From Homo Ludens:

The spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion — a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusion, illudere or inludere). Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.

In bringing politics to the magic circle, the leagues themselves have become spoil-sports, breaking the spell over certain fans.

More Money, More Problems

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok tries to explain why many people think that it was easier for families to thrive in bygone generations, even though the economic data say otherwise. He notes nostalgia and the effects of social media, but focuses on the value of time, drawing on a theory expressed by Staffan Burenstam Linder in The Harried Leisure Class.

Tabarrok writes:

Real GDP per capita has doubled since the early 1980s but there are still only 24 hours in a day. How do consumers respond to all that increased wealth and no additional time? By focusing consumption on goods that are cheap to consume in time. We consume “fast food,” we choose to watch television or movies “on demand,” rather than read books or go to plays or live music performances. We consume multiple goods at the same time as when we eat and watch, talk and drive, and exercise and listen. And we manage, schedule and control our time more carefully with time planners, “to do” lists and calendaring.

That can be difficult:

Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.

So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs. It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption requires a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively.

It feels hard.

Covering similar terrain, Matthew Yglesias argues that “if you want a genuine 1950s lifestyle today, you can probably afford it.” He explains:

Middle-class people from the past were poor by our standards. In 1950, the average new single-family home was 983 square feet. If you’re willing to live someplace unfashionable like Cleveland, I can find you a 1,346-square-foot, three-bedroom house for $189,900. That’s an estimated monthly payment of $1,382 per month or $16,584 per year. Let’s say you’re living by the rule of thumb that says housing should be 30% of your annual income. Well, that pencils out to $55,280 per year. Is that out of reach for the modern Ohioan? The BLS says the mean wage for all occupations in the Cleveland metro area is $59,530. There’s no all-occupations median, unfortunately. But for postal service clerks, the median is $56,200. Suppose you know a skilled trade and you can apply for this mechanic job at the airport that pays $32/hour. That’s north of $60k per year.

So what about child care? Summer camp? All that Baumol stuff? Well, it doesn’t matter, because you’re thriving 1950s-style and your wife takes care of all that. People think it’s weird that you guys only have one car, but that’s the ‘50s for you. It’s a 27-minute commute to your job at the airport by metro. You’re four blocks from the elementary school and two blocks from the playground, so mom and the kids are fine to be carless if you need it for the day, and it’s only a 25-minute walk to the shopping center at Kamm’s Corners.

Of course with three kids and a modest income, you’re not taking vacations by airplane or dining out much, but 1950s people didn’t do that either … For $80 you can get a television with a bigger screen and better resolution than what RCA was selling for $400 in 1965.

Provocation of the Week

In Liberties, James Kirchick argues that an important figure in the struggle for gay rights doesn’t get his due:

While Stonewall was the birthplace of gay liberation, the movement for gay civic equality had begun much earlier. After some fizzling starts in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the early 1950’s, the effort found its footing in the more staid precincts of Washington, D.C. The leaders of this cause may not have been “revolting” drag queens, but they were revolutionaries, of a sort.

The central figure was a Harvard-trained astronomer named Franklin E. Kameny. In 1957, Kameny was fired from his job with the Army Map Service on account of his homosexuality. Thousands of people had already been terminated on such grounds, but Kameny was the first to challenge his dismissal, a decision that would, in the words of the legal scholar William Eskridge, eventually make him “the Rosa Parks and the Martin Luther King and the Thurgood Marshall of the gay rights movement.’” In 1960, Kameny appealed to the Supreme Court to restore his job. The petition that he wrote invoked the noblest aspirations of the American founding: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To the government’s claim that his firing was justified on account of its right to prohibit those engaged in “immoral” conduct, Kameny replied with what was, for its time, a radical, even scandalous, retort: “Petitioner asserts, flatly, unequivocally, and absolutely uncompromisingly, that homosexuality, whether by mere inclination or by overt act, is not only not immoral, but that, for those choosing voluntarily to engage in homosexual acts, such acts are moral in a real and positive sense, and are good, right, and desirable, socially and personally.” He continued: “In their being nothing more than a reflection of ancient primitive, archaic, obsolete taboos and prejudices, the policies are an incongruous, anachronistic relic of the Stone Age carried over into the Space Age—and a harmful relic!”

Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, Kameny expressed his outrage at being treated as a “second-rate citizen,” and like the leaders of that heroic struggle he appealed to America’s revolutionary founding document for redress:

We may commence with the Declaration of Independence, and its affirmation, as an “inalienable right,” that of “the pursuit of happiness.” Surely a most fundamental, unobjectionable, and unexceptionable element in human happiness is the right to bestow affection upon, and to receive affection from whom one wishes. Yet, upon pain of severe penalty, the government itself would abridge this right for the homosexual.

Kameny’s arguments may have been revolutionary, but his goals were not. He had no desire to overturn the American government; he just wanted it to live up to its self-proclaimed principles. When his appeal to the Supreme Court was denied, Kameny founded the first sustained organization in the United States to represent the interests of “homophiles” (as some gays called themselves at the time), the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., in which capacity he led peaceful protests, wrote letters to every member of Congress, and engaged in public awareness campaigns. In 1965 — four years before Stonewall — Kameny organized the first picket for gay rights outside the White House. Men were required to wear jackets and ties; women, blouses and skirts reaching below the knee. “If you’re asking for equal employment rights,” he instructed his nine comrades, “look employable.” Eight years later, he played a crucial role in lobbying the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its register of mental disorders.

To the younger and more militant gay liberationists of New York and San Francisco, Kameny’s dedication to liberal reform reeked of assimilationism. Many of them came to view Kameny with contempt, speaking of him in the same tones with which black nationalists derided Martin Luther King, Jr. With his fussy dress codes, his carefully typewritten letters, and his veneration of the Constitution, Kameny was a practitioner of dreaded “respectability politics,” which for radicals (then and now) has been the great scourge of American liberalism. But Kameny was no conformist. In his petition in 1960, he declared:

These entire proceedings, from the Civil Service Commission regulation through its administration and the consequent adverse personnel actions, to respondents’ courtroom arguments, are a classic, textbook exercise in the imposition of conformity for the sake of nothing else than conformity, and of the rigorous suppression of dissent, difference, and non-conformity. There is no more reason or need for a citizen’s sexual tastes or habits to conform to those of the majority than there is for his gastronomic ones to do so, and there is certainly no rational basis for making his employment, whether private or by the government, contingent upon such conformity.

In 2015—fifty years after staging his picket outside the White House, and four years after his death at the age of eighty-six—Kameny was vindicated when the very Supreme Court that had refused to hear his case of wrongful termination ruled that the Constitution recognized the right of same-sex couples to marry.

That’s all for this week. A happy Fourth of July to my American readers. I’ll be on vacation next week, so I’ll see you all the week after that.

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First comes the spark of affinity at the group hang: You loved the Ferrante novels too? Then come the bottomless brunches, if you don’t have kids, or playground dates, if you do. Together, you and your new friend weave text threads scheduling coffee and reassuring each other that you’re being normal and that those other people are being crazy. Periodically, the heart emoji interjects.

Eventually, though, comes a minor affront, a misunderstanding, a misalignment—then another, and another. They’re all small things, of course, but like, she always does this. And then, all too often, comes what is known in therapy circles as the “giant block of text.”

“Some of my female clients are getting these—you’ve probably experienced this—massive paragraphs of text about things that they’re doing wrong or perceived slights,” Shannon Barrett, a licensed clinical social worker in Germantown, Maryland, told me recently.

I have experienced this. One massive paragraph informed me that I’m not texting my friend enough. (My excuse: I hate texting. Texting as an act of friendship, to me, is like invoicing as an act of love.) Another text block said I haven’t initiated enough hangouts. “I’m doing the best that I can,” I wrote back, guilty, flummoxed, a synchronized diver who belly flopped.

[Read: The six forces that fuel friendship]

Some therapists have the sense these types of friendship performance reviews are becoming more common, but there’s no way to know if that’s true. Friendship, in general, is less common: People are spending much less time with friends than before, and the surgeon general now calls loneliness an “epidemic.” In past eras, friendship seemed much more intense, judging by the florid letters Victorians wrote to their pals: “The divine magnet is in you,” Herman Melville once gushed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “and my magnet responds.” These days, you’d be lucky to get a “slay, queen.”

Nevertheless, advice is proliferating on how to aggressively confront, or even abandon, friends who disappoint us. Online guides abound for “how to break up with a friend,” as though the struggle is in what to say, rather than whether to do it. One TikTok therapist suggested that you tell your erstwhile friend “you don’t have the capacity to invest” in the friendship any longer, like you’re a frazzled broker and they’re a fading stock. The massive paragraph of text, though not a friend breakup per se, often reads like one—and leads to one.

Psychologists tell me there is a kinder, more realistic way to maneuver through a friendship that’s lacking in some area. You don’t need a guide for breaking up with your friends, because you don’t need to break up with your friends. You just need to make more friends.

Of course, it’s reasonable to hold a friendship to certain expectations. Most people have, if not standards, then at least a wish list for their friends, of qualities that differentiate them from strangers. The University of Kansas communication professor Jeffrey Hall has broken these expectations into six categories: First, there’s “genuine positive regard,” or the idea that the other person likes you for who you are. Second, there’s “self-disclosure,” or a feeling of freedom to discuss personal topics. Third, there’s “instrumental aid,” which is a friend’s willingness to help you move, say, or to provide other kinds of tangible support. Fourth, there’s “similarity,” or seeing the world in a like-minded way. Fifth, there’s “enjoyment,” or having fun in each others’ company—feeling that the conversation is easy and entertaining. Finally, there’s a strange category called “agency,” which presumes that it’s nice when your friends are rich and powerful—people who can help you find a job, or let you stay in their summer house. (Hall has found that women tend to expect more of their friends in the realms of positive regard and self-disclosure, whereas men tend to expect slightly more by way of agency.)

The problem is that few people state their expectations directly. More typically, “you’re building the expectations as you do it,” Hall told me. You write the rules of the friendship as the friendship unfolds: You tell your friend a secret, and they prove trustworthy, so next time, you tell them another. You don’t say outright that your level of self-disclosure is high.

This reminded me of one woman I interviewed whose best friend had forgotten her birthday, a lapse that led to an unmendable fight. Now she still occasionally picks up her phone to text the friend, then thinks better of it. As we spoke, I realized that I haven’t wished some of my friends a happy birthday in years, and I don’t usually hear from them on my birthday either. We never established the birthday expectation.

This nebulousness is precisely what makes friendship so enchanting—and exasperating. We find ourselves depending on people who didn’t know they were being depended upon. And because friendships are voluntary and fluid, “you may ultimately doom the relationship by calling somebody out on their failures,” Hall said.

[From the March 2022 issue: It’s your friends who break your heart]

The other problem is that few people meet all these expectations organically, no matter how badly we might want them to. We can’t always wring all six friendship duties out of one person. In dialing up the pressure on a best friend, you risk ignoring the casual connections that can provide camaraderie or sympathy just as well. Rather than resting on one pillar, healthy friendship is better imagined as crowd-surfing—many hands holding you up.

I lose sight of this myself sometimes. I have one older, mentor-type friend whom I talk with most days, and he recently questioned one of my life choices. I was startled by how much it hurt; it felt like being rejected by a parent. If his wasn’t the only opinion I ever solicited, I might have seen it as a stray thought rather than the last word. Roaming my neighborhood in tears, I called a different friend, the friend I call when I get upset—who I now realize is the only friend I call when I get upset. I’m not sure what I’ll do if she’s ever unavailable.

What many experts recommend instead is to ease up on your one or two closest friends and befriend people who can do whatever it is your besties are failing at. The resounding chorus from everyone I interviewed was that no one person can fulfill all of your needs. Some friends are good listeners, some invite you on fun trips. The person you call in a crisis might not be the one who tells the best jokes at happy hour.

Of course, if a friend disappoints you, you should first try communicating, ideally in the counseling-approved “I felt Y when you X” cadence. Relationships, including friendships, tend to be healthier when people address issues, rather than skirt them or store them up, writes the psychologist Marisa Franco in her book, Platonic.

But even if you communicate with the dexterity of a hostage negotiator, some people are not going to do what you want. A chronically late person might never be on time, no matter how many feelings conversations they’re subjected to. If we “recognize this person might not be in a position to meet that need, we can then take steps to go out and build new connections with people who can,” says Miriam Kirmayer, a clinical psychologist who specializes in friendship.

That doesn’t mean letting go of the friend who let you down, though. You can find the person who will remember your birthday, and still enjoy everything else about the birthday forgetter. “Not only does that allow us to then meet this need that we have; potentially, it also will allow us to be less bothered by the moments where a friend disappoints us or doesn’t act in the way that we really want them to,” Kirmayer told me. It’s worth also considering, she added, what the disappointing friend has done for you lately—maybe they didn’t call when you had surgery, but they sent a meal.

Friendship requires stamina, writes Sheila Liming in her recent book Hanging Out, but the pace of modern life is better suited to bailing. “Enthusiasm and ardor get kindled quickly, but so do dislike and dismissal,” she writes. “As a result, we make a habit of turning away from all the things and people and encounters that bother, confuse, or tax us. We abandon them, comforting ourselves with excuses about how they’re not worth our time anyway.”

You might feel relieved, in the moment, to cut out a person who’s upset you, in the same way that any final decision provides a sweet release from dissonance. “We tend to think about our relationships as all or nothing,” Kirmayer said. “Either they’re my best friend or we’re not close at all.” But people are messier than that, and relationships blurrier.

It’s, in fact, normal to downgrade and upgrade friends over time—and without spelling out that you’re doing so. (In You Will Find Your People, the writer Lane Moore calls this “leveling up” and “leveling down” your friends.) This kind of reshuffling isn’t always prompted by a friend’s faux pas—it can happen because your friend had a baby, or moved, or got busy. Some friends dwell for a while in a gray area, sort of mad at each other but also meeting up regularly. “Sometimes, we have to let things be long and loose in order for them to pass through a crucial point of conflict and then get good again,” Liming writes.

Even the most passionate friendships can ebb with age and distance. In his “divine magnet” letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville brims with ardor for his friend and, at the time, neighbor. “Whence come you, Hawthorne?” he writes. “By what right do you drink from my flagon of life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine.” (His word choice has prompted historians to wonder whether the two men were perhaps more than friends.) Melville’s bond with Hawthorne influenced his writing of Moby-Dick, and Melville dedicated the book to him, “In Token of My Admiration for his Genius.” He told his friend that “knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”

A few days after receiving that letter, however, Hawthorne moved away, and the two corresponded less frequently. They still visited each other, taking long walks and talking of “Providence and futurity,” but they grew apart. By the time Hawthorne died in 1864, they hadn’t seen each other in seven years. Their friendship—“this infinite fraternity of feeling”—had naturally dimmed. But its glory lives on.

In the beginning, the chatbots and their ilk fed on the human-made internet. Various generative-AI models of the sort that power ChatGPT got their start by devouring data from sites including Wikipedia, Getty, and Scribd. They consumed text, images, and other content, learning through algorithmic digestion their flavors and texture, which ingredients go well together and which do not, in order to concoct their own art and writing. But this feast only whet their appetite.

Generative AI is utterly reliant on the sustenance it gets from the web: Computers mime intelligence by processing almost unfathomable amounts of data and deriving patterns from them. ChatGPT can write a passable high-school essay because it has read libraries’ worth of digitized books and articles, while DALL-E 2 can produce Picasso-esque images because it has analyzed something like the entire trajectory of art history. The more they train on, the smarter they appear.

Eventually, these programs will have ingested almost every human-made bit of digital material. And they are already being used to engorge the web with their own machine-made content, which will only continue to proliferate—across TikTok and Instagram, on the sites of media outlets and retailers, and even in academic experiments. To develop ever more advanced AI products, Big Tech might have no choice but to feed its programs AI-generated content, or just might not be able to sift human fodder from the synthetic—a potentially disastrous change in diet for both the models and the internet, according to researchers.

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

The problem with using AI output to train future AI is straightforward. Despite stunning advances, chatbots and other generative tools such as the image-making Midjourney and Stable Diffusion remain sometimes shockingly dysfunctional—their outputs filled with biases, falsehoods, and absurdities. “Those mistakes will migrate into” future iterations of the programs, Ilia Shumailov, a machine-learning researcher at Oxford University, told me. “If you imagine this happening over and over again, you will amplify errors over time.” In a recent study on this phenomenon, which has not been peer-reviewed, Shumailov and his co-authors describe the conclusion of those amplified errors as model collapse: “a degenerative process whereby, over time, models forget,” almost as if they were growing senile. (The authors originally called the phenomenon “model dementia,” but renamed it after receiving criticism for trivializing human dementia.)

Generative AI produces outputs that, based on its training data, are most probable. (For instance, ChatGPT will predict that, in a greeting, doing? is likely to follow how are you.) That means events that seem to be less probable, whether because of flaws in an algorithm or a training sample that doesn’t adequately reflect the real world—unconventional word choices, strange shapes, images of people with darker skin (melanin is often scant in image datasets)—will not show up as much in the model’s outputs, or will show up with deep flaws. Each successive AI trained on past AI would lose information on improbable events and compound those errors, Aditi Raghunathan, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told me. You are what you eat.

Recursive training could magnify bias and error, as previous research also suggests—chatbots trained on the writings of a racist chatbot, such as early versions of ChatGPT that racially profiled Muslim men as “terrorists,” would only become more prejudiced. And if taken to an extreme, such recursion would also degrade an AI model’s most basic functions. As each generation of AI misunderstands or forgets underrepresented concepts, it will become overconfident about what it does know. Eventually, what the machine deems “probable” will begin to look incoherent to humans, Nicolas Papernot, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto and one of Shumailov’s co-authors, told me.

The study tested how model collapse would play out in various AI programs—think GPT-2 trained on the outputs of GPT-1, GPT-3 on the outputs of GPT-2, GPT-4 on the outputs of GPT-3, and so on, until the nth generation. A model that started out producing a grid of numbers displayed an array of blurry zeroes after 20 generations; a model meant to sort data into two groups eventually lost the ability to distinguish between them at all, producing a single dot after 2,000 generations. The study provides a “nice, concrete way of demonstrating what happens” with such a data feedback loop, Raghunathan, who was not involved with the research, said. The AIs gobbled up one another’s outputs, and in turn one another, a sort of recursive cannibalism that left nothing of use or substance behind—these are not Shakespeare’s anthropophagi, or human-eaters, so much as mechanophagi of Silicon Valley’s design.

The language model they tested, too, completely broke down. The program at first fluently finished a sentence about English Gothic architecture, but after nine generations of learning from AI-generated data, it responded to the same prompt by spewing gibberish: “architecture. In addition to being home to some of the world’s largest populations of black @-@ tailed jackrabbits, white @-@ tailed jackrabbits, blue @-@ tailed jackrabbits, red @-@ tailed jackrabbits, yellow @-.” For a machine to create a functional map of a language and its meanings, it must plot every possible word, regardless of how common it is. “In language, you have to model the distribution of all possible words that may make up a sentence,” Papernot said. “Because there is a failure [to do so] over multiple generations of models, it converges to outputting nonsensical sequences.”

In other words, the programs could only spit back out a meaningless average—like a cassette that, after being copied enough times on a tape deck, sounds like static. As the science-fiction author Ted Chiang has written, if ChatGPT is a condensed version of the internet, akin to how a JPEG file compresses a photograph, then training future chatbots on ChatGPT’s output is “the digital equivalent of repeatedly making photocopies of photocopies in the old days. The image quality only gets worse.”

The risk of eventual model collapse does not mean the technology is worthless or fated to poison itself. Alex Dimakis, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-director of the National AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, pointed to privacy and copyright concerns as potential reasons to train AI on synthetic data. Consider medical applications: Using real patients’ medical information to train AI poses huge privacy violations that using representative synthetic records could bypass—say, by taking a collection of people’s records and using a computer program to generate a new dataset that, in the aggregate, contains the same information. To take another example, limited training material is available in rare languages, but a machine-learning program could produce permutations of what is available to augment the dataset.

[Read: ChatGPT is already obsolete]

The potential for AI-generated data to result in model collapse, then, emphasizes the need to curate training datasets. “Filtering is a whole research area right now,” Dimakis told me. “And we see it has a huge impact on the quality of the models”—given enough data, a program trained on a smaller amount of high-quality inputs can outperform a bloated one. Just as synthetic data aren’t inherently bad, “human-generated data is not a gold standard,” Ilia Shumailov said. “We need data that represents the underlying distribution well.” Human and machine outputs are just as likely to be misaligned with reality (many existing discriminatory AI products were trained on human creations). Researchers could potentially curate AI-generated data to alleviate bias and other problems, by training their models on more representative data. Using AI to generate text or images that counterbalance prejudice in existing datasets and computer programs, for instance, could provide a way to “potentially debias systems by using this controlled generation of data,” Aditi Raghunathan said.

A model that is shown to have dramatically collapsed to the extent that Shumailov and Papernot documented would never be released as a product, anyway. Of greater concern is the compounding of smaller, hard-to-detect biases and misperceptions—especially as machine-made content becomes harder, if not impossible, to distinguish from human creations. “I think the danger is really more when you train on the synthetic data and as a result have some flaws that are so subtle that our current evaluation pipelines do not capture them,” Raghunathan said. Gender bias in a résumé-screening tool, for instance, could in a subsequent generation of the program morph into more insidious forms. The chatbots might not eat themselves so much as leach undetectable traces of cybernetic lead that accumulate across the internet with time, poisoning not just their own food and water supply, but humanity’s.

Watercooler talk, polite jokes, grumbles about a demanding project: These are the mundane exchanges that grease the social wheels of a traditional 9-to-5 job. At best, they lend a pleasant sheen to the workday; at worst, they act as a mind-numbing refrain. But I Think You Should Leave, the hit Netflix sketch show whose third season recently debuted, regularly distorts this supposedly familiar environment, revealing an underside that is both strange and hilarious.

The series is the brainchild of Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin, who first met while writing for Saturday Night Live. Yet ITYSL doesn’t feel like an outgrowth of that sketch-comedy institution. It has little interest in releasing the awkward tension of any jokes; instead, they get escalated until they veer into the surreal. More often than not, premises focus on someone’s mounting anxiety—specifically the kind that stems from misunderstanding banal situations, such as a first date or a party—and the extremes they’ll pursue to escape that humiliation. There tends to be a lot of yelling.

Throughout ITYSL, the office has been a prime setting for unleashing uncomfortable characters who grate against unspoken social codes. “There’s so much built-in status and hierarchy” in a typical workplace, Kanin told The New Yorker in 2021. “And it’s a great place to be embarrassed.” Countless sketch and situational comedies, including SNL, The Kids in the Hall, and The Office, have explored the goofy possibilities of corporate dysfunction. The Office, in particular, mined co-worker tensions for relatable eye rolls, typically delivered through Jim’s exasperated glances at the camera. ITYSL is similarly interested in poking fun at eccentric colleagues, but it also finds new ways to call out the stale rules that everyone else is following.

Much of the third season touches on the absurdity of being hyper-professional. In one sketch, a group of accountants in a conference room is startled by a loud boom. After two team members share what the noise reminded them of—all reasonable aural connections, such as thunder or a truck backing into the building—Randall (played by Robinson) offers his take: “I thought it was like a volcano erupting.” Randall’s response is too strange for the lighthearted interaction, and his co-workers exchange confused glances in return. Professional settings mandate a level of composure that Randall can’t muster. Communication tends to hinge on mild language, recognizable clichés, or corporate buzzwords. Employees agree to a certain level of restraint to avoid standing out—in other words, to signal that they belong. But belonging can require conformity. As silly as invoking a volcano, ITYSL suggests, is being confined to wooden language that’s been arbitrarily deemed appropriate.

[Read: Long live the delightfully dumb comedy]

Fueling many of ITYSL’s office-based sketches is a character’s fierce desire and woeful inability to fit in, to grasp the implicit patter and patterns that are required to turn a group of acquaintances into a genuine—or at least functional—community. In one sketch, after an employee attending an HR training (Alison Martin) gets a few chuckles for a campy conflict-resolution joke (“Back away, banana breath!”), she takes the bit way too far, insisting that they create a T-shirt with her catchphrase. In another scene, Stan (Robinson) becomes overly invested in a team-training scenario that imagines he’s mortal enemies with his co-worker Rick (Bardia Salimi) and commits to awkwardly acting out his hatred. In each instance, the show explores how thin the line is between social acceptability and ostracization.

Randall, Stan, and others like them are clearly exaggerated examples of what not to do in the workplace. Yet they also expose the limits of professionalized behavior at a time when corporate platitudes seem to be infiltrating conversations outside of the office. The trend was reflected in a viral TikTok video from earlier this year advising viewers on how to break up with a friend, which drew flak on social media for the formal way it handled a personal matter. When our intimate relationships begin following the conventions of an HR meeting, we might lose opportunities for the kind of genuinely spontaneous connections that can be messy, emotive, and instructive. As much as I Think You Should Leave has become known for its comical extremes, the show’s most enduring message might be its subtlest: a reminder of both the risk and the joy of breaking free from a script.

Across the internet, a biological scapegoat has emerged for almost any mysterious medical symptom affecting women. Struggling with chronic fatigue, hair loss, brain fog, or dwindling sex drive? When no obvious explanation is at hand, an out-of-whack endocrine system must be to blame. Women have too much cortisol, vloggers and influencers say; or not enough thyroxine, or the wrong ratio of progesterone to estradiol. Social media is brimming with advice from self-proclaimed hormone “gurus” and health coaches; the tag #hormoneimbalance has racked up a staggering 950 million views on TikTok alone.

Now dozens of start-ups promise to diagnose these imbalances from the comfort of your home. All it takes is the prick of a finger, a urine sample, or a vial of spit. You mail your sample out to a lab or run the test right in your kitchen, no co-pay or doctor visit required. A few days later, you receive a slick lab report and in some cases, a customized treatment plan to alleviate the depression, the insomnia, the feeling of just being off.

Hormone imbalances can indeed contribute to an array of mental and physical symptoms, and hormone testing overseen by providers is a routine practice in medicine. Doing so remotely could theoretically improve women’s health and access to care. But despite their growing popularity and Amazon-like convenience, at-home hormone tests might cause more problems than they solve. Several women’s-health and hormone specialists told me that remote testing has long been useful for detecting pregnancy and tracking ovulation, but that few, if any, products now for sale have been consistently and rigorously proven to work for broader, newly advertised purposes. Testing kits are marketed as a way of helping women decipher puzzling symptoms or assess their fertility. But experts said that the technology—at least as it stands right now—is unreliable and could have the opposite effect, causing anxiety and confusion instead.

Mindy Christianson, an ob-gyn and the medical director of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, told me that in the best-case scenario, an accurate home hormone test would lead its users to seek out necessary medical care for real medical problems. That’s what happened to Chrissy Rice, a 38-year-old in Georgia. From 2018 to 2022, Rice experienced a racing heart, panic attacks, skin rashes, fatigue, and stomach pain—but her blood work and cardiac tests kept coming back normal. Her doctor chalked her symptoms up to anxiety and prescribed an anxiolytic medication. Rice wasn’t satisfied, so she skipped the meds and ordered a $249 women’s-health-testing kit from a company called Everlywell. The kit, which uses saliva and finger-prick sampling, claims to check for abnormal hormone levels that may be keeping women from “feeling their best.” When Rice’s results lit up with four abnormal readings, she was “honestly relieved,” she told me: It gave her confidence that her symptoms hadn’t all been in her head. When she brought the results to another provider, he ordered more tests and eventually diagnosed her with an autoimmune condition called Hashimoto’s, for which she’s since been treated.

[Read: No one really understands how to treat menopause]

Rice’s success story relied on a lot of things going right: The test correctly flagged that something about Rice’s body chemistry had gone awry. (In this case, #hormoneimbalance really did apply.) In response, Rice used her results to advocate for appropriate care from a trusted health provider. But not everyone is so lucky.

Tests like the one Rice took rely on processes that have not yet been rigorously validated in clinical trials. Where traditional hormone testing involves in-person blood draws followed by a highly sensitive and specific process called liquid chromatography–tandem mass spectrometry, home tests typically use dried urine, dried blood, or saliva sampling and a variety of techniques for measuring what’s in those samples. Women have, of course, been peeing on pregnancy-testing sticks since the 1980s. But these tests work well because the target hormone is present at relatively high levels, and should be found only during pregnancy. By contrast, hormones such as estradiol, testosterone, and progesterone—which are commonly targeted by this new wave of start-ups’ tests—regularly circulate throughout the body during various stages of a woman’s life, and are far trickier to measure using the low-volume samples involved in dried urine, dried blood, and saliva tests.

A handful of small studies from the past three decades (many of which are funded by direct-to-consumer testing companies or conducted by their employees) suggest that these methods may be accurate. Jennifer Conti, an ob-gyn physician and professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine who advises the home-hormone-testing start-up Modern Fertility, told me that the company’s internal data, especially a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2019, convinced her that its technology was useful for consumers who want to make more informed family-planning decisions. “But this idea that at-home testing is a godsend is not true,” Conti said. “It’s something that can be very helpful right now for a certain population of people to open the door and start a conversation.”

[Read: Can genetic counselors keep up with 23andMe?]

Other experts still aren’t confident that the tests are worthwhile. I asked Andrea Dunaif, a professor and specialist in endocrinology and women’s health at Mount Sinai, and Hershel Raff, an endocrinology and molecular-medicine expert at the Medical College of Wisconsin, to review the 2019 study. According to the study’s authors, their findings suggest that Modern Fertility’s finger-stick testing methods can be used interchangeably with traditional blood draws to measure fertility-related hormones. But Dunaif and Raff pointed out a laundry list of methodological issues that they argue limit the power of the findings: The type of assay used isn’t accurate for determining testosterone or estradiol levels in women. Researchers didn’t use appropriate hormone-level ranges to test accuracy. Samples were analyzed within 48 hours—a timeline that doesn’t match up with real-world shipping. (Current leadership and members of Modern Fertility’s clinical-research team declined multiple requests for comment. But Erin Burke, a clinical researcher who co-authored the study and is no longer working for Modern Fertility, said she stands by the data. She told me that the team’s work shows that these testing methods are accurate and precise.)

Although many experts see minimal data to support their use, at-home tests can still be sold on account of a regulatory loophole: The FDA does not typically review what it calls “low risk general wellness” products before they hit the market. Some endocrinologists advise looking for home hormone tests with a certification from the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments program (which is legally required for every direct-to-consumer testing company) or the College of American Pathologists, both of which ensure that a company’s labs maintain certain quality standards and undergo regular inspections. But Dunaif told me the certifications don’t guarantee precise results. She would never recommend that consumers use a currently available product for testing women’s sex steroid hormones remotely, she said, arguing that people will waste money and likely get information that is either “falsely reassuring or falsely distressing.” (Dunaif recently consulted for Quest Diagnostics, a large clinical-lab chain that doesn’t offer home hormone tests.)

Charlotte, a New Jersey woman in her mid-30s, experienced the muddle of uncertain results firsthand. (I’m identifying her by only her first name to protect her medical privacy.) In 2021, Charlotte ordered a hormone panel from Modern Fertility after she began experiencing irregular periods. Her results showed an abnormally high level of prolactin, a hormone involved in ovulation and lactation, which made her think she might be infertile. Charlotte spent days scouring the internet for information while she waited to discuss the results with her doctor. When she finally showed her ob-gyn the Modern Fertility report, the doctor was incredulous. She basically dismissed the at-home results out of hand, and instead put Charlotte on progesterone. A few months later, Charlotte got pregnant.

[Read: Women aren’t just small men]

Like Rice’s home test, Charlotte’s helped her start a conversation with a trusted health-care provider and develop a plan. But Charlotte told me that the process wasn’t worth the panic-filled waiting game and desperate Googling. She wishes she’d skipped the home test and consulted her doctor first.

Even when home hormone tests are accurate, their results are not diagnostic on their own. Drawing a straight line from hormone levels to a diagnosis is impossible without a medical history or physical exam; a user can’t predict her chances of pregnancy, for example, solely based on measurements of her fertility-related hormones. Nor would low levels of, say, estradiol or progesterone be enough to indicate endometriosis. Most people’s symptoms aren’t tied directly to a hormone imbalance, says Stephanie Faubion, the director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health and the medical director of the North American Menopause Society. The more than 50 chemical messengers that coordinate all kinds of processes, including metabolism, reproduction, and mood, are constantly fluctuating and difficult to measure with a quick-hit hormone test, Faubion told me; people’s symptoms may be attributable to multiple interrelated factors. “Just checking a hormone level and saying Here’s your problem doesn’t serve women well,” she said. “It’s oversimplifying an issue."

Some companies offer physician-reviewed reports, chat services, or phone calls with health providers to clarify any confusion. But Mary Jane Minkin, a gynecologist, menopause expert, and clinical professor at Yale School of Medicine, told me that those services might not be enough to curb misinterpretation, especially if test results aren’t reliable. Minkin worried that users may make drastic lifestyle changes or take off-the-shelf supplements. Christianson, of the Johns Hopkins Fertility Center, said that a growing number of her patients visit her clinic believing they are infertile or in premature menopause based on abnormal readings, when it’s not true. Others are rushing to freeze their eggs unnecessarily. And Faubion worries that providers, too, might use tests that aren’t evidence-based to make decisions about hormone therapy for patients. Some testing start-ups already offer personalized treatment plans and bioidentical hormone-replacement therapy via telehealth based on a user’s results.

Other experts had the opposite concern: that women whose home-test results appear normal would miss out on crucial interventions. Christianson told me that she’s seen men skip out on necessary infertility evaluations based on at-home semen tests. Women could end up making similar mistakes. And Dunaif said that women experiencing chronically irregular periods might be falsely reassured by a home hormone test and delay needed treatment for endocrine disorders or polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS).

[Read: When missed periods are a metabolic problem]

At-home-hormone-testing companies aim to solve a pressing demand for clarity and control as women address their medical needs. If women have been tempted to blame their hormones for anything that’s wrong, that’s at least partly because they aren’t receiving sufficient guidance from doctors. For decades, female patients have been dismissed, misdiagnosed, and mistreated by their health providers more than male patients have. Far less clinical research has been conducted on women than men, which can make health care a guessing game. A diagnosis for a hormone disorder such as PCOS or endometriosis typically takes consultations with several doctors across two to 10 years. Plus, traditional hormone testing can be expensive, and specialists are difficult to find. Only 1,700 reproductive endocrinologists and 2,000 menopause specialists practice in the United States; fertility clinics are rare outside cities.

In an ideal world, women wouldn’t feel the need to circumvent their doctors to test their hormones at home. But as it stands, many are desperate for answers, and direct-to-consumer testing companies are responding to their frustrations. Someday, the tests might help point users to the appropriate specialist, provide useful information for women in medical deserts, or enable people to better monitor chronic conditions for which the relevant hormones are simple to measure. But until they are rigorously evaluated, women are left with imperfect choices.

Pat McErlean takes viewers on tours of the countryside near his home in Dumfries and Galloway.

In early 2020, when the coronavirus was still a distant concern, my wife and I booked an AirAsia flight to Bali. Big mistake. At the start of lockdown, we scrambled to secure a refund. We called the airline’s customer-support line: no dice. We pleaded with its online chatbot, a lobotomized character named AVA. We sent a Twitter message to the brand on March 17 and received a response seven weeks later that read, in full, “Twitter Feedback.”

Those were dark days in airline customer service, with so many travelers desperate to figure out alternative plans. The present is not much brighter. In recent months, airlines around the world have changed how they engage with customers who need help. Frontier will no longer take your call, encouraging fliers to make contact via chatbot. Alaska Airlines is removing check-in kiosks at certain airports, driving people to its app. Air France, KLM, and Ryanair have all suspended customer service on Twitter, which for a time may have been the quickest way to summon a living, breathing employee.   

As Twitter melts down and people flee Facebook, social media just isn’t as useful as it once was for airline customer service. At the same time, airlines are leaning into AI, betting that the latest wave of chatbots will be the most cost-effective way to support customers. The long-standing truth is that companies don’t want to talk to you. First they didn’t want to do it in person, then they didn’t want to do it by phone, now they don’t want to do it online, and soon they won’t want to do it at all. It’s not personal—it just costs money. But hype-fueled AI products have yet to pick up the slack. “A chatbot being able to talk and to learn and to suggest and to persuade and do all of these things that humans do? I haven’t seen it in action, personally,” Eva Ascarza, a co-founder of the Customer Intelligence Lab at Harvard Business School, told me. Airline customer service is caught between two eras of the internet: one built on social media, the other on machine learning. The transition promises to be rocky. If you’re traveling this summer, you better hope that you don’t need help from an airline.

Airlines belong to a category of consumer-facing businesses that marketers call “high-touch”; they deal with customers whose needs are constantly evolving. Flights are delayed, bags get lost, people have to change their plans. And customers feel they deserve a certain level of care: After all, despite its gradual democratization, air travel remains quite expensive, especially in this period of high inflation. Multiply passenger expectations by the total number of seats—Delta flies something like the population of Sacramento every day, on average—and you start to appreciate the sector’s complexities.

These daunting customer-service demands have pushed airlines to automate since the dawn of mainframes. In 1960, IBM and American Airlines launched the first computerized reservation tool, based on a program developed for the Air Force. Customers would call a travel agent, who would then call an airline ticketing agent, who would then input the trip particulars. By 1964, the system could process some 7,000 bookings an hour, at a time when ticketing agents working manually could process one or two. The problem is, we’re still using it. “The basic systems which said ‘Box A talks to Box B via telex’ have largely remained unchanged since the 1950s,” Timothy O’Neil-Dunne, an airline-industry consultant, told me. (He paused to make sure I knew what a telex was. It’s a fax for text messages.) “So we are dealing with very, very old tech,” he added.

That old tech speaks in short codes: confirmation numbers, airport initials, seat numbers, passenger types. Customers rarely know all of the data that apply to their itinerary, which meant that until the advent of more advanced AI in recent years, changing a flight or locating a bag required a human intermediary, someone fluent in airline and English who could translate a question and input it as DL754, ATL, 19B, and Y. But call centers are expensive—even in Manila. Mindsay, a company that develops conversational AI for the industry, estimates that each support call costs airlines $2.20; in 2017, Harvard Business Review pegged the average cost of a live customer-service interaction at three times that amount.

Over the past decade, Facebook and Twitter emerged as efficient alternatives, allowing airlines to automate their response to certain posts and messages while paying special attention to the most urgent issues (or in some cases, the highest-profile users). In some ways, airlines demonstrated the viability of extending customer service over social media—if they could do it, any brand could. A study last year by the customer-experience company Emplifi found that among 23 industries, airlines had the second-fastest average customer-response time. In many cases, tweeting at an airline can really result in shorter wait times than sternly repeating “representative” on the phone or running a gantlet of scripted if-then scenarios with an online textbox.

Until recently, that kind of automated sorting was the best that chatbots—which many airlines offered early versions of—could muster. The predominant use case for AI in customer service was “the prioritization of calls, the prioritization of requests,” Ascarza said: software that decided how long you could wait for human assistance before the big vein in your head popped. On the other side of Twitter sat a flesh-and-blood airline agent whose voice was never heard but keenly felt. You could tweet something salty, tag the airline, and soon get an invitation to DM from an agent, who invariably signs their name.

But customer service through social media has become strained. “Can you calm down and allow me some time to work please ??” Delta tweeted to an inquiring customer last year. During the pandemic, airlines struggled to handle the unprecedented volume of passengers upset by endless rescheduling, and they doubled down on their automation efforts. In 2020, Delta temporarily suspended its customer service on Twitter and Facebook amid agent shortages and increased wait times. KLM, which was fielding 50,000 Facebook messages a day that March, enhanced its chatbot with machine learning; the discount carriers WestJet and AirAsia leaned into their existing ones.

Not all bots were created equal: AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes recently called AVA, my erstwhile nemesis, “the most hated AI chatbot” in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, it worked in the aggregate—at least from the brand’s point of view. “During COVID, AVA helped to clear millions of cases that would not have been possible given the amount of requests,” Fernandes said in an emailed statement. That was all before the implosion of Twitter under Elon Musk: Twitter has begun charging companies $1,000 a month to integrate their customer service into the app, prompting Air France and other companies to reconsider the site altogether. Meanwhile, the rise of platforms like TikTok, which aren’t as conducive to customer engagement, have undermined social-media support even further.

Those trends, along with recent strides in generative AI, have emboldened airline executives. Air India has committed $200 million to update its digital systems, which will include ChatGPT-driven features. Frontier claims that its self-service model requires less labor and delivers better customer-service experiences (although in a recent investor report, the airline baldly states its interest in limiting “avenue[s] for customer negotiation”). In February, AirAsia replaced AVA with a new bot called Ask Bo, which it promises will be “more proactive and attentive” thanks to “enhanced” AI. Technical details are scant, although a spokesperson for the airline claims that since Bo’s launch, 95 percent of all customer queries have flowed through it, and 73 percent of those queries were resolved with no follow-up. Considering how eagerly airlines have leaned into automation, expect other carriers to soon follow suit: “Airlines look on the face of it to be an ideal place to start to deploy an AI-based chatbot” powered by the latest large language models, O’Neil-Dunne said.

These days, even when you appeal to airlines over social media, you’re likely triggering some kind of machine-learning program. Both Twitter and Meta have invested in automation features for brands fielding customer messages. “I just get a link, and then I’m starting this WhatsApp conversation,” Ascarza said. “Sometimes I know it’s a bot, sometimes not.” She pointed out that although research suggests consumers prefer human interaction, it’s often because they lack compelling alternatives. That’s starting to change—and the ancillary features of AI support may suit us just fine. On a text-based interface, “it’s okay to be short,” Ascarza said. “And it’s okay not to be polite. And it’s okay to just get to the point.”

But the freedom to jettison social niceties is a shallow benefit. The simple reality is that customer service has eroded on social media, while the AI programs meant to replace it don’t yet meet the burdens of air travel. The last wave of chatbots, such as SWISS’s Nelly and WestJet’s Juliet, could clear the most straightforward cases with brute force, but they could also be blundering and ineffective. Airlines have iterated on those models and introduced new and improved versions, like Ask Bo, looking to capitalize on the fresh interest in AI as so many other companies are. Still, sophisticated bots on the level of ChatGPT don’t widely exist in air travel, and the way that airlines will actually deploy them—however many months or years from now—is an open question. For now, as the social web recedes from view and AI stumbles into an uncertain growth spurt, consumers everywhere are falling through the cracks.

In the long run, AI might improve customer experiences more than it degrades them. As airlines build smarter and smoother chatbots, they may free up their dwindling labor force to deal with the smaller percentage of more complicated requests. If chatbots are already capable of so much, why couldn’t they help us deal with a canceled flight or a lost bag? But AI could reshape customer service in more insidious ways. O’Neil-Dunne noted that as their customer-support tools become more nuanced, airline offerings are going the other way—giving rise to unbundled amenities and pared-down services, like some basic-economy tickets that don’t let you pick your seat without a surcharge. “If the product is simpler, the servicing is easier,” he said.

On the back end, AI could assess the value of every request, including if and when customers should receive help at all. “The decision of who not to serve is as important as who to serve,” Ascarza said. One logical outcome for an airline with millions of customers might be to simply deny or ignore a percentage of all complaints, which already happens with maddening frequency. The only thing worse than a feckless chatbot is a chatbot telling you, with perfect cogence and clarity, to get lost.

The reporters arrived in news vans and satellite trucks that trundled down King Road and colonized parking spots outside the crime scene. TV producers crowded into the Corner Club, chatting up students for tips and gossip, mispronouncing the town’s name—Mos-cow, they kept calling it, not Moss-coe. Nancy Grace, the cable-news host famously obsessed with morbid crimes, set up a table right outside the victims’ house so she could gesture at the building on air while speculating about the last sound they heard before dying. The story was irresistible: Four University of Idaho students brutally stabbed to death in the middle of the night. The killer still at large. No suspects. Motive unknown.

Then the sleuths came. TikTok detectives, true-crime podcasters—they descended on the town with theories to float and suspects to investigate. They rifled through the victims’ digital lives, hunting for clues that might crack the case. In niche Facebook groups, they shared their findings. Did a history professor plot the murders in a jealous rage? Was the nearby fraternity involved? What about that hoodie-clad guy on a Twitch livestream standing behind two of the victims at a food truck?

Days passed without an arrest, then weeks. Frightened students fled the campus. The local police, overwhelmed with tips, begged the public to stop calling with unvetted information. But people just kept coming. “Dark tourists” arrived to take pictures of the house where the murders happened, and post them for bragging rights in their Reddit forums. Someone turned up outside the police line with ghost-hunting equipment to commune with the victims’ spirits. A TikToker with about 100,000 followers tried to identify the killer with tarot cards.

The distinction between professional reporters and clout-chasing cranks blurred into one unwieldy mass of noise and disruption and fearmongering. Locals turned bitterly on all of it, treating the press like hostile occupiers. They hung signs to mess with TV reporters’ live shots—FUCK YOU NANCY GRACE, read one—and posted notes on their doors begging journalists to go away. One local bar owner publicly fantasized about punching reporters in the face.

As the search for the killer dragged on and rumors spread unchecked, the friendly little college town seemed to harden and crack. People were scared, and suspicious of one another. The press couldn’t be trusted; neither could the police. Locals installed security systems and took out restraining orders. They bought guns.

A suspect was arrested six weeks after the murders, but by then it almost didn’t matter. The sleuthing couldn’t stop now. People were too dug in, too invested in their pet hunches and favorite suspects. Some questioned whether the police had the wrong man; some floated potential accomplices. Conspiracy theories lingered, and so did the unease.

[From the March 2023 issue: Megan Garber on how America’s constant need for entertainment blurred the line between fiction and reality]

Don Anderson, a retired high-school teacher who’d lived in Moscow most of his life, couldn’t believe how different everything felt. In some ways, the frenzy that followed the murders was just as disruptive to the community as the crime itself. Before all this, he said, nobody locked their doors. Now everybody was on edge—including him. One day in February, someone called the police claiming that they planned to go into Moscow High School and start shooting. Police quickly figured out it was a hoax—the call wasn’t even coming from Idaho—but Anderson found himself speculating about the motive behind the threat. Was it a prank by some outsider obsessed with the murders? A sinister warning of more violence to come? Was the town just a permanent magnet for voyeurs and creeps now—synonymous with the worst thing that had ever happened there?

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Anderson told me, “if we’re ever going to be the same.”

When I arrived in Moscow in February, the initial media circus had passed. Bryan Kohberger had been arrested six weeks earlier for the murders of four students—Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin—and the judge had placed a gag order on everyone involved in the case. The news trucks would return once the trial got under way, but for now things were relatively quiet. (Kohberger chose not to enter a plea last month, in effect pleading not guilty.)

I’d been drawn to the town, like everyone else, by the eerie facts of the murders and the still-eerier profile of the suspect, a former criminology student at nearby Washington State University. The details already in circulation were chilling. A car resembling Kohberger’s white Hyundai Elantra could be seen on surveillance videos driving by the house several times shortly before the attacks. Police linked his DNA to a leather knife sheath left on a bed, and his phone history suggested that he’d been near the house 12 times in the preceding months. Once I got to Moscow, however, I found myself fixating less on the crime than on its aftermath—the wreckage left behind when the media and the sleuths had cleared out.

Located on Idaho’s eastern border, Moscow is known around the state for a certain mountain-hippie vibe. Students joke that the town is permanently “stuck in the ’70s.” It has a lively folk-dance scene and an independent theater that shows classic horror films. Main Street is lined with brown-brick buildings that house quirky small businesses including Ampersand, a purveyor of boutique olive oil, and the Breakfast Club, known for its “world-famous cinnamon roll pancakes.”

But even months after the murders, the town seemed traumatized. No one wanted to talk about the case, on the record or off. When I introduced myself as a reporter, people recoiled. My efforts to talk with the victims’ neighbors were met with exasperation and anger. At one door, I found a sign that read simply, WE HAVE NO STATEMENT. LEAVE US ALONE. Eventually I resorted to writing apologetic notes with my phone number and leaving them on windshields and doorsteps. Nobody called.

At the offices of the University of Idaho campus paper, The Argonaut, I found a masthead’s worth of student journalists glumly disillusioned with journalism. Months of unseemly behavior by a scoop-desperate press corps had dimmed their view of the profession. They’d seen cameramen hide in bushes on campus, and reporters try to sneak into dorms. They’d seen TV correspondents shout hostile questions at teenagers still processing their classmates’ deaths as if the kids were prevaricating politicians. In one notably unsavory episode, a tabloid photographer tracked down one of the roommates who’d survived the attack that night and took paparazzi-like photos at her parents’ house for the Daily Mail.

Abigail Spencer, a reporter for The Argonaut, told me that she was struggling to square the heroic stories she’d learned in journalism classes with the reporters who’d invaded her campus. “We’re taught they’re all Cronkite,” she said. “They’re not.”

Haadiya Tariq, who was the paper’s editor, told me the rude behavior had helped her understand the wider antipathy toward the press. “No wonder people hate you,” she sometimes found herself thinking. She was alarmed by the extent to which professional news outlets appeared to deliberately stoke the online ecosystem of conspiracy theories about the case. The TV-news bookers always seemed so nice and thoughtful when they were asking for interviews. But once the cameras turned on, Tariq told me, the questions were invariably aimed at getting her to theorize about the murders in a way that might get traction in the true-crime forums. Experiencing this had helped her understand why so much of the coverage felt “weird or inaccurate or sensational”: “It is 100 percent trying to feed the audience, which is the internet sleuths,” she told me. “That’s kind of the dirty secret I’m starting to realize.” Perhaps more disturbing than the vulturous reporters or the vortex of TikTok speculation was the way the media and the sleuths seemed to encourage and sustain each other—their priorities converging in a vicious ouroboros.

Meanwhile, some unlucky Moscow residents were still struggling to reassemble their lives after becoming main characters in murder-related conspiracy theories. Rebecca Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho, was suing the TikToker who’d accused her of plotting the students’ murders because of a (completely fabricated) love affair with Kaylee Goncalves. (The TikToker denied any wrongdoing, and police have said that Scofield was not a suspect.) Friends of a recently deceased Afghanistan veteran were fending off ghoulish speculation on social media that he was involved in the crime.

Jeremy Reagan, a law student who lived in the victims’ neighborhood, became a target when he gave a handful of TV interviews about the murders. Sleuths studied his body language and parsed his facial expressions.

“It reminds me of Ted Bundy when he would talk about murders,” one observed.

“Very disconcerting,” another said.

Soon, they started mining Reagan’s Facebook profile for clues. A bandage on his right hand was treated as especially incriminating—how did he cut himself? Same with a four-year-old Facebook post that mentioned a rave. “Guys at raves ‘chase women’ and ‘do drugs,’ many things to note,” one sleuth deduced. “The girls partied, he mentioned that. Did he try to party with them? Did he actually party with them? Was he turned down by them?’”

Reagan, hoping to clear his name, volunteered to take a DNA test. The police never named him as a suspect. But the online sleuths kept digging—even contacting his friends for intel—and the menacing messages from strangers kept piling up. Reagan started carrying a gun.

“Just having it on me gives that extra sense of security,” he said in a cable-news interview. “Especially now, where the cybersleuths may or may not come.”

Illustration by Zoë Van Dijk

As with every gruesome crime that attains “true crime” status, the Moscow case has been a career-maker for some people in the media. Three separate book projects are reportedly in the works. NewsNation, the upstart cable channel that launched in 2021, has seen record ratings for its wall-to-wall coverage; its lead reporter on the case, Brian Entin, has amassed half a million Twitter followers and been profiled in Vanity Fair.

John and Lauren Matthias knew right away that the Moscow murders would be a big story for them. The Las Vegas–based couple hosts a popular true-crime podcast called Hidden—he’s a forensic psychologist; she’s a former TV reporter—and they have a strong grasp on which cases will pop. The key here, John told me, is that the case began with an “unsub” (police lingo for an unidentified subject of an investigation). “There was a mystery to be solved,” John said. “Nobody knew who the suspect was, there was a huge amount of uncertainty, and people want to play the role of Sherlock Holmes.”

The grisly murders also exploited some of the most basic human fears. “The idea of a group of people asleep in their home at night being attacked randomly … it’s literally a nightmare,” John said.

At its root, the couple believes, true-crime sleuthing is about the psychological desire to bring order where there is none, to make sense of a world that seems scary. “The mind wants the world to make sense,” John told me. “We’re constantly looking for patterns even when they don’t exist. There’s a lot of research that shows that we don’t like things to be random or uncertain.”

Lauren acknowledged that she doesn’t adhere to the same journalistic standards she did when she was a reporter. She indulges in conjecture; she tries to meet her audience where it is. “I never portray myself as the podcaster who’s going to solve it, or has the answers,” she told me. “I become just like my listeners: ‘None of us know. Let’s talk about it. Let’s speculate together. Let’s find clues together.’”

There are times when she feels uncomfortable with the more fever-swampy aspects of this ecosystem. The rush to turn random people into suspects and then demonize them, the lack of accountability when a theory is debunked—it can feel a little gross. “I’ve been a network reporter,” Lauren told me. “And here I am in this really bizarre true-crime community trying to find my footing as a professional.”

But the Matthiases also bristle at the lack of respect they get from mainstream news outlets. They note that they were the first to discover a years-old internet forum in which Kohberger had discussed suffering from “visual snow syndrome”—a disorder associated with depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Rather than crediting their scoop, CNN used a TikTok video of Lauren discussing the story to illustrate the irresponsibility of online sleuths. (When The New York Times eventually “broke” the “visual snow” story, CNN featured the paper’s reporting.)

The appetite for coverage of cases like this one, Lauren told me, is not fizzling out anytime soon. She sees their podcast as a force for good: “We either need to embrace this and be respectful, responsible voices in this community, or watch it become a bigger volcano.”

There are dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to unpacking the Moscow murders. The largest has more than 222,000 members. When I joined the group, several weeks after Kohberger’s arrest, I expected the forum to be quiet. The case was in a holding pattern—what would the murder hobbyists even have to talk about? This was, it turned out, deeply naive.

The group was buzzing. There were chat threads for people to speculate about Kohberger’s motive; there were chat threads for people convinced that Kohberger didn’t do it. A large contingent of members was busy building the case that a Mexican drug cartel was involved. (One key piece of evidence: an image from Google Maps that showed shoes hanging from power lines in the victims’ neighborhood, a purported sign of drug activity—though a quick Google search reveals that shoes can also be a memorial for someone who’s died.) Others latched on to a stray comment made by Kaylee Goncalves’s father about how she’d researched child trafficking. Had Kaylee gotten herself crosswise with a powerful child-trafficking ring? How deep did this go?

Groups like this one invariably attract a fair number of weirdos. Kohberger himself was reportedly known to hang out in crime-related forums, identifying himself as a criminology student; some people have even speculated that anonymous Reddit comments posing theories about the Idaho murders came from Kohberger himself.

But there was something else about the Facebook chatter that unnerved me. While the content wasn’t explicitly political, the group’s mode of thinking bore a striking resemblance to the hives of conspiracism and paranoia that have infected American civic life.

Here was a group of like-minded people clustered in a strange corner of the internet, developing a vocabulary, forming a shared worldview, inventing new storylines to help make sense of the world. Villains were conjured from thin air and elaborate backstories attached to them. Galaxy-brain pattern-finding provided the narrative satisfaction that reality could not. How different, in essence, was this universe from the one inhabited by anti-vaxxers or 9/11 truthers or Pizzagate enthusiasts? Are they not animated by the same urge that animates crime obsessives—to impose order on chaos, to gamify unpredictable, actual life? As John Matthias pointed out to me, “When you have an environment of fear and uncertainty, you tend to get this type of rampant speculation that’s divorced from evidence.”

Devotees of the Moscow case would no doubt push back on this notion. They might argue that their hobby is benign—that they’re just killing time on the internet, indulging in a bit of frivolous speculation for fun. But the consequences of this kind of conspiracy thinking are never contained to their virtual communities. They dribble out into real-life communities, where real people are affected.

Two weeks after I left Moscow, the University of Idaho announced that it planned to demolish the gray house at 1122 King Road. The house sits halfway up a hill, surrounded by squat apartment buildings and unassuming homes. Before the murders, it was known as a hub of off-campus social activity. The roommates liked to throw parties, and local police had responded to several noise complaints. On the day I visited, there were still signs of before. A Christmas wreath hung on the door; strings of lights dangled above the back patio.

The question of what to do with the house had been a subject of debate in town. It was still a crime scene at the moment, but some locals wanted to see it restored and preserved in honor of the victims. These students had good times in that house, the argument went—why let their memories be overshadowed by the murders?

But there was a bleak reality to contend with. As long as the house was standing, it seemed, an unnerving stream of sightseers and sleuths would continue to turn up in the neighborhood. There was no going back.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week, I asked readers if parents should stop giving their children smartphones before high school.

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Eric is a teacher. He writes:

Cell phones are the single biggest addiction, obsession, and obstacle to learning, maturing, and socializing that I have seen in almost 20 years as an educator. Most students—hell, most adults—are powerless to resist the temptation to stay continually connected to their phones. Students know better than anyone just how distracting and disruptive they are, and, if being honest, will almost unanimously say that they are better students and people when their phone is out of sight. The fact that more schools do not help students by removing the single greatest hindrance to the educational experience we have ever seen is baffling, and it will not be seen favorably by those who look back at it.

Elizabeth is the mother of 9-year-old twins:

We are in Barcelona this year, and my daughters attend a school where phones are not allowed. They simply tell students to leave their phones (if they have them) at home. Kids play and talk during recess. The second day of school I arrived to take my daughters to an appointment. I found them walking around the school yard holding hands with a new “best friend” chatting and giggling. When I left with my daughters, all the other girls in the class clustered around to say goodbye. This school also has three 45-minute periods of recess during the day in addition to a lunch hour, so there is lots of time for socialization and minimally supervised play.

Right after smartphones came on the market, we didn’t know the effects on children and teens (and adults!). Now that the effects on mental health, attention, and learning have become clear, there’s bound to be a sea-change where more and more parents won’t allow children and teens smartphones. I’ve told my kids they can have a smartphone when they can afford to buy one and pay for their own monthly plan. I will buy them a dumb phone when they are 16 and driving by themselves. Until then they have a landline, an analog watch, a time that they should be back home, and the freedom to roam the neighborhood.

Ben is going to be a senior in high school and writes that “everyone I know, myself included, are addicted to their phones.” He continues:

My parents did not let me get a phone until sixth grade (having a phone in middle school is basically a necessity) and no social media until 10th, far later than most of my peers. While frustrating at the time, my parents made the right call. I’ve seen kids become depressed over social media, watched it end relationships, and seen it make many people detached from reality. When I got social media, I was mature enough to use it, and waiting to use it has lessened my addiction to it. I have elementary-age siblings, and seeing fourth or fifth graders with a phone will never stop being weird.

I understand why parents give their children phones. It makes sense at the time because their kids are always at practice or a friend’s house. But five years later, in middle or high school, the addiction is so strong that most kids can’t go a single class period without being on their phone. And I know the amount of time and energy that female friends and people I’ve been in relationships with spend on having a perfect Instagram profile.

Parents refusing to give a phone before high school will only cause resentment and some social isolation. But phones should not be given to elementary schoolers; social media should not be allowed before high school, and once there, access should be based on maturity. These technologies rule my friends’ and my relationships and time, and while it’s not exactly a bad thing, everyone I know occasionally wishes it would all just go away.

Jaleelah got her first smartphone when she was 12 and enjoyed having Google Maps. She writes:

I think that moving straight from not owning a smartphone to using one without restrictions is a bad idea. The transition from middle school to high school is already a difficult one. Increased workload, increased physical freedom, and increased expectations of self-management make it hard for 14-year-olds to balance their priorities. The added variable of a new, addictive, validation-providing device can make it even harder for ninth graders to learn the study skills required to graduate. One of my high-school teachers enforced anti-phone policies for his youngest classes, but intentionally allowed them in class in the highest grades in order to force students to learn self-regulation. I think this is a good idea. Phones should be completely banned from middle schools, but restrictions should progressively loosen throughout high school (alongside lessons about managing distractions) in order to prepare students for adult life.

Zack is an English teacher at a public high school in Montgomery County, Maryland. He has read many assignments in which students reflect on their beliefs about smartphones and social media.

He writes:

My school is in a fairly affluent suburb. Phones are omnipresent. In the 12 years since I began here, I have seen phones become more of a distraction and students noticeably less engaged. Post COVID, “withdrawn” is probably more accurate than “less engaged.” Kids now genuinely struggle with how to speak to each other about what they are learning. Student discourse is at an all-time low. They come in, open a laptop, set their phone beside it, and burn through whatever work has been assigned for the day.

As a teacher in 2023, I am by no means a Luddite about smartphones or social media. I am not a stickler about seeing them out in my room. I allow students to listen to music as they write. If they need to look something up, I encourage it. For the first time in my career, I feel that leniency needs to change, that schools need to adopt more restrictive measures, not only due to the rise in mental health concerns, but in the need to learn to interact with the world without a barrier, without the constant allure of their life online.

My students are not shocked or surprised by adults’ ever-growing concern over social media. They do not roll their eyes when anxiety, depression, and teen suicide are mentioned in the same breath as smartphones, Instagram, and TikTok. My kids are not using social media in blissful ignorance of its harms; they are using it in spite of those realities because it governs their relationship to the world and to each other. As such, these students still advocate for the necessity of social media and smartphones in their lives.

They recount opportunities for spontaneous discovery. They argue the need for communication with their parents, siblings, teammates, and beyond, and say the fear of a school shooting makes this need feel urgent. They are passionate about the role social media plays for students of marginalized identities who often find community online when they do not find it at school, at home, or in the neighborhood. Simply put, these kids appreciate the complexity of the challenges social media and smartphones present.

What they do not know how to do is stop using them, or alter, fundamentally, how they use them. Many say they wish they hadn’t had access to them before high school. Nearly half of the girls in one class wrote that in middle school, access to a smart phone sent them into a depression and that arguments about phone use at home created unhealthy dynamics between them and their parents. Each of these students lamented their parents’ decision in allowing them to have social media access before high school. Girls who fought their parents for a phone for years before they turned 15 reported appreciating that their parents had made that decision, even if it was hard at the time.

Maybe I am just getting older. Less prone to shrug my shoulders at a seemingly unfixable problem. Less worried about being what I am: the adult in the room. But when young people praise parents for making hard and unpopular decisions, or criticize them for making ones that unintentionally caused harm, we should listen. If schools became one place in their lives where the frenetic online anxiety couldn’t supersede the lived moment, I can’t help but wonder if these kids might not find that a relief. Even a gift.

Tanner was given a smartphone at 13, and writes:

Prior to that, I wrote often and loved creating stories. As soon as I could access social media and the internet from the palm of my hand, I stopped writing. It seemed so laborious and unsatisfying compared to the instant gratification and stimuli available on my phone. Now, in my late 20s, I've finally curbed my smartphone use and have started writing again. But I will always regret the decade I spent glued to my phone instead of creating.

One of my biggest fears with smartphones is that they are stifling a generation of writers, musicians, philosophers, artists, scientists, inventors, and all sorts of other creative professionals. Creativity comes from moments of boredom and idleness. Smartphones eliminate so many of these moments. Creativity also requires an open, curious, inquisitive mind. I think young people will struggle to develop such a mind when using smartphones to constantly consume vapid, worthless content that usually lacks artistic merit.

B., an administrator at an international school in South Korea, has noticed “a troubling phenomenon”:

Every year, more and more students (even responsible, high-performing ones) do not know how to navigate basic social situations. I will prompt students to do a simple task (e.g. “please get out a pen or pencil”), and a substantial portion will simply stare at me, as if I said nothing. This is not defiance, at least not in a traditional sense. It’s more like a catatonic response induced, I believe, by being unfamiliar with or even overwhelmed by real-world interactions. The same students will be upbeat and engaged, and show dynamic facial expressions, the second they’re permitted to look at their phones.

My school has an extensive outdoor-education program. All students go on multiday outdoor trips, and they cannot bring phones with them at all. For the first five or six hours, many of the kids are miserable. But eventually, something flips. When truly separated from their phones, the kids begin to talk to each other, play games, and engage even with the teachers. There is still evidence of social handicap during these interactions, but the difference is remarkable. I find hope that even the heavily phone-addicted teenagers of Korea can show signs of basic sociability with a short-term separation from their phones. The lesson I learn from this: If a few days away from smartphones can make unsociable teens interact with a semblance of humanity, responsible parents should give their children a childhood free from the devices entirely.

Robert recently began teaching at a public school in North Carolina: He writes:

My first day, I told another science teacher that I had bought a storage rack for the students to deposit their phones into before entering the classroom. She was surprised and strongly urged me to reconsider, telling me that this would be like “cutting off their arms.” Although I found her analogy disturbing, I had no experience teaching high school and reluctantly took her advice. This was by far the worst teaching decision I made.

I became a cellphone cop. I would make the first announcement to put their phones away at the beginning of every class and then proceed to spend the next 90 minutes trying to enforce it. I caught them cradling their phones in their laps, holding them under their desks, using them to cheat on tests and quizzes, and leaving them in their backpacks but listening to them through their AirPods. One of the projects we did was to analyze the impact of the time they spent on their phones. The average daily screen time for students in my classes for the month of April was nine and a half hours with a mean of 285 pickups.

Olive graduated from high school last year. She writes:

I only got a smartphone partially through my junior year, while many of my friends had them since middle school. In many ways, this was rather inconvenient. My parents ended up with many of my friends’ phone numbers saved because of how often I had to borrow their phones, and I even had to ask my school’s crossing guard for her phone at times. I would say that it was overall a positive thing, though. I saw how much other students were distracted by their phones, in and out of class, despite them being “banned” during instruction. Despite how educationally detrimental smartphones were, the biggest effect was actually a social one. In many in-person events, those around me having a phone left me sometimes isolated, and it still hurts to be with friends only to see them using TikTok instead of actually talking. It feels like the limited time I get to spend with my friends is often stolen away by our technology, and it’s not been good for me.

There is an alternative perspective, though: that having a computer capable of connecting me to my friends while at home has actually helped tremendously. The only reason I’m as close as I am with many of my friends, and even my girlfriend, is the fact that we’ve been able to communicate while apart. Although this has sometimes meant replacing in-person quality time with digital communication, it has undoubtedly helped me become more social and prevented me from staying as shy of a bookworm as I was before I downloaded apps like Discord to talk to my friends. Because of these mixed factors, I’d say that “dumb” phones with a more advanced at-home alternative are the way to go, to allow for communication with parents while away, and with friends while at home.

Kerry was a teacher for almost 40 years.  She writes:

The damage smartphones do to concentration isn’t limited to children; I worked in a school where parents participated in the classrooms, and toward the end of my career, we struggled to keep the adults off their phones too! The damage to concentration is serious, but the damage to connection is far worse. People who are staring at their phones have lost the ability to be present in a room—or in nature—in a very real sense.