Book of the Day #373: The Anxious Generation by @JonHaidt 🎧 Audio edition, narrated by Jonathan Haidt, Sean Pratt. Our review: bookofthe.day/go/rB0C9F37G28… Listen free with an Audible trial: bookofthe.day/go/at?c=x #ad #BookCommunity #Parenting

Congrats to Mexico on joining the world's growing community of countries with phone free schools! Kudos to Mexican President @Claudiashein and Secretary of Education @mario_delgado who have been convening a national conversation about technology's impact on kids. They found that large majorities of parents, teachers, and administrators all wanted strong action. The TAG Movement and I look forward to continuing to support this ongoing conversation in Mexico and around the world. The latest PISA report underscores the urgency of rolling back the phone-based childhood and the phone-based school day. nytimes.com/2026/09/22/world…

Every celebrity who appears in an ad for online gambling has had plenty of warning that they’re collaborating, for cash, with the new version of the tobacco industry. Hold them accountable. nytimes.com/2026/09/19/busin…

Want to rebuild trust in government? Start by banning members of Congress from trading stocks. It’s the clearest way to prevent insider trading and make sure leaders are serving the people, not themselves. @SenOssoff and I are working hard to get that done.

If you send your child into a store alone to buy something (which you should do frequently), give them cash instead of a card, so they have to look the employee in the eyes and perhaps speak.

The latest PISA report shows the drop in reading scores started in the 2010s, before COVID, and it did not slow down after COVID school closures ended. The authors point to smartphones as a plausible contributor. At the Tech and Society Lab at NYU-Stern, we have gathered all of the recent natural experiments on phone-free schools. We summarize the findings here (a mix of positive and null effects; very few negatives), and suggest a longer list of outcome variables that future studies should measure, such as noise levels in hallways, and library books taken out. afterbabel.com/p/are-phone-f…

Here I argue that the original sin of generative AI and its chatbots is using the first person, and that this is most harmful to young developing minds. It’s key to my argument in Artificial Intimacy. theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0…

Three studies show that liberals don’t see it as problematic for science when journals back liberal candidates. But the future of science depends on changing this.

Great progress! @RepAuchincloss and @RepHouchin introduced the 16 & Up Social Media Act today. This bipartisan legislation bars under-16s from platforms that were designed to hook young users: infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmic feeds, appearance-altering filters, etc. This is the approach I've been waiting to see from the U.S. Congress. In the long run we want to incentivize companies to make safer products. Until then, gaining access to platforms with manipulative, unsafe design needs age minimums.

Thanks @GavinNewsom for signing a number of new child protections into law, including AB2, which meaningfully increases the costs to companies when they are found liable in court for harming kids.  Thanks to @JoshLowenthal for sponsoring it as well as your continued leadership on protecting California's kids.