"By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?" Jon Haidt says there is an epidemic of mental illness among teenage girls and social media has been its major cause.
Andy Boddington mourns the death of BBC local radio as we know it.
Callum Mason on the warning from the Association of School and College Leaders that Department for Education guidance is taking away schools’ ability to make exceptional decisions on pupils’ leave of absence and damaging trust with parents.
"Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was 'woke shadowbanning,' whereby the things you said wouldn't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter's deep state didn't like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won't reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them." Cory Doctorow explains 'enshittification' - the process by which commerce kills Social Media platforms.
Lizzie Dearden reports that armchair sleuths were a threat to the police investigation of the disappearance of Nicola Bulley,
The Monks Wood Wilderness experiment is now 60 years old. Richard K. Broughton says that, as a rewilding study before the term existed, it shows how allowing land to naturally regenerate can expand native woodland and help tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.
