Solstice mailbag

Phones in schools, DC crime, US steel, and Nikki Haley's moderate vibes

We’re dealing with some very short days this week — hope any readers in the southern hemisphere are enjoying their daylight!

A bit of housekeeping before the mailbag: DC Public Schools are out today until after the New Year, so Kate, Jose, and I will be visiting family on the West Coast. Maya and Ben will also be taking the week off.

The whole Slow Boring crew is going to take some time to relax and enjoy the holidays, but as a thank you to our paid subscribers for making 2023 our best year yet, we have some less newsy content scheduled just for you over the break. For everyone on the free list, happy holidays and we’ll see you in the New Year!

This means, though, that staff won’t be in the comments much next week, so everyone please be on your best behavior. And please note that we’re going to be much quicker than usual to hand out 24-hour bans¹ to prevent anything problematic from escalating while the mods are on vacation.

Be good everyone!

Some good news: Airline cancellation rates are running at their lowest level in five years this holiday season. GDP Now is predicting another solid quarter of economic growth to close out the year. Pending home sales are up. Housing starts are up. Scientists have discovered that some coral reefs “remember” how to survive heat waves. The racial wage gap is at an all-time low, and stock markets are at-or-near record highs.

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.

Randall: Along these lines, I wonder how Matt feels about banning phones in school. I’m 100% in favor and I feel like schools know it would be the right thing to do and are just afraid of backlash.

The anti-phone view seems correct to me, though I’d also say the quality of the evidence on this isn’t as strong as I’d like. If some state legislature somewhere would like to take this issue up by passing a law that institutes a three-year phone ban at half the public schools in the state, with random assignment and a plan to look at a preregistered set of dependent variables, that would be an enormous favor to the world.

When I’ve chatted with educators about this, there tends to be broad agreement that if you could make smartphones vanish magically, that would be clearly good. What’s tougher is they don’t necessarily want, in practice, to be given the task of enforcing a new set of rules that students will hate and that parents won’t unanimously have their backs on. But I’m gonna keep asking people about this, because I think it’s going to become an increasingly mainstream idea and we probably need more thinking on the implementation details.

srynerson: Matt, in honor of Andre Braugher, what is your favorite episode/story arc of “Homicide: Life on the Street”? (Mine is “Crosetti” (season 3, episode 6), which I defy anyone not to cry at the end of!)