The pro-social reality TV show we need

"The Builders," coming soon

I’ve really been enjoying the chance to go a bit deeper on reader questions in this new Friday format, so thank you all for bearing with us as we try something new and for submitting such thoughtful requests. We know some of you do still miss the old mailbag, though, and wanted to let you know that we’ll be bringing it back once a month. Be on the lookout for a special edition mailbox soon!

In good news this week, I’ve been a little skeptical of Michelle Wu’s approach to things in Boston, but her Squares + Streets zoning reform seems legitimately good. Also, the Lead Detect Prize competition has its first round of winners out, and progress is happening on geoengineering research.

---

This week, I had some thoughts on one of the pieces we’re recommending, Jessica Winter’s review of Jonathan Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.” They didn’t quite warrant a column of their own, so I thought I’d share them here.

If you’re not familiar with Haidt, he’s an academic with moderate political views. That’s not particularly unusual, but the structure of academia is such that people with moderate views are on the far-right end of the political spectrum in most rooms. People who find themselves in that situation often choose to put their heads down and do their work, but some like to mix it up and spend a non-trivial amount of time punching left. Haidt takes the second approach, and his previous book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” is in particular a critique of the campus left. As you might expect, a lot of left-wing intellectuals don’t like Haidt. And thus, a perhaps surprisingly large amount of Winter’s essay is dedicated to distancing herself from prior Haidt books and kind of talking herself into the idea that it’s okay for her to agree with him about the need for greater regulatory scrutiny of smartphones and social media.

If you’re eyeball-deep in the discourse, this all makes sense.

But stepping back, there’s something kind of funny about it. The basic structure of the smartphone debate is that Haidt is drawing strong pro-regulation policy conclusions from a base of evidence that is suggestive but not entirely definitive. People on the other side are taking the pro-business view that Apple and Google and Facebook and Twitter and ByteDance should be able to do what they want, unless their critics can meet a nearly insurmountable evidentiary burden. Which is just to say that it’s a very traditional left-right argument about business regulation — similar to arguments about smoking or carbon dioxide or seatbelts (where the left was correct) or nuclear energy (where the left was wrong) — but with the traditional positions mixed up.

I don’t know Haidt well, but I have talked to him, and my strong suspicion is that one reason he’s reached the conclusion he has about smartphones is precisely because he is not as right-wing as his critics think — “we’ve got to stop the biggest corporations in the world from running amok” is a very normal progressive idea.

Other recommendations:

• “An Abundance Agenda for New York,” by Sebastian Hallum Clarke.

• Matt Zeitlin on Biden’s aluminum agenda.

• I really enjoyed this video exploring aspect ratio choices made by filmmakers over time and some of the dilemmas of the current era of focus on IMAX and other premium screens. On a related note, I think people sometimes misconstrue the value of the “theatrical experience.” Yes, a big screen and booming sound can be great. But there’s also something to be said for laughing at a comedy in a crowded room, or just being forced to turn your damn phone off and pay attention to story details.

• Mark Goldberg’s take on the World Central Kitchen tragedy in Gaza and the larger context in play.

• I’m going to try harder to stick to my resolution to not make Slow Boring just be about the 2024 race. But if you want to hear my thoughts on election news, check out the Politix podcast — latest episode is about Democrats’ abortion opportunity.

---

This from Alan, seemed like the perfect lead-in to today’s reader column: