Bret: I’m almost always for free speech and I’m usually against intrusive nanny-statism. But this time, DeSantis is right, for the same reason it’s right to make it illegal for kids to buy cigarettes or alcohol: Social media isn’t just a means of communication. It’s a mechanism for addiction and a recipe for destruction.
Gail: OK, continue depressing me.
Bret: The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes in his new book, “The Anxious Generation,” that there is a striking correlation between the birth of social media and the iPhone around 10 to 15 years ago and a long list of psychological and social pathologies among adolescents, from sleep deprivation to suicide. I’d love to think parents can do it alone, but sometimes families need help from the state to stop something that is otherwise as damaging as it is ubiquitous.
There, we did it: We had a nice thing to say about the governor of Florida.
Gail: There has to be something wrong here. I’ll sleep on it.
Bret: And before we go, Gail, we’re having this conversation on the eve of the big solar eclipse. Any deep thoughts on this stellar event — assuming it isn’t too cloudy to see it — coming so soon after our itty-bitty earthquake last week?
Gail: Not my job, Bret. This calls for a man with a poem. C’mon.
Bret: A literary friend of mine introduced me to this beauty by Archilochus of Paros, who lived 27 centuries ago. It’s a reminder of all the transcendent natural experiences that connect us, as human beings, over time, distance, religion and culture — and of how the Greeks always said it best.
Nothing will surprise me anymore, nor be too wonderful
for belief, now that the lord upon Olympus, father Zeus,
dimmed the daylight and made darkness come upon us in the noon
and the sunshine. So limp terror has descended upon mankind.
After this, men can believe in anything. They can expect
anything. Be not astonished any more, although you see
beasts of the dry land exchange with dolphins, and assume their place
in the watery pastures of the sea, and beasts who loved the hills
find the ocean’s crashing waters sweeter than the bulk of land.