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one major downside to all this quantification: It can interfere with our ability to know our own bodies. Once you outsource your well-being to a device and convert it into a number, it stops being yours.

With my smart watch, sometimes I would wake up in the morning and check my app to see how I slept — instead of just taking a moment to notice that I was still tired

It’s an extension of our hustle-oriented culture, said the executive coach and performance expert Brad Stulberg, author of “The Practice of Groundedness.” “Our culture promotes the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the predominant arbiter of success, and these devices play right into that,

given the range of evidence and the fact that the biggest increases relate to a specific group (teenage girls) and a specific set of issues clustered around anxiety and body image I would assign a high probability to it being a real issue. Especially as it fits the anecdotal conservations I have with headteachers and parents.

Is social media the cause?

One of the most commonly identified culprits is social media. Until recently I’ve been sceptical for two reasons. First I’m allergic to moral panics.

GPT-4, in contrast, is a state-of-the-art system capable of creating not just words but describing images in response to a person’s simple written commands.

When shown a photo of a boxing glove hanging over a wooden seesaw with a ball on one side, for instance, a person can ask what will happen if the glove drops, and GPT-4 will respond that it would hit the seesaw and cause the ball to fly up.

an AI program, known as a large language model, that early testers had claimed was remarkably advanced in its ability to reason and learn new things

When we are herding, neuroimaging experiments show increased activation in the amygdala area of the brain, where fear and other negative emotions are processed. While you may feel vulnerable and exposed on your own, being part of the herd gives you a distinct sense of protection. You know in your guts that, in the midst of others, the risk of being hit by a car is lower because it is somehow distributed among the group’s members

The more of them, the lower the risk. There is safety in numbers. And so much more than mere safety.

Herding also comes with an intoxicating sense of power: as members of a crowd, we feel much stronger and braver than we are in fact.

Over the past year, though, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of these strong states.

The weaknesses are of two sorts. First, the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader at the top all but guarantees low-quality decision making, and over time will produce truly catastrophic consequences

Second, the absence of public discussion and debate in “strong” states, and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow, and can erode at a moment’s notice.

he has in mind the younger cohort, Generation Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. “When you look at Americans born after 1995,” Mr. Haidt says, “what you find is that they have extraordinarily high rates of anxiety, depression, self-harm, suicide and fragility.” There has “never been a generation this depressed, anxious and fragile.”

He attributes this to the combination of social media and a culture that emphasizes victimhood

Social media is Mr. Haidt’s present obsession. He’s working on two books that address its harmful impact on American society: “Kids in Space: Why Teen Mental Health Is Collapsing” and “Life After Babel: Adapting to a World We Can No Longer Share.

For some perspective on what’s happening with Elon Musk and Twitter, I suggest spending a few minutes familiarizing yourself with one of Twitter’s sillier episodes from the past, a fight that erupted almost a year ago between the “shape rotators” of Silicon Valley and the “wordcels” (aspersion intended) of journalism and related professions. Many of the combatants were, at first, merely fighting over which group should have higher social status (theirs), but the episode also highlighted real divisions between West Coast and East — math and verbal, free-speech culture and safety culture, people who make things happen and people who talk about them afterward.

For years now, conflict between the two groups has been boiling over onto social media, into courtrooms and onto the pages of major news outlets. Team Shape Rotator believes Team Wordcel is parasitic and dangerous, ballyragging institutions into curbing both free speech and innovation in the name of safety. Team “Stop calling me a Wordcel” sees its opponents as self-centered and reckless, disrupting and mean-meming their way toward some vaguely imagined doom.

his audacity seems to be backfiring, as of course did Napoleon’s eventually.

In the old days—and here I mean even as recently as 2000 or 2004—audiences were built around media institutions. The New York Times had an audience. The New Yorker had an audience. The Weekly Standard had an audience.

If you were a writer, you got access to these audiences by contributing to the institutions. No one cared if you, John Smith, wrote a piece about Al Gore. But if your piece about Al Gore appeared in Washington Monthly, then suddenly you had an audience.

There were a handful of star writers for whom this wasn’t true: Maureen Dowd, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion. Readers would follow these stars wherever they appeared. But they were the exceptions to the rule. And the only way to ascend to such exalted status was by writing a lot of great pieces for established institutions and slowly assembling your audience from theirs.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

If I’m really not enjoying a book, I bog down after 50 pages or so and stop. In those cases, I try to remind myself that not every book was written specifically for my tastes and that it’s best not to confuse my own preferences with gospel truth. I also find it useful to recognize that the writer may have spent years writing the book and knows it better — or at least deeper — than I do, so maybe the fault or flaw resides partially or completely in me.