James' World 2

This episode of Star Trek Shows us where the present administration is taking us!

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The Enterprise encounters two duo-chromatic and mutually belligerent aliens who put the ship in the middle of their old conflict.

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Two duo-chromatic and mutually belligerent aliens

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When Australia’s parliament passed legislation late last year banning under-16s from social media, anxious parents across the country breathed a collective sigh of relief.

“We want Australian children to have a childhood,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said as he introduced the legislation. We need to “get kids off phones and back on the footy field.”

Plenty of parents have echoed those sentiments to me over the past decade as I interviewed more than 250 families about the challenges of parenting in a digital age. When I started my research back in 2015, my own children were just toddlers and I had complete control over their digital devices. But as I wrapped up my book

Parenting in a Digital World last year, I found myself in the thick of all the concerns parents had raised: the hours children spend glued to screens; their failure to complete chores and homework because of devices; family arguments over technology; and a lack of knowledge about what kids are even doing online.

I empathize with the mums and dads that I’d interviewed, who were trying to balance social expectations of what it means to be a good parent with the desires and demands of their children. 

From France and Norway to the UK and several US states, authorities are grasping for ways to protect kids after years of headlines about the dangers of social media. Smartphones have destroyed a generation, psychologist Jean Twenge wrote in 2017. Social media and smart phones have caused a “rewiring of childhood,” author Jonathan Haidt stated last year. 

But categoric assertions about kids and technology only deepen the anxieties of parents caught between dueling narratives. On the one hand, the media tells parents that too much screen time compromises their children’s development, and by extension, their future wellbeing. On the other, a utopian narrative about the emancipating potential of digital technologies frames them as a necessary ingredient for young people’s education and success.

Media panic has a long history — successive generations raised the alarm first about comics and radio, then cinema, television, and video games. Over the years, we’ve worried that violent videos desensitize young people and increase aggression. We’ve feared that subliminal messages in heavy metal lyrics could incite youth suicide. We also have a tendency to forget these early concerns once a new form of media captures our attention, something Kirsten Drotner, a professor of media studies, refers to as “historical amnesia.”

This media-effects research tradition continues today: Many studies

have linked social media use to conditions such as depression or low self-esteem. But rarely is there evidence of direct causation. For example, does excessive social media use lead to depression, or are some young people using social media significantly more than their peers because they’re already depressed?

Where concerns about earlier media forms focused on exposure to content, today we have an added worry: how young people interact with content. Unlike the passive consumption of TV shows, for instance, digital platforms enable people to make active choices on how to behave. They can participate in online communities and activities and create and share their own content, which has benefits but also tends to increase screen time and poses additional risks. Not only are young people exposed to all manner of explicit content, but they have the tools to create and share their own — widening the challenges for parents, police, and educators.

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Illustration: Ibrahim Rayintakath for Bloomberg

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There’s a new sunflower in town. But it isn’t your stereotypical sunflower with cheery yellow petals.

The so-called “woolly devil” is tiny, pale, and well camouflaged amid limestone-rich rocks and look-alike plants in Texas’s Big Bend National Park, where it was discovered. “When we found it, we didn’t realize it was something new,” says Deb Manley, a park volunteer, who, with a colleague, was the first to spot the little plant. “I just figured it was another small annual that was going to be difficult to look up.”

And indeed, it was quite difficult to look up; it didn’t quite match anything in the guides for tiny, fuzzy wildflower plants. But that turned out to be for a very good reason—the flower was a species not yet known to scientists. “It was so unique that it actually needed to have its own genus, and that’s a very rare thing,” says Isaac Lichter Marck, an evolutionary biologist and a daisy taxonomist at the California Academy of Sciences. Like Manley, he’s a member of the team who published the discovery of the woolly devil in February in PhytoKeys.

Sunflowers are the part of the most diverse family among flowering plants, Asteraceae, which contains more than 30,000 formally described species. This includes, of course, the iconic, bright yellow “common sunflower,” or Helianthus annuus. All sunflower species have a strange trait in common: any one of their blooms, called a capitulum, is actually made up of two varieties of flowers—ray flowers, which make up the sunflower’s characteristic halo of petals, and disc flowers that fill the inner ring of the flower head. The woolly devil follows this plan in miniature: it sports two or three ray flowers that are white with maroon stripes, with a few unremarkable disk flowers between them.

Wild sunflowers tend to thrive in harsh environments, such as the desert conditions that characterize Big Bend National Park: lots of sunshine, extreme heat, and occasional sudden summer storms. “That’s made them really successful in the last 15 to 20 million years, in which the Earth has undergone a lot of cooling and drying,” Lichter Marck says.

The new find is formally known as Ovicula biradiata. Ovicula means “little sheep” in Latin, and the name not only describes the plant but also honors the iconic bighorn sheep that used to roam Big Bend before they were killed by hunters and diseases. (Texas began to reintroduce sheep to the region in 2010). Meanwhile the common name “woolly devil” reflects the plant’s discovery near a canyon called Devil’s Den, Manley says, as well as the hornlike appearance of plants with two ray florets—and, she admits, the frustration of distinguishing it from other tiny, fuzzy plants.

And these plants really are woolly, Lichter Marck says. Thousands of hairs fully cover the stems and leaves. “In order to extract DNA from the plant, we actually had to give the leaves a little shave,” he says. The hairs likely protect the plant from hungry animals, he notes. “Imagine you’re an herbivore—you come to chew on these leaves, but you just get a mouthful of wool,” Lichter Marck says.

This feature is surprisingly common among sunflowers in such harsh environments. It likely also protects the plant from damaging ultraviolet light or the dry desert air that sucks moisture from plants. And right now the region is in a severe drought, so woolly devils need all the protection they can get, Manley says.

The drought also makes keeping tabs on the woolly devil a challenge for Manley and anyone else looking to spot it. The plant is difficult to distinguish when not in flower—and it only flowers after it rains. “It’s frustrating,” Manley says, noting that not even she can track down the plant right now, much less newcomers to the park who have heard about the discovery. “There is not much going on in the park right now, botanically—the main event right now is there’s a lot of plants dying,” she says.

Even if the drought eases up, Lichter Marck worries about the fate of the woolly devil, which Manley and other park representatives identified last year in only a few patches of the park. “We may have documented this plant as it’s on its way out, and we’re lucky to do so,” he says. “It’s almost an urgent type of science. We need to document these things before they go extinct.”

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NASA Perseverance rover captured stunning imagery of an area called “Airey Hill” in Jezero Crater on the Red Planet. Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley gives you a tour. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS; ESA/DLR/FU-Berlin

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Perseverance

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“Obviously,” he continued, “now I realize it’s quite the opposite.”

In the years since that night, Mr. Lewis, now 37, has become a bard of British parenting comedy. He’s on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. His route to success began after the pandemic, when he began posting short online videos that gently mocked (and commiserated with) his fellow British millennial parents.

In some sketches, Mr. Lewis acts the harried grown-up. In the clip below, he’s trying to adhere to a nap schedule while driving. There’s an unseen toddler in the back who mustn’t be allowed to fall asleep. As they approach home, he gets increasingly desperate.

“Should we sing?” he asks. “Do the actions! Big energy!” he commands. Then, he tries swerving, which is more dangerous than fun. their times, he pretends to be a kid. In one long-running series, he stages conversations between toddlers who sound a lot like adults but who deadpan the baffling logic of two year olds. (The series, Two Toddlers Chatting, is his most popular, he said, with about 60 million views on Instagram alone.)

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George Lewis, a bard of British parenting comedy, is on his first tour as a headliner, and his shows keep selling out. Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

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