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When you enter a relationship, you’re not just embracing the shared present, you’re also stepping into the emotional landscape shaped by your partner’s past. Previous relationships can leave behind unresolved fears, scars, and insecurities that inevitably affect your dynamic.

While this emotional baggage may seem heavy, it can provide valuable insights into your partner’s needs and vulnerabilities. Yet, if these feelings go unspoken or unmanaged, they have the potential to cloud your connection and make you feel like you’re navigating someone else’s unresolved history.

The challenge lies in supporting your partner through their emotional residue without compromising your own boundaries. How can you offer empathy without becoming the emotional caretaker? How do you respect your partner’s past without letting it shape your future together? These are questions many couples grapple with.

Here are three steps to help balance empathy and self-care, allowing both you and your partner to thrive without being weighed down by past shadows.

1. Be A Mirror, Not A Healer

When someone you love struggles with emotional pain from their past, it’s natural to want to help. Our empathy drives us to heal those we care about, but in romantic relationships, attempting to “fix” your partner’s wounds can backfire. This approach places an undue burden on you that isn’t yours to carry.

Your role isn’t to erase their past hurts or provide a magical solution. Instead, you can be a mirror—reflecting their emotions back to them with empathy and understanding. This means listening deeply, offering validation, and creating a space where they feel seen and heard.

Research indicates that “partner-orientation thinking,” which involves evaluating both your feelings and your partner’s regarding the relationship, can lead to greater relationship satisfaction. Often, what your partner needs most is not a fix for their pain but for you to hold space as they work through it themselves.

Why is this important?

Trying to heal your partner can blur emotional boundaries and lead to burnout, resentment, or even codependency. Conversely, being a reflective listener fosters a healthy emotional balance, allowing both partners to maintain their independence while offering support.

In practice, when your partner expresses insecurity or anxiety tied to their past, you might say, “I understand why what happened before makes you feel this way. I’m here with you now, but how do you think we can approach this together?”

2. Watch For Trigger Loops

Emotional baggage from past relationships often brings triggers—specific situations that provoke strong emotional reactions tied to unresolved experiences like betrayal or abandonment. These triggers can create recurring patterns of conflict, known as “trigger loops,” where your partner reacts not to the present but to past hurts.

For instance, if your partner was betrayed in a previous relationship, they might

become anxious when you’re late or don’t respond to messages promptly. Their reaction is less about the current situation and more about the fear of being hurt again.

Initially, these triggers may seem like minor disagreements, but if they keep surfacing, it’s essential to recognize the underlying pattern. Ask yourself, “Is my partner responding to the present or to their past?” Acknowledging this distinction can help defuse tension and clarify the situation.

Why is this important?

Left unaddressed, trigger loops can erode trust and lead to misunderstandings, leaving both partners feeling frustrated or confused. Recognizing these patterns early helps interrupt the cycle and prevents small triggers from escalating into larger conflicts.

In practice, if your partner has trust issues stemming from past betrayal and begins questioning your actions, it’s crucial to acknowledge the trigger instead of reacting defensively—one of the “horsemen” that predicts the end of a relationship. You might say, “I understand why this brings up old fears, but I’m committed to being honest with you. Let’s talk about what’s making you feel uneasy.”

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There are multiple ways to steer through past hurts without hitting rough waters. Here are a few of … [+]  Getty

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It’s said that lightning never strikes the same place twice and a watched pot never boils.

But neither statement is true—especially when your “pot” is an enormous tropical lightning storm bristling with thunderbolts, and you’re watching it from far above in the stratosphere. Two recent studies in Nature found that some storms are indeed at a rolling boil—one that emits powerful bursts of gamma rays, not steam. And some of these emissions occur in mysterious, previously unrecognized patterns, split-second flickers that seem to spark ordinary lightning discharges.

“How lightning gets started inside thunderstorms is a big mystery,” says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the University of New Hampshire, who served as a reviewer for both studies. “Decades of balloon and aircraft measurements have failed to find electric fields inside storms large enough to make a spark, and yet thunderstorms manage to make more than eight million flashes per day around the planet. We are clearly missing something important. These new observations could be that ‘something.’”

Scientists have long known that thunderstorms can produce gamma rays, extremely high-energy light that is more often associated with astrophysical phenomena, such as exploding stars and matter-devouring black holes. In earthly tempests, the physics behind such emissions is relatively well-understood: swirling, windblown water droplets and ice crystals build up an electric charge within a storm, with positively charged particles rising to the cloud tops and negatively charged ones sinking to the bottom. This results in a sprawling electric field on the order of 100 million volts—powerful enough to accelerate electrons inside the storm to nearly the speed of light, slamming the charged particles into air molecules that give off further electrons and setting off a cascade of collisions so energetic that gamma rays are ultimately produced.

Researchers had observed two forms of thunderstorm gamma-ray emissions: relatively long-lived “glows” lasting hundreds of seconds, as well as intense, microsecond-scale bursts known as terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs), bright enough to be visible to Earth-observing satellites.

But scientists also knew this picture was incomplete, built as it was on piecemeal readings from airborne and ground-based instruments. “We still have significant uncertainties in the electrical nature of storms, from the details of how charge is separated by particles within the cloud to the physics of lightning initiation and channel development,” says Vanna Chmielewski, an atmospheric scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, who was not involved in the new research. “Many of these processes are difficult if not impossible to accurately capture in a laboratory setting or model, given the number of contributing factors, known variability within even a single storm and limited observational datasets which can be used for validation.”

To get a clearer view, in 2023 a team led by Nikolai Østgaard and Martino Marisaldi, both atmospheric physicists at the University of Bergen in Norway, monitored the gamma-ray emissions of large storms from up close and on high, chasing down thunderheads with 10 flights of a NASA-owned modified U-2 spy plane over the Caribbean and Central America. The program, called ALOFT (Airborne Lightning Observatory for Fly’s Eye Geostationary Lightning Mapper Simulator and Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes), constitutes the most comprehensive and focused airborne surveillance of thunderstorm gamma-ray emissions yet performed.

“ALOFT was designed to try to definitively answer the question ‘Are these gamma-ray flashes and glows common or rare?’” says Steve Cummer, an electrical engineer at Duke University and co-author of both studies. “And it delivered big time… The gamma-ray production process is way, way more important than we thought.”

The flights revealed glows and TGFs, as expected, but also much more: Both phenomena proved far more abundant than predicted, with most of the TGFs being dim enough to escape the notice of any overwatching satellites. The glows also weren’t steadily emanating from isolated regions in the storms as anticipated, but rather bubbled up in surges of radiation for hours across regions about 100 kilometers wide. And amid the hundreds of recorded events, the researchers also glimpsed something new—so-called flickering gamma-ray flashes (FGFs), pulsing spikes of emission that lasted for milliseconds and seemed to spring from glows. Most intriguingly, Østgaard says, “all the transient gamma-ray events were followed by intense lightning.”

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Whether you have a newborn, a busy toddler, or an active preschooler, the question—” When will my child learn to read?”—has likely crossed your mind. According to experts, most kids learn to read by the time they are 6 or 7 years old.1

Reading Milestones. Nemours Kids Health.

But the process of reading begins long before that.

In fact, the first 3 years of your child’s life is the most important time for speech and language development. For this reason, you should be reading to your baby, singing to them, and talking about things that are happening in their day. These actions stimulate their brain development and build literacy skills.2

“Pre-literacy skills can begin as early as a newborn and into the first few months of life,” says Kristin Miller, director of education at the Celebree School. “Reading out loud regularly to your infant helps…build vocabulary, and encourages a love of reading into their toddler years and beyond.”

Average Age Kids Learn to Read

By the time children are in kindergarten, they are expected to recognize their name and know how to hold a writing utensil. They also should be able to identify all 26 uppercase and lowercase letters, says Yvette Manns, MEd, a language and literacy specialist, author, certified dyslexia practitioner, and creator of Phonics Read-Alouds book series. 

“Beyond the letters’ names, children also need to know the 44 sounds of English, called phonemes,” explains Manns. “These phonemes are important because children will learn the sound-symbol (letter) relationships, which is what we know as phonics. Phonics will help them break the code of words and learn to be successful readers.”

Equipping your child with these early literacy skills before kindergarten is important to their success at becoming a reader by the time they are 6 or 7 years old. This means introducing them to books, letters, sounds, words, and more long before you fill out the school enrollment forms. 

However, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) reports that as many as one in three children enter kindergarten without the needed language skills to learn how to read.2 This could potentially put them behind and make it challenging for them to keep up. It also may slow them down in making the crucial transition in third grade from learning to read to reading to learn.

Reading Milestones to Watch For 

The first step in helping a child learn to read is simply reading aloud to them frequently from the time they are a baby and giving them a collection of books to “read” on their own, says Kathryn Starke, MS, a former elementary school teacher, national literacy consultant, and author of Tackle Reading.

In fact, research shows that reading books to your child as an infant can boost vocabulary and reading skills years later—long before the start of elementary school. And, by the time they reach their fourth birthday, they could be displaying emergent literacy skills, such as name-writing.3 As they get older, they will identify letters or combinations of letters, and then connect those letters to sounds.

Here are some other milestones you might notice along the way. 

Toddlers 

By 18 months, toddlers are continuing to develop their language and communication skills and laying the groundwork for future literacy, says Miller. Pre-literacy milestones you might observe in an 18-month old include:

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E-cigarette usage declined among kids, as did cigarette and cigar smoking, and hookahs, according to the CDC’s annual National Youth Tobacco Survey. In fact, overall tobacco use saw a marked drop from the 2023 poll, with an estimated 2.25 million students having consumed a tobacco product in the past 30 days, compared to 2.8 million students the year before. But one product saw an increase in usage: nicotine pouches.

Unlike cigarettes, cigars, or pipes, nicotine pouches don’t contain any actual tobacco leaves, though the nicotine they contain can be derived from tobacco plants. Even so, for the purpose of the survey, the CDC still classifies them as a tobacco product. Nicotine pouches are composed of a powder made up of nicotine (which by itself is extremely addictive and dangerous) and flavorings. Users insert them between their gums and lips, and the nicotine is absorbed through the gums and mouth lining as the powder dissolves, according to the CDC.

The pouches have become something of a culture war issue over the past few years, with conservative heavy hitters, including congresspeople Mike Collins and Marjorie Taylor Green, adopting them as an anti-regulation cause célèbre. Though they’ve been on the market for decades, their popularity has exploded over the past decade. One study found sales of the product increased over 300% between 2016 and 2020, while tobacco company Phillip Morris, which owns the popular Zyn brand, reported a 78% increase in sales of the pouches in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Tucker Carlson even told comedian/podcaster/walking haircut nightmare Theo Von that he believed the pouches enhanced his acumen in the boudoir. If you need a scare before Halloween, just try picturing that. Horrifying. It should also be noted that this claim is almost definitely false. Study after study has found a link between tobacco use and erectile dysfunction, including e-cigarettes. Even without a delivery mechanism that involves tobacco, nicotine constricts blood vessels, which can contribute to sexual dysfunction.

Now, we know that the trend has reached young people. In 2023, the pouches were the fourth most popular tobacco product among the middle and high school students, behind vapes, cigarettes, and cigars. This year, they’ve moved into second place, with 1.4% of replying students saying they had used them in the past 30 days, up from 1.2% the previous year. Vapes remain, by far, the most popular product, but their usage declined from 7.7% to 5.9%. Cigarettes came in third (hitting the lowest rate ever recorded by the survey, which the CDC has conducted since 1999), followed by cigars.

Experimenting with tobacco now seems less likely to lead to a habit. In this year’s survey, 42.9% of students who had ever used a tobacco product said they had done so in the past month, down from 46.7% the previous year.“We’re headed in the right direction when it comes to reducing tobacco product use among our nation’s youth,” said Brian King, director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products, in a statement. “But we can’t take our foot off the gas. Continued vigilance is needed to continue to reduce all forms of tobacco product use among youth. Addressing disparities remains an essential part of these efforts to ensure that we don’t leave anyone behind.”

Each year, the CDC conducts the National Youth Tobacco Survey through an online questionnaire, which middle and high school students (grades six through 12) voluntarily fill out on a self-administered basis. For the 2024 survey, data was collected on May 22, with 29,861 students taking part.

You should all know this by now, but nicotine use is tied to a wide variety of health problems (on top of ED), including hardening of artery walls, threats to pregnancy, and even affecting brain development in people under 25. Just as a general rule, if Tucker Carlson likes something, it probably produces human misery, and that’s a lesson we should be teaching our kids.

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Kids are smoking less, but the popularity of nicotine pouches has made its way to the youth, according to CDC data. © Swenico.com via Flickr

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Scholars have long contemplated the connection between language and thought—and to what degree the two are intertwined—by asking whether language is somehow an essential prerequisite for thinking.

British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell answered the question with a flat yes, asserting that language’s very purpose is “to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.” But even a cursory glance around the natural world suggests why Russell may be wrong: No words are needed for animals to perform all sorts of problem-solving challenges that demonstrate high-level cognition. Chimps can outplay humans in a strategy game, and New Caledonian Crows make their own tools that enable them to capture prey.

Still, humans perform cognitive tasks at a level of sophistication not seen in chimps—we can solve differential equations or compose majestic symphonies. Is language needed in some form for these species-specific achievements? Do we require words or syntax as scaffolding to construct the things we think about? Or do the brain’s cognitive regions devise fully baked thoughts that we then convey using words as a medium of communication?

Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist who studies language at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has spent many years trying to answer these questions. She remembers being a Harvard University undergraduate in the early 2000s, when the language-begets-thought hypothesis was still highly prominent in academia. She herself became a believer.

When Fedorenko began her research 15 years ago, a time when new brain-imaging techniques had become widely available, she wanted to evaluate this idea with the requisite rigor. She recently co-authored a perspective article in Nature that includes a summary of her findings over the ensuing years. It makes clear that the jury is no longer out, in Fedorenko’s view: language and thought are, in fact, distinct entities that the brain processes separately. The highest levels of cognition—from novel problem-solving to social reasoning—can proceed without an assist from words or linguistic structures.

Language works a little like telepathy in allowing us to communicate our thoughts to others and to pass to the next generation the knowledge and skills essential for our hypersocial species to flourish. But at the same time, a person with aphasia, who are sometimes unable to utter a single word, can still engage in an array of cognitive tasks fundamental to thought. Scientific American talked to Fedorenko about the language-thought divide and the prospects of artificial intelligence tools such as large language models for continuing to explore interactions between thinking and speaking.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How did you decide to ask the question of whether language and thought are separate entities?

Honestly, I had a very strong intuition that language is pretty critical to complex thought. In the early 2000s, I really was drawn to the hypothesis that maybe humans have some special machinery that is especially well suited for computing hierarchical structures.And language is a prime example of a system based on hierarchical structures: words combine into phrases and phrases combine into sentences.

And a lot of complex thought is based on hierarchical structures. So I thought, ‘Well, I’m going to go and find this brain region that processes hierarchical structures of language.’ There had been a few claims at the time that some parts of the left frontal cortex are that structure.

But a lot of the methods that people were using to examine overlap in the brain between language and other domains weren’t that great. And so I thought I would do it better. And then, as often happens in science, things just don’t work the way you imagine they might. I searched for evidence for such a brain region—and it doesn’t exist.

You find this very clear separation between brain regions that compute hierarchical structures in language and brain regions that help you do the same kind of thing in math or music. A lot of science starts out with some hypotheses that are often based on intuitions or on prior beliefs.

My original training was in the [tradition of linguist Noam Chomsky], where the dogma has always been that we use language for thinking: to think is why language evolved in our species. And so this is the expectation I had from that training. But you just learn, when you do science, that most of the time you’re wrong—and that’s great because we learn how things actually work in reality.

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This month, Google dropped a few hints about how its most important and lucrative product, Search, will be changing in the coming months. Earlier this year, the company rolled out AI Overviews — generated summary blurbs that are frequently passable and not infrequently completely erroneous — to many of its customers. “This week, we’re rolling out search results pages organized with AI in the U.S.,” the company said in a blog post. The test would be limited to “recipes and meal inspiration” for now, but searchers will “now see a full-page experience, with relevant results organized just for [them].” This, Google suggested, would be an exciting improvement. “You can easily explore content and perspectives from across the web including articles, videos, forums, and more — all in one place,” the company said. Not only that, but the company is testing a new design for AI Overviews that “adds prominent links to supporting webpages directly within the text.” Oh, and one more thing about the AI Overviews: Google has been “carefully testing ads” for “relevant queries.”

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to imagine AI Overviews, which are currently contained in a box above the standard and ever more cluttered search page, expanding from summaries to more comprehensive digests of information, with more citations, more things to tap and click, and space for sponsorship. Google’s most visible, high-stakes AI deployment is a set of tools that will automatically find and “organize” content from the web, present it in summary with prominent links, and have big chunky ads for products, not just links. Sound familiar? Google’s vision for the future of AI is … Google, again.

The prevailing narrative around Google’s current situation is that, despite its leadership in AI research, it was caught flat-footed by the arrival of apps like ChatGPT. It’s been hampered in its attempts to respond by institutional caution and clumsy moderation choices, but also by fear that revamping Search, a great product gradually undermined by an even greater business model, might threaten its underlying ad business. There simply isn’t as much room for ads, and not as much tapping or clicking, in a world where search engines start answering questions. There’s a lot of truth in this story, but it depends on an understanding of what Google has become and how people use it that’s slightly out of date.

Google is, substantially, still a platform for finding content on the web supported by ads from brands and websites. It’s also, by default, a major e-commerce platform, or at least a site through which we start to find things to buy. This has changed how the service looks and feels as well as the entire web around it. It should also change how we think about Google’s competition. Sure, it should be worried about OpenAI. But it might be more worried about … Amazon?

I don’t mean to understate the extent to which the arrival of ChatGPT and other AI services has rattled Google: It has. When Google and Microsoft showed off their first AI search demos in early 2023, they highlighted the ability to “chat” with your search engine, which would then produce, in conversational format or a clean, simple digest, links and summaries from the web. These were compelling previews of an entirely new interface. Arguably the most enticing things about them were that they were stripped down and simple, and they did what they were asked.

That’s not quite what they ended up shipping, of course. AI Overviews, in the beginning, leaned hard into summary, attempting to synthesize full answers while minimizing outside content. They also appeared as one more widget among many, another extra box with an unclear relationship to the rest of the results page, sometimes existing in conflict with other information presented just a few inches away. Google’s previews of its “AI-organized” results pages now look an awful lot like Google Search result pages, with a bunch of grids and modules and lists remixed but ultimately sort of piled together. Google, despite suggestions that it might change everything, is rapidly circling back around to where it started:

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Marie Curie, born more than 150 years ago, is still the only female scientist many people can name. The double Nobel Prize winner is most famous for her discovery of radioactivity, as well as the radioactive elements radium and polonium. She is less well known for encouraging a generation of women who worked in her lab and went on to work in research because of the path she paved. Though few women in science have reached Curie’s level of fame and name recognition, they continue to make gains in the field because of her life and example.

In the new book The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2024), author (and Scientific American poetry editor) Dava Sobel chronicles Curie’s life and work, and sketches biographies of many of the women who worked with her. Sobel found that few people are familiar with the network of researchers she nurtured, as well as many other aspects of the famous chemist’s history. “Everybody knows her name, but hardly anybody knows anything about her,” Sobel says.

Scientific American spoke with Sobel about Marie Curie’s contributions to science, history, and gender equality.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

How did you learn about the female scientists Curie worked with?

In 2020, I was asked to review a book called Women in Their Element, a collection of essays about female chemists. The only two names I recognized to begin with were Marie Curie and her daughter [Irène Joliot-Curie]. But then as I read, I was really struck by the number of women who had spent some time with her, either studying under her or working in her lab. By the fifth or sixth one, it really started to look like a network. And through the Curie Museum in Paris, I discovered there were really at least 45 women who passed through her laboratory. She was the first woman ever to teach at the Sorbonne. And then that made her a magnet for these other women. Also, she was already world-famous because she had won the Nobel Prize, and that spread her name everywhere. So I thought, well, this is something about Madame Curie that most people don’t know, and that’s how I got started.

How did Curie end up making the huge discoveries she made?

She had extraordinary drive to get herself out of Warsaw to Paris, to be able to get an advanced education, to believe in herself that much [in the face of strong resistance toward women in science at the time], and then to be willing and able to do the kind of laboratory work that she did. And then she married the right person. She and her husband Pierre Curie worked together when she started to do her doctoral research on this new discovery of [physicist Henri] Becquerel’s, uranic rays.

This was the radiation coming from uranium decay.

Right. This was a new thing, and nobody was paying attention to it because everybody was more interested in x-rays at the time [in 1896]. And [Curie] thought she’d go after the less exciting topic; there were 1,000 papers already written about x-rays, and nobody was doing anything with uranic rays. So that was the right time.

It’s amazing to me that she entered this field at this time and then had her first child just a year later, in 1897. I’d assumed before I read the book, that the children came well after she’d established herself as a scientist.

This is a very female story. She had two children; she had a miscarriage; she had trouble nursing. Some of the women who came to her lab stopped working when they got married and had children. It’s been more than 100 years, and that’s still true for many women in science. I really wanted to meet those issues directly in the book because I think it’s so important for young women to read about other female scientists and how they managed.

Did Curie actively set out to recruit more women into science?

I don’t think she was specifically looking to hire women, but what was different about her was that she had nothing against hiring them. So that was big, and then again, she was so prominent that she attracted them and inspired them. There are a couple of women in the story who were much younger and grew up hearing about her, which made them think, “Oh, I could be a scientist, too.” And the amazing thing to me is how she still has that effect. She’s been dead for almost 100 years, but she is still an inspiration—and not just to women who go into science but women in a variety of fields.

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Sociologist Elena Portacolone was taken aback. Many of the older adults in San Francisco she visited at home for a research project were confused when she came to the door. They’d forgotten the appointment or couldn’t remember speaking to her.

It seemed clear they had some type of cognitive impairment. Yet they were living alone.

Portacolone, an associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco, wondered how common this was. Had anyone examined this group? How were they managing?

When she reviewed the research literature more than a decade ago, there was little there. “I realized this is a largely invisible population,” she said.

Portacolone got to work and now leads the Living Alone With Cognitive Impairment Project at UCSF. The project estimates that at least 4.3 million people 55 or older who have cognitive impairment or dementia live alone in the United States.

About half have trouble with daily activities such as bathing, eating, cooking, shopping, taking medications, and managing money, according to their research. But only 1 in 3 received help with at least one such activity.

Compared with other older adults who live by themselves, people living alone with cognitive impairment are older, more likely to be women, and disproportionately Black or Latino, with lower levels of education, wealth, and homeownership. Yet only 21% qualify for publicly funded programs such as Medicaid that pay for aides to provide services in the home.

In a health care system that assumes older adults have family caregivers to help them, “we realized this population is destined to fall through the cracks,” Portacolone said.

Imagine what this means. As memory and thinking problems accelerate, these seniors can lose track of bills, have their electricity shut off, or be threatened with eviction. They might stop shopping (it’s too overwhelming) or cooking (it’s too hard to follow recipes). Or they might be unable to communicate clearly or navigate automated phone systems.

A variety of other problems can ensue, including social isolation, malnutrition, self-neglect, and susceptibility to scams. Without someone to watch over them, older adults on their own may experience worsening health without anyone noticing or struggle with dementia without ever being diagnosed.

Should vulnerable seniors live this way?

For years, Portacolone and her collaborators nationwide have followed nearly 100 older adults with cognitive impairment who live alone. She listed some concerns people told researchers they worried most about: “Who do I trust? When is the next time I’m going to forget? If I think I need more help, where do I find it? How do I hide my forgetfulness?”

Jane Lowers, an assistant professor at the Emory University School of Medicine, has been studying “kinless” adults in the early stages of dementia — those without a live-in partner or children nearby. Their top priority, she told me, is “remaining independent for as long as possible.”

Seeking to learn more about these seniors’ experiences, I contacted the National Council of Dementia Minds. The organization last year started a biweekly online group for people living alone with dementia. Its staffers arranged a Zoom conversation with five people, all with early-to-moderate dementia.

One was Kathleen Healy, 60, who has significant memory problems and lives alone in Fresno, California.

“One of the biggest challenges is that people don’t really see what’s going on with you,” she said. “Let’s say my house is a mess or I’m sick or I’m losing track of my bills. If I can get myself together, I can walk out the door and nobody knows what’s going on.”

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In late August, Bloomberg reported rumors that electric automaker Tesla plans to reveal its forthcoming autonomous robotaxi — expected to be called the Cybercab — on Oct. 10 at the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank. This vehicle will reportedly be purpose-built to function solely as a self-driving cab. As such, it will not contain an accelerator, brake pedals, or a steering wheel, and will be hailed via a special Tesla app. A week or so ago, sources shared an image of a small, canary-yellow vehicle trolling the Warners lot, tailed by Tesla production vehicles, leading some to suggest it was a camouflaged robotaxi.

Overstatements, obfuscations, and broken promises regarding the unveiling and production of future Tesla products — a “semi” tractor-trailer, a new sporty roadster, an entry-level vehicle, this robotaxi — are so frequent as to be standard operating procedure. Since Tesla entirely eliminated its public relations department four years ago, The Hollywood Reporter can’t confirm that this event (already postponed once this year) will occur at all.

But, if it does move forward, the global launch of a new Tesla at Warners is certain to raise eyebrows in Hollywood and draw scrutiny toward the chummy relationship between the carmaker’s increasingly controversial CEO, Elon Musk, and Warners’ embattled chief executive, David Zaslav. (Warner Bros. declined to comment on the rumored robotaxi reveal.) As Musk has continued his trajectory into the MAGA-verse — pledging allegiance to right-wing conspiracies, amplifying racist and antisemitic messages, disparaging trans people, including his own daughter, and endorsing Donald Trump — his stock in Hollywood, and that of his brand, has plummeted.

“Elon is very outspoken, and his political views are not as popular in the entertainment industry,” says Debbie Levin, CEO of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), which promotes messages, actions, and products to create positive environmental change in Hollywood.

The brand’s current diminished status in Hollywood is particularly notable when compared to a decade ago, when Tesla products began penetrating the industry. “The Tesla became the ‘It’ car in terms of electrification,” Levin says. “If you could spend $100,000 on a car, that was sort of the way to go to show that you care about the environment.”

As the brand expanded, Southern California — long at the forefront of vehicular trends — became one of its largest markets. “When you’re in Hollywood, driving around the studios, that’s pretty much all you see,” says Ed Kim, president and chief analyst of Auto Pacific, a SoCal-based mobility research firm. “It’s Teslas everywhere.”

Shifts are now occurring in local consumer interest and purchase behavior. “Certainly, we have seen sales drop significantly at Tesla this year,” Kim says, citing a nearly 25 percent drop in sales in the Golden State this quarter alone. This is notable not just because the brand is losing market share as established luxury automakers like Audi, BMW, and Mercedes, and compelling upstarts like Polestar, Lucid, and Rivian, diversify their EV offerings, but because, in an expanding EV marketplace, Tesla is shrinking. “Despite all the headlines, EV sales are still growing. They’re just not growing at the same speed that they were before. But Tesla is actually losing sales,” Kim says. “In fact, Tesla is one of the few EV makers that has been losing volume, not just losing market share.”

This decline can be correlated with Musk’s recent rightward turn and related online antics. “Rejection of Tesla recently spiked and continues among Democrats. They want nothing to do with Tesla,” says Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, a Southern California-based consultancy that conducts hundreds of thousands of in-depth psychographic surveys with new car buyers annually. “And there are no hidden Republicans that are buying these. That just doesn’t exist.”

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“Tesla is one of the few EV makers that has been losing volume, not just losing market share,” says automative analyst Ed Kim. THR Illustration; images: David Livingston/Getty Images, Adobe Stock

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Megan Rumney, an executive with a financial-services firm in Severna Park, Md., an affluent Baltimore suburb, decided to buy her older son a smartphone. She made the purchase with the understanding that she would use it to track his location and social media use. Rumney was hesitant to do so for the fifth grader but admits she felt a lot of social pressure and eventually gave in. All of her friends were getting their children a smartphone, and Rumney didn’t want her son to feel left out; his friends almost exclusively communicate using their devices. Still, she was concerned about the risks of social media and cyberbullying.

At the time, Rumney thought this was a good compromise. It allowed her son, Harrison, now age 14, to ride his bike to school, sporting events, and friend’s houses, giving him some sense of autonomy. A few years later she got her younger son Weston, now age 11, an Apple Watch for much the same reason. At times, though, tracking has become a burden of sorts.

When her kids aren’t with her, she uses apps such as Life360 and her younger son’s Apple Watch to track their location. Rumney says that once you have the technology, it’s hard not to use it all the time. “It’s good to know where they are and be able to get in touch with them, but it’s also a double-edged sword,” she says.

Rumney says she likes knowing where her kids are but doesn’t like her family’s overreliance on devices. She adds that she’s just not sure that being able to track Harrison was worth him having a phone that he spends so much time on, and she doesn’t know how this type of monitoring will affect him emotionally down the line. “If I could do it all again, I’m not sure, I would,” Rumney says. In fact, she’s held off on getting her younger son his own smartphone.

About half of parents in the U.S. say they monitor their adolescents’ movements via location-tracking apps, according to a study published in June 2023 in the Journal of Family Psychology. An additional 14 percent of parents who participated in the study claimed to use a tracking app while their child reported that they weren’t being surveilled, indicating that the monitoring was done unbeknownst to the child.

Experts worry that tracking teens’ locations can turn into a slippery slope that can at times hinder a teen’s relationship with their parents and harm their developing sense of autonomy, as well as create a false sense of security.

With so many things for parents to worry about, from school shooters to fentanyl overdoses and child trafficking, it’s no surprise that they look to location monitoring apps such as Find My iPhone and Life360, which use GPS, as well as the location of nearby Wi-Fi networks and cellular towers, to track and keep their children safe, says Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, whose research focuses on the mental health and well-being of adolescents and emerging adults. “With that said, for adolescents, this is a stage of life when kids are seeking autonomy and independence from their parents,” she says, “and a time when privacy feels really important to kids for good developmental reasons.”

Choukas-Bradley adds that part of teenagers’ normal development has to do with the urge for privacy and the ability to maneuver their first romantic relationships or hold their own with peers while just hanging out. This stage of seeking independence during the teen years remains crucial to them for fostering a sense of personal responsibility, learning to make their own decisions, and establishing their own system of values. “There’s some tricky gray areas with regards to what tracking kids can tell parents and what that does to a kid’s sense of autonomy and privacy,” she says. Research published in the August 2019 issue of the International Journal of Adolescence and Youth found that some children understood their parents’ concerns for their safety, but at the same time, many felt that their parents often went too far by contacting them constantly in ways that felt meddlesome.

When parents’ scrutiny is overly intrusive, teens’ natural tendency is to rebel. “This can lead to feelings of resentment, which may strain the relationship,” says Judy Ho Gavazza, an associate professor of psychology at Pepperdine University.

A study published in November 2020 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior found that perceptions of privacy invasion are associated with rebellious responses. Teens devise ways to evade their parents by turning off their phone, letting their battery go dead, or refusing to respond to text messages. (Friction over tracking happens less with preteens, who need more supervision and expect less privacy.)

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