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As Election Day begins to wind down, polls suggest that the presidential race will be one of the closest in the history of American politics, as neither candidate holds a meaningful edge in enough states to win 270 electoral votes.

☆ Opinion | Mockery Won’t Increase Fertility
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-08 | by ( David French | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I’m not a natalist for economic reasons — though I do think aging societies can create economic problems. And I agree with my colleague Jessica Grose that there is too much panic among natalists about declining birthrates. Sacrificial love is not exclusive to parents, of course, but it flows naturally from decent people when they have kids. It has more promise as a cultural cause, but even then it is often scolding and even malicious. When JD Vance rants, for example, about “childless cat ladies,” he’s not engaged in a coherent cultural argument.

Persons: I’m, Jessica Grose, JD Vance, ” he’s, Charlie Kirk, ”

☆ The Endless Quest to Max Out on Happiness - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-08-08 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Three times a day my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. After I took 100 surveys over about a month, that’s not what my results told me. I reported the most happiness when I was eating and the least when I was working. Being reminded that most of my life is obligatory does not exactly spark joy. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

Persons: that’s Locations: TrackYourHappiness.org

☆ Opinion | The Election of Divorced Men vs. All the Single Ladies
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-31 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The gist, vis-à-vis relationship status, was that in every category more women than men identify as Democrats, with the biggest gap existing among divorced Americans. According to Gallup, Cox writes, “A majority (54 percent) of divorced men identify as Republican compared to 41 percent of divorced women,” the largest gender gap among divorced people in two decades. As my colleague Thomas Edsall noted in May, in recent years there’s also a yawning gender gap among young voters, with young women becoming increasingly Democratic and young men becoming increasingly Republican. Edsall quoted the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who cites Donald Trump’s “chaotic and divisive style” and lack of respect, among the reasons that young women have been fleeing the G.O.P. Young women, Lake said, “want stability and are very concerned about division and the potential for violence.”All this data was collected when Joe Biden was on course to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

Persons: “, ”, Daniel Cox, Cox, Thomas Edsall, there’s, Edsall, Donald Trump’s, Lake, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, JD Vance Organizations: Republican Party, Trump, Survey Center, Gallup, Democratic Locations: Young

☆ Opinion | JD Vance’s ‘Cat Ladies’ Riff Has Serious ‘Handmaid’s Tale’ Vibes
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-25 | by ( Paul Krugman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

You may have heard about JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” riff. It’s a statement, as my colleague Jessica Grose writes, that shows the desperation of Republicans who are still “clinging to the tag line that the G.O.P. It’s the kind of comment that makes you wonder if Vance thinks that he has been nominated by the Republican Party to serve as the vice president of the Republic of Gilead. Sorry — yes — Vance knows that our nation is still called the United States of America. But there’s a real “Handmaid’s Tale” vibe to a lot of what we’re hearing from the right.

Persons: JD Vance’s, Vance, they’ve, Kamala Harris, It’s, Jessica Grose, — Vance Organizations: Senate, Republican Party Locations: America, Republic of, United States of America

☆ Opinion | The Attacks on Kamala Harris for Not Having Kids Will Backfire
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-23 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On Sunday, almost immediately after prominent Democrats started endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president, attacks from the political right started pouring in. There were five others: George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Polk and James Buchanan. But more to the point, if you think that the concerns of parents and families will always be “abstract” to someone who doesn’t have children, you’re telling on yourself. It’s not simply that, by all accounts, Harris has a close, loving relationship with her stepkids. It should go without saying, but: Having children doesn’t necessarily make you a better person.

Persons: Kamala Harris, Will Chamberlain, Ron DeSantis’s, Harris, shouldn’t, ”, Harris wouldn’t, George Washington, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, James Polk, James Buchanan, Warren Harding, It’s, they’ll

☆ Opinion | ‘Black Pill’ and the Dark Anarchy of Our Political Moment
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-17 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I found out during a live comedy show that the former president had been shot at. The second comic confirmed what the first one said, and joked that if this had happened in another era, they probably would have canceled the show. But at this point we’re all so primed for political chaos and inured to news of fresh violence that the audience — including me — barely reacted. From the right, that it was the result of a deep-state plot. As Becca Rothfeld put it in a review of “Black Pill” for The Washington Post, “The flotsam of the internet is childish, ridiculous and, consequently, easy to underestimate.

Persons: Donald Trump, —, Corey Comperatore, David Dutch, James Copenhaver, Elle Reeve, ”, Becca Rothfeld, ” Reeve, Trump, Elliott Kline Organizations: Poison Society, The Washington Post Locations: Charlottesville, Va

☆ Opinion | Becoming a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Is Like Getting Into Harvard
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-10 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

As a way to dissociate from political news, I’ve spent the past week mainlining stories about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders; it started when I binged the new Netflix docuseries “America’s Sweethearts,” which follows the women trying out and training for the 2023-2024 squad. I’m a New York Jew who got kicked out of ballet class when I was 4 because I lacked any discernible talent or interest. So I didn’t expect to fall in love with a show that is so steeped in Southern and dance culture. Because the newbies are competing for positions against veterans, the acceptance rate in any given year can be comparable to that of an Ivy League school. The seven episodes of the Netflix series weren’t enough for me.

Persons: I’ve, I’m, Caitlin Dickerson, Reece, ”, “ Organizations: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Netflix, Jew, Ivy League, Cowboys, CMT Locations: New

☆ Opinion | Are We in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-03 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When I asked readers who identified as spiritual but not religious to reach out to me, I was astounded by how much variety there was in the faith experiences of individuals in this group. Some said they found spirituality both in the beauty of the physical world and in communing with other people. “I found the 12-step program to be sort of a spirituality that worked for me,” a woman named Maggie who lives in the Northeast told me. (I’m not using her last name because one of the tenets of her 12-step program is anonymity.) She finds the 12-step program to be free of that kind of hypocrisy and appreciates the “bone-scraping honesty” of her fellow group members.

Persons: “, ”, Maggie, what’s Organizations: Northeast Locations: communing

☆ Opinion | It’s Time to Ban Pharmaceutical Advertising
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-19 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

“Zofran girlies rise up.”Seeing that phrase on my screen as I idly scrolled TikTok made me stop and watch the whole video, but probably not for the reasons its creator wanted. Zofran is a drug that prevents nausea and vomiting. I’ve taken it a bunch of times — most memorably at a hospital via IV, when a doctor told me he wanted to “stop the barf cycle” during a bout with norovirus. It also comes in pill form, and it’s often prescribed for cancer patients to offset the side effects of chemotherapy. The Zofran girlies video asserts that “literally everyone” on TikTok is talking about Zofran, because “it’s so hard to get” — a claim I’d never heard before.

Persons: “, TikTok, I’d

☆ Young Women Predictably Flee Organized Religion - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-12 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Her parents took her and her sister to nondenominational megachurches that adhered to a lot of Baptist and Pentecostal ideals, she said. As a kid, she loved the way every service felt “like a concert,” filled with music and light, and she made loads of friends through church. “So I didn’t want to associate with that kind of evangelicalism.”Draut is representative of an emerging trend: young women leaving church “in unprecedented numbers,” as Daniel Cox and Kelsey Eyre Hammond wrote in April for Cox’s newsletter, American Storylines. A new survey reveals that the pattern has now reversed.”While over the past half-century, Americans of all ages, genders and backgrounds have moved away from organized religion, as I wrote in a series on religious nones — atheists, agnostics and nothing-in-particulars — young women are now disaffiliating from organized religion in greater percentages than young men. And women pushing back on the beliefs and practices of several faiths, particularly different Christian traditions, is something I have been reading about more and more.

Persons: Alexis Draut, nondenominational, Draut, ”, Donald Trump, Daniel Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond, Cox, Hammond, we’ve Organizations: Berry College, Survey Center, American Enterprise Institute Locations: Kentucky, Georgia

☆ Opinion | You Can’t Perform a Good Marriage
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-29 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I saw the new Netflix documentary series “Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal,” anticipating just some prurient garbage to half-watch before drifting off to sleep. That’s because ashleymadison.com is a website for married people looking to find partners in infidelity — its tagline is “Life is short. The heart of the series comes from the couples who were affected. Though one couple that had an open marriage seemed unruffled by the invasion of privacy, two other families are featured that were devastated by the hack. One of those couples is Sam and Nia Rader, a Texas-based Christian vlogging couple who had gone viral a few times before the hack.

Persons: Ashley Madison, ”, Daniel Victor, Nia Rader, ” Sam Rader, “ vlogging, John Gibson, Christi Gibson Organizations: Netflix, YouTube, Disney Locations: Texas, Louisiana

☆ Opinion | The Gender Pay Gap Is a Culture Problem
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-22 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

American women made significant progress toward closing the gender pay gap in the second half of the 20th century, but that gap has barely budged over the past two decades. In 2022, according to Pew Research, “American women typically earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men. While there are several factors at play, one of the key contributors to the gap is what’s known as the motherhood penalty and the corresponding fatherhood premium: Women’s pay decreases when they have children, while men’s pay increases. Somewhat surprisingly to me, his research, which builds on years of earlier scholarship, suggests that a country’s family policy has relatively little to do with how big the parenthood pay gap is. A society’s culture and norms seem to be much bigger factors in how big the motherhood penalty is: The more egalitarian the culture, the lower the gap.

Persons: don’t, ”, Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Gabriel Leite Organizations: Pew Research, of Economic Research

☆ Opinion | Loneliness Is a Problem That A.I. Won’t Solve
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-18 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

One day it will be better than a real [girlfriend]. One day, the real one will be the inferior choice.” The article goes on to breathlessly outline use cases for “A.I. companions,” suggesting that some future iteration of chatbots could stand in for mental health professionals, relationship coaches or chatty co-workers. This week, OpenAI released an update to its ChatGPT chatbot, an indication that the inhuman future foretold by the Andreessen Horowitz story is fast approaching. While some observers, including the Times Opinion contributing writer Julia Angwin, who called ChatGPT’s recent update “rather routine,” weren’t particularly impressed, there’s been plenty of hype about the potential for humanlike chatbots to ameliorate emotional challenges, particularly loneliness and social isolation.

Persons: Andreessen Horowitz, A.I, OpenAI, Horowitz, ”, Scarlett Johansson, Julia Angwin, weren’t, there’s Organizations: The Washington Post, omni

☆ A.I. Can Be Really Dumb. But It’s Still a Good Tutor. - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-17 | by ( Peter Coy | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I understand why parents are unhappy with the proliferation of computers in school, as my Opinion colleague Jessica Grose documented in a recent series of newsletters. For example, imagine teaching ratios by showing a Yankees fan how to update Aaron Judge’s batting average. can also give teachers and parents the detailed information they need to help their young charges more effectively. As I wrote last month, there’s a risk that A.I. will substitute for human labor and eventually render us all superfluous.

Persons: Jessica Grose, ”, “ we’ve, Aaron Judge’s

☆ Opinion | ‘Tradwife’ Content Isn’t Really for Women. It’s for Men Who Want Submissive Wives.
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-15 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Tradwife content has been a social media phenomenon for a few years, and even though the trend creates a lot of discourse online and off, I’ve resisted writing about it because I think it’s a trap. Their posts sometimes come with florid captions about the joy and freedom that come from submitting to their husbands, because biblical submission doesn’t connote inferiority. The whole discussion can be a trap because the content itself is meant to be a heightened provocation — some tradwife creators post things that they label as triggering opinions and then say they get so much hate for being stay-at-home moms. But they rely on that dissonance in order to create more engagement (which leads to more clicks and more money). These posts have a way of painting feminists as haters who resist their true nature and casting career women in opposition to women who don’t work for pay.

Persons: I’ve, “ Locations: gauzy

☆ Opinion | The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-01 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Too much life enters this house,” Tillie Olsen, the writer, labor activist and mother of four daughters, wrote in a letter to the poet Anne Sexton. Olsen and Sexton were among the early recipients of a paid fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. In some ways, remarkable progress has been made for American women since then — at the time, for example, it was perfectly legal to fire a woman for getting pregnant. (In other ways, we have returned to the 19th century.) The book made me ponder whether some of the conflicts that parents feel between their family responsibilities and other parts of their lives can be fully resolved.

Persons: ” Tillie Olsen, Anne Sexton, “, lunchpacking —, Olsen, Sexton, Maggie Doherty’s, Radcliffe’s, Mary Ingraham Bunting, Maxine Kumin, Barbara Swan, Marianna Pineda Organizations: Radcliffe Institute for Independent, Art Locations: midcentury America, Doherty’s

☆ Opinion | Every Tech Tool in the Classroom Should Be Ruthlessly Evaluated
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Educational technology in schools is sometimes described as a wicked problem — a term coined by a design and planning professor, Horst Rittel, in the 1960s, meaning a problem for which even defining the scope of the dilemma is a struggle, because it has so many interconnected parts that never stop moving. When you have a wicked problem, solutions have to be holistic, flexible and developmentally appropriate. Which is to say that appropriate tech use for elementary schoolers in rural Oklahoma isn’t going to be the same as appropriate tech use in a Chicago high school. I spent the past few weeks speaking with parents, teachers, public school administrators and academics who study educational technology. We need a complete rethink of the ways that we’re evaluating and using tech in classrooms; the overall change that I want to see is that tech use in schools — devices and apps — should be driven by educators, not tech companies.

Persons: Horst Rittel, Julia Freeland Fisher, Jonathan Haidt, ”, Fisher Organizations: Christensen Institute Locations: Oklahoma, Chicago

☆ Opinion | Most Teachers Know They’re Playing With Fire When They Use Tech in the Classroom
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-17 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Unconstrained skills are more complex ones that develop over a lifetime of learning and can deepen over the years. (It’s worth noting that many popular educational apps are not high-quality.) And I think those are the questions that researchers, policymakers, school leaders, teachers and principals should be asking,” he said. “What are the best use cases for this digital technology in the classroom?”In last week’s newsletter, I came in pretty hot about the pitfalls of educational technology in American classrooms. But that doesn’t mean there are no benefits to any use of educational technology.

Persons: Josh Gilbert, Gilbert, ”, I’m, haven’t Organizations: Boston College, Harvard

☆ Opinion | Get Tech Out of the Classroom Before It’s Too Late
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-10 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director. To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Persons: Jaime Lewis, “, ”, Lewis Organizations: YouTube, San Luis Coastal Unified School District Locations: San Luis, San Luis Obispo, Calif

☆ Opinion | Screens Are Everywhere in Schools. Do They Actually Help Kids Learn?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-27 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

A few weeks ago, a parent who lives in Texas asked me how much my kids were using screens to do schoolwork in their classrooms. (Smartwatches and smartphones are banned in my children’s schools during the school day, which I’m very happy about; I find any argument for allowing these devices in the classroom to be risible.) No, this parent was talking about screens that are school sanctioned, like iPads and Chromebooks issued to children individually for educational activities. I’m embarrassed to say that I couldn’t answer her question because I had never asked or even thought about asking. I rarely heard details about what these screens are adding to our children’s literacy, math, science or history skills.

Persons: Chromebooks, I’m, Natasha Singer, “ Organizations: ”, Progress Locations: Texas, New York State

☆ Opinion | Does Everyone Want to Be on the ‘Mommy Track’?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-16 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I think I had five jobs because they just weren’t working for what was going on in my personal life,” Koelsch told me. Now, she works four days from home, one day in the office, and her life is manageable. Remote work, and Washington State’s paid family and medical leave program, will make having another kid possible for her. One was the negative effect of the increased volatility and outrageous expense of child care (which I wrote about on Wednesday). I’ve seen a fair number of headlines over the past few years like this one, “WFH Goes From New Path to Dead End for Working Mothers,” and this one, “‘You Are Mommy Tracked to the Billionth Degree,’” suggesting that for ambitious moms, working from home is a mistake.

Persons: Liz Koelsch, Jessica Bennett, she’s, ” Koelsch, Washington State’s, I’ve Organizations: Covid, Washington, Reading Locations: “

☆ Opinion | How to Fix the Crisis of Trust in Higher Education
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been keeping track of every report I see about major budget shortfalls at universities. Here’s a sampling:“SUNY Warns of Future $1B Deficit Without Higher Tuition or More Aid” — The Times Union, Jan. 2. “Penn State Plans Nearly $100M in Cuts for FY26 Budget” — Higher Ed Dive, Jan. 24. “As U. of Arizona Confronts Budget Cuts, Workers and Students Brace for the Worst” — The New York Times, Feb. 21. The other is the decline in Americans’ confidence in higher education.

Persons: I’ve, Brace, Sharon Otterman, Josh Moody, Ed Organizations: The Times Union, UConn, Connecticut, “ Penn, Workers, New York Times, Gallup Locations: Arizona, New York

☆ Opinion | A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-02 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The superintendent told NBC News the photos included students’ faces superimposed onto nude bodies.”I had heard about this kind of thing happening to high school girls, which is horrible enough. I’m not a technophobe and have, in the past, been somewhat skeptical about the outsize negative impact of social media on teen girls. The possibilities are especially frightening when the technology is used by teens and tweens, groups with notoriously iffy judgment about the permanence of their actions. I have to admit that my gut reaction to the Beverly Hills story was rage — I wanted the book thrown at the kids who made those fakes. But I wanted to hear from someone with more experience talking to teens and thinking deeply about the adolescent relationship with privacy and technology.

Persons: Kat Tenbarge, Liz Kreutz, ”, — Organizations: NBC News, “, Beverly Vista Middle, NBC, Beverly Locations: Beverly Hills, Calif

☆ Opinion | Could Swifties or Trekkies Decide the Election?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Tolkien via social media for political action. But despite the good-natured skepticism, Sundberg said she understands and respects what the Working Families Party is trying to do. Social media is where many young voters live — about a third of adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. And turning out young voters who are otherwise not particularly politically engaged will be key to winning elections up and down the ballot in November. As Marcela Valdes explained this week for The New York Times Magazine, young voters tend to have low turnout rates.

Persons: Emily Sundberg, ”, Tolkien, What’s, Biden, Sundberg, Marcela Valdes Organizations: Working, Party, Pew Research, House, The New York Times Magazine, Center for Information, Research, Civic, Tufts University Locations: TikTok, Gen

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