Banning phones in schools? Good or bad? I’m a boomer, so I vote yes.
“Since the advent of cell phones, schools have been grappling with how to handle them, but the movement to remove phones from schools has accelerated over the past year.
This is now happening at nearly all levels: states are passing or calling for “phone ban” legislation. Districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District (the largest public school district in the US) are implementing new rules. And of course, individual schools are grappling with what to do.
Though much of the discussion has focused on seemingly straightforward “phone bans,” there is actually a range of policies under consideration.”
From After Babel, Should Schools Ban Cell Phones?
“What makes somebody riot? Why do people throw bricks at police while being filmed by dozens of phones, knowing it could get them a jail sentence that ruins their lives? Their decision may be political. The current British riots — the country’s worst disorder since 2011 — clearly express anti-immigrant feeling. … But in fact, riots are not purely political events. They are more emotional than that. To understand them as a simple matter of rational actors calling for specific policies is to miss out a lot about why riots start, how they spread, and how authorities should respond.”
The Financial Times reports on what lies behind riots from the left, right, and center. How to read a riot
The drumbeats against ultra-processed foods, food without a clear definition, have reached a fevered pitch – because the greatest Satan has been brought out in the war against them.
“When tobacco use became widespread at the turn of the 20th century, rates of lung cancer began increasing in the 1920s, and continued on a terrible upward trend until the early 1990s. Tobacco companies waged a shrewd disinformation campaign that included funding doctors’ research and promoting false studies while hiding negative evidence. After long battles, the US Food and Drug Administration was allowed to regulate tobacco products in 2009.
A similar trend is developing with ultra-processed foods, the consumption of which has increased since 2000. A lack of regulation in the US has allowed additives that are “generally recognized as safe” to flood the food system.”
From Stat’s First Opinion, Ultra-processed foods: the tobacco of the 21st century?
Tom Wolfe was a great observer of our times. While many know him from The Right Stuff, I found all his books engaging and thought-provoking. I am not alone in this experience.
“The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes. These media-age aristocrats had to excel at tasks that members of the beau monde have always excelled at — being rich, thin and well-connected; keeping the duplexes adorned with the design trends. But they had to do so much more. They had to be morally avant-garde, able to articulate the luxury opinions du jour. They had to perform all these inversions — rising to the social stratosphere by ostentatiously demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed, assuring their place atop the structures of power by striking radical poses and pretending to support tearing those structures down. Wolfe was there at the dawn of 20th-century one-downmanship, when you could rise to the social stratosphere by donning peasant and revolutionary garb.”
From David Brooks and the NY Times, The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop
Chuck Dinerstein, MD, MBA
Director of Medicine
Dr. Charles Dinerstein, M.D., MBA, FACS is Director of Medicine at the American Council on Science and Health. He has over 25 years of experience as a vascular surgeon.
