How Social Media Apps Could Be Fueling Homicides Among Young Americans

Between 2014 and 2021, the national homicide rate for 15- to 19-year-olds increased by 91%. But as Alec McGillis reports in this co-published feature, something has fundamentally changed even beyond that staggering statistic—and the adults who try to defuse youth violence find it nearly impossible to stop.

Smartphones and social platforms existed long before the homicide spike; they are obviously not its singular cause. But considering the recent past, it’s not hard to see why social media might be a newly potent driver of violence. When the pandemic led officials to close civic hubs such as schools, libraries and rec centers for more than a year, people — especially young people — ­were pushed even further into virtual space. Much has been said about the possible links between heavy social media use and mental health problems and suicide among teenagers. Now Timpson and other violence prevention workers are carrying that concern to the logical next step. If social media plays a role in the rising tendency of young people to harm themselves, could it also be playing a role when they harm others?

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The Jerk Aficionados

As part of “Jerk Week” at The Ringer, Alan Siegel takes on the archetype of the lovable a-hole and the actors who specialize in portraying them—from Julia Louis-Dreyfus to Alan Rickman. If you’ve ever cracked up at Adam Scott’s alpha inanities from Step Brothers, this is one for you.

Unsurprisingly, though, not all A-listers are comfortable making even the occasional foray into sleaze. That’s usually left to character actors who spend years skillfully pretending to be slimy. It’s not an easy job. Because once you get that reputation, it can be hard to shake—whether you like it or not. Seann William Scott played the (ultimately) good-hearted meathead lax bro Steve Stifler in four American Pie movies. He lost count of the times he met fratty young men who thought he was his character in real life. “They would realize that I was nothing like that and it was kind of fucking up their universe,” Scott told me for a 2019 interview. “I’d always see confusion. Their circuits firing off and then there was always a little bit of sadness. It was kind of breaking their heart because they had this idea of how I’d be. Sometimes I was like, ‘I don’t want to break their heart.’ So I would say something outlandish. And they were like, ‘Oh yeah, OK.’ And then I’d just walk away. These guys have given me a career. I can’t crush their spirit.”

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Remembering the Rappers We Lost

As every single imaginable journalism outlet covers hip-hop’s 50-year legacy this week—the culture “officially” kicked off with a Bronx block party on August 11—Danyel Smith drops the mic with this haunting, sober, even life-affirming elegy for its many casualties. Read the final section and tell me you don’t have goosebumps.

So much of Black journalism is obituary. Early deaths — literal, artistic, carceral — are commonplace. And Black men in hip-hop exist in an endless loop of roller-coaster success, hazy self-worth, bullets, fame and its cousin, paranoia. There’s earned distrust of white people in white medical coats and of the so-called thin blue line. In this loop, the death of Black male potential is a recurring theme.

There should be more soft-focus memorial in this brief alternative history of rap, told through the deaths of artists as opposed to their benchmark albums. But Black men who die as they come of age, or in their prime, are high-def, even in afterlife: livid yet unsurprised to still be doing the backbreaking work of fueling a cultural imagination. On Jay-Z’s 1996 track “Can I Live,” he was premonitory. “We feel we have nothing to lose,” he said, “So we offer you/Well, we offer our lives.”

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The Ones We Sent Away

In her gut-wrenching piece—a masterpiece of thoughtful longform journalism—Jennifer Senior profiles her aunt Adele, a woman eventually diagnosed with Coffin-Siris syndrome 12 after being institutionalized for decades. Senior attempts to understand the trauma Adele and her family suffered after being deprived of one another based on medical advice considered best at the time.

I was 12 when I learned. My mother and I were sitting at the kitchen table when I wondered aloud what I’d do if I ever had a disabled child. This provided her with an opening.

Her name is Adele.

My grandmother told my mother that she instantly knew something was different when Adele was born. Her cry wasn’t like other babies’. She was inconsolable, had to be carried everywhere. Her family doctor said nonsense, Adele was fine. For an entire year, he maintained that she was fine, even though, at the age of 1, she couldn’t hold a bottle and didn’t respond to the stimuli that other toddlers do. I can’t imagine what this casual brush-off must have done to my grandmother, who knew, in some back cavern of her heart, that her daughter was not the same as other children. But it was 1952, the summer that Adele turned 1. What male doctor took a working-class woman without a college education seriously in 1952?

Only when my mother and her family went to the Catskills that same summer did a doctor finally offer a very different diagnosis. My grandmother had gone to see this local fellow not because Adele was sick, but because she was; Adele had merely come along. But whatever ailed my grandmother didn’t capture this man’s attention. Her daughter did. He took one look at her and demanded to know whether my aunt was getting the care she required.

In March of 1953, my grandparents took Adele, all of 21 months, to Willowbrook State School. It would be many years before I learned exactly what that name meant, years before I learned what kind of gothic mansion of horrors it was. And my mother, who didn’t know how to explain what on earth had happened, began telling people that she was an only child.

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He’s The Trans Son Of An Anti-Trans Influencer. It’s His Turn To Speak.

Renton Sinclair grew up in a hell manufactured by his mother, a zealous Christian and rising MAGA star who is now using him and her version of his life story to advance a right-wing agenda:

Renton knows his mom has always loved the spotlight. She was, after all, a Miss America contestant, having been crowned Miss Illinois in 1996. Renton is horrified that, in a way, Tania has a new, albeit crueler, pageant. It’s a pageant similarly obsessed with gender. For Tania, it has higher stakes than a sash and crown: She believes it’s her divine destiny and duty to take part in the current conservative crusade to force trans people out of public life, a necessary step in paving the path for Christ’s return. As outlandish and self-aggrandizing as that may seem, Tania has allies in high places to help her on this holy mission.

Renton has watched as his mom has started to speak from the same stages as famous right-wing figures—Eric Trump, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn and others—calling for laws that would force him to be everything he’s not.

He has watched his mom get on these stages and call him a “prodigal daughter”—a reference to the biblical story of the Prodigal Son, a wayward child destined to one day repent and return to God, return home, return to her.

But Renton is neither a prodigal nor a daughter.

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The Secret Life of the 500+ Cables That Run the Internet

When I think of globe-spanning internet signals, my mind goes to the skies. But only a small percentage of internet traffic is bouncing between satellites. The vast majority, 95% or more, is traveling through surprisingly thin cables at the bottom of the ocean. 

As you can imagine, those cables are not easy to install, maintain, or repair when things go awry—which happens more and more frequently as both climate change and geopolitical tensions make the ocean a more volatile environment. Stephen Shankland explores those complexities, as well as the surprisingly interesting history of these high-speed cables, in this CNET feature. 

These cables, only about as thick as a garden hose, are high-tech marvels. The fastest, the newly completed transatlantic cable called Amitié and funded by Microsoft, Meta and others, can carry 400 terabits of data per second. That’s 400,000 times faster than your home broadband if you’re lucky enough to have high-end gigabit service.

And yet subsea cables are low-tech, too, coated in tar and unspooled by ships employing basically the same process used in the 1850s to lay the first transatlantic telegraph cable. SubCom, a subsea-cable maker based in New Jersey, evolved from a rope manufacturer with a factory next to a deep-water port for easy loading onto ships.

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The Atomic Disease

For Orion, Rachel Greenley looks at America’s love affair with all things nuclear and its complete inability to manage disasters and the toxic waste that has been contaminating soil and water in nearby communities for decades, with deadly results.

Here is the narrative on the atomic bomb: It was created out of urgency. The United States and our Allies were losing the war. Thousands of young American men had died. Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor. Intel reported that the Germans had discovered fission, the process used to break apart an atom’s nucleus and release its energy. Hitler could not win. Hanford’s B Reactor was built within a year and produced plutonium just a few months later. It was a secretive project. Most workers and the surrounding communities did not know the full extent of what they were working on or living by or exposed to. They were simply proud to be contributing to the war effort.

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