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New York takes a swing at screen addiction
New York has begun a new charge in the great screen addiction war. During WWII a maharaja took in 1,000 kids. Plus, remember that one time humanity almost went extinct?
Greg Sullivan
August 10, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 3 minutes
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“Addiction - When you can give up something any time, as long as it's next Tuesday.”
― Nikki Sixx
In this issue...
Society
New York hopes to curb social media’s access to young kids.
"Kids these days and their phones" is a complaint that goes back at least to the 1950s when spiral phone cords ran under bedroom doors, but New York decided griping isn’t cutting it. As Erik Barnes reports, the state just finalized the rules for its SAFE for Kids Act, and it puts Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and the like on a very short leash when it comes to minors.
The act means no algorithm-driven feeds for minors without a parent's sign-off, and no notifications pinging kids between midnight and 6 a.m. Attorney General Letitia James summed up the shift plainly: "Platforms cannot automatically place minors into feeds engineered to maximize engagement." The new rules include a hard deadline and real fines waiting for any platform that shrugs it off.
Not everyone's celebrating. Critics worry the age-verification piece means millions of adults proving they're adults just to keep scrolling, and anyone who's fought the screen time battle at home knows enforcement is easier said than done. The story also includes what parents can do right now, no legislation required.
How can you not love this image by GOOD reader Kathleen Nowak of the moon reflecting on the Red Bay, Ontario? One imagines that after taking the picture, she sat in the chair and watched the moon march across the sky.
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How do you feel about the war on screen time?I recognize the irony that you're probably weighing in from a phone. |
Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy
Digvijaysinhji Ranjitsinhji Jadeja gave them not just food and shelter, but a chance to be kids while retaining their identity.
When hundreds of Polish children arrived in India’s Nawanagar state during World War II, they had already been driven from their homes, survived Soviet labor camps, and lived through years of uncertainty. The war had stripped away school, friends, and the everyday routines most children naturally build their lives around.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the children’s journey had begun years earlier. Following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, thousands of Polish families were deported to labor camps scattered across Siberia and Central Asia. After the 1941 Sikorski-Mayski Agreement allowed many Polish civilians to leave the Soviet Union, some eventually made the long journey south to India.
Science
The fact that you exist is, statistically speaking, a little wild.
Researchers have discovered that, just a bit shy of a million years ago, humans nearly went extinct, falling to fewer than the number of students in my high school. About 1,280 breeding individuals*. That's it. That was the species. And they stayed at that razor-thin headcount for roughly 117,000 years, ground down not by a single catastrophe but by the slow violence of the Early-Middle Pleistocene: severe weather, brutal glacial cycles, an Ice Age that just kept going.
In a piece by Mark Wales, the numbers do most of the heavy lifting. The bottleneck erased an estimated two-thirds of our genetic diversity, and the lines that survived weren't necessarily the strongest or smartest. They were just the ones that happened to keep going. Bigger brains made it through. A lot of other traits didn't.
Most family trees, across most species, eventually end. Yours didn't. Every person you've ever met is a descendant of the same small group of ancient outlasters who, for reasons no one can fully explain, kept showing up.
* - To clarify, my high school did not have 1,280 BREEDING individuals. I don’t think.
On August 10, 1846, President James K. Polk signed the act creating the Smithsonian Institution, and the United States officially accepted the strangest gift in its history. The money came from James Smithson, a British chemist who had never crossed the Atlantic, never met an American, and never explained why he did it.
Smithson was the illegitimate son of a duke, which in 18th-century England meant a life of polite exclusion, no matter how good your science was. When he died in 1829, he left his entire estate to a country he knew only from books, to found "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge." The bequest arrived as 104,960 gold sovereigns, hauled across the ocean in eleven boxes and melted down at the Philadelphia Mint. Congress then spent eight years arguing over what, exactly, to do with it.
They accepted. That stranger's fortune now underwrites 21 museums, the National Zoo, and roughly 155 million objects, and you can still walk into every one of those museums for free. In 1904, Alexander Graham Bell personally sailed to Italy to bring Smithson's remains to the country he never got to see.
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💬 From the group text…
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