Opinion | Social media is bad enough to get the parties to agree

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Katie Boyd Britt (R-Ala.) are sponsors of the, well, Protecting Kids on Social Media Act.

You already know the reasons we need an intervention, but to pluck some of their statistics:

• More than half of teens say social media use is “nearly ubiquitous.”
• Depression in teens doubled over the last decade or so.
• Almost 1 out of 3 teen girls considered suicide in 2021.

“We wish social media companies could cure these problems on their own,” the senators write. “But these companies have proven incapable or unwilling to protect kids on their platforms. It falls to Congress, then.”

Their op-ed lays out some sensible safeguards, starting with the requirement that social media sites verify users’ ages.

While Congress is busy protecting kids from Instagram, we all should be protecting ourselves from artificial intelligence, columnist Megan McArdle writes. The people from “Dune” killed it off entirely!

Alas, there is no way we’re stopping, or even pausing AI, as some luminaries have warned we must do. In a competitive world, the edge AI provides is as addictive as the spice.

“So however much we might want to raise the Butlerian sword,” Megan writes, referring to the Dune-world extermination of thinking machines, “in the end we won’t dare; we will enter the AI race rather than risk losing it.”

Still, there is optimism here: This is also a challenge to harness AI for all the good it can do.

Chaser: Speaking of dunes (work with me here!), Saudi Arabia is constructing a fantastical, futuristic mega-city in the desert. The Editorial Board says it’s built on tyranny.

Been there, fact-checked that

When Donald Trump walks around with an enormous sign on his back that says “NONSTOP LIES. Do not platform,” and then you give him a town hall that goes off the rails, the only response is, “I don’t know what I expected.”

Media columnist Erik Wemple writes that of course Trump steamrolled CNN on Wednesday night, “flooding the venue with falsehoods” to a cheering audience. Covering and questioning the 2024 Republican front-runner will be critical, Erik writes; news outlets just still haven’t figured out how to do it.

Contributing columnist Ramesh Ponnuru at least has a few spicy ideas for questions that could make interviewing the former president worth something. “Getting into the weeds of factual disputes with Trump, even when he is provably wrong” isn’t fruitful, Ramesh writes. He proposes 11 lines of inquiry that might be more productive.

From researcher Hannah Ritchie’s op-ed exploring the downsides of Germany’s retreat from nuclear power. The country took its final three plants offline last month in the name of safer, renewable energy.

But let’s say it hadn’t. Let’s say Germans had kept all their nuclear plants running since 2010. In that universe, Ritchie calculates, coal would only make up 13 percent of electricity use. Instead … see above.

Her op-ed explains that going non-nuclear blew up Germany’s decarbonization timeline — “an environmental disaster that the rest of the world should avoid.” And, yes, it’s true nuclear plants could cause deadly disaster. But Ritchie points out that fossil fuel’s air pollution is killing every day.

Chaser: Assistant editor Rob Gebelhoff writes that American opposition to offshore wind energy is all hot air. It’s time to build.

Earlier this week, I mentioned Alexandra Petri’s piece imagining school boards’ objections to (or approvals of) various plays and musicals.

Clearly, many of you read it, because many of you commented with your own jokes. So we published a selection of the plays and musicals thought up by you:

• “‘My Fair Lady’ makes fun of wealthy people and implies that they use the poor for their own gains, as if that has ever happened.”
• “That technicolor dreamcoat will make students — *gasp* — gay.”

Even the comments on that collection of comments contain gems. Username Dire Straits wrote, “Surprised you didn’t include South Pacific, a bunch of Navy guys dressed in drag with coconut boobies and grass skirts.”

Enjoy the comments, and the comments on the comments, and comment yourself, so we can keep talking musicals day after day … after day after …

• Writer Jason Campbell says his grandmother has lived through a lot as a Black woman. And, at 100 years old, she’s still going.
• Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party are fanning the flames of Islamophobic hatred — sometimes literally, contributing writer Rana Ayyub writes.
• With little help from Congress, Biden is doing his best on the border, the Editorial Board writes.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s… The Bye-Ku.

Glowing with music or just —

Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!