The 5 Instagram Features That US States Say Ruin Teens’ Mental Health | Everyone Was Wrong About Reverse Osmosis—Until Now | The Hard Truth About Immigration | Hands Off Shakespeare

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� � � � � � The 5 Instagram Features That US States Say Ruin Teens' Mental Health - WIRED    In 2019, Instagram's top executive, Adam Mosseri, went on TV to describe how the Meta-owned social media app was "rethinking the whole experience" to prioritize the "well-being" of users above all else. Today, a bipartisan group of attorneys general representing 42 US states alleged in a series of lawsuits that Mosseri's remarks were part of a decade-long pattern of deceit by Meta that claimed Instagram and Facebook were safe, while they in fact did young people harm. The suits claim Meta put user engagement ahead of user safety. "Despite overwhelming internal research, independent expert analysis, and publicly available data that its social media platforms harm young users, Meta still refuses to abandon its use of known harmful features—and has instead redoubled its efforts to misrepresent, conceal, and downplay the impact of those features on young users' mental and physical health," alleges the main lawsuit, led by Colorado and Tennessee. About 22 million US teenagers use Instagram each day, it says. Meta spokesperson Liza Crenshaw says the company has introduced over 30 tools, such as parental controls and usage limiters, to support young users who, she notes, also suffer from growing academic pressure, rising income inequality, and limited mental healthcare services. "We share the attorneys general's commitment to providing teens with safe, positive experiences online," Crenshaw says. "We're disappointed that instead of working productively with companies across the industry to create clear, age-appropriate standards for the many apps teens use, the attorneys general have chosen this path." Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Everyone Was Wrong About Reverse Osmosis—Until Now - WIRED    Menachem Elimelech never made peace with reverse osmosis. Elimelech, who founded Yale's environmental engineering program, is something of a rock star among those who develop filtration systems that turn seawater or wastewater into clean drinking water. And reverse osmosis is a rock star among filter technologies: It has dominated how the world desalinates seawater for about a quarter of a century. Yet nobody really knew how it worked. And Elimelech hated that. Still, he had to teach the technology to his students. For many years, he showed them how to estimate the high pressures that push the water molecules in seawater across a plastic polyamide membrane, creating pure water on one side of the film and leaving an extra-salty brine on the other. But these calculations relied on an assumption that nagged Elimelech and other engineers: that water molecules diffuse through the membrane individually. "This always bothered me. It does not make any sense," he says. This might seem like an arcane engineering question, but Elimelech's beef with reverse osmosis is based on a real-world problem. Over 3 billion people live in areas where water is scarce. By the year 2030, demand is set to outstrip supply by 40 percent. Continued here � � � � � � The Hard Truth About Immigration - The Atlantic    If the United States wants to reduce inequality, it’s going to need to take an honest look at a contentious issue. “This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he put his signature on the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, at the base of the Statue of Liberty. “It does not affect the lives of millions.” All that the bill would do, he explained, was repair the flawed criteria for deciding who could enter the country. “This bill says simply that from this day forth those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills and their close relationship to those already here.” Edward Kennedy, the 33-year-old senator who had shepherded the bill through the Senate, went even further in promising that its effects would be modest. Some opponents argued that the bill would lead to a large increase in immigration, but those claims were false, Kennedy said. They were “highly emotional, irrational, and with little foundation in fact,” he announced in a Senate hearing, and “out of line with the obligations of responsible citizenship.” Emanuel Celler, the bill’s champion in the House, made the same promises. “Do we appreciably increase our population, as it were, by the passage of this bill?” Celler said. “The answer is emphatically no.” Continued here � � � � � � Hands Off Shakespeare - The Atlantic    In this time of bipartisan acrimony, many on the left and on the right share one point of consensus: Shakespeare is a problem. Admittedly, this consensus exists at the ends of the spectrum, and chiefly among the professional prudes and scolds who inhabit those extremities. After a season in which most of the hits Shakespeare took were from the education professionals on the cultural left (he was misogynist, racist, bigoted, colonializing, and Eurocentric), he has been taking some from the right (he was smutty, profane, dallied with homosexuality, and is too hard to read). The most recent sally of this kind was a kerfuffle in Florida over the summer when Hillsborough County teachers decided, or were told, to cut the sexy parts from Shakespeare to avoid falling afoul of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act. Then the Florida Department of Education jumped in and told teachers they can do full Shakespeare—for now. To be fair, Shakespeare is hanging in there despite the sniping. The Common Core State Standards for English mention him nine times, requiring high-school students to read at least one of his plays. Mocking the pursed-lipped, humorless ideologues at both ends is easy. But I worry that despite programs like the National Endowment for the Arts’ modest Shakespeare in American Communities, we will forget why Shakespeare matters deeply, why he really is a universal author, and why he is worth reading even if he talks about sex, features unpleasant male behaviors, and uses words (a good 25,000 of them, some of which he invented) that we find hard to understand. Continued here

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