Ethan Freedman
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ethanpfreedman.com
Ethan Freedman
@ethanpfreedman.com
13K followers 1.7K following 110 posts
Reporter: science, nature, agriculture, climate. Bylines at Scientific American, Live Science, Hakai, Sierra, Slate, Fatherly, etc.

He/Him. RTs =/= Endorsement. Opinions solely my own. Old posts regularly delete en masse.

Chicago

www.ethanpfreedman.com
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ethanpfreedman.com
Carr, on the studies that look at the social media-mental health connection:
(response). What these experiments miss is the way a new communication technology reshapes social relations in general 36 The ubiquity of smartphones and social media has fundamentally changed the social lives of kids (and many adults), regardless of how many minutes a day they spend on Snapchat or TikTok or Instagram. If none of your friends wants to hang out, you'll suffer the effects of social isolation even if you delete all the social media apps on your phone. Indeed, deleting the apps may make you feel more isolated. Twenge explains the situation well: The smartphone led to a global rewiring of human social interaction-when most people own smartphones and use social media, everyone is impacted, whether they use these technologies or not. It's harder to strike up a casual conversation when everyone is staring down at a phone. It's harder for friends to get together in person when the norm is to communicate online instead. Scientific experiments can obfuscate as well as illuminate. Trying to get a grip on broad, complex sociocultural trends by conducting lab tests on individuals is like trying to get a sense of the shoreline by squinting at grains of sand through a microscope. Sometimes you have to lift your eyes and take a wider view.
November 15, 2025 at 10:25 PM
ethanpfreedman.com
I really can’t understand why a lot of people on here seem to defend the idea (also shared by the tech platforms!) that social media *isn't* a cause of mental distress, other than maybe some kind of user Stockholm syndrome

From Superbloom, Nicholas Carr
The extent of social media's psychological harm has been debated for years. Skepties point out that some studies show that social media can have psychological benefits, giving young people more social connections. That's true. For some kids, it's a lifeline. The skeptics are also quick to stress that correlation does not prove causation. That's also true. But while spreading doubts about the causative role of social media in mental distress may have been warranted a decade ago, it's hard to justify now. It comes off as a head-in-the-sand response, and, given the numbers, an irresponsible one. As Haidt wrote in a 2023 review of recent research, "There is now a great dea of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny cor-relate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.*33 In her 2023 book, Generations, Jean Twenge offers an exhaustive analysis of data from the longitudinal studies of young people's attitudes and behavior.4 On the basis of timing and other factors, she rules out alternative phenomena that have been suggested as possible primary causes for the mental illness spike, such as economic hardship, political worries, fears about climate change or school shootings, parental and academic pressures, and stresses from the pandemic. Though all those things may contribute to feelings of stress or unhappiness, it's the rapid growth in digital media use that exhibits by far the strongest and most consistent association with the surge in psychological problems. What makes the longitudinal evidence particularly compelling is that it's consistent not only through time but also across pretty much every country and culture where phones and social media are popular. Data from World Health Organization surveys of hundreds of thousands of teenagers in dozens of countries show that "the number of teens with significant psychological distress was unchanged or down between 200…
November 15, 2025 at 10:19 PM
ethanpfreedman.com
Zohran logo font saying “Too Much Tuna”
November 8, 2025 at 11:23 PM
ethanpfreedman.com
The populist platform
"Breakfast for Dinner" stylized like the Zohran campaign logo
November 8, 2025 at 9:04 PM
ethanpfreedman.com
I was Googling for a link of a story I wrote about the Chicago River at @sentientmedia.org, but I'm glad the AI here could inform me that rivers don't have a central nervous system
Googling for "chicago river sentient" and informed by the AI that "No, the Chicago River is not sentient"
October 31, 2025 at 11:27 PM
ethanpfreedman.com
An old format, but this popped into my head tonight
French dispatch meme of Chalamet, Anderson, Swinton, and Murray as, respectively, the theme songs of NFL on FOX, Monday Night Footbal, NFL on CBS, and Sunday Night Football
October 20, 2025 at 2:48 AM
ethanpfreedman.com
This chart says "Your linebacker will see you now"

www.bls.gov/charts/emplo...
Employment change by industry Aug 2025 12-month net change, with a huge bar for private education and health services and small or negative bars for every other sector
October 19, 2025 at 7:00 PM