The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt, Penguin Press, 400 pages, $30
Jonathan Haidt opens The Anxious Generation with what is supposed to be an analogy for kids' use of smartphones and social media: Would you let your child travel to Mars, he asks, if some Silicon Valley CEO said it was safe? It's an absurd comparison: Whatever harms may or may not befall minors with iPhones, they're light-years less apparent, substantial, or universal than those facing kids shuttling through outer space to a desert planet with an atmosphere mainly made of carbon dioxide.
