As a journalist, I love a punchy, even sensational headline. The late Vincent A. Musettos 1983 New York Post front page crime story zinger “Headless Body in Topless Bar” remains the pinnacle of the art form, the kind of sublime pun that many of my ink-stained wretches would rather have on their resumes than actual journalism awards.
But still, I was horrified to see the lurid and exaggerated headlines that followed after neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in January about whether screen time is affecting the cognitive development of American children: “Gen Z is the first generation dumber than their parents,” is popular news.
Horvath’s testimony – and his recent book The digital delusion— made the argument that laptops and smartphones have undermined childhood education and caused declining test scores: “Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to underperform us on basically every cognitive measure we have,” he said at the hearing, “from basic attention to memory to literacy to numeracy to executive function to even overall IQ.”
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It’s a reasonable argument (though not proven), but it feeds directly into a far less sensible, age-old “What’s wrong with kids today?” narrative that pleases unscrupulous headline writers as much as it rankles those of us who care about the data.
In this issue’s cover story, “The Kids Are All Right,” science journalist and Scientific American Contributor Melinda Wenner Moyer digs into the actual numbers, and what she finds is surprisingly optimistic. Far from being a lost cause, today’s youth are better off than their parents in many measurable ways. Research suggests they are more open and inclusive than previous cohorts, show higher levels of empathy than seen at almost any other point in the past four decades, and show significantly lower levels of drug use and violence. Moyer’s reporting suggests that changes in parenting—specifically, a move toward more emotionally literate interactions—could raise a generation smarter, kinder, and more self-aware than those before them.
Some of you may have wondered why Moyer’s story isn’t featured on the cover of the issue you’re holding. It’s not an April Fool’s joke. We’re trying a little experiment: Our newsstands have a child on the front, while the subscriber-only edition has a stylized drawing of a spiral galaxy.
This spring other cover article, “A Galactic Mystery,” astrophysicist Maria Luísa Buzzo describes a cosmic enigma that keeps astronomers up at night: Scientists hypothesized that galaxies are held together by dark matter because without the invisible material, all those stars would simply fly away from each other. So what holds together recently discovered dwarf galaxies that appear to have no dark matter at all?
Buzzo explores the detective story surrounding these ghostly objects and explains how they are forcing scientists to rethink how galaxies form. A leading theory involves high-speed collisions between dwarf galaxies that separate visible matter from dark matter, a violent celestial divorce that leaves star-rich orphans poor in dark matter.
Elsewhere in the magazine, I recommend you check out evolutionary biologist Jacob S. Suissa’s deep dive into the world of the corpse flower. This botanical monster, which smells like rotting flesh to attract carrion beetles, is a remarkable example of adaptation in action. It’s a tale of gigantism, mimicry and the strange, smelly roads life can take to ensure survival. No nonsense.
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