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Happy Wednesday — and happy Tax Day, for what that's worth.

A Boston headmaster named Walter F. Downey told the New York Times in 1925 that the radio ranked alongside movies, automobiles, and dance halls as a distraction from study. "With the exception of honor students," he said, "nearly every pupil in the school has been affected by the radio distraction." His advice to parents? "I would advise them to keep their radios under lock and key while their children are supposed to be studying and under lock and key while their children are supposed to be sleeping. It is the only way to limit the harm."

Psychologist Amy Orben has a name for what Headmaster Downey was living through: the "Sisyphean cycle of technology panics." Every generation gets a new technology, the same fears, the same research, the same political responses—and then everyone forgets and starts over. In 1982, the president of the Mathematical Association of America predicted that calculators would render long division "dead as a dodo bird." Six years later, state school chiefs were still hotly debating whether students should be allowed to use calculators in math class at all.

Today's edition is full of the current chapter.

  • The Hill reports on how the screen time fight is expanding beyond cellphones—with parents and advocates now going after 1-on-1 devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

  • In Massachusetts, Gov. Healey is proposing new default social media settings for minors, including a two-hour daily time limit and restrictions on infinite scroll.

  • CNBC looks at why workers are so anxious about AI, and argues that the way business leaders talk about it is making it worse.

  • On the Learning Curve podcast, Georgetown's Mark Fisher argues that colleges have a specific role in safeguarding democracy as AI reshapes how citizens engage with information.

  • And a new Vox review of the documentary The AI Doc makes the case that we're stuck in the same loop we've always been in—oscillating between doomsday and utopia without spending much time in the messy middle where the actual policy work happens. 

None of this means the concerns aren't real — they very much are. But it's worth remembering that every generation has had its version of keeping the radio under lock and key.

—Thomas

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