#increase in canada jobs

[hierophanthistorian]

he has said many people get pharma coverage through their jobs so we don't need government pharmacare btw.

[Text in image: Poilievre said many Canadians already have access to drug coverage through workplace plans that may offer better benefits than those the NDP-backed Liberal plan eventually could offer.]

What social programs does PeePee want to gut?

We don't know his full plans, as its not an election yet, but he has said in the past:

He wants to defund the CBC

He wants to kill the recently passed Pharmacare bill.

He wants to kill the recently passed Dentalcare for all bill.

He has voted against pro-pension policies.

He also said this: “I’m very hesitant to spend taxpayers’ money on anything other than the core services of roads, bridges, police, military, border security and a safety net for those who can’t provide for themselves. That’s common sense. Let’s bring it home,” Poilievre told reporters during a campaign stop at a Vancouver gas station.

Massive cuts are guaranteed if this shit weasel gets elected.

[emberwhite]

I spent the last 11 months working with my illustrator, Marta, to make the children's book of my dreams. We were able to get every detail just the way I wanted, and I'm very happy with the final result. She is the best person I have ever worked with, and I mean, just look at those colors!

I wanted to tell that story of anyone's who ever felt that they didn't belong anywhere. Whether you are a nerd, autistic, queer, trans, a furry, or some combination of the above, it makes for a sad and difficult life. This isn't just my story. This is our story.

I also want to say the month following the book's launch has been very stressful. I have never done this kind of book before, and I didn't know how to get the word out about it. I do have a small publishing business and a full-time job, so I figured let's put my some money into advertising this time. Indie writers will tell you great success stories they've had using Facebook ads, so I started a page and boosting my posts.

Within a first few days, I got a lot of likes and shares and even a few people who requested the book and left great reviews for me. There were also people memeing on how the boy turns into a delicious venison steak at the end of the book. It was all in good fun, though. It honestly made made laugh. Things were great, so I made more posts and increased spending.

But somehow, someway these new posts ended up on the wrong side of the platform. Soon, we saw claims of how the book was perpetuating mental illness, of how this book goes against all of basic biology and logic, and how the lgbtq agenda was corrupting our kids.

This brought out even more people to support the book, so I just let them at it and enjoyed my time reading comments after work. A few days later, then conversation moved from politics to encouraging bullying, accusing others of abusing children, and a competition to who could post the most cruel image. They were just comments, however, and after all, people were still supporting the book.

But then the trolls started organizing. Over night, I got hit with 3 one-star reviews on Amazon. My heart stopped. If your book ever falls below a certain rating, it can be removed, and blocked, and you can receive a strike on your publishing account. All that hard work was about to be deleted, and it was all my fault for posting it in the wrong place.

I panicked, pulled all my posts, and went into hiding, hoping things would die down. I reported the reviews and so did many others, but here's the thing you might have noticed across platforms like Google and Amazon. There are community guidelines that I referenced in my email, but unless people are doing something highly illegal, things are rarely ever taken down on these massive platforms. So those reviews are still there to this day. Once again, it's my fault, and I should have seen it coming.

Luckily, the harassment stopped, and the book is doing better now, at least in the US. The overall rating is still rickety in Europe, Canada, and Australia, so any reviews there help me out quite a lot. I'm currently looking for a new home to post about the book and talk about everything that went into it. I also love to talk about all things books if you ever want to chat. Maybe I'll post a selfie one day, too. Otherwise, the book is still on Amazon, and the full story and illustrations are on YouTube as well if you want to read it for free.

[newsbites]

Employment in Canada rose slightly last month after January's jobs report raised eyebrows among economists anticipating a slowdown in the labour market this year.

In its labour force survey Friday, Statistics Canada said the economy added 22,000 jobs in February, with employment up in the private sector.

The federal agency said the country's unemployment rate held steady at five per cent, hovering near record lows.

The bulk of the job gains were made in health care and social assistance, public administration and utilities. Meanwhile, jobs were lost in business, building and other support services.

In January, the economy added 150,000 jobs, beating forecasts significantly.

[vague-humanoid]

As Canada Post workers remain on the picket line, a key point of contention in their demands is what they describe as a growing physical and mental toll amid increasing pressure on workers, more extreme weather and whether to expand health benefits

From delivering parcels through scorching heatwaves to battling blizzards, Canadian postal workers increasingly face extreme weather conditions that strain their bodies and minds.

“In recent years, climate change has shown a bit of a trend,” said Brahm Enslin, local president at CUPW Saskatoon Local 824.

“There was an ice storm and we had a rash of injuries,” Enslin added, referring to the storm last year in Saskatoon. “Members that broke their hip just by going out there.”

Enslin, 41, has worked at Canada Post for 16 years and said the extreme weather brought on by climate change — whether it’s inhaling smoke from wildfires or delivering mail during storms — has added significant physical and mental pressure to their jobs.

And that’s one of the reasons postal workers are demanding more support for these challenges in their new contract, he said.

[f0point5]

Lando Norris x reader Masterlist

🚨I am currently rewriting this series so please be aware it is unfinished🚨

Only rumours ‘bout my hips and thighs - News of Y/N and Lando’s budding “relationship” hits F1 news

It’s blue, the feeling I’ve got - Rumours about Lando and Y/N heat up. Meanwhile, Y/N is skeptical about Lando’s friendly overtures

You will take the long way - Y/N discusses her secret, and Lando lets out his frustrations with Max

At least I’m trying - Y/N catches up on the new season of Drive to Survive, while Lando makes another effort to befriend her

Gain the weight of you - Y/N ties up loose ends as the stage is set for the relationship to go public

You told your family for a reason - Y/N arrives in Bahrain, and the deception deepens

The jury’s out - Y/N meets more people in Lando’s life with mixed reception, and attends her first race

(They) find something to wrap (their) noose around - Lando is subject to some controversy, which means Y/N has to step in, whole fighting to stay in her comfort zone

You don’t know how nice that is…but I do - Y/N attends the race where she makes an immediate connection with Oscar, and Lando makes an ill-advised move to impress her

You don’t feel pretty, you just feel used - Y/N finds herself in high demand, much to her dismay, as she heads to Australia for the next race

I’m feeling like I don’t know you - Lando’s feelings about how Y/N is spending her time in Australia bubble over

New to town with a made up name - Y/N does a Q&A

Every time you shine, I’ll shine for you - Lando secures an amazing result at the Australian Grand Prix, while neitzens discuss his new relationship.

That old familiar body ache - Y/N is forced to get back to work, which includes seeing Lando

The rust that grew between telephones - Y/N’s campaign debuts while she and Lando are in Japan. Lando searches for answers for what happened in Monaco

It’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound - Y/N skips the Japanese Grand Prix and puts her job in jeopardy

Did you see the photos? No, I didn’t but thanks though - Y/N is forced to defend Lando from gossip, while her position as his girlfriend remains precarious

They say what doesn’t kill you makes you aware - Max F weighs in on Lando’s troubles, while Lando finds he and Y/N have a common interest

Lights, camera, bitch smile - Y/N puts on an impressive show at the Grand Prix. Lando’s jealousy gets the better of him, leading to a frank conversation

Don’t you worry your pretty little mind - Y/N reaches out to Lando when he is the subject of online trolling to offer support

I did my best to lay to rest - Y/N and Lando get closer in Miami, but the increased publicity may lead to things being unearthed that Y/N would like to stay buried

I was grinning like (he’s) winning - Y/N watches Lando become a Grand Prix winner

You can’t talk to me when I’m like this - Lando wins the Miami Grand Prix, but a misstep means Y/N is not part of the celebration

I never grew up, it’s getting so old - Oscar steps in to help when Y/N and Lando aren’t speaking

Can (he) see right through me? (I) see right through me - Y/N takes Oscar’s advice and opens up to Lando

Our secret moments, in a crowded room - Y/N and Lando spend time together while Monaco hosts the Historic Grand Prix

They’ll be chasing their tails trying to track us down - Fans speculate when Y/N and Lando are not seen together and she misses the Imola Grand Prix

It’s nice to have a friend - Y/N has a busy week in the South of France, and Lando tries to be supportive as the two plan to keep the rouse going when his family comes to town

I spy with my tired little eye - Y/N attends the Monaco Grand Prix

We might just get away with it - Y/N remains in Monaco with Lando to keep up pretences

Telling me to punish you for things you never did - Lando arrives alone in Canada while the internet finds out Y/N has been spending time with Freddie…and so does Lando.

Love’s a show, but I would die for you in secret - Father’s Day brings Y/N closer to understanding Lando, and letting Lando understand her

Braced myself for the goodbye, (…) but you took me by surprise - Y/N attends the Spanish Grand Prix. After a disappointment, Lando receives some tough love

But God, I love the English - Y/N accompanies Lando to the UK, and he supports her as the quadrant collaboration goes live

[socialjusticeinamerica]

Europe is rearming and they have rebuffed Trump, Vance, Rubio, and Musk. Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine Europe has undergone its largest re-armament and modernization program in History. Every country in Western Europe, not just the NATO states, has massively increased their military budgets and some by more than 5 times their pre-invasion spending. Poland has also constructed massive military fortifications along their border with Belarus and Russia that would make a Russian ground invasion collapse or at least grind to a halt indefinitely.

Putin’s military is shattered and has nearly run out of arms, ammunition, and supplies. They have lost nearly a million dead and wounded. The Russian army has proved to be disastrously incompetent and ill equipped. They are relying on conscripts, convicts, and mercenaries. They’ve been supplemented by North Koreans that are even less trained and motivated and are arriving without equipment and riddled with diseases.

Russia has proven it does not have the ability to defeat Ukraine or even a single NATO state, let alone the whole alliance. NATO states have a nuke sharing agreement and even if the US pulls out France and the UK each have enough to destroy Russia many times over. The Germans are furious with the way the Trump administration has been treating them and meddling in their domestic politics. Some months back French president Macron threatened to send his own troops into Ukraine after Putin interfered in the French elections. All the members of the European Union have individually stated they are prepared to go it alone without the US. They are likely meeting now to formalize that. The European Union does not need the US as their joint economy and militaries make them nearly are equal and likely soon to be our superior.

They are not going to be brow beaten into submission like so many states were by Hitler prior to the commencement of a shooting war. Canada has long had not so secret military discussions with both France and the UK regarding military aid should a rogue US administration try to invade them or engage in economic hostilities. It’s commonly known among educated Canadians and there have even been Canadians novels loosely based on this.

Now it may seem like our allies are well prepared and planning for the worst but there are flies in the ointment. The greatest variable is that Putin is a nut job who can only hold power by launching military operations to rally the base around him. He’s done this before every election but with his losses he’s on thinner ice than ever with his own people. He also has a stated policy of “nuclear de-escalation” which NATO officials have written about at length. What it means is he invades a territory then places tactical nukes there and then “de-escalates” by threatening to nuke anyone who tries to dislodge him. Russia hasn’t done this yet as it is a plan reserved for NATO states not his lesser neighbors.

The simple fact is that no matter how much of his power, and his nation’s power crumbles around him, he just doesn’t give a flying f—k. He knows he is a dead man the moment he loses offices so he is prepared to take the world down with him, because that’s what lunatics do.

The other variable is that Trump is an ignorant, drug-addled, madman with delusions of grandeur and dreams of being remembered as one of history’s greatest tyrants alongside Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Stalin, etc. Trump is currently attempting to blackmail Ukraine into giving him all of that country’s rare earth minerals that are desperately needed to produce computers, cell tech, and other advanced tech. Now since Trump is an aging idiot he was most likely informed of the need for them by Muskrat and the other tech bros. He’s also going to meet with Putin and MBS in Saudi Arabia to work on a settlement for the Ukraine war. Could you find three bigger villains? The only one missing is Xi of China who is making final preparations to invade Taiwan and seize 99% of the world’s semiconductor production. Xi knows he has Musk and Trump in his pocket and that the US will no longer defend that strategic island.

Likely Trump and Putin are planning to divide up Europe and the Americas like Hitler and Stalin divided Poland while China is given free rein in Asia like the Axis empower Japan to do in World War II. Many Americans, especially some older types, former veterans, and white supremacists have a fascination with Hitler and WWII. They saw Germany as an underdog and wondered (even wished to have seen) what would have happened had Germany won.

Something big is brewing and the European Union leaders know the time has come. Many of them are telling their press as we speak that Europe has relied on the U.S. for too long and that they wish they had increased their military budgets sooner and began their own war preparations without the U.S. as an ally or even a possible foe. The world’s biggest democracy and biggest non-aligned nation, India, also knows something is brewing and has cancelled their military contracts with Russia while placing arms orders with European countries. They are also planning to invest in creating a homegrown defense industry so they will no longer be reliant on others and better able to stand up to the endless border wars China keeps launching against them.

What we’re seeing now is extremely similar to what transpired immediately before both world wars.

In a past life I was a historian and defense analyst before a series of family tragedies forced me to step back and take a local position as an educator and part-time internet know it all. I’ve spent decades researching these things and how they are driven by politics. Nothing is carved in stone, especially when the primary bad actors are as unstable as sh-t house rats.

All the people who still do this for a living are certain that the next several months will see us devolve into a fascist dictatorship unless something dramatic happens. Dear leader passing away, losing his nerve and backing down, or grow tired of Musk upstaging him and removing the South African bastard. There’s also a slim chance he’ll be impeached if the Dems take back both houses of Congress in the mid-terms and even slimmer chance that he will be deposed by a popular uprising. He’s very erratic and not sleeping enough and switching back and forth between coke and Adderall doesn’t help, nor does his obvious cognitive decline.

Putin is more worrisome at this point as he’s slowly but steadily losing control. Xi like all his predecessors is extremely patient but he’d be blind not to see this will likely be his best chance to snatch Taiwan, albeit at a high cost when he would prefer to take it without the expense of a war. Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia remain total wildcards sitting in close proximity to a large part of the world’s oil. All are using proxies or are themselves client states. Israel has nukes. Iran secretly has or will shortly have them. Saudi Arabia is believed to have purchased the technology from Trump with that infamous $2 billion dollar gift to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Empty folders of nuclear secrets at Mar-a-Lago point to this.

In summation few of the outcomes facing us are good. The world is again on the cusp of large regional wars, if not a world war. International lawlessness has already commenced and will certainly escalate. Fascism is imminent at home. The death of America as a super power and the world’s policeman is at hand. Trump’s insane tariffs, dismantling of government agencies, and removal of social safety nets will at the least cause a very large and long lasting recession if not a depression. If a depression takes root it will likely spread worldwide. A worldwide depression could lead to large scale wars as it did with WWII.

Putting lunatics in charge is going to end much worse than Trump’s first reign of terror. And remember a million Americans died that time from his incompetence. This time his people are prepared and are already wreaking havoc at an unprecedented level.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“Many dozens of respondents on the receiving end of flaking ascribed the phenomenon to growing levels of social fragmentation because of social media and smartphones, a general sense of apathy in the population and an increasing normalisation of inconsiderate behaviour in the interest of personal needs and desires…

Although some conceded that widespread precarity and poor health were factors, many accused friends of treating their friendships as if they are transactions they felt entitled to withdraw from or invest in as it suited them, and of using stress or their mental health as an excuse to escape personal accountability…

One volunteer organiser for a non-profit from Canada said the number of no-shows to his events had increased several-fold. “At one point,” he said, “I scheduled a lecture with 45 registrants, only to have three arrive.”

“[What drives flaking?] I think a culture that encourages people to be increasingly inward looking, always thinking about themselves, how they feel, what they want,” said Fiona, 40, from Dublin. “People don’t seem to think about how flaking might disappoint or hurt the feelings of their friends. Their thinking seems to only go as far as ‘ugh, I’m not in the mood’.”

“I have noticed a rise in people cancelling plans,” said Tim, 44, a solicitor from Canberra, Australia. “It can be annoying, but I also understand the feeling of something seeming like a good idea when it is in the future, then not feeling like going [on the day]. I have adjusted my mindset so I almost expect 50% of [everyday] social plans not to happen.”

Tim was among people from the UK, the US, Australia and elsewhere who shared with the Guardian how they experienced “flaking” – the cancelling of plans at often short notice owing to not being in the mood, feeling demotivated or tired, or wanting to do something else instead – a phenomenon that many felt had become more prevalent.

“I think the main driver of flaking is that everyone is burnt out,” Tim said. “I feel like I am under constant communication bombardment. Most social events are planned for the evening or weekend, which is the precise time you just want a break from people. I definitely have stronger feelings of not wanting to do things when the time comes.”

Like countless threads about flaking on platforms such as Reddit, people shared how friends and family members had, often at the last minute, dropped out of smaller everyday occasions such as lunch dates and long-planned gatherings – trips and concerts, but also birthdays, weddings and funerals.

Many dozens of respondents on the receiving end of flaking ascribed the phenomenon to growing levels of social fragmentation because of social media and smartphones, a general sense of apathy in the population and an increasing normalisation of inconsiderate behaviour in the interest of personal needs and desires.

Being able to just send a quick text to cancel, various people said, meant people did not have to face those they stood up and incentivised late cancellations.

Although some conceded that widespread precarity and poor health were factors, many accused friends of treating their friendships as if they are transactions they felt entitled to withdraw from or invest in as it suited them, and of using stress or their mental health as an excuse to escape personal accountability.

Various professional event organisers and business owners who responded to the callout also reported a rise in no-shows post-Covid – for commitments such as dentist and hairdresser’s appointments, ticketed events, job interviews or business meetings.

One volunteer organiser for a non-profit from Canada said the number of no-shows to his events had increased several-fold. “At one point,” he said, “I scheduled a lecture with 45 registrants, only to have three arrive.”

“[What drives flaking?] I think a culture that encourages people to be increasingly inward looking, always thinking about themselves, how they feel, what they want,” said Fiona, 40, from Dublin. “People don’t seem to think about how flaking might disappoint or hurt the feelings of their friends. Their thinking seems to only go as far as ‘ugh, I’m not in the mood’.”

Like others, Fiona harboured concerns that “the acceptance of flakiness might contribute to the growth of loneliness in society”.

“Increasingly with gen Z and millennials there is a fetishisation of introversion,” said Andrew, 23, from Brisbane who works in telecoms sales. “Web comics and memes make a moral comparison to extroverts, who are supposedly loud, obnoxious people. Introverts are [depicted as] moral people who own cats and crochet. But our generation is also experiencing record high loneliness, so I think we shouldn’t praise choosing loneliness or celebrate [extreme levels of] introversion.”

On the other end of the spectrum were dozens of respondents who reported that they were increasingly cancelling plans themselves, with many of them saying this was the result of permanent exhaustion, work stress, poor mental health or a lack of funds.

Many from this camp said they felt no need any longer to apologise for prioritising their personal needs over those of others. “I would argue that these are all reasons why flakiness is not actually people cancelling for no reason, but a legitimate response to how society is now structured and the lifestyles we lead,” said Bethan, from Yorkshire.

A woman from Canada called Tabitha described the concept of flakiness as “ableist”. “People aren’t ‘flaky’ for prioritising their mental and physical health instead of ‘roughing it out’ to attend inconsequential things,” she said.

“I have noticed a rise in ‘flaking’ but it’s been welcome, and I’ve certainly been a perpetrator,” said a 43-year-old artist from Melbourne. “There’s been a sense of absolute understanding and relief.”

Few people, she said, wanted to go out these days. “Fewer people drink, the cost of living is high and everyone has a mountain of responsibilities, not to mention burnout and anxiety. Unless it’s a significant birthday or wedding, I’m not quite sure why one would agree to gather in the first place. These days I’ll take any excuse to cancel last-minute and it feels like self-care.”

A 35-year-old architect and small business owner from Perth said: “When I get flaked on, I feel relieved that I have an excuse to not have to leave the house. I have always wanted to be a flaky person, but society didn’t let me. Now that [many others] have given up, I feel like I let myself go, too.

“I love my friends and I do want to catch up with them – but I wish I could do so from the comfort of my own bed.” She did “feel bad”, she said, “for all the social butterflies that are getting their going out dreams crushed.”

A number of people referenced the feeling that attending social gatherings no longer yielded the “rewards” it used to in the past, with costs having increased and other participants being tired or disinterested.

Libby, 70, a retired healthcare professional from Western Australia, worried about flaky behaviour threatening people’s reputations, friendships and social cohesion, and raised concerns about “very short-term thinking” becoming the norm.

A family member, she said, had been a no-show for a close family wedding. “They gave zero notice. When I confronted her, she was totally unapologetic. Her mother pretty much told me she’d been invited to a weekend away with friends, a more attractive offer, apparently. I have lost all respect for them.”

Many of those who complained about flaky friends and family said it had substantially affected their self-esteem and trust in people, with various people saying they had stopped organising gatherings entirely because of the “logistical nightmare” of increasing numbers of people dropping out or wanting to amend plans multiple times to suit their needs better.

“I’m not sure if flakers see that their flaking eats away at the basic fabric of the friendship. At the end of the day, all relationships are built on trust, and to flake, constantly at least, is to break that trust,” said Tristan, 38, from Surrey who works in film production.

“People just feel like they don’t owe anybody anything any more, but they also just don’t want the scrutiny of others,” said a graduate in her late 20s from Devon.

“Everyone can upload things to their [social media] profiles that’ll make them look like they’re on top of the world, but these curated images aren’t real and wouldn’t hold up in conversation at a party. It’s all really unhealthy.”

Many mourned the loss of longstanding friends who, various people felt, had harmed themselves and others by retreating from their social obligations.

“I think many people who feel generally good about having become more flaky don’t realise that they are slowly manoeuvring themselves off the pitch,” said Lara, 37, a business consultant from London.

Her old university friendship group, she said, had originally been very diverse, a mix of high achievers and dreamers, extroverts and introverts. Over the past few years however, the group had gradually shrunk as some people had “excluded themselves” by routinely withdrawing from social events.

“Those of us who still meet up regularly – we started off as drinking buddies in halls, but today we flag professional or even romantic opportunities to each other, recommend investment strategies, doctors, childminders, schools, contractors, affordable holiday rentals ... It’s mostly a support group that helps us all navigate life better, and many of us have been thriving to a significant degree because we stayed in it.”

Several respondents described their increasing inability to keep an appointment as “self-sabotage”, among them Kevin, a 39-year-old researcher from Vancouver, Canada, who felt defensive but also ambivalent about his behaviour.

Flaking allowed him, he said, to avoid situations that required him to address personal issues and conflict. “It has taken me ages to begin to accept this about myself, but I hate making plans and regret it almost every time,” he said.

Kevin blamed people’s growing tendency to cancel on ever-increasing amounts of “labour” – both “actual hours worked” as well as historically high levels of “shadow work” for consumers, such as assembling furniture, pumping gas or self-checkouts.

“Then factor in all the garbage we have to do on our phones now – how many hours a month do we spend creating online accounts and downloading apps and managing bugs and making complaints, just to park the car or order groceries?”

Worsening public services, he felt, also forced people to do more childcare, eldercare and self-care. “So that person is supposed to show up for a park walk with an acquaintance on a rainy Tuesday evening because they said they would? Nah.”

“It’s really terrible,” said Ellie, an interpreter from London in her 30s. “I loved my old friends, but they used to stand me up all the time. After years of progressively worsening levels of flakiness since the pandemic, to the point where nobody invited me ever and nobody turned up when I organised something, I realised I needed different, more resilient friends – people with the capacity to give. It’s scary to think about where all this will end.”

[abroaddream]

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[mimicmimikyuwrites]

Giving Him Head - (W/ America, England, Canada) x GN!Reader SMUT

Summary: Smutty little scenarios where you go down on some (America, England, Canada) of the nations. Yup. 💕

Contents/Possible Warnings: Oral sex (male receiving), Hair Pulling, praise kink (kinda), implication of multiple orgasms, SMUT, MDNI

America (Alfred F. Jones)

Alfred had always been fond of throwing large parties, a firm believer in "go big, or go home." The biggest one he threw each year had to be his birthday party. He could go all out with fireworks, cookouts, and every red-white-and-blue-colored food he could ever ask for or dream of having. The presents were a nice thing to get too, but you always gave him his favorites.

Usually, he'd receive it after everyone had left and gone home, leaving only the two of you, but today he wanted one a bit earlier, leading you to sneak off with him to a secluded area of the house while everyone remained outside.

"Fuckfuckfuck," he groaned, tugging at the locks of your hair while you sucked on his cock, stroking what you couldn't fit with your hand. He had been pent up all day, especially after seeing you dressed in the stars and stripes of his nation's flag. You looked irresistible to him for the entire day, so much so that he didn't think he'd make it this long without either of you touching each other.

"That's it, you're doing such a good fucking job," He praised, throwing his head back with a loud moan as you paid extra attention to the tip, swirling your tongue around it as the salty taste of pre-cum filled your mouth. He was being loud like he always did. It was his day today, and he'd be damned if he didn't enjoy every last bit of it.

He began to lightly thrust upwards, hips meeting the up-and-down bobbing of your head. You looked so beautiful like this, lips wrapped around his thick length while you looked up at him with half-lidded eyes filled with wanton desire. Oh, he was going to wreck you later after all the guests outside had returned home. You were his favorite birthday present, after all.

England (Arthur Kirkland)

Arthur was a composed man who did his best to act like a true gentleman to those around him, especially to you. He kept his words and actions proper, but no one can maintain their composure every moment of their life. Especially not when they have their partner on their knees for them and ready to please.

"Fuck," He cursed, the sound drawn-out and a lewd cross between a moan and a whine. He was rarely ever this vocal, but with your lips wrapped perfectly around his cock as you managed to take the whole of it inside your warm, wet mouth, he thinks he could forgive himself for being a little too loud. When you look up at him through eyes that look too innocent for the act you're doing, his composure slips even more.

"Just like that, love," he manages to get out shakily, already close from how well you're taking him. "You're going to make me cum." He moans, hands finding themselves buried in your hair, light pulling at your soft locks as you manage to take him in even deeper, your bobbing up and down with an increased speed.

The delicious, almost pathetic noise that escapes him makes something click inside if you, and you know things aren't finished here until he's a broken, babbling mess of the gentleman he portrays himself as. He was yours to ruin, after all.

Canada (Matthew Williams)

Matthew had always been a people-pleaser, more ready to do things for others than he was for others to do for him. He was a sweet man in every aspect, and you believed that type of good needed to be paid back double, even if he insisted that it didn't. It took a decent amount of coaxing and reassurance to get him in the position you were in now.

"P-Please–" He stuttered out, only to let out a loud gasp that turned into a whiny moan as you swallowed his cock whole. He didn't know what he was begging for; was it more? Was it less? He didn't know anything other than that the warm wetness of your mouth around him felt overwhelmingly good. He had already cum once, but you showed no intent on stopping.

He was already close again; the sight of you on your knees in front of him, combined with the way you were taking him, was growing to be too much for him to handle. His hands found themselves grabbing at the bedsheets below as he tried to delay what was to come and enjoy the moment a little longer, but you grabbed them, moving them to your hair.

"Pull it, be as rough as you want, I won't break." You told him quickly before your mouth returned back to his cock. He let out a soft moan, experimentally tugging on your locks, pleasantly surprised when a moan of your own left you while you continued to bring your head up and down. Maybe, just maybe, getting rewarded for his good deeds wasn't so bad after all.

[i-wanna-write]

If One’s Different, One’s Bound to be Lonely - Wolverine Fanfic

Fic Synopsis: We know Wolverine and Sabertooth but the reader is known as Jackal. Just like the other two, their mutation is animalistic, lending them healing factors, enhanced physical abilities, and animal senses. This fic details their relationship with the Anchor!Wolverine and how they ended up meeting the Worst!Logan

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Chapter Warnings: Violence, cutting, mentions of sex but no smut, ANGST, brief mention of rape but no details/descriptions

Word Count: 3.5k+

A/N: We’ve finally reached a movie!!!! This chapter doesn’t have much dialogue but moves the plot along!

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It’s been years since your intimate night with James. You recall it having been 1965 or ‘66 when you two finally gave into your instincts, sharing that night together.

He left a few days later, leaving to join the Vietnam war with Victor. It made you feel weird. You felt different knowing you wouldn’t run in to him. That you wouldn’t move and see him randomly in the woods, or at a gas station, or a bar.

Rather than dwelling on that thought for long, you fell back into a your old routine. Moving every 3 months, hunting for food, and reading. Only this time, you had soemthing to look forward to - the end of the war.

And It finally did end - in 1975. So your focus shifted to waiting for James to return. To looking forward to where your life would take you next, maybe James by your side.

Months though turned into years, and years turned into five. Now it’s 1980 and you haven’t seen James. It’s been about fifteen years and at this point, your night with James and all past run ins seem like a dream.

A year or two ago you found a cabin in Canada, secluded just how you like it. You were in town to stock up on food when you visited the library with the intent to steal some books. However, you somehow ended up with a job there.

The job allows you to be around the thing you love, and not interact with most people. You simply organize the books and put them away once they’ve been returned. You may have to answer the occasional question, but for the most part, you’re alone.

Just how you like it.

The library is quiet so you have no overwhelming sound. Not many people visit so you don’t have to fight your instincts. You can just be around what you love in silence.

Your days consist of work, reading, and watching the moon at night. Your cabin is secluded enough you are able to enjoy the silence of nature, no sounds of the city to bother you.

All that led you to now, partaking in your usual nightly routine. You’re currently sitting on the porch, whiskey in hand as you watch the moon rise into the sky. If you had to guess, it’s almost a full moon and you like thinking the animals will soon be noisier.

You take a deep breath, enjoying the fresh air. With your mutation you’ve come to understand through the years that another reason you love solitude is the smell. Being in cities and around others was never a pleasant aroma.

You take another breath when you catch a familiar scent. You immediately tense, feeling your heartrate begin to increase. Your mind has to be playing tricks on you.

It can’t be.

You haven’t smelt the familiar whiskey and cigar in so many years.

Your gaze moves from the moon to the tree line to the first floor when you see a familiar build. There standing, flannel donned with a bag slung over his shoulder, is James.

You rise, forgetting your whiskey and immediately running off the steps and towards him. He seemed to have the same thought as you meet in the middle. His bag dropping as you jump into his arms, legs hugging around his waist.

Your own arms are around his neck while his own hold you up by your ass. Your lips immediately find his and you moan on the contact.

They’re soft, tasting of tobacco and solely James. Your mouths move hastily against each other, neither of you able to get enough of the other. He presses his tongue into your mouth and you let him take over the kiss, content to just be in his presence.

The kiss ends all too soon but James doesn’t let you go. He allows your legs to drop form his waist but keeps his hands on your ass, keeping you close. Your head is tucked into his chest, his own resting on your head.

You’re both silent a moment, just relishing in being together again. His heart pounds strongly beneath your ear and you have to stop tears from falling. He’s finally here.

“Fuck I missed you sweetheart.” He whispers against you before placing a kiss on your head.

“Fifteen years James.” You mumble against his chest.

“I go by Logan now.” You pull away at that, looking into his brown eyes, eyes you missed so much l, as you arch an eyebrow.

You’re able to take him in. Though fifteen years has passed he still looks the same. His hairs is longer than before, tufts still on either side but more prominent. He has a few wrinkles and there seems to be bags under his eyes.

You frown at that, not knowing what he’s been through. You lower your hands from his neck, grabbing his to take them off you. You grab his right hand in your left.

“Come, I’ll make dinner and you can tell me anything you want.”

…

That night, after dinner and many moments together to try to make up for the past years, the two of you lay in bed, sweaty and naked. He shared with you how Victor and he fought in the war for a few years before Victor fucked it up.

Ever the narcisstic masgonist he is, he attempted to rape a vietnamese woman and killed a Senior officer who tried to stop him. This led to himself and Jam- Logan, being brought in front of a firing squad.

He shared how he and Victor were than imprisoned because the bullets obviously didn’t work. How they were approached by a man named William Stryker to join a team of mutants.

They took him up on the offer.

James decided to go by his biological father’s surname - Logan. You finally learned how Victor and James were half brothers - that they shared the same father. It was only revealed when Logan went through puberty, as his mutation showed itself and Victor, being older, already had the mutation.

He shared how, throughout his time with weapon X - the mutants team - it turned into something he didn’twant to be a part of. The other mutants on the team and Stryker himself were brutal. Viscous. They couldn’t control themselves and had no empathy for those they were after or can across. All this was what James was against.

So he left.

He finally left Victor.

In turn, you shared with him your time apart. Your job at the library and how you’ve lived in this cabin awhile now. You live a quiet life, not worrying about being found out or running to the next cabin.

You were almost happy there.

He of course teased you about ‘becoming domesticated’. How he was off using his instincts while you were the one who ignored them. How the two of you seemed to have switched.

But you tell Logan how he was always the piece missing. How you missed not hiding your true self and instincts like you did with him. How being with him, you didn’t feel different. Didn’t feel lonely.

So Logan settled in with you, getting a job as a local lumberjack, putting his flannels to use. You lived a quiet life together for six years. You both left each morning to go to work, returning for a quiet night of dinner, whiskey, and sex.

Until everything changed again.

…

Tonight you and Logan lay in bed naked, tangled in your sheets and drenched in sweat. You’re laying with your head on his chest, right arm playing with his chest ahir. One of his arms is around your waist, the other smoothing your hair back and forth, a cigar hanging from his lips.

You tried to stop him from smoking in bed but it was a losing battle. Besides, the scent of them became soothing to you and now helps you fall asleep everynight. That, and just knowing he’s here, safe and with you.

The only lights in the room are his cigar and the moon. The embers alight Logan’s face, showing his stubble that lines his jaw and his deep brown eyes. To you, he looks the most peaceful in moments like this.

Like he hasn’t fought in numerous wars, seen terrible things, done terrible things. It’s moments like this you cherish the most. You can both be yourself and not care about all the factors of the outside world.

Logan catches your eyes and gives you a quizzical look. “What?” He asks, cigar between his teeth.

“Nothing.” You say to him, continuing to just stare.

“I can feel your eyes on me.”

“Just admiring your beauty.” You say, smiling brightly.

Logan chickles. “Smartass.” He says before taking the cigar from his mouth to place a kiss on your forehead.

You smile at the feeling, always feeling safe with him.

“Want to hear a story I read today.” You ask him.

He places the cigar back in his mouth, taking another drag. You watch as the smoke leaves his mouth, always amazed at how cool he makes it look. It’s funny that nothing can really kill him. So he may as well relish in the things the average human cannot do so often without the risk of cancer.

“What’d you read about today, sweetheat?” He places his hand back onto your hip, pulling you closer if possible.

“It’s about why the moon is so lonely.” You start, your voice soft. “It used to have a lover named Kuekuastheu and they walked the skies together. Everyone was jealous of the relationship but a spirit, Trickster was the most envious and planned to break the relationship.

He told Kuekuastheu that the moon wanted some wild roses from the normal world. So he went to get them, not knowing that once you leave the spirit world, you can never come back.

When Kuekuastheu returned he found out he couldnt re-enter. The moon was so sad so she got help from the sun to give her light power to her love. Keukuastheu asked the Master to turn into a wolf because when he went into the forest, he saw how harsh men were.

He saw how they cut a wolf to get its fur and eat it, so he chose a wolf to help them. He made people fear them and good came out of it, for whenever a wolf barred its teeth, it was a better option to run rather then hit or kill it.

But Keukuastheus still loves the moon so much that at night he goes to the cliff top and howls her name. For she can never be with him again.” You finish, a tear leaving your eye as you can’t imagine that kind of loss.

“You know what Keukuastheus means in the Native American language?” Logan whispers, looking you in your eye.

You shake your head. The sad fable did not reveal that.

“Wolverine.” Logan says.

You frown at that, suddenly not liking the symbolism. You don’t want to be his moon. He your Keukuastheus.

“Well, now it’s creepy and sad rather then romantic and sad.” You point out, a pout forming on your lips.

Logan snorts, shaking his head. He discards his cigar with his hand on your waist, stuffing it into the ashtray on his night stand. He then re-grabs your hip, pulling you half on top of him before lowering his head into your hair, giving your head one more kiss.

“It’s just a fable sweetheart, go to sleep.”

You close your eyes, feeling safe, happy, and not alone.

…

You're standing in your kitchen, making dinner for you and Logan. Another bright side of settling down near a town is frequent grocery shopping. You’d be lying if you said you missed hunting rabbit and deer as your source of daily protein.

You’re in the middle of seasoning some steaks, prepared to peal potatoes when the front door opens. A smile graces your face, surprised but happy Logan is home early.

“You’re home early.” You say, turning to face him.

Only it’s not Logan. Instead, it’s someone you havent seen in twenty years.

Victor.

“Sorry frail, figured you and I have some catchin’ up to do.” He says, walking closer to you.

You take in the man you loathed from the moment you met him. He still looks the same. Short hair on the top of his head with stubble lining his jaw. His canines are on full display, his claws grown on his hands which are at his side.

“Wasn’t expecting company.” You say, watching his every move, ready to fight if needed.

He continues to walk closer to you, looking around the place you’ve grown to call home. He slides his nails over the top of the couch, ripping it and you watch as the stuffing falls out. He moves closer to you and you take a step from the counter, knowing not to get yourself backed into a corner.

You watch as Victor leans his head up, nose flaring as he takes in the scent around him. He flashes you a smile. “Seems you and the runt might end up with some runts of your own based on the smell of this place.”

“What do you want Victor.” You say, arms crossed over your chest.

You know he’s not here for chit-chat. But you’ve ripped his throat out twice and you wont hesitate to do it a third.

Victor shrugs. “I mean, we’re practically family. Just wanna see how my little bro is treating his misses.”

“Cut the shit.” You snap, anger rising and teeth threatening to elongate. “I know what you’ve done the past years and I know sure as shit you’re not here to ‘catch up’.”

Victor smiles again, shaking his head. “Knew he didn’t like you just for your looks.” He crosses his own arms across his chest, mirroring you. “My… Colleague, has an interest in you. He wants a little meeting.”

You let out a laugh. “Not a chance in hell. And i suggest you fuck off before I make you.”

“I’m not sure, domestication seems to have made you soft.”

You growl at that, teeth elongated and claws growing. You know he’s bating you into a fight. You know he is. But your instincts are telling you to attack. To go for the throat. To finally make his heart stop beating.

Your instincts win out.

With a growl, you go to attack. Victor is just as ready. The two of you meet in the middle, his claws slicing into your shoulders while your own enter his stomach.

You grunt, pulling away and turning back to look at the man. He moves to attack again and you take the defensive, blocking the hit. You quickly turn, claws out and manage to slice his arm. He looks down at it, rage in his eyes before coming at you again, teeth bared.

He goes for your throat but you manage to get your own hand up, him taking a chunk out of your arm. You groan at the pain and grab the nearest thing, your potatoes peeler, and shred it down his face so he lets go.

You go to attack again as he’s momentarily distracted, swiping at his throat and managing to scratch him but not missing the jugular. Blood sprays your kitchen and you grab a chair, aiming to hit him. He quickly rips it out of your hands and growls.

He lands a punch to your face, your head going to the side and body flying back as you land on your on your ass and elbows. He rushes over to you but you move your legs, swiping his out from under him. This time he’s the one to land on his back and you quickly straddle him.

“Want to be with a real man?” He grunts to you, bucking up his hips.

You grimace in disgust and lean down, teeth aiming for his neck. They never get to make contact as he bucks again, this time with his hands on your hips and flip your position. His hands immediately find your neck and they enclose around them.

You feel your breathing cease and throat start to crush. You try to move you head up towards him, teeth bared to snap at his arms. Your hands are on his face, scratch any surface you can get but to no avail. He’s older, stronger, quicker, and more feral.

“Thanks for the rematch frail.” Victor says before you feel a pinch in your neck and everything goes dark.

…

“It’s amazing she isn’t already with child.” A voice calls you out of your unconsciousness.

You slowly open your eyes, the vision blurry before coming into view. You’re met with a room that looks like a hospital operation room, the scent of saline and disinfectant meeting your nose.

You look down to see you're in only a hospital gown. Your legs are spread open, knees and ankles strapped down. You let out a low growl, teeth and claws growing as you try to free your hands.

You hear a loud, fast beeping and hear someone speak. “She’s awake, sir.”

You try to look around for the noise but cannot see who spoke it.

“Fuckign Mutants, can’t do anything right. Give her another dose, I’m not done extracting yet.”

You have no idea what that means but know it’s not good. You immediately start to pull on the restraints, trying to free yourself. Soon though, you feel another prick in your neck and the world turns dark again.

…

The next time you awake the smell is the exact opposite of the first time. It's the stench of body odor, feces, and blood. You slowly open your eyes to see you’re in a cell laying on a dirty cot.

You immediately rise to your feet only for them to collapse, not able to hold your weight. You slowly stand back up, moving to sit on the edge of the cot.

You look around to notice the room is dark, only one window outside of the cell and in the hall. The cell itself having no window of its own. It consists of only the cot and a bucket in the corner.

Next you move back to your sense of smell, already covering the stenches. You can make out two unfamiliar scents and nothing else. You allow your ears to strain, hearing two separate heartbeats and breaths.

“Hello?” You call out, noticing your voice is hoarse.

“New girl, that you?” A voice calls from your right.

“I guess.” You reply, hand reaching out to rub along your throat as if to soothe the hoarseness.

“They’ve had you sedated for a month. Never saw someone fight as hard.” The voice from your left calls.

Your mind swirls You have no idea where you are. You don’t remember anything that has been done to you. Moments like this you’re grateful but also upset that you have your regenerative ability. You have no idea what has been done to you.

That thought scares you.

“Where are we?” You question.

“A facility they experiment on mutants.” the voice says angrily.

Great. Of course fucking Victor would drop you off here. Your mind thinks to Logan, wondering where he is. If he’s looking for you. If he thinks you’re dead.

You know that when he returned home he saw a blood massacre in the cabin. He probably would have smelt Victor as well as yourself, knowing the two of you fought. The question is, what did Victor do to him once Logan found him?

You don’t have time to think more on that, as an alarm is sounded throughout the hall. You rise, your legs cooperating this time and watch as your cell opens. You rush out, seeing that the two on either side of you are just kids, no older then the age of fifteen.

“Damn!” the boy on your left shouts. “You look like shit.”

You glance down, noticing that you’re in a half ripped shirt and dirty sweatpants. You see that you cell neighbors, the other a girl, are dressed in clean white t-shirts and sweats. Looks like you didn’t get any special treatment.

You lift your head, listening for any sound or smell of someone else. You hear feet moving from outside your hall, following them and smelling they’re all the same as the children next to you. Mutants running towards freedom.

“Come on,” you tell them, turning to your right. “Outside is this way.”

“How do you know?” the girl questions, looking scared.

You tap your nose with your finger, then repeat it to one of you ears. “My mutation.”

You then start running towards the hallway exit, knowing they’ll follow you. You open the locked door easily with your strength, looking out to see more teenagers running in the direction you suspected.

You allow your neighbors to go first before following, running along with the kids. You look around and notice this hallway is just a stretch with doors on either side, you’re assuming housing cells like the one you were just in.

You continue to run, noticing how there are staff on the floor, dead. You hold no ill feelings towards that, happy to just be out of this hell hole where you don’t even remember what you went through.

Soon, sunlight reaches your eyes and you soon exit the facility, grass under your bearfeet. You watch as the children are guided on to a jet, a woman dressed in black ushering them in.

You want answers. You want to know where Logan is, what happened to him. Where Victor is. You wouldn’t mind tearing out his throat, for good this time.

Deciding to not follow the others, you turn to walk towards the tree line. You’ve survived in the woods numerous of times and you know you can do it again. Your plan of action is to find out where you are, get home, then find Logan if he’s not there.

A hand suddenly stops you, causing you to turn and ready to fight. Having grabbed you is a man also dressed in black, similar to that of the woman. He’s wearing sunglasses and is tall, probably six feet with broad shoulders.

“Where are you going, jet’s this way.” The man says, his hand now on your own.

You jerk your hand out of his grasp. “To get answers.” you say, not owing this man anything.

“Revenge wont get you anything.” The man says, trying to persuade you to come with him.

You shoot him a smile, all teeth elonged and claws grown.

“I’m the Jackal. I can get anything.”

You then turn your back to the man, continuing to walk to the treeline.

…

After escaping the facility, you found out you were still in Canada and only about two hundred miles from your home. You stayed moving in the woods for a week, hunting and gathering your strength.

Afterwards, you found a nearby cabin that was empty but lived in. You broke in, helped yourself to a shower and change of clothes before packing a bag of food and leaving. You trekked through the woods for another week, allowing your scent of smell to guide you back home.

Finally you reached it, noticing how it looked run down. You immediately ran in to see the aftermath of your fight with Victor from a month ago. Blood was all over the kitchen cabinets, piles on the floor. The couch was torn apart, the kitchen table broken.

You walked into your bedroom, seeing the room the same as when you were last there. You sat down on the bed, the scent of Logan lingering.

Tears suddenly gathered in your eyes and you let out a sob as they continued to fell. You were angry. So angry. How Victor could come in and take you. How you were able to let yourself be taken and experimented on.

You were frustrated. Confused. You had no idea what has happened to you the past month and frustrated you couldn’t remember. One of the kids said you were sedated for a month and you cannot imagine what happened during that time.

You were sad. Sad for all those kids that undergone something that you might’ve. That they were just different and that meant they could be taken and experimented on.

But most of all you were sad cause you lost Logan again. You had Logan for six years, you were finally normal, not different. But it all had to go and change. And you have no idea where he is or what happened to him.

It seemed you really were the moon, and Logan Kuekuastheu.

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Tag List: @randomblogzsblog, @sebastianstanblog, @h0n3y-l3m0n05 @somiaw @sseleniaa

A/N: I cannot find where I found a fuller version of the Moon and the Wolverine story. I hope I did it justice.

[saywhat-politics]

We estimate Trump's 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico and 10% tariffs on China will:

🔹 Increase taxes by $1.2T (2025-2034)

🔹 Reduce GDP by 0.4%

🔹 Reduce employment by 344k jobs

🔹 Result in an average tax increase of $830 per US household (2025)

[allthecanadianpolitics]

There's some hopeful news for Canadian employees when it comes to their wages. According to Statistics Canada's latest jobs survey, the average hourly wage in Canada increased to an annual rate of 5.1 per cent in May, up from 4.8 per cent in April. This means the average worker made $34.94 an hour last month, which is $1.69 more than the average wage last year.

Continue Reading.

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The new globalism is global labor

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

Depending on how you look at it, I either grew up in the periphery of the labor movement, or atop it, or surrounded by it. For a kid, labor issues don't really hold a lot of urgency – in places with mature labor movements, kids don't really have jobs, and the part-time jobs I had as a kid (paper route, cleaning a dance studio) were pretty benign.

Ironically, one of the reasons that labor issues barely registered for me as a kid was that my parents were in great, strong unions: Ontario teachers' unions, which protected teachers from exploitative working conditions and from retaliation when they advocated for their students, striking for better schools as well as better working conditions.

Ontario teachers' unions were strong enough that they could take the lead on workplace organization, to the benefit of teachers at every part of their careers, as well as students and the system as a whole. Back in the early 1980s, Ontario schools faced a demographic crisis. After years of declining enrollment, the number of students entering the system was rapidly increasing.

That meant that each level of the system – primary, junior, secondary – was about to go through a whipsaw, in which low numbers of students would be followed by large numbers. For a unionized education workforce, this presented a crisis: normally, a severe contraction in student numbers would trigger layoffs, on a last-in, first-out basis. That meant that layoffs loomed for junior teachers, who would almost certainly end up retraining for another career. When student numbers picked up again, those teachers wouldn't be in the workforce anymore, and worse, a lot of the senior teachers who got priority during layoffs would be retiring, magnifying the crisis.

The teachers' unions were strong, and they cared about students and teachers, both those at the start of their careers and those who'd given many years of service. They came up with an amazing solution: "self-funded sabbaticals." Teachers with a set number of years of seniority could choose to take four years at 80% salary, and get a fifth year off at 80% salary (actually, they could take their year off any time from the third year on).

This allowed Ontario to increase its workforce by about 20%, for free. Senior teachers got a year off to spend with their families, or on continuing education, or for travel. Junior teachers' jobs were protected. Students coming into the system had adequate classroom staff, in a mix of both senior and junior teachers.

This worked great for everyone, including my family. My parents both took their four-over-five year in 1983/84. They rented out our house for six months, charging enough to cover the mortgage. We flew to London, took a ferry to France, and leased a little sedan. For the next six months, we drove around Europe, visiting fourteen countries while my parents homeschooled us on the long highway stretches and in laundromats. We stayed in youth hostels and took a train to Leningrad to visit my family there. We saw Christmas Midnight Mass at the Vatican and walked around the Parthenon. We saw Guernica at the Prado. We visited a computer lab in Paris and I learned to program Logo in French. We hung out with my parents' teacher pals who were civilian educators at a Canadian Forces Base in Baden-Baden. I bought an amazing hand-carved chess set in Seville with medieval motifs that sung to my D&D playing heart. It was amazing.

No, really, it was amazing. Unions and the social contract they bargained for transformed my family's life chances. My dad came to Canada as a refugee, the son of a teen mother who'd been deeply traumatized by her civil defense service as a child during the Siege of Leningrad. My mother was the eldest child of a man who, at thirteen, had dropped out of school to support his nine brothers and sisters after the death of his father. My parents grew up to not only own a home, but to be able to take their sons on a latter-day version of the Grand Tour that was once the exclusive province of weak-chinned toffs from the uppermost of crusts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour

My parents were active in labor causes and in their unions, of course, but that was just part of their activist lives. My mother was a leader in the fight for legal abortion rights in Canada:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/8882641733

My dad was active in party politics with the New Democratic Party, and both he and my mother were deeply involved with the fight against nuclear arms proliferation, a major issue in Canada, given our role in supplying radioisotopes to the US, building key components for ICBMs, testing cruise missiles over Labrador, and our participation in NORAD.

Abortion rights and nuclear arms proliferation were my own entry into political activism. When I was 13, I organized a large contingent from my school to march on Queen's Park, the seat of the Provincial Parliament, to demand an end to Ontario's active and critical participation in the hastening of global nuclear conflagration:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53616011737/

When I got a little older, I started helping with clinic defense and counterprotests at the Morgentaler Clinic and other sites in Toronto that provided safe access to women's health, including abortions:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/morgentaler-honoured-by-order-of-canada-federal-government-not-involved-1.716775

My teens were a period of deepening involvement in politics. It was hard work, but rewarding and fundamentally hopeful. There, in the shadow of imminent nuclear armageddon, there was a role for me to play, a way to be more than a passive passenger on a runaway train, to participate in the effort to pull the brake lever before we ran over the cliff.

In hindsight, though, I can see that even as my activism intensified, it also got harder. We struggled more to find places to meet, to find phones and computers to use, to find people who could explain how to get a permit for a demonstration or to get legal assistance for comrades in jail after a civil disobedience action.

What I couldn't see at the time was that all of this was provided by organized labor. The labor movement had the halls, the photocopiers, the lawyers, the experience – the infrastructure. Even for campaigns that were directly about labor rights – campaigns for abortion rights, or against nuclear annihilation – the labor movement was the material, tangible base for our activities.

Look, riding a bicycle around all night wheatpasting posters to telephone poles to turn out people for an upcoming demonstration is hard work, but it's much harder if you have to pay for xeroxing at Kinko's rather than getting it for free at the union hall. Worse, the demonstration turnout suffers more because the union phone-trees and newsletters stop bringing out the numbers they once brought out.

This was why the neoliberal project took such savage aim at labor: they understood that a strong labor movement was foundation of antiimperialist, antiracist, antisexist struggles for justice. By dismantling labor, the ruling class kicked the legs out from under all the other fights that mattered.

Every year, it got harder to fight for any kind of better world. We activist kids grew to our twenties and foundered, spending precious hours searching for a room to hold a meeting, leaving us with fewer hours to spend organizing the thing we were meeting for. But gradually, we rebuilt. We started to stand up our own fragile, brittle, nascent structures that stood in for the mature and solid labor foundation that we'd grown up with.

The first time I got an inkling of what was going on came in 1999, with the Battle of Seattle: the mass protests over the WTO. Yes, labor turned out in force for those mass demonstrations, but they weren't its leaders. The militancy, the leadership, and the organization came out of groups that could loosely be called "post-labor" – not in the sense that they no longer believed in labor causes, but in the sense that they were being organized outside of traditional labor.

Labor was in retreat. Five years earlier, organized labor had responded to NAFTA by organizing against Mexican workers, rather than the bosses who wanted to ship jobs to Mexico. It wasn't unusual to see cars in Ontario with CAW bumper stickers alongside xenophobic stickers taking aim at Mexicans, not bosses. Those were the only workers that organized labor saw as competitors for labor rights: this was also the heyday of "two-tier" contracts, which protected benefits for senior workers while leaving their junior comrades exposed to bosses' most sadistic practices, while still expecting junior workers to pay dues to a union that wouldn't protect them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/25/strikesgiving/#shed-a-tier

Two-tier contracts were the opposite of the solidarity that my parents' teachers' union exhibited in the early 1980s; blaming Mexican workers for automakers' offshoring was the opposite of the solidarity that built transracial and international labor power in the early days of the union movement:

https://unionhall.aflcio.org/bloomington-normal-trades-and-labor-assembly/labor-culture/edge-anarchy-first-class-pullman-strike

As labor withered under a sustained, multi-decades-long assault on workers' rights, other movements started to recapitulate the evolution of early labor, shoring up fragile movements that lacked legal protections, weathering setbacks, and building a "progressive" coalition that encompassed numerous issues. And then that movement started to support a new wave of labor organizing, situating labor issues on a continuum of justice questions, from race to gender to predatory college lending.

Young workers from every sector joined ossified unions with corrupt, sellout leaders and helped engineer their ouster, turning these dying old unions into engines of successful labor militancy:

https://theintercept.com/2023/04/07/deconstructed-union-dhl-teamsters-uaw/

In other words, we're in the midst of a reversal of the historic role of labor and other social justice movements. Whereas once labor anchored a large collection of smaller, less unified social movements; today those social movements are helping bring back a weakened and fragmented labor movement.

One of the key organizing questions for today is whether these two movements can continue to co-evolve and, eventually, merge. For example: there can be no successful climate action without climate justice. The least paid workers in America are also the most racially disfavored. The gender pay-gap exists in all labor markets. For labor, integrating social justice questions isn't just morally sound, it's also tactically necessary.

One thing such a fusion can produce is a truly international labor movement. Today, social justice movements are transnational: the successful Irish campaign for abortion rights was closely linked to key abortion rights struggles in Argentina and Poland, and today, abortion rights organizers from all over the world are involved in mailing medication abortion pills to America.

A global labor movement is necessary, and not just to defeat the divide-and-rule tactics of the NAFTA fight. The WTO's legacy is a firmly global capitalism: workers all over the world are fighting the same corporations. The strong unions of one country are threatened by weak labor in other countries where their key corporations seek to shift manufacturing or service delivery. But those same strong unions are able to use their power to help their comrades abroad protect their labor rights, depriving their common adversary of an easily exploited workforce.

A key recent example is Mercedes, part of the Daimler global octopus. Mercedes' home turf is Germany, which boasts some of the strongest autoworker unions in the world. In the USA, Mercedes – like other German auto giants – preferentially manufactures its cars in the South, America's "onshore-offshore" crime havens, where labor laws are both virtually nonexistent and largely unenforced. This allows Mercedes to exploit and endanger a largely Black workforce in a "right to work" territory where unions are nearly impossible to form and sustain.

Mercedes just defeated a hard-fought union drive in Vance, Alabama. In part, this was due to admitted tactical blunders from the UAW, who have recently racked up unprecedented victories in Tennessee and North Carolina:

https://paydayreport.com/uaw-admits-digital-heavy-organizing-committee-light-approach-failed-them-in-alabama-at-mercedes/

But mostly, this was because Mercedes cheated. They flagrantly violated labor law to sabotage the union vote. That's where it gets interesting. German workers have successfully lobbied the German parliament for the Supply Chain Act, an anticorruption law that punishes German companies that violate labor law abroad. That means that even though the UAW just lost their election, they might inflict some serious pain on Mercedes, who face a fine of 2% of their global annual revenue, and a ban on selling cars to the German government:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

This is another way reversal of the post-neoliberal era. Whereas once the US exported its most rapacious corporate practices all over the world, today, global labor stands a chance of exporting workers' rights from weak territories to strong ones.

Here's an American analogy: the US's two most populous states are California and Texas. The policies of these states ripple out over the whole country, and even beyond. When Texas requires textbooks that ban evolution, every pupil in the country is at risk of getting a textbook that embraces Young Earth Creationism. When California enacts strict emission standards, every car in the country gets cleaner tailpipes. The WTO was a Texas-style export: a race to the bottom, all around the world. The moment we're living through now, as global social movements fuse with global labor, are a California-style export, a race to the top.

This is a weird upside to global monopoly capitalism. It's how antitrust regulators all over the world are taking on corporations whose power rivals global superpowers like the USA and China: because they're all fighting the same corporations, they can share tactics and even recycle evidence from one-another's antitrust cases:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/big-tech-eu-drop-dead

Look, the UAW messed up in Alabama. A successful union vote is won before the first ballot is cast. If your ground game isn't strong enough to know the outcome of the vote before the ballot box opens, you need more organizing, not a vote:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/

But thanks to global labor – and its enemy, global capitalism – the UAW gets another chance. Global capitalism is rich and powerful, but it has key weaknesses. Its drive to "efficiency" makes it terribly vulnerable, and a disruption anywhere in its supply chain can bring the whole global empire to its knees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

American workers – especially swing-state workers who swung for Trump and are leaning his way again – overwhelmingly support a pro-labor agenda. They are furious over "price gouging and outrageous corporate profits…wealthy corporate CEOs and billionaires [not] paying what they should in taxes and the top 1% gaming the system":

https://www.americanfamilyvoices.org/_files/ugd/d4d64f_6c3dff0c3da74098b07ed3f086705af2.pdf

They support universal healthcare, and value Medicare and Social Security, and trust the Democrats to manage both better than Republicans will. They support "abortion rights, affordable child care, and even forgiving student loans":

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-20-bidens-working-class-slump/

The problem is that these blue-collar voters are atomized. They no longer meet in union halls – they belong to gun clubs affiliated with the NRA. There are enough people who are a) undecided and b) union members in these swing states to defeat Trump. This is why labor power matters, and why a fusion of American labor and social justice movements matters – and why an international fusion of a labor-social justice coalition is our best hope for a habitable planet and a decent lives for our families.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/20/a-common-foe/#the-multinational-playbook

[darkwood-sleddog]

things that the united states could do to prevent the spread of rabies & other diseases in canines that is not resorting to restricting dog importation to dogs above 6 months of age:

fund more low cost vaccination clinics across the country. this alone would do more than anything else on this list.

require that all municipalities/states require dog registration where a rabies vaccine is required (this is already the case in a majority of the united states). Additionally require additional vaccinations like dog influenza, and distemper (diseases that have been confirmed brought to the united states by dogs imported by rescue organizations). In my State part of the cost of dog registration goes to funding low cost veterinary services for those in need. Increased registration would provide increased resources for those needing low cost vaccination.

Fund and provide more resources for municipalities to enforce dog registration. Currently this is entirely on the budget of municipalities and in small communities enforcement officers are untrained volunteers with a small stipend because that's what we can afford. this needs to change.

set up a pet passport program with land bordering countries like Canada and Mexico for easier land traveling for PERSONAL, PRIVATELY OWNED pets with a well documented history.

I would also accept an actual veterinary check at border crossings over the 6 month rule seeing as whenever I have imported dogs whoever checks my documentation has been very blaise about looking at the actual dog. A veterinary check could prevent (some, but likely not all) untruthful situations and try to ensure the dog's age and health match any passport documentation. Note that I don't feel this is ideal, but would 1.) create jobs at crossings and import points and 2.) may prevent some of falsified paperwork dogs from crossing if that truly is such a concern.

Forgive student loans of veterinary students and provide resources and funding for veterinary scholarships. Veterinarians in the United States are at high risk of suicide and the industry is at a breaking point with many vets not taking new clients due to lack of resources. This prevents vaccination for many people. Forgiving existing loans and providing increased scholarships will ensure an influx of people new to the industry are not struggling and will also be more likely to stay in the industry.

Have clearly laid out containment agreement and importation exceptions from rabies free countries and not rely on a chat bot to answer people's importation questions with any nuance.

[antiporn-activist]

I thought y'all should read this

I have a free trial to News+ so I copy-pasted it for you here. I don't think Jonathan Haidt would object to more people having this info.

Tumblr wouldn't let me post it until i removed all the links to Haidt's sources. You'll have to take my word that everything is sourced.

End the Phone-Based Childhood Now

The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development.

By Jonathan Haidt

Something went suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likelyto live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z.

Surveys show that members of Gen Z are shyer and more risk averse than previous generations, too, and risk aversion may make them less ambitious. In an interview last May, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison noted that, for the first time since the 1970s, none of Silicon Valley’s preeminent entrepreneurs are under 30. “Something has really gone wrong,” Altman said. In a famously young industry, he was baffled by the sudden absence of great founders in their 20s.

Generations are not monolithic, of course. Many young people are flourishing. Taken as a whole, however, Gen Z is in poor mental health and is lagging behind previous generations on many important metrics. And if a generation is doing poorly––if it is more anxious and depressed and is starting families, careers, and important companies at a substantially lower rate than previous generations––then the sociological and economic consequences will be profound for the entire society.

What happened in the early 2010s that altered adolescent development and worsened mental health? Theories abound, but the fact that similar trends are found in many countries worldwide means that events and trends that are specific to the United States cannot be the main story.

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

As a social psychologist who has long studied social and moral development, I have been involved in debates about the effects of digital technology for years. Typically, the scientific questions have been framed somewhat narrowly, to make them easier to address with data. For example, do adolescents who consume more social media have higher levels of depression? Does using a smartphone just before bedtime interfere with sleep? The answer to these questions is usually found to be yes, although the size of the relationship is often statistically small, which has led some researchers to conclude that these new technologies are not responsible for the gigantic increases in mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

But before we can evaluate the evidence on any one potential avenue of harm, we need to step back and ask a broader question: What is childhood––including adolescence––and how did it change when smartphones moved to the center of it? If we take a more holistic view of what childhood is and what young children, tweens, and teens need to do to mature into competent adults, the picture becomes much clearer. Smartphone-based life, it turns out, alters or interferes with a great number of developmental processes.

The intrusion of smartphones and social media are not the only changes that have deformed childhood. There’s an important backstory, beginning as long ago as the 1980s, when we started systematically depriving children and adolescents of freedom, unsupervised play, responsibility, and opportunities for risk taking, all of which promote competence, maturity, and mental health. But the change in childhood accelerated in the early 2010s, when an already independence-deprived generation was lured into a new virtual universe that seemed safe to parents but in fact is more dangerous, in many respects, than the physical world.

My claim is that the new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood. We need a dramatic cultural correction, and we need it now.

1. The Decline of Play and Independence 

Human brains are extraordinarily large compared with those of other primates, and human childhoods are extraordinarily long, too, to give those large brains time to wire up within a particular culture. A child’s brain is already 90 percent of its adult size by about age 6. The next 10 or 15 years are about learning norms and mastering skills—physical, analytical, creative, and social. As children and adolescents seek out experiences and practice a wide variety of behaviors, the synapses and neurons that are used frequently are retained while those that are used less often disappear. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.

Brain development is sometimes said to be “experience-expectant,” because specific parts of the brain show increased plasticity during periods of life when an animal’s brain can “expect” to have certain kinds of experiences. You can see this with baby geese, who will imprint on whatever mother-sized object moves in their vicinity just after they hatch. You can see it with human children, who are able to learn languages quickly and take on the local accent, but only through early puberty; after that, it’s hard to learn a language and sound like a native speaker. There is also some evidence of a sensitive period for cultural learning more generally. Japanese children who spent a few years in California in the 1970s came to feel “American” in their identity and ways of interacting only if they attended American schools for a few years between ages 9 and 15. If they left before age 9, there was no lasting impact. If they didn’t arrive until they were 15, it was too late; they didn’t come to feel American.

Human childhood is an extended cultural apprenticeship with different tasks at different ages all the way through puberty. Once we see it this way, we can identify factors that promote or impede the right kinds of learning at each age. For children of all ages, one of the most powerful drivers of learning is the strong motivation to play. Play is the work of childhood, and all young mammals have the same job: to wire up their brains by playing vigorously and often, practicing the moves and skills they’ll need as adults. Kittens will play-pounce on anything that looks like a mouse tail. Human children will play games such as tag and sharks and minnows, which let them practice both their predator skills and their escaping-from-predator skills. Adolescents will play sports with greater intensity, and will incorporate playfulness into their social interactions—flirting, teasing, and developing inside jokes that bond friends together. Hundreds of studies on young rats, monkeys, and humans show that young mammals want to play, need to play, and end up socially, cognitively, and emotionally impaired when they are deprived of play.

One crucial aspect of play is physical risk taking. Children and adolescents must take risks and fail—often—in environments in which failure is not very costly. This is how they extend their abilities, overcome their fears, learn to estimate risk, and learn to cooperate in order to take on larger challenges later. The ever-present possibility of getting hurt while running around, exploring, play-fighting, or getting into a real conflict with another group adds an element of thrill, and thrilling play appears to be the most effective kind for overcoming childhood anxieties and building social, emotional, and physical competence. The desire for risk and thrill increases in the teen years, when failure might carry more serious consequences. Children of all ages need to choose the risk they are ready for at a given moment. Young people who are deprived of opportunities for risk taking and independent exploration will, on average, develop into more anxious and risk-averse adults.

Human childhood and adolescence evolved outdoors, in a physical world full of dangers and opportunities. Its central activities––play, exploration, and intense socializing––were largely unsupervised by adults, allowing children to make their own choices, resolve their own conflicts, and take care of one another. Shared adventures and shared adversity bound young people together into strong friendship clusters within which they mastered the social dynamics of small groups, which prepared them to master bigger challenges and larger groups later on.

And then we changed childhood.

The changes started slowly in the late 1970s and ’80s, before the arrival of the internet, as many parents in the U.S. grew fearful that their children would be harmed or abducted if left unsupervised. Such crimes have always been extremely rare, but they loomed larger in parents’ minds thanks in part to rising levels of street crime combined with the arrival of cable TV, which enabled round-the-clock coverage of missing-children cases. A general decline in social capital––the degree to which people knew and trusted their neighbors and institutions––exacerbated parental fears. Meanwhile, rising competition for college admissions encouraged more intensive forms of parenting. In the 1990s, American parents began pulling their children indoors or insisting that afternoons be spent in adult-run enrichment activities. Free play, independent exploration, and teen-hangout time declined.

In recent decades, seeing unchaperoned children outdoors has become so novel that when one is spotted in the wild, some adults feel it is their duty to call the police. In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that parents, on average, believed that children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in front of their house, and that kids should be 14 before being allowed to go unsupervised to a public park. Most of these same parents had enjoyed joyous and unsupervised outdoor play by the age of 7 or 8.

2. The Virtual World Arrives in Two Waves

The internet, which now dominates the lives of young people, arrived in two waves of linked technologies. The first one did little harm to Millennials. The second one swallowed Gen Z whole.

The first wave came ashore in the 1990s with the arrival of dial-up internet access, which made personal computers good for something beyond word processing and basic games. By 2003, 55 percent of American households had a computer with (slow) internet access. Rates of adolescent depression, loneliness, and other measures of poor mental health did not rise in this first wave. If anything, they went down a bit. Millennial teens (born 1981 through 1995), who were the first to go through puberty with access to the internet, were psychologically healthier and happier, on average, than their older siblings or parents in Generation X (born 1965 through 1980).

The second wave began to rise in the 2000s, though its full force didn’t hit until the early 2010s. It began rather innocently with the introduction of social-media platforms that helped people connect with their friends. Posting and sharing content became much easier with sites such as Friendster (launched in 2003), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004).

Teens embraced social media soon after it came out, but the time they could spend on these sites was limited in those early years because the sites could only be accessed from a computer, often the family computer in the living room. Young people couldn’t access social media (and the rest of the internet) from the school bus, during class time, or while hanging out with friends outdoors. Many teens in the early-to-mid-2000s had cellphones, but these were basic phones (many of them flip phones) that had no internet access. Typing on them was difficult––they had only number keys. Basic phones were tools that helped Millennials meet up with one another in person or talk with each other one-on-one. I have seen no evidence to suggest that basic cellphones harmed the mental health of Millennials.

It was not until the introduction of the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008), and high-speed internet (which reached 50 percent of American homes in 2007)—and the corresponding pivot to mobile made by many providers of social media, video games, and porn—that it became possible for adolescents to spend nearly every waking moment online. The extraordinary synergy among these innovations was what powered the second technological wave. In 2011, only 23 percent of teens had a smartphone. By 2015, that number had risen to 73 percent, and a quarter of teens said they were online “almost constantly.” Their younger siblings in elementary school didn’t usually have their own smartphones, but after its release in 2010, the iPad quickly became a staple of young children’s daily lives. It was in this brief period, from 2010 to 2015, that childhood in America (and many other countries) was rewired into a form that was more sedentary, solitary, virtual, and incompatible with healthy human development.

3. Techno-optimism and the Birth of the Phone-Based Childhood

The phone-based childhood created by that second wave—including not just smartphones themselves, but all manner of internet-connected devices, such as tablets, laptops, video-game consoles, and smartwatches—arrived near the end of a period of enormous optimism about digital technology. The internet came into our lives in the mid-1990s, soon after the fall of the Soviet Union. By the end of that decade, it was widely thought that the web would be an ally of democracy and a slayer of tyrants. When people are connected to each other, and to all the information in the world, how could any dictator keep them down?

In the 2000s, Silicon Valley and its world-changing inventions were a source of pride and excitement in America. Smart and ambitious young people around the world wanted to move to the West Coast to be part of the digital revolution. Tech-company founders such as Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin were lauded as gods, or at least as modern Prometheans, bringing humans godlike powers. The Arab Spring bloomed in 2011 with the help of decentralized social platforms, including Twitter and Facebook. When pundits and entrepreneurs talked about the power of social media to transform society, it didn’t sound like a dark prophecy.

You have to put yourself back in this heady time to understand why adults acquiesced so readily to the rapid transformation of childhood. Many parents had concerns, even then, about what their children were doing online, especially because of the internet’s ability to put children in contact with strangers. But there was also a lot of excitement about the upsides of this new digital world. If computers and the internet were the vanguards of progress, and if young people––widely referred to as “digital natives”––were going to live their lives entwined with these technologies, then why not give them a head start? I remember how exciting it was to see my 2-year-old son master the touch-and-swipe interface of my first iPhone in 2008. I thought I could see his neurons being woven together faster as a result of the stimulation it brought to his brain, compared to the passivity of watching television or the slowness of building a block tower. I thought I could see his future job prospects improving.

Touchscreen devices were also a godsend for harried parents. Many of us discovered that we could have peace at a restaurant, on a long car trip, or at home while making dinner or replying to emails if we just gave our children what they most wanted: our smartphones and tablets. We saw that everyone else was doing it and figured it must be okay.

It was the same for older children, desperate to join their friends on social-media platforms, where the minimum age to open an account was set by law to 13, even though no research had been done to establish the safety of these products for minors. Because the platforms did nothing (and still do nothing) to verify the stated age of new-account applicants, any 10-year-old could open multiple accounts without parental permission or knowledge, and many did. Facebook and later Instagram became places where many sixth and seventh graders were hanging out and socializing. If parents did find out about these accounts, it was too late. Nobody wanted their child to be isolated and alone, so parents rarely forced their children to shut down their accounts.

We had no idea what we were doing.

4. The High Cost of a Phone-Based Childhood

In Walden, his 1854 reflection on simple living, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” It’s an elegant formulation of what economists would later call the opportunity cost of any choice—all of the things you can no longer do with your money and time once you’ve committed them to something else. So it’s important that we grasp just how much of a young person’s day is now taken up by their devices.

The numbers are hard to believe. The most recent Gallup data show that American teens spend about five hours a day just on social-media platforms (including watching videos on TikTok and YouTube). Add in all the other phone- and screen-based activities, and the number rises to somewhere between seven and nine hours a day, on average. The numbers are even higher in single-parent and low-income families, and among Black, Hispanic, and Native American families.

In Thoreau’s terms, how much of life is exchanged for all this screen time? Arguably, most of it. Everything else in an adolescent’s day must get squeezed down or eliminated entirely to make room for the vast amount of content that is consumed, and for the hundreds of “friends,” “followers,” and other network connections that must be serviced with texts, posts, comments, likes, snaps, and direct messages. I recently surveyed my students at NYU, and most of them reported that the very first thing they do when they open their eyes in the morning is check their texts, direct messages, and social-media feeds. It’s also the last thing they do before they close their eyes at night. And it’s a lot of what they do in between.

The amount of time that adolescents spend sleeping declined in the early 2010s, and many studies tie sleep loss directly to the use of devices around bedtime, particularly when they’re used to scroll through social media. Exercise declined, too, which is unfortunate because exercise, like sleep, improves both mental and physical health. Book reading has been declining for decades, pushed aside by digital alternatives, but the decline, like so much else, sped up in the early 2010s. With passive entertainment always available, adolescent minds likely wander less than they used to; contemplation and imagination might be placed on the list of things winnowed down or crowded out.

But perhaps the most devastating cost of the new phone-based childhood was the collapse of time spent interacting with other people face-to-face. A study of how Americans spend their time found that, before 2010, young people (ages 15 to 24) reported spending far more time with their friends (about two hours a day, on average, not counting time together at school) than did older people (who spent just 30 to 60 minutes with friends). Time with friends began decreasing for young people in the 2000s, but the drop accelerated in the 2010s, while it barely changed for older people. By 2019, young people’s time with friends had dropped to just 67 minutes a day. It turns out that Gen Z had been socially distancing for many years and had mostly completed the project by the time COVID-19 struck.

You might question the importance of this decline. After all, isn’t much of this online time spent interacting with friends through texting, social media, and multiplayer video games? Isn’t that just as good?

Some of it surely is, and virtual interactions offer unique benefits too, especially for young people who are geographically or socially isolated. But in general, the virtual world lacks many of the features that make human interactions in the real world nutritious, as we might say, for physical, social, and emotional development. In particular, real-world relationships and social interactions are characterized by four features—typical for hundreds of thousands of years—that online interactions either distort or erase.

First, real-world interactions are embodied, meaning that we use our hands and facial expressions to communicate, and we learn to respond to the body language of others. Virtual interactions, in contrast, mostly rely on language alone. No matter how many emojis are offered as compensation, the elimination of communication channels for which we have eons of evolutionary programming is likely to produce adults who are less comfortable and less skilled at interacting in person.

Second, real-world interactions are synchronous; they happen at the same time. As a result, we learn subtle cues about timing and conversational turn taking. Synchronous interactions make us feel closer to the other person because that’s what getting “in sync” does. Texts, posts, and many other virtual interactions lack synchrony. There is less real laughter, more room for misinterpretation, and more stress after a comment that gets no immediate response.

Third, real-world interactions primarily involve one‐to‐one communication, or sometimes one-to-several. But many virtual communications are broadcast to a potentially huge audience. Online, each person can engage in dozens of asynchronous interactions in parallel, which interferes with the depth achieved in all of them. The sender’s motivations are different, too: With a large audience, one’s reputation is always on the line; an error or poor performance can damage social standing with large numbers of peers. These communications thus tend to be more performative and anxiety-inducing than one-to-one conversations.

Finally, real-world interactions usually take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. But in many virtual networks, people can easily block others or quit when they are displeased. Relationships within such networks are usually more disposable.

These unsatisfying and anxiety-producing features of life online should be recognizable to most adults. Online interactions can bring out antisocial behavior that people would never display in their offline communities. But if life online takes a toll on adults, just imagine what it does to adolescents in the early years of puberty, when their “experience expectant” brains are rewiring based on feedback from their social interactions.

Kids going through puberty online are likely to experience far more social comparison, self-consciousness, public shaming, and chronic anxiety than adolescents in previous generations, which could potentially set developing brains into a habitual state of defensiveness. The brain contains systems that are specialized for approach (when opportunities beckon) and withdrawal (when threats appear or seem likely). People can be in what we might call “discover mode” or “defend mode” at any moment, but generally not both. The two systems together form a mechanism for quickly adapting to changing conditions, like a thermostat that can activate either a heating system or a cooling system as the temperature fluctuates. Some people’s internal thermostats are generally set to discover mode, and they flip into defend mode only when clear threats arise. These people tend to see the world as full of opportunities. They are happier and less anxious. Other people’s internal thermostats are generally set to defend mode, and they flip into discover mode only when they feel unusually safe. They tend to see the world as full of threats and are more prone to anxiety and depressive disorders.

A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development.

5. So Many Harms

The debate around adolescents’ use of smartphones and social media typically revolves around mental health, and understandably so. But the harms that have resulted from transforming childhood so suddenly and heedlessly go far beyondmental health. I’ve touched on some of them—social awkwardness, reduced self-confidence, and a more sedentary childhood. Here are three additional harms.

Fragmented Attention, Disrupted Learning

Staying on task while sitting at a computer is hard enough for an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex. It is far more difficult for adolescents in front of their laptop trying to do homework. They are probably less intrinsically motivated to stay on task. They’re certainly less able, given their undeveloped prefrontal cortex, and hence it’s easy for any company with an app to lure them away with an offer of social validation or entertainment. Their phones are pinging constantly—one study found that the typical adolescent now gets 237 notifications a day, roughly 15 every waking hour. Sustained attention is essential for doing almost anything big, creative, or valuable, yet young people find their attention chopped up into little bits by notifications offering the possibility of high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.

It even happens in the classroom. Studies confirm that when students have access to their phones during class time, they use them, especially for texting and checking social media, and their grades and learning suffer. This might explain why benchmark test scores began to decline in the U.S. and around the world in the early 2010s—well before the pandemic hit.

Addiction and Social Withdrawal

The neural basis of behavioral addiction to social media or video games is not exactly the same as chemical addiction to cocaine or opioids. Nonetheless, they all involve abnormally heavy and sustained activation of dopamine neurons and reward pathways. Over time, the brain adapts to these high levels of dopamine; when the child is not engaged in digital activity, their brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms. These generally include anxiety, insomnia, and intense irritability. Kids with these kinds of behavioral addictions often become surly and aggressive, and withdraw from their families into their bedrooms and devices.

Social-media and gaming platforms were designed to hook users. How successful are they? How many kids suffer from digital addictions?

The main addiction risks for boys seem to be video games and porn. “Internet gaming disorder,” which was added to the main diagnosis manual of psychiatry in 2013 as a condition for further study, describes “significant impairment or distress” in several aspects of life, along with many hallmarks of addiction, including an inability to reduce usage despite attempts to do so. Estimates for the prevalence of IGD range from 7 to 15 percent among adolescent boys and young men. As for porn, a nationally representative survey of American adults published in 2019 found that 7 percent of American men agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I am addicted to pornography”—and the rates were higher for the youngest men.

Girls have much lower rates of addiction to video games and porn, but they use social media more intensely than boys do. A study of teens in 29 nations found that between 5 and 15 percent of adolescents engage in what is called “problematic social media use,” which includes symptoms such as preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, neglect of other areas of life, and lying to parents and friends about time spent on social media. That study did not break down results by gender, but many others have found that rates of “problematic use” are higher for girls.

I don’t want to overstate the risks: Most teens do not become addicted to their phones and video games. But across multiple studies and across genders, rates of problematic use come out in the ballpark of 5 to 15 percent. Is there any other consumer product that parents would let their children use relatively freely if they knew that something like one in 10 kids would end up with a pattern of habitual and compulsive use that disrupted various domains of life and looked a lot like an addiction?

The Decay of Wisdom and the Loss of Meaning 

During that crucial sensitive period for cultural learning, from roughly ages 9 through 15, we should be especially thoughtful about who is socializing our children for adulthood. Instead, that’s when most kids get their first smartphone and sign themselves up (with or without parental permission) to consume rivers of content from random strangers. Much of that content is produced by other adolescents, in blocks of a few minutes or a few seconds.

This rerouting of enculturating content has created a generation that is largely cut off from older generations and, to some extent, from the accumulated wisdom of humankind, including knowledge about how to live a flourishing life. Adolescents spend less time steeped in their local or national culture. They are coming of age in a confusing, placeless, ahistorical maelstrom of 30-second stories curated by algorithms designed to mesmerize them. Without solid knowledge of the past and the filtering of good ideas from bad––a process that plays out over many generations––young people will be more prone to believe whatever terrible ideas become popular around them, which might explain why videos showing young people reacting positively to Osama bin Laden’s thoughts about America were trending on TikTok last fall.

All this is made worse by the fact that so much of digital public life is an unending supply of micro dramas about somebody somewhere in our country of 340 million people who did something that can fuel an outrage cycle, only to be pushed aside by the next. It doesn’t add up to anything and leaves behind only a distorted sense of human nature and affairs.

When our public life becomes fragmented, ephemeral, and incomprehensible, it is a recipe for anomie, or normlessness. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim showed long ago that a society that fails to bind its people together with some shared sense of sacredness and common respect for rules and norms is not a society of great individual freedom; it is, rather, a place where disoriented individuals have difficulty setting goals and exerting themselves to achieve them. Durkheim argued that anomie was a major driver of suicide rates in European countries. Modern scholars continue to draw on his work to understand suicide rates today. 

Durkheim’s observations are crucial for understanding what happened in the early 2010s. A long-running survey of American teens found that, from 1990 to 2010, high-school seniors became slightly less likely to agree with statements such as “Life often feels meaningless.” But as soon as they adopted a phone-based life and many began to live in the whirlpool of social media, where no stability can be found, every measure of despair increased. From 2010 to 2019, the number who agreed that their lives felt “meaningless” increased by about 70 percent, to more than one in five.

6. Young People Don’t Like Their Phone-Based Lives

How can I be confident that the epidemic of adolescent mental illness was kicked off by the arrival of the phone-based childhood? Skeptics point to other events as possible culprits, including the 2008 global financial crisis, global warming, the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting and the subsequent active-shooter drills, rising academic pressures, and the opioid epidemic. But while these events might have been contributing factors in some countries, none can explain both the timing and international scope of the disaster.

An additional source of evidence comes from Gen Z itself. With all the talk of regulating social media, raising age limits, and getting phones out of schools, you might expect to find many members of Gen Z writing and speaking out in opposition. I’ve looked for such arguments and found hardly any. In contrast, many young adults tell stories of devastation.

Freya India, a 24-year-old British essayist who writes about girls, explains how social-media sites carry girls off to unhealthy places: “It seems like your child is simply watching some makeup tutorials, following some mental health influencers, or experimenting with their identity. But let me tell you: they are on a conveyor belt to someplace bad. Whatever insecurity or vulnerability they are struggling with, they will be pushed further and further into it.” She continues:

Gen Z were the guinea pigs in this uncontrolled global social experiment. We were the first to have our vulnerabilities and insecurities fed into a machine that magnified and refracted them back at us, all the time, before we had any sense of who we were. We didn’t just grow up with algorithms. They raised us. They rearranged our faces. Shaped our identities. Convinced us we were sick.

Rikki Schlott, a 23-year-old American journalist and co-author of The Canceling of the American Mind, writes,

"The day-to-day life of a typical teen or tween today would be unrecognizable to someone who came of age before the smartphone arrived. Zoomers are spending an average of 9 hours daily in this screen-time doom loop—desperate to forget the gaping holes they’re bleeding out of, even if just for … 9 hours a day. Uncomfortable silence could be time to ponder why they’re so miserable in the first place. Drowning it out with algorithmic white noise is far easier."

A 27-year-old man who spent his adolescent years addicted (his word) to video games and pornography sent me this reflection on what that did to him:

I missed out on a lot of stuff in life—a lot of socialization. I feel the effects now: meeting new people, talking to people. I feel that my interactions are not as smooth and fluid as I want. My knowledge of the world (geography, politics, etc.) is lacking. I didn’t spend time having conversations or learning about sports. I often feel like a hollow operating system.

Or consider what Facebook found in a research project involving focus groups of young people, revealed in 2021 by the whistleblower Frances Haugen: “Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rates of anxiety and depression among teens,” an internal document said. “This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups.”

7. Collective-Action Problems

Social-media companies such as Meta, TikTok, and Snap are often compared to tobacco companies, but that’s not really fair to the tobacco industry. It’s true that companies in both industries marketed harmful products to children and tweaked their products for maximum customer retention (that is, addiction), but there’s a big difference: Teens could and did choose, in large numbers, not to smoke. Even at the peak of teen cigarette use, in 1997, nearly two-thirds of high-school students did not smoke.

Social media, in contrast, applies a lot more pressure on nonusers, at a much younger age and in a more insidious way. Once a few students in any middle school lie about their age and open accounts at age 11 or 12, they start posting photos and comments about themselves and other students. Drama ensues. The pressure on everyone else to join becomes intense. Even a girl who knows, consciously, that Instagram can foster beauty obsession, anxiety, and eating disorders might sooner take those risks than accept the seeming certainty of being out of the loop, clueless, and excluded. And indeed, if she resists while most of her classmates do not, she might, in fact, be marginalized, which puts her at risk for anxiety and depression, though via a different pathway than the one taken by those who use social media heavily. In this way, social media accomplishes a remarkable feat: It even harms adolescents who do not use it.

A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or TikTok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society. On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about. Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

Social media is all about network effects. Most students are only on it because everyone else is too. Most of them would prefer that nobody be on these platforms. Later in the study, students were asked directly, “Would you prefer to live in a world without Instagram [or TikTok]?” A majority of students said yes––58 percent for each app.

This is the textbook definition of what social scientists call a collective-action problem. It’s what happens when a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a particular action, but each actor is deterred from acting, because unless the others do the same, the personal cost outweighs the benefit. Fishermen considering limiting their catch to avoid wiping out the local fish population are caught in this same kind of trap. If no one else does it too, they just lose profit.

Cigarettes trapped individual smokers with a biological addiction. Social media has trapped an entire generation in a collective-action problem. Early app developers deliberately and knowingly exploited the psychological weaknesses and insecurities of young people to pressure them to consume a product that, upon reflection, many wish they could use less, or not at all.

8. Four Norms to Break Four Traps

Young people and their parents are stuck in at least four collective-action traps. Each is hard to escape for an individual family, but escape becomes much easier if families, schools, and communities coordinate and act together. Here are four norms that would roll back the phone-based childhood. I believe that any community that adopts all four will see substantial improvements in youth mental health within two years.

No smartphones before high school  

The trap here is that each child thinks they need a smartphone because “everyone else” has one, and many parents give in because they don’t want their child to feel excluded. But if no one else had a smartphone—or even if, say, only half of the child’s sixth-grade class had one—parents would feel more comfortable providing a basic flip phone (or no phone at all). Delaying round-the-clock internet access until ninth grade (around age 14) as a national or community norm would help to protect adolescents during the very vulnerable first few years of puberty. According to a 2022 British study, these are the years when social-media use is most correlated with poor mental health. Family policies about tablets, laptops, and video-game consoles should be aligned with smartphone restrictions to prevent overuse of other screen activities.

No social media before 16

The trap here, as with smartphones, is that each adolescent feels a strong need to open accounts on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and other platforms primarily because that’s where most of their peers are posting and gossiping. But if the majority of adolescents were not on these accounts until they were 16, families and adolescents could more easily resist the pressure to sign up. The delay would not mean that kids younger than 16 could never watch videos on TikTok or YouTube—only that they could not open accounts, give away their data, post their own content, and let algorithms get to know them and their preferences.

Phone‐free schools 

Most schools claim that they ban phones, but this usually just means that students aren’t supposed to take their phone out of their pocket during class. Research shows that most students do use their phones during class time. They also use them during lunchtime, free periods, and breaks between classes––times when students could and should be interacting with their classmates face-to-face. The only way to get students’ minds off their phones during the school day is to require all students to put their phones (and other devices that can send or receive texts) into a phone locker or locked pouch at the start of the day. Schools that have gone phone-free always seem to report that it has improved the culture, making students more attentive in class and more interactive with one another. Published studies back them up.

More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world

Many parents are afraid to give their children the level of independence and responsibility they themselves enjoyed when they were young, even though rates of homicide, drunk driving, and other physical threats to children are way down in recent decades. Part of the fear comes from the fact that parents look at each other to determine what is normal and therefore safe, and they see few examples of families acting as if a 9-year-old can be trusted to walk to a store without a chaperone. But if many parents started sending their children out to play or run errands, then the norms of what is safe and accepted would change quickly. So would ideas about what constitutes “good parenting.” And if more parents trusted their children with more responsibility––for example, by asking their kids to do more to help out, or to care for others––then the pervasive sense of uselessness now found in surveys of high-school students might begin to dissipate.

It would be a mistake to overlook this fourth norm. If parents don’t replace screen time with real-world experiences involving friends and independent activity, then banning devices will feel like deprivation, not the opening up of a world of opportunities.

The main reason why the phone-based childhood is so harmful is because it pushes aside everything else. Smartphones are experience blockers. Our ultimate goal should not be to remove screens entirely, nor should it be to return childhood to exactly the way it was in 1960. Rather, it should be to create a version of childhood and adolescence that keeps young people anchored in the real world while flourishing in the digital age.

9. What Are We Waiting For?

An essential function of government is to solve collective-action problems. Congress could solve or help solve the ones I’ve highlighted—for instance, by raising the age of “internet adulthood” to 16 and requiring tech companies to keep underage children off their sites.

In recent decades, however, Congress has not been good at addressing public concerns when the solutions would displease a powerful and deep-pocketed industry. Governors and state legislators have been much more effective, and their successes might let us evaluate how well various reforms work. But the bottom line is that to change norms, we’re going to need to do most of the work ourselves, in neighborhood groups, schools, and other communities.

There are now hundreds of organizations––most of them started by mothers who saw what smartphones had done to their children––that are working to roll back the phone-based childhood or promote a more independent, real-world childhood. (I have assembled a list of many of them.) One that I co-founded, at LetGrow.org, suggests a variety of simple programs for parents or schools, such as play club (schools keep the playground open at least one day a week before or after school, and kids sign up for phone-free, mixed-age, unstructured play as a regular weekly activity) and the Let Grow Experience (a series of homework assignments in which students––with their parents’ consent––choose something to do on their own that they’ve never done before, such as walk the dog, climb a tree, walk to a store, or cook dinner).

Parents are fed up with what childhood has become. Many are tired of having daily arguments about technologies that were designed to grab hold of their children’s attention and not let go. But the phone-based childhood is not inevitable.

The four norms I have proposed cost almost nothing to implement, they cause no clear harm to anyone, and while they could be supported by new legislation, they can be instilled even without it. We can begin implementing all of them right away, this year, especially in communities with good cooperation between schools and parents. A single memo from a principal asking parents to delay smartphones and social media, in support of the school’s effort to improve mental health by going phone free, would catalyze collective action and reset the community’s norms.

We didn’t know what we were doing in the early 2010s. Now we do. It’s time to end the phone-based childhood.

This article is adapted from Jonathan Haidt’s forthcoming book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

Authors

Julia M. Wright George Munro Chair in Literature and Rhetoric, Dalhousie University

Dick Zoutman Professor Emeritus, Medicine, Queen's University, Ontario

Mark Ungrin Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Biology & Experimental Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Calgary

Ryan Tennant PhD Candidate, Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo

Canada’s postsecondary institutions have a responsibility to protect students and others on campus from the risks of post-COVID condition as a matter of campus safety.

Canada’s Chief Science Advisor, Mona Nemer, recently released the report, Dealing with the Fallout: Post-COVID Condition and its Continued Impacts on Individuals and Society.

Post-COVID condition (PCC), also known as “long COVID,” refers to the poorly understood and often serious health damage left by the SARS-CoV-2 virus after the acute illness appears to have passed.

Universities, colleges and schools have a duty to take reasonable precautions to protect students, staff and faculty from foreseeable harms. They must ensure the water on campus is safe to drink. They must install fire and carbon monoxide detectors and make evacuation plans. Many have adopted a smoke-free policy on campus as part of a commitment to an international charter on health promotion in universities and colleges. Yet there is little pandemic health promotion on Canadian campuses.

The authors of this story bring together expertise in higher education, engineering, biomedical sciences, medicine and the health humanities. As a few of us noted in a recent peer-reviewed article on the pandemic for BMC Medicine, “COVID-19 is airborne, transmitted primarily via infectious aerosols that move through the air like smoke.”

As with any other pathogen (or smoke, for that matter), if it can’t get into your body, then it can’t make you sick. The Chief Science Advisor’s report recognizes the vital importance of reducing PCC cases by reducing infections.

Post-COVID condition A COVID-19 infection can be the tip of a very large iceberg. A Statistics Canada report last year indicated that Canadians have lost millions of school and work days because of PCC. PCC has a long list of possible symptoms, including negative effects on brain functioning, mental health, as well as cardiovascular and lung health.

The Chief Science Advisor’s report notes that “with each SARS-CoV-2 reinfection, the risk of developing PCC is cumulative.” Postsecondary students are particularly vulnerable to repeated COVID-19 infections because of shared living spaces (dorms, student housing) and frontline work (waiting tables and retail jobs, for instance), and transmission can be boosted by extensive mixing due to complex timetables and crowded spaces on campuses.

While we lack specific data on sick days and long COVID cases at the postsecondary level in Canada, national data suggests over 40 per cent of Canadians were infected over a three-month period last winter. There are about two million postsecondary students in Canada.

Postsecondary students are inevitably affected by the multiple surges in infections each year, and so are losing days to acute COVID-19 illness. And, with each infection, they are at increased risk of PCC. This is key to understanding the pandemic’s ongoing disruptions to education and well-being for the current generation of college and university students. A study of U.S. university students with PCC noted symptoms such as “difficulty thinking, fatigue, feeling anxious” and “memory loss,” consequential for academic performance and overall well-being.

Reducing infections

We have abundant high-quality peer-reviewed scholarship from a range of disciplines to help us reduce infections. Building on this evidence base, the Chief Science Advisor’s report calls for “protective measures through steps that government, institutions and employers can take.” These protections include “improved indoor air quality,” better “public messaging” and “effective masking in crowded spaces.”

Improving indoor air quality includes increasing ventilation rates, adding high quality filters to the air handling systems, the use of portable air filtration units, germicidal ultraviolet lights, and the monitoring and public display of carbon dioxide levels in all living and learning spaces on campus. Improving indoor air quality has been shown to reduce in-classroom transmission of COVID-19 by at least 80 per cent in schools.

Free N95 masks and updated vaccinations should also be made available, and their use promoted on campuses to improve awareness and access. Communications should educate students on reducing their risk. Drawing on faculty expertise from all disciplines, and with little financial cost, postsecondary institutions can implement and model best practices on all of these fronts.

Organized, evidence-informed efforts are also urgently needed to accommodate students whose coursework has been significantly affected by infection or PCC. PCC includes a wide range of symptoms at varying levels of severity, so no cookie-cutter approach will work well.

The pandemic’s ongoing effects Institutions lack even the most basic data about PCC on campus. How many people on campus are already affected by PCC and to what degree? How many are on extended leave or had to withdraw or resign because of it?

Transdisciplinary faculty and student expertise and lived experience can help institutions to understand the pandemic’s ongoing effects. This is a necessary step to the development of more inclusive and effective approaches to mitigating the harms of the pandemic.

Without efforts to reduce students’ risk of getting sick — and to meaningfully help them when they do — we can only expect more population-level problems with well-being, ongoing health-care needs and academic success. These effects have the potential to ripple into the general workforce, adding to population and economic consequences. While the pace of research on COVID-19 has been and continues to be fast, new discoveries will not erase the lost educational days and other long-term harms that are already putting pressure on this generation.

The burden of PCC and the pandemic will will shape the next half century, and it is in everyone’s interest that our postsecondary institutions start working now to limit these harms.