"Many of the counselors and campers didn’t have phones on them: Campers were not allowed access to technology..."

"... while counselors could have them only during select nights and moments during the day, and Ms. Clement said she had always thought of that as a benefit, part of the atmosphere that went with being along the river. 'You don’t know how much of a joy it was to be unplugged,' she said."

From "As Texas Flood Raged, Camp Mystic Was Left to Fend for Itself/Flash floods surged through in the middle of the night, but many local officials appeared unaware of the unfolding catastrophe, initially leaving people near the river on their own" (NYT)

Ms. Clement = Nancy Clement, an 18-year-old counselor, who escaped the flood.

Also: "The county does have access to a private system known as CodeRED that sends out alerts to residents’ phones, but it is not clear to what extent it was used. At 4:22 a.m., a firefighter asked on an emergency channel if there was 'any way we can send a CodeRED out' to residents in the town of Hunt, where Camp Mystic and the Presbyterian camp are located, 'asking them to find higher ground or stay home,' according to a report by Texas Public Radio. But it appears that the first CodeRED did not go out for about an hour. Louis Kocurek, a resident of the town of Center Point, told The Times that the CodeRED text message he received had come in at 10:07 a.m. Sheriff Leitha said he could not say why the alerts had not been issued earlier."

ADDED: There is a second front-page NYT article today, and it's about what I think is an even more shocking problem: "Camp Mystic Cabins Stood in an ‘Extremely Hazardous’ Floodway":

"Screen time together is better than individual device time, experts say. Start playing multiplayer video games like Mario Kart on the same screen...."

"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"

From "The White House is worried about kids’ screen time. Here are five things parents can do. A new MAHA-led report on childhood health has harsh words about screen time, but the reality is more nuanced" (WaPo)(free-access link).

Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!

That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.

"Young people in the city are very boring now. I am only in my early 30s but the difference between 10 years ago is stark."

"When I was in my early 20s, you would go out and meet new people every bar you went to. Every night had a funny or interesting story. Contrast that with the Gen Zs you see out: they sit glued to their phones, are scared of speaking to new people, vape constantly, and are only interested in the latest viral tiktok they saw. If you are in New York and spend all your time hanging with other transplants from your same home city, scrolling your phone, and order delivery from a franchise for all your meals, why even live here? You can eat chick fil a and watch TikToks in any city in the US. Guess I'm getting old!"

Says Bud Weiser — if that really is your name — in the comments section of "Why Are These Clubs Closing? The Rent Is High, and the Alcohol Isn’t Flowing/The financial decline of some of the city’s most popular clubs has put a spotlight on the realities of nightlife" (NYT).

Agreeing with Bud is Clark:

"Mr. Haidt has a metaphor... Our emotions are like a galumphing elephant, and our conscious reasoning..."

"... is the rider on top. We may think it’s the rider steering the elephant, but more often it’s the other way around. Our emotions land somewhere, and then we try to rationalize why. 'Almost every social thing I’ve ever tried to do, we had to speak to the elephant, change people’s minds, change their hearts,' Mr. Haidt said. 'This is the first time I haven’t had to do that. Almost everybody’s elephant is already leaning my way.'"

From "First He Came for Cancel Culture. Now He Wants to Cancel Smartphones/The N.Y.U. professor Jonathan Haidt became a favorite in Silicon Valley for his work on what he called the 'coddling' of young people. Now, he has an idea for fixing Gen Z" (NYT).

The "idea for fixing Gen Z" is "no smartphones before high school, no social media before age 16 and no phones in schools."

“When you have a system which everyone hates, and then you have a way to escape it, it can change within a year, and that’s what happened in 1989,” Mr. Haidt said. “It’s different from the fall of communism but I expect it to be about as fast as the fall of communism. Because it’s a regime that we all hate.”

We all hate smartphones... or, I guess, kids with smartphones? I went to look up whether Haidt's name is pronounced "hate," and I ended up running into his dissertation: "Moral Judgment, Affect, and Culture, or, Is it Wrong to Eat Your Dog?":

A family's dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog's body and cooked it and ate it for dinner.

"Gantulga’s family are nomadic reindeer herders in Mongolia, near Lake Khuvsgul. They have more than 200 animals..."

"... and belong to the Dukha community, who take great care of their reindeer. Gantulga goes to school from 9am to 2pm, and has extra lessons in Mongolian, English and maths. In the summer, he accompanies the men and older boys to the taiga forest, to find greener pasture for the reindeer. They live in a tipi, which can be draughty, but at night the floor is covered with sheepskins to sleep on. There is a solar panel that powers his smartphone. When he grows up he would like to be a reindeer herder, but his father fears he may want to move to the city."

From "Spider-Man posters, wood fires, food rations and car-shaped beds – what children’s bedrooms look like around the world/From a trailer in Kentucky to a tipi in Mongolia to an off-grid farmhouse in Wales, the places where children sleep offer a fascinating glimpse into their wildly divergent lives" (The Guardian)(vivid photos at the link).

About that trailer in Kentucky:

"Yes, phones — and dogs! Both have an outsized role in the lives of many these days. Why? They're less messy than people."

"Why bother dealing directly with all of these people around me and all of the challenging negotiations required to compromise, to build bonds, etc? And we wonder why we're increasingly polarized."

That's the top-rated comment on the NYT article, "The Insidious Habit That Can Hurt Your Relationship/Ignoring a partner in favor of your phone, or 'phubbing,' can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. Here’s how to stop."

The article doesn't mention dogs. The commenter widened the subject matter quite interestingly, don't you think? 

Is the NYT promoting a new word in "phubbing" or is it real slang that already part of the culture and I just never noticed? I see from the "Phubbing" article in  Wikipedia that it's a word an advertising agency tried to make happen a decade ago:

"We asked more than 100 millennials and Gen Xers about their parents’ phone habits. Around half said their parents are good..."

"... about not being on their phones too much and being present in the moment.... The rest, however, are absorbed in their devices. They are playing Words with Friends, Candy Crush and card games, often with the volume turned up. They are looking at the news, checking sports scores, scrolling Facebook and texting. Some are even using them as actual phones. 'Phone calls are the worst,' says Richard Husk, a parent of two. 'They will take a 45-plus-minute phone call with some random golf buddy while I am over with the kids trying to visit with them.' Tyler McClure said his mom is on Facebook constantly and can’t do anything without her phone, while his dad 'Googles the things he’s watching on television as he watches television.'... Many people we spoke to said their parents enjoy reading things out loud from their phones, telling their families or anyone nearby about the weather, the headlines or viral stories that may or may not be true...."

From "Baby boomers can’t stop staring at their phones/Everyone struggles to put down their phones, but some families have had enough" (WaPo).

Reading the news and reading things out loud that you think ought to be shared – that's what my grandfather used to do. He was born in 1899, and the news was in the newspaper. Of course, there was only one copy of the newspaper in the house, and he was the one with the claim to the front section. He'd be sitting in his chair in the corner of the living room, newspaper open in front of his face, and he applied his own standards to what ought to be heard by the rest of us. No one ever considered that this might be some sort of old-man, out-of-it habit that the younger people should mobilize to fix!

And thank God if your aging parent has friends. How dare you characterize your father's friend as "random"? If someone is his friend, that person is not random. I think this Husk fellow ought to think about what he's doing when he's "over with the kids trying to visit with" his father. Maybe dad is trying to give Husk the clue that the visit has gone on too long. Are you there for a few hours, or are you visiting for days? I don't know, but I don't think you should disrespect your father in the newspaper like that.

I wish my father were still alive, spending too much time on the phone or not. And I would love to hear Pop (my grandfather) read selections from the Wilmington Morning News again.

Students these days "don’t have a big relationship to their hands. I’ve had to show them how to cut a circle out of paper...."

"You keep the scissors there and you move the paper like this, and they’re like, 'What?' There’s so much dexterity that they, by and large, do not have.... [They] start keyboarding in kindergarten. Handwriting, that thing that we think is no big deal, there’s so much dexterity in it. Not just in the hand you’re writing with, but the nondominant hand is always in action, moving the paper, paying attention. I mean, there’s a reason people gesture while they talk. If somebody is trying to explain something complicated, and they have to sit on their hands, it’s much harder for them to explain it.... [With a phone] you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.... So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price...."

Says Lynda Barry, quoted in "A Genius Cartoonist Believes Child’s Play Is Anything But Frivolous" (NYT). Barry is a professor of "interdisciplinary creativity" at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.

"A thrill, almost like a fad. When you don’t have activities in their communities, everything’s shut down, young people are going to find a way to entertain themselves. It’s recreation, that’s what it is."

Said Warees Majeed, a founder of a group that works with troubled youth in Washington, quoted in "‘I Honestly Believe It’s a Game’: Why Carjacking Is on the Rise Among Teens/The crime has made a resurgence across the country over the past two years, and many of those arrested are startlingly young" (NYT). 

The top-rated comment over there is: "Well, the youth are certainly in crisis. But the idea that the pandemic is driving little children to callous, murderous acts is absurd on its face. As the article itself points out, pandemic restrictions were dropped in most places a long time ago and carjackings persist. I will never in my life shake the sickness in my belly I felt after watching the video of the DC carjackers who killed the Uber driver. After stealing his car and killing him, one of the teen girls wails that she left her cell phone in his car and she needs to go back and get it. No reaction to what she had done or to the lifeless body of the man she had just killed lying in the street. She just wanted her cell phone back. Something is seriously broken in parts of our American culture and we need to have an honest discussion about what it is."

"Of course, in a perfect world, should Chad Oulson have grabbed a bag of popcorn and tossed it onto the defendant? Of course not. But … you can’t shoot and kill another person over that."

Said Scott Rosenwasser, the Pinellas-Pasco assistant state attorney, addressing the jury, quoted in "He shot a man over tossed popcorn, prosecutors say. His defense: Stand-your-ground" (WaPo).

The defendant, Curtis Reeves was irritated by the light emanating from the cell phone Chad Oulson had left on in the movie theater. At some point Oulson threw popcorn at Reeves and Reeves shot Oulson dead. Stories like this tend to get boiled into the idea that X shot Y over popcorn (or something similarly trivial). 

But:

In pretrial hearings, Reeves testified that Oulson was “on top of” him... “He hit me with his fist or with something. I think he had his cellphone in his hand because I saw the blur of the screen,” Reeves said.

Oulson was 43, Reeves 71.

Now, I know the feeling... I don't answer my phone if I don't recognize the number... but this is ridiculous.

"Colorado hiker, lost for 24 hours, ignored rescuers' calls because hiker didn’t recognize the number/The hiker told rescue officials they had wandered off the trail and could not find their way back" (Fox News).

By the way, were you confused about the number of hikers? Based on that headline, I was. You can count on Fox News to do woke pronouns, even at the cost of clarity. You never find out whether this was a man or a woman. In addition to they/them approach to pronouns, we get "The person started hiking" and "the subject ignored 'repeated phone calls' because they simply didn’t recognize the number."

These were official rescuers, not private citizens mobilizing for the task. Given the present-day habit of phone users declining to answer unknown numbers, they ought to have a way to use caller idea to display their identity.