Youth, Social Media, and How Instagram Values Teens at $270 (John Perritt & Erica Bechtel)

Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra on a theology of play: when do games simply delight us, when do they disciple us, and how should parents think about both?

The three hosts are back at the end of the summer, and the news has piled up. Meta settled with forty-seven state attorneys general for up to $17 billion, and Austin walks through what the company actually conceded, why those concessions leave the core product intact, and how Meta turned its own loss into a strike at Snap, TikTok, and YouTube. Andrew noticed that Claude’s memory feature excludes religious beliefs, which leaves a secular default sitting underneath everything else it personalizes, and Joel explains what really happened when models “escaped the sandbox,” whether a VPN is worth paying for, and why an ordinary church is an easy target.

Jay Y. Kim on how noise rewires our craving for silence, and why analog presence transforms where digital only informs.

Ian Harber joins to weigh AI companions, a fragmenting internet, and what is real when the feed is full of bots.