Ken Rudin joins The Great Battlefield podcast to talk about his career as a journalist at NPR, hosting his podcast, The Political Junkie and why he's changed his nonpartisan orientation in the Trump era.
As screens replace toys, childhood is being gamified. What this shift means for parents, play, development, and holiday gift-giving.
Something is changing this Christmas, and parents everywhere are feeling it. Bedrooms overflow with toys no one touches, while tablets steal the spotlight, pulling children as young as five into digital worlds that retailers are slow to recognize. The shift is quiet but unmistakable, and many parents are left wondering what toy purchases even make sense anymore.
Research shows that higher screen time correlates with significantly lower engagement in other play activities, mainly traditional, physical, unstructured play. It suggests screen-based play is displacing classic play with traditional toys. Families are experiencing in real time what experts increasingly describe as the rise of “gamified childhoods.”
Parents walk store aisles searching for something that will excite the children on Christmas morning, yet we already know the truth. The toys we select will not compete with Minecraft® or Roblox® games like Dress to Impress® and 99 Nights in the Forest®, or with other digital universes where kids spend most of their creative energy. Children care about avatars, skins, upgrades, quests, weapons, and character packs. They care about customizing their online identities, cheat codes, and unlocking features that help them advance. Dolls, trucks, and building sets simply cannot hold their attention as well as digital play does.
This year, my family donated toys twice. Not because we want to purge clutter, but because the playroom tells the whole story. Many toys from birthdays still remain unopened in the closet. Others are played with once and never touched again. Yet the moment a tablet turns on, the excitement is instant. The dopamine hits from the rewards of progressing through a game are strong. The children want Robux, Minecoins, game passes, exclusive content, and digital tools that help them explore their online worlds. It becomes clear that parents are shopping in physical toy stores for an outdated model of childhood.
Retailers are falling even further behind. Childhood culture has shifted. Merchandise tied to the digital properties kids care about barely exists. Try finding quality items connected to 99 Nights in the Forest, KPop Demon Hunters®, or many of the other games that influence children’s online experiences. You will likely walk away empty-handed. The demand is high, and the audience is loyal, yet retailers are missing a significant financial opportunity.
This disconnect leaves parents frustrated, confused, and sometimes feeling guilty. We want to give something meaningful. We want to see genuine joy on our children’s faces. Instead, we often watch them unwrap toys that end up in the donation pile by Spring Break. At the same time, many parents feel a quiet worry building. We see how deeply these games pull our children in, and we instinctively sense that this level of immersion is not always healthy. The research reflects their concerns. Some families even notice changes in mood, patience, and attention when gaming becomes the center of play. Gaming is not a slight seasonal trend. It reflects a significant cultural shift in how children imagine, learn, and socialize.
I admit I disapprove of the nature of many of these games for the children in my family, yet I see the pressure they feel because all their friends are talking about the zombie-crazed deer in 99 Nights. The adage that asks whether you would jump off a bridge if your friends did no longer works. The answer is yes, but now parents are the ones providing the safety equipment so their children can jump and land as softly as possible.
As a former teacher and an early childhood specialist, I suggest shifting the focus this holiday season to experiences as gifts. Children may not hold on to physical toys, but they remember moments. Experiences support healthy development in ways that toys sometimes cannot. Families can consider museum memberships, robotics camps, art classes, sports clinics, concerts, creative workshops, or meaningful family outings. To keep the magic of unwrapping alive, parents can place a small related gift under the tree, such as a child-friendly camera for a year of museum visits, a nature explorer kit for an outdoor program, or art supplies that introduce an upcoming class.
Christmas feels different now, but it also offers an opportunity. I am mourning the decline of traditional toys, but parents can use this season to rethink how we protect, connect, and support our children in an evolving world.
The playtime paradigm shift is already here.
Janice Robinson-Celeste is a former educator and the founder of Successful Black Parenting Magazine, a multi-award-winning publication that empowers Black families. She is a Public Voices fellow of the OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
Rising costs, AI disruption, and inequality revive interest in Louis Kelso’s “universal capitalism” as a market-based answer to the affordability crisis.
“Affordability” over the cost of living has been in the news a lot lately. It’s popping up in political campaigns, from the governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia to the mayor’s races in New York City and Seattle. President Donald Trump calls the term a “hoax” and a “con job” by Democrats, and it’s true that the inflation rate hasn’t increased much since Trump began his second term in January.
But a number of reports show Americans are struggling with high costs for essentials like food, housing, and utilities, leaving many families feeling financially pinched. Total consumer spending over the Black Friday-Thanksgiving weekend buying binge actually increased this year, but a Salesforce study found that’s because prices were about 7% higher than last year’s blitz. Consumers actually bought 2% fewer items at checkout.
Moreover, according to an analysis by Mark Zandi from Moody's Analytics, consumer spending has been driven largely by high-income households, with the top 10% accounting for nearly half of all spending. "That group has always accounted for a much larger share of spending, but that share has risen significantly over time, and now is the highest it's ever been," Zandi told CBS News.
While partisan sides fight over whether there is an affordability gap, other experts predict it could worsen significantly as we enter the AI age. If intelligent machines are increasingly able to do more and more human jobs, workers' bargaining power to capture their fair share of the accumulating wealth will diminish. Wages will likely continue lagging behind economic growth and price increases. It’s like a hamster on the wheel, chasing its own tail, trying to keep up. So what’s the solution?
Interestingly, several decades ago, an American original named Louis O. Kelso proposed an innovative way to help every American have a bigger share of the economic pie. Kelso was an economic trailblazer and financial genius who, in the 1970s, proposed a new approach to a more broadly shared prosperity that broke with the usual “Tax the rich and redistribute the income” model that became popular in the US, Europe, Canada, and elsewhere.
Instead, to a national audience that heard Kelso through interviews on shows like 60 Minutes with Mike Wallace and profiles in the New York Times and Time, and through his bestselling book The Capitalist Manifesto, Kelso proposed spreading ownership of capital assets to everyday Americans. In an economy where the top 10% of affluent Americans own 93% of all stocks, he proposed that more Americans should own more stock, so that they, too, could benefit from rising profits in successful companies and from the innovation of new technologies, which often drive the rising profits.
Louis Kelso called his vision “universal capitalism.” His philosophy was rooted in the same principles that had motivated America’s founders like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, and the Populist movement of the late 19th century, who were strong proponents of widespread property ownership -- in the form of land -- as a catalyst for both economic liberty and political freedom. But in Kelso’s plan, farmland was replaced by stock ownership in valuable companies.
Pie in the sky, you say? Louis Kelso demonstrated the viability of his vision with his invention of what is known as the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Today, ESOPs are used by some 6,300 businesses, including Walmart, Lowe’s, Southwest Airlines, Recology, and Publix Super Markets, to financially empower 15 million worker-owners who are compensated with stock in the companies they work for, in addition to their wages. That’s a greater number of workers than those who are labor union members.
Kelso’s ESOP legislation in the 1970s attracted broad support from the right and the left, from leading Democrats and Republicans, including Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and today is still supported by both Democratic and Republican party platforms – even as Kelso’s ideas were scorned by mainstream economists, like Milton Friedman.
While ESOPs benefit the employees of a particular company, Kelso proposed other financing vehicles as part of a broader call for universal capitalism designed to provide ownership of key capital assets to more people. For example, Kelso adapted one of his financing techniques, a Consumer Stock Ownership Plan (CSOP), to help a co-op of nearly 5,000 struggling farmers in California’s Central Valley secure a bank loan to purchase their own fertilizer plant. The bank loan was repaid from the fertilizer plant's future profits. That got the farmers out from under the exploitative boot heel of the oil companies that monopolized the fertilizer industry. The farmers paid off the bank loan in record time, even as they saved a billion dollars by drastically reducing fertilizer prices.
Kelso also had plans for how to use his financing mechanisms to not only house the poor but to turn them into owners of their own homes. One of Kelso’s original plans became what is known today as the Alaska Permanent Fund, which allows every Alaskan to share equally in the state’s oil wealth, an early and successful example of Universal Basic Income. Without Kelso’s influence, there would likely be no IRAs, 401(k)s, and other savings vehicles that eventually were birthed out of the “shareholders for all” movement that he spawned. He had another plan, called a General Stock Ownership Plan (GSOP), that would have created a kind of sovereign wealth fund in which a portfolio of stock investments on behalf of large populations of Americans would provide a second income stream for those people, beyond their wages, out of the future returns on those investments.
Kelso anchored his initiatives in a deep understanding of the economic impacts of new technologies and scientific innovation. Kelso was one of the first to fully grasp the ramifications of the insight that French economist Thomas Piketty made famous 40 years later—that the rate of return on capital investment naturally exceeds the economic growth rate, and therefore the rate of wage increases. Kelso recognized that capitalism has a natural bias toward the concentration of ownership, particularly of the machines and technologies that drive productivity and profits. Consequently, financial wealth accumulates much faster than wage income, and that’s why the small 10 percent elite of wealthy investors get richer while the 90% of wage-earners tread water or worse. As the US stands on the cusp of an AI revolution dominated by a handful of tech companies, Kelso’s warning about the negative impacts when only a small handful of wealthy investors benefit financially from technological advancement has never been more urgent.
In today’s world of unbalanced inequality, of the 1% vs the 99% riven with populist grievances, universal capitalism is more relevant than ever. Kelso’s economic vision advances the common-sense notion that the vast majority of Americans should be owners of the businesses in which they work, as well as of the economy in general. Interestingly, Kelso, who was a corporate attorney by profession, was not some leftie liberal. His own politics could best be described as libertarian-humanitarian. And he was also anti-communist but critical of American capitalism. In fact, he thought that, during the economic doldrums of the 1970s, he was saving capitalism from the allure of communism/socialism.
The Kelso vision is urgently relevant today because it is a story about economic fairness and the future of the American Dream. During a time of federal retrenchment and cash-strapped states and cities, Kelso’s creative financing vehicles are increasingly being discussed as potential ways to fund housing, college tuition, public ownership of utilities, universal basic income, public transportation, and even reparations to slave descendants, without dipping into the public treasury.
With the US seeking a politically viable way to move past toxic populism into a new era of bipartisanship, the time is ripe to reintroduce Louis O. Kelso and his “positive populist” vision to new generations.
Steven Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
US Capital with tech background
Techies, activists, and academics were in Paris this month to confront the doom scenario of internet shutdowns, developing creative technology and policy solutions to break out of heavily censored environments. The event– SplinterCon– has previously been held globally, from Brussels to Taiwan. I am on the programme committee and delivered a keynote at the inaugural SplinterCon in Montreal on how internet standards must be better designed for censorship circumvention.
Censorship and digital authoritarianism were exposed in dozens of countries in the recently published Freedom on the Net report. For exampl,e Russia has pledged to provide “sovereign AI,” a strategy that will surely extend its network blocks on “a wide array of social media platforms and messaging applications, urging users to adopt government-approved alternatives.” The UK joined Vietnam, China, and a growing number of states requiring “age verification,” the use of government-issued identification cards, to access internet services, which the report calls “a crisis for online anonymity.”
We once believed technology would bring liberation, but instead, each year delivers new instruments of control for governments and companies while everyday citizens’ use of technology is restricted.
Why, in an era of unprecedented technological capability, is censorship still thriving?
Censorship is not a technical problem; it’s a governance choice. Today’s internet is not just a conduit for information, but a geopolitical battleground, and the architecture of the internet holds immense sway over the contours of our global landscape.
In-country censorship is still often sold as national security, and it inevitably props up authoritarianism, as highlighted in the Freedom House report. But it’s not just authoritarian states censoring the internet. While governments, with the cooperation of corporations, claim to fight child abuse and disinformation in the name of “safety” and “security,” they often deploy the same mechanisms to suppress dissent, obscure accountability, and shape narratives in their favor.
Cross-border censorship, too, is accelerating. Economic fragmentation in a post-neoliberal era finds resonance in “digital sovereignty,” whereby states are tightening control over their borders and betting on the AI-powered success of their own tech industries. The global internet requires a delicate balance between sovereignty and interoperability: the means by which jurisdictions take control of internet traffic while communications and commerce remain open is a deeply technical matter. Now it’s a highly political one, too.
Censorship, in all cases, is not an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of the information age; it is a feature of power in a connected world.
Today, there is rising public concern around corporate power moving from the boardroom into government. We used to call these companies “too big to block,” imagining that a silver lining of their global dominance might be that it could shield users from censorship and surveillance. Instead, they’ve become too big to hold accountable and too protective of their power, and so their bold support for people in regions of digital repression has waned.
Governments have privatized power. And global governance mechanisms like the recently ratified UN Cybercrime Treaty require companies to quietly perform post-neoliberal diplomacy, responding directly to requests from jurisdictions for user data. Plenty of companies are loudly resisting this delegation from governments to adjudicate on national and international humanitarian legal issues.
Google has resisted China and Russia. Signal and Apple have both threatened to leave the UK market. But other businesses make short-term compromises with any authority, democratic or otherwise, undermining diplomatic and human rights goals, to protect profits and market access. Tech power is as risky to human rights as it’s ever been, and we need brave corporate leadership to protect human rights.
There exists a technical document published by the Internet Research Task Force (IETF RFC 9505) that describes the mechanisms that censorship regimes around the world use to block or impair internet traffic and their implications for end-user access to content and services. Deeply tied to policy regimes that are economically protectionist and making geopolitical power plays, the specifications in this document implicate the machinery behind the deeply socio-political impacts of censorship. It’s proof that censorship is a solved technical problem waiting on political will to catch up.
While niche tools like VPNs are critical for high-risk users, the real failure is that Big Tech doesn’t deploy networks using known, standardized circumvention techniques at scale. The IETF/IRTF is in the early stages of establishing the long-term research of censorship as an area of study for Internet Protocol designers.
Companies argue that defying censorship laws risks total shutdowns, denying citizens access altogether. But this logic—“better partial access than none”—merely teaches governments that coercion works.
Democratic governments might have started out in an ideological war over open internet governance– like the U.S.’s fight against China. Still, today it’s just about corporate dominance with no one, not even Europe, trying to pretend this is anything other than economic protectionism. Ironically, broad cuts to foreign assistance have unquestionably undermined global access to US tech.
Giants of the internet have more political power than ever, and they’re squandering it. Governments and corporates have never been more aligned, but this serves to retrench power mutually, unless this alliance is used to stand up for human rights.
Human rights defenders are challenging this corporate–government alignment with clarity of mission. While watchdog groups like Freedom House document abuses and heighten global pressure, convenings like SplinterCon and RightsCon–to be held in May in Zambia–are building a movement to resist censorship from the ground up. EU parliamentarians recently issued a joint letter urging Big Tech to counter online repression in Iran. At the same time, US congresspeople introduced the FREEDOM Act to ensure unfiltered internet access for people living in Iran. These front-line efforts show that public pressure still works, and that democratic societies can set the terms of digital governance if they choose to. These are promising developments, but they don’t just require follow-through; we need an expansive coalition that can pressure governments and corporations alike to resist the quiet normalization of censorship as a matter of fundamental human rights.
Mallory Knodel is a public interest technologist and a Public Voices Fellow on Technology in the Public Interest with The OpEd Project.
Panic-driven legislation—from airline safety to AI bans—often backfires, and evidence must guide policy.
"As far as human nature is concerned, with panic comes irrationality." This simple statement by Professor Steve Calandrillo and Nolan Anderson has profound implications for public policy. When panic is highest, and demand for reactive policy is greatest, that's exactly when we need our lawmakers to resist the temptation to move fast and ban things. Yet, many state legislators are ignoring this advice amid public outcries about the allegedly widespread and destructive uses of AI. Thankfully, Calandrillo and Anderson have identified a few examples of what I'll call "panic policies" that make clear that proposals forged by frenzy tend not to reflect good public policy.
Let's turn first to a proposal in November of 2001 from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). For obvious reasons, airline safety was subject to immense public scrutiny at this time. AAP responded with what may sound like a good idea: require all infants to have their own seat and, by extension, their own seat belt on planes. The existing policy permitted parents to simply put their kid--so long as they were under two--on their lap. Essentially, babies flew for free.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) permitted this based on a pretty simple analysis: the risks to young kids without seatbelts on planes were far less than the risks they would face if they were instead traveling by car. Put differently, if parents faced higher prices to travel by air, then they'd turn to the road as the best way to get from A to B. As we all know (perhaps with the exception of the AAP at the time), airline travel is tremendously safer than travel by car. Nevertheless, the AAP forged ahead with its proposal. In fact, it did so despite admitting that they were unsure of whether the higher risks of mortality of children under two in plane crashes were due to the lack of a seat belt or the fact that they're simply fragile.
A group of pediatricians stepped in to quash the AAP’s unfounded proposal. They reported that “even if the policy led to no increase in car travel and cost only $20 per round trip per young child, the cost per life saved would be about $4.3 million per discounted life-year.” As difficult as it may be to put a price tag on saving the life of an infant, in a world of scarce legislative attention and sparse resources, policymakers cannot avoid such analysis. Thankfully, the FAA sided with reason, resisted popular pressure, and rejected the AAP’s proposal.
Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee that reason will win out over panic policies. Following a number of tragic school bus incidents in the 1960s and 1970s, Congress faced mounting calls to insist on heightened safety regulations for school buses. The resulting proposal would have increased the cost of school buses by twenty-five percent by virtue of shoring up their safety measures. How do you think school districts would have responded?
Stick with the older buses for longer, right? Few school districts have spare funds lying around. Yet, this somewhat obvious response by districts appears to have been lost on the chief proponents of the policy.
The upshot is that policymaking that occurs in the heat of public panic is precisely when we ought to slow down, rely on evidence, and avoid enacting laws that will actually do more harm than good. It is undeniable that extensive use of AI tools has resulted in tragic outcomes for several young Americans.
How best to respond, though, is not as clear-cut as many may have you believe. It’s highly questionable that existing reports about the pros and cons of AI tools are representative of users. It’s also highly probable that proponents of bans are not adequately weighing the fact that there’s a massive shortage of psychiatrists to address the growing need among children and teens for specialized support. This is especially for children in rural and economically-insecure communities. Finally, and most importantly, it’s nearly certain that by stigmatizing the use of AI, proponents of panic policies may undermine uses of tools that have already shown their effectiveness. Not all AI is created equal. While there may be a case for limiting and even banning certain uses of certain AI tools, such policies should be grounded in evidence, not vibes.
To be clear--as someone who suffered from mental health issues as a child, I am not at all opposed to the motivations of those paying close attention to the misuse of AI. I applaud their devotion and attention to this issue. However, I’m vehemently opposed to allowing panic to distract us from adhering to good public policy. This is an emotional topic, which often makes it difficult for nuanced conversations, but the well-being of our youth demands that we rise to the occasion--leaning on research, investigation, and deliberation rather than acting on headlines and speculation.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and author of the Appleseed AI substack.
Journalist and Political Junkie Ken Rudin
