Grade-tracking apps, fish farming, and more of the week’s best stories

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The other day, I got the first of many push notifications that I will receive over the next 13 years: Your son’s grades are in.

My oldest is in kindergarten and so I am reentering the world of public education after nearly two decades outside of the system that defines our adolescence. In some ways, it has been striking how little things have changed. We bought school supplies, we learned the new bus route, we’re in the middle of a food drive right now.

But, as with so many things, there is one unavoidable difference between today and the 1990s, when I was in kindergarten: my smartphone. I now have three apps on my phone: a bus tracker, a news and announcements app, and another that reports attendance and grades. And I will admit it: As much as I don’t care about my kindergartener’s grades in the grand scheme of things, I did click almost as soon as I saw the notification. I couldn’t resist.

As it turns out, I’m not the only parent dealing with this newfangled anxiety. That’s one of the most interesting things I learned this week reading the coverage of my colleagues here at Vox.

The surprising source of kids’ stress lurking on parents’ phones

So gone are the days when students had to carry their report card in their backpack, either dreading or eager for the moment when they must show it to their parents (and perhaps weighing how it might become “lost.”) Today, we skip that part entirely: Parents have their children’s grades reported directly to their phone, just like everything else. Anna North pieces through the complex experience of handling these new tools as a modern parent. On the one hand, they provide us connection and transparency when it comes to our kid’s education. But it also adds to the information overload that stresses so many parents out.

Is my deli sandwich going to kill me?

My mom, God bless her, routinely forwards food recall notifications to my wife and me, ever since we had a brief listeria scare during one of my wife’s pregnancies. Well, as you can imagine, that text chain has been pretty busy lately. What in the heck is going on? Keren Landman (MD, I might add) takes a look and offers some helpful advice about how to consider the risk of foodborne illness at a time when it seems the recalls are flying in fast and furious. It’s not the end of the world to eat a turkey sandwich. But maybe this is a chance to think with a little more care about what we eat.

Fish farming was supposed to be sustainable. But there’s a giant catch.

Speaking of meat, this is a plug not only for this particular story, in which Kenny Torrella answers one of my personal big questions these days, but Vox’s new Processing Meat newsletter. In this week’s edition, Kenny explores fish farming and exposes the truth behind the often mistaken belief that farming fish could somehow be more sustainable than catching them wild — which is hardly its own panacea either.

🎧Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth

You’ve probably caught some wind of Coates’s media tour supporting his new book, but let me assure you: You haven’t heard a conversation like this one between TNC and The Gray Area host Sean Illing. They probe the Israel-Palestine conflict, Coates’s immediate concern, but more than that, they ponder difficult questions about certainty and truth. About striving to find a way to reconcile irreconcilable stories that different groups of people are telling one another, and what it means to live an existence replete with doubt. 

How the wealthy are redrawing the world map

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes peek: This was a Q&A I myself edited and I quickly became obsessed with everything about it. Our own Josh Keating interviewed author Atossa Araxia Abrahamian about her new book, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World. I don’t want to spoil too much, so let me put it like this: They use the free ports featured in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi spy thriller Tenet as an entry point to explore the slippery nature of sovereignty in the current era and the surprising potential of economic free zones to alleviate some of the worst humanitarian crises. That was about the last thing I expected when I first opened this story.

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