what happened to critical thinking?

Head to http://squarespace.com/minale to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain! ➤ PRODUCTION directed, written, produced by Mina Le co-writer: Madison Huizinga editor: Charlee Reiff ➤ INTERVIEWEES Manouch Zomorodi manoushz.com https://www.instagram.com/manoushz/ https://manoush.substack.com/ Michael Rugnetta https://rugnetta.com/ https://www.instagram.com/mikerugnetta/ https://neverpost.transistor.fm/ ➤ SOCIALS Instagram: http://instagram.com/gremlita TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@gremlita Letterboxd: http://boxd.it/7YgX ➤ CONTACT Business email: team.minale@iala.com ➤ SOURCES Sundar, S.S., Snyder, E.C., Liao, M. et al. Sharing without clicking on news in social media. Nat Hum Behav 9, 156–168 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02067-4 Shulman, Hillary C et al. “Reading dies in complexity: Online news consumers prefer simple writing.” Science advances vol. 10,23 (2024): eadn2555. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adn2555 Smith, Ben. Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral. Penguin Press, 2023. https://www.buzzfeed.com/leonoraepstein/disneylands-1965-employee-handbook-was-just-as-strict-as-you https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephenlaconte/boyfriends-friend-acting-weird-advice?origin=web-hf https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/12/rage-bait-explained-oxford-word-year https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination-fear-politics.html https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp555xy5ro https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/physics/articles/10.3389/fphy.2022.970174/full Fisher, Max. The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2022. www.vulture.com/article/influencer-recession-audrey-peters-interview.html https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gp555xy5ro https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2dpj485nno https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65069316 https://www.forbes.com/sites/larsdaniel/2024/10/04/hurricane-helena-deepfakes-flooding-social-media-hurt-real-people/ https://cacm.acm.org/research/as-good-as-a-coin-toss-human-detection-of-ai-generated-content/ Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/09/whats-driving-decline-in-u-s-literacy-rates/ Bone, Jessica K et al. “The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey.” iScience vol. 28,9 113288. 20 Aug. 2025, doi:10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288 Barranco, Kate, and Kendall Bryant. “The digital crossroads: Media literacy and the future of youth online.” PLOS digital health vol. 4,6 e0000876. 5 Jun. 2025, doi:10.1371/journal.pdig.0000876 https://news.virginia.edu/content/qa-what-makes-rage-bait-so-hard-ignore https://www.newporthealthcare.com/resources/industry-articles/rage-bait-mental-health-impact/ Xuanjun Gong, Richard Huskey, Allison Eden, Ezgi Ulusoy, Computationally modeling mood management theory: a drift-diffusion model of people’s preferential choice for valence and arousal in media, Journal of Communication, Volume 73, Issue 5, October 2023, Pages 476–493, https://www.newporthealthcare.com/resources/industry-articles/rage-bait-mental-health-impact/ https://www.gallup.com/analytics/349280/gallup-global-emotions-report.aspx https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/03/12/almost-half-of-americans-say-people-have-gotten-ruder-since-the-covid-19-pandemic/ https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/ragebait-anger-internet-b2738116.html Santana, A. D. (2014). Virtuous or Vitriolic: The effect of anonymity on civility in online newspaper reader comment boards. Journalism Practice, 8(1), 18–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2013.813194 https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53735-for-many-americans-their-smartphone-is-the-last-thing-they-see-at-night-and-the-first-thing-they-see-in-the-morning https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/eko4fj/tumblr_drama_the_big_cole_sprouse_social_tumblr/ https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism Spencer, David R. The Yellow Journalism: The Press and America's Emergence as a World Power. Northwestern University Press, 2007. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-the-report-the-naval-court-inquiry-the-destruction-the-uss https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/1998/april/special-report-what-really-sank-maine https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/yellow-journalism https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/12/rage-bait-explained-oxford-word-year 0:00 - intro 4:05 - ragebait today 11:50 - history of clickbait 14:15 - media literacy 18:26 - what is happening to our brains? 24:15 - ragebait hotline 30:05 - yellow journalism 35:55 - how to deal with the current media environment 38:56 - conclusion