About That Mom Who Was Arrested Because Her Kid Went on a Walk
Plus, why are influencer bros so obsessed with AG1?
A mom in Georgia was recently arrested and charged with reckless conduct after her ten-year-old son was found walking less than a mile from her home. I can’t stop thinking about it. Many of us grew up riding our bikes around the neighborhood and walking with friends to the lake down the bike path. Even now, with a two-year-old, I wonder how much freedom is good for him: Is it OK if he wanders around the upper area of our farm, where I can mostly see him and hear him when the window’s cracked? Certainly, when he’s ten I’ll be OK with him walking to the park down the road.
I kept seeing this story in my social feeds and thinking about the free-range parenting movement that Outside, where I work (I’m back, btw, yay!), has covered for years. So I assigned an op-ed on the topic to the talented Krista Langlois, who wrote:
Anecdotally, many of the people concerned by modern kids walking or playing alone seem to be folks from generations older than my own, who themselves had ample freedom growing up but may have watched too much CSI since then. My own peers—elder Millennials, mostly—have absorbed plenty of articles extolling the developmental benefits of letting our kids manage risks and build independence, and many of us try to encourage such behaviors.
What I’m Reading
Influencers Swear By the AG1 Powder Supplement. Does It Actually Work?
By Martin Fritz Huber
When I recently saw my former roommate, he mentioned that he’d started taking the popular daily supplement powder AG1 as a form of nutritional insurance. He is not alone; the brand was valued at $1.2 billion in 2022 and has been dubbed a “unicorn” in an overcrowded supplement market.
Part of this success can be attributed to seductive messaging: the AG1 website tells us that it is a “science-driven supplement that supports physical health and mental performance” and is “designed to replace multiple supplements by providing a comprehensive blend of nutrients in one tasty scoop each day.” That tasty scoop consists of 12 grams of greens powder, which are meant to be mixed with 8 ounces of water and consumed on a daily basis. Its purported benefits include increased energy, immunity defense, and improved gut health.
An optimized nutritional boost in an easily administered dose. Needless to say, we’ve heard similar promises before. But such miracle elixirs make us ever-keen to ask the question: Could it be true this time?
A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right
By Jia Tolentino
The sexual-assault reckoning of the twenty-tens attempted to give “My body, my choice” a ring of finality: it was a woman’s choice what to do with her body, even if she was drunk, even if the guy was famous, even if she’d acted as if she wanted him before. At the time, I had the naïve idea that something had permanently changed. I thought we had already seen the backlash—that it was represented by Donald Trump’s first electoral victory, and that the idea that women are full people was at enough of a consensus that seismic, if messy, progress could still happen, as it did in 2017, with #MeToo. Now there is no more Roe and Trump is about to be President again, and it took less than twenty-four hours after his reëlection for young men to take up a slogan that could define the coming era of regression: “Your body, my choice.”
How Fit Were Real Gladiators Compared to Those in ‘Gladiator II’?
By Ryleigh Nucilli
There’s a very interesting break in culture between the Romans and the Greeks (after the Romans conquered the Greeks), where the Greeks became obsessed with diets, and they wanted to look like statues (like this). If you look at modern gym culture, it’s very much the same. You’ve got some people who aesthetically look great, but they can’t do anything. They’re physically perfect, but they can’t run, can’t lift, can’t play. I see that in our culture as well, with what the Romans warned about: excessive obsession with the “look.”
Last But Not Least
