Many Such Takes: Phones in Schools, Cracker Barrel Goes Woke, Adoption and More

The most unhinged discourse of the week, always free

Welcome to Many Such Takes! For those unfamiliar, this is a free weekly segment (I also do lots of other stuff!) For Many Such Takes, I stay up to date with the latest and most chaotic Twitter (and now BlueSky) discourse so you don’t have to.

Phones in Schools

As many of you may be aware, schools have begun banning phones in class because as teachers have attested, kids are spending so much time on their phones in class that they’re unable to pay attention in class. Teachers have also cited students texting their parents throughout the day, not about emergencies but about things that could wait until later.

Most people on Twitter agreed that phones should be banned in schools (or at least during classtime.) Several people brought up the issue of school shootings as a reason kids need phones on them during class, but others pointed out that having a phone with you wouldn’t actually make you safer:

Unsurprisingly, Taylor Lorenz (who has been, I would say, openly pro-phone) took the stance that it was necessary for kids (especially poorer or marginalized kids) to have phones in class, mostly because phones would be a way for them to access information.

This statement catapulted Lorenz into Main Character territory for multiple days. She continued by asserting that phones are useful for communication.

She also disagrees that smartphones are bad for kids’ mental health:

This one is a bit more out-there, but she believes that endgame of the GOP is to ban phones for everyone in the country, including adults:

She also framed the issue as one of social justice (and received some support.) I could have sworn there was a tweet about the use of phones to fact-check chud teachers pushing right-wing talking points, but a lot of tweets have been deleted.

However, the most MST-worthy moment probably happened when Taylor Lorenz coined a phrase that really has viral copypasta potential:

It’s the perfect copypasta!

The most sane take I saw on the whole thing came from this woman. I had the same thought. I didn’t have smart phones in high school, but we did have cell phones, and they were banned in class! You couldn’t text your mom in class or they’d take your phone away. Seemed reasonable? Also, not that I agree with her, but Taylor Lorenz initially did say that banning phones during classtime was okay, she just didn’t trust that the motivation was about learning or education.

I did see some wild takes out there—such as this one which I regrettably didn’t screenshot (the person who said it seemed a bit unhinged, to be fair.)

But things got more heated when writer Benjamin Ryan uncovered what appeared to be a sponsored video for the Bark phone featuring Lorenz. The Bark phone is a social media-free phone for children as young as six which is said to enhance learning and facilitate socializing with friends.

Taylor Lorenz hit back and insisted she didn’t do any paid promotion—she promoted the product for free:

Well, I know how I feel after reading all of this: obviously, we need to spend more time on our phones so we never miss this kind of discourse again!

Cracker Barrel

This drama basically got hidden for me because my whole TL was about phones in class (also I had family in town, and I was—I swear to you this is true—not on my phone that much.) But eventually I pieced together that the Cracker Barrel logo had been redesigned, and this is news.

I had briefly seen whisperings about how the Cracker Barrel logo was given a “woke” redesign, so I assumed it included some kind of marginalized people or whatever, but as it turns out, it just got simplified and erased the old man, which if anything, is ageist and eugenicist!

But conservatives were mad, including this guy who gave his life to Christ in a Cracker Barrel parking lot:

Most of Twitter believed that the people melting down about the Cracker Barrel logo were lunatics, grifters, or both:

We also got some really cool redesigns of the redesign:

Adoption

This week, actress Millie Bobby Brown and her husband adopted a baby despite them being twenty-one and twenty-three, respectively. There’s no legal reason why someone this young wouldn’t be able to adopt, but naturally, given that adoptive parents tend to be older, Twitter was surprised.

Twitter also had mixed thoughts on the ethics of the adoption, with many users assuming they had adopted from foster care when they likely did a private infant adoption (there are approximately zero healthy infants waiting for parents—in fact, more than thirty waiting adoptive parents per healthy infant. I wrote a long piece about that below:)

Generally though, adoption is something most people aren’t informed about (like, at all) so we had takes like “Thank goodness she adopted a child who needed a home instead of getting a surrogate!” not to mention this one:

She got clowned in the QTs for being insensitive but I was shocked that basically nobody corrected her on the fact that it’s nearly impossible to adopt an infant.

Funny Tweets/Other Happenings

• This grumpy dog

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