2017
June
30
Friday

Monitor Daily Podcast

June 30, 2017
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Clayton Collins
Director of Editorial Innovation

This has been a week for thinking about tech and consequences.

Let’s not spend time on that 53-word tweet by the US president.

The iPhone just turned 10! You might remember getting an early one. Whatever you had before became a paperweight. While Apple didn’t invent smartphones, it did revolutionize them. The items it replaced “could fill a warehouse of nostalgia,” notes a watch-worthy video at Recode. Some 1.2 billion iPhones have been sold to date, adding up to $738 billion in sales, reports Forbes.

Beyond ushering in the era of the ubiquitous smartphones, Apple also triggered an avalanche of apps. That undoubtedly helped speed our arrival at another tech milestone: This week Facebook reached 2 billion users worldwide. (Founder Mark Zuckerberg is bent on bringing the internet to parts of the world that remain disconnected.)

And operator behavior? Individuals haven’t always self-regulated very well. Bundled in with all of the good and productive, there is isolation, addiction, and bullying. States scramble to implement laws requiring hands-free phones for drivers. Families try to disinvite devices to dinner. Tweets own a weirdly big slice of the news cycle. (We said we wouldn’t go there.)

We’re seeing new signs of a quest for balance. One study indicates that nearly 6 in 10 teens now take voluntary breaks from social media (and are glad they did). That kind of milestone is worth noting, too. 

Now to our five stories for today.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

James West/The Canadian Press/AP
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mixed and mingled at Brundage Point River Center during a Canada Day kick-off and ice-cream social in Grand Bay-Westfield, New Brunswick, Thursday. Canada Day, which marks the anniversary of the enactment of the Constitution Act in 1867, is July 1.
Ann Hermes/The Christian Science Monitor/File
Jaime Hooper spoke to a group of women last year during a counseling session at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Addiction Treatment Program in Lebanon, N.H. New Hampshire has seen a rise in opioid-related deaths last year, and has the second-highest rate per capita, behind West Virginia. But the state has also been working to expand treatment.

The Monitor's View

Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press/AP
Prince Charles shakes hands with locals as he participates in an event in Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada, June 29. Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall visited the Canadian Arctic to kick off a royal visit that's scheduled to culminate in Ottawa July 1 as Canada marks its 150th birthday.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Maxim Shemetov/Reuters
A boy leaps into the Black Sea from a pier in central Sochi, Russia. Recent weeks here have been all about soccer. Sochi was one of the host cities of FIFA’s Confederations Cup. The finals will be held at the Krestovsky Stadium in St. Petersburg July 2 between the winners of the semi-finals, Chile and Germany.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks, as always, for joining us. Come back around on Monday (and bring friends). We have Michael Holtz reporting in Hong Kong for the 20th anniversary of the handover. Everyone talks about the political implications of Beijing’s control, but a sometimes overlooked local concern is the mainland’s renewed heavy influence on the island’s culture.

Netflixing this weekend? Think I might check out "Okja," about a young South Korean girl’s bid to save her companion – a genetically modified “superpig” – from the slaughterhouse. The Monitor’s Peter Rainer didn’t love it. Others did. My early intel: It’s no “Charlotte’s Web.” Happy weekend. 

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2017
June
30
Friday
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