screens are – In its July issue, The Highlight looks past politics and headlines to ask why everyday life can feel worse even as America is better off than it was in 1976—threading that unease through stories about touch, children, organ donation, AI thirst traps, and the s
The first thing you do in the day—unlock a door, jot down a thought, dial a number—used to have resistance. A key would turn. Paper would catch a pen. A keypad would click under your finger.
In the July issue of The Highlight. Sara Herschander starts from that older rhythm and moves into a quieter loss: more of what used to require your hands now asks for a tap. “Going through life meant interacting with the world around you. ” Herschander writes. “turning a fiddly key in a lock… scratching out notes on paper. dialing a phone number on an actual keypad.” But increasingly. she argues. those tasks—and many others—feel the same: you touch a screen.
That shift is more than a design trend. In the cover story. Herschander describes how people are “losing touch with our sense of. well. touch. ” and why young children are suffering the worst effects of all that screen time. The issue also asks whether a return to a more tactile world is imminent. turning the question from culture into urgency: when the world becomes something you interact with by tapping instead of gripping. what does that do to how children learn their bodies and their attention?.
The issue widens the lens with a stark. American contrast built into its own table of contents: “The US is better off than it was in 1976. So why does it feel worse?” The tone suggests readers are being invited to sit with the gap between material improvement and lived experience—between what looks better on paper and what feels harder in daily life.
Other stories push that same boundary-testing impulse into different corners of society. One piece turns to organ donation and the line between dead and dying. presenting how a “boom” in organ donation complicates the boundary between life and death. The issue doesn’t frame it as abstract ethics. It frames it as a hard question shaped by timing, definitions, and the moment when medicine and mortality collide.
For younger readers. and for anyone who spends time online. the issue follows a more modern kind of risk: the rise of extremely convincing AI thirst traps. with a report focused on “Why gay guys are falling for AI thirst traps.” The inclusion of that story places the threat in plain sight—less about strangers asking for money than about something more intimate and more engineered than people often expect.
It also returns to the everyday built environment, with “America’s housing was built for a world we no longer live in.” Housing, like screens, is a kind of interface. It shapes routines. It can make life easier—or out of step—without anyone voting on the mismatch.
And if the issue moves from touch to the body’s boundary with death. from AI’s impersonations to housing’s outdated assumptions. it still keeps one foot on the long arc of American culture: “The great American quest for the great American novel. ” along with “5 books that define America — for better and for worse.” Even the short. topical prompts in the list—“Good news about America’s birthday” and “Should you keep practicing a religion even if you don’t believe?”—carry the same sense that identity and meaning are being renegotiated. not just debated.
The through-line is simple and quietly unnerving: what we build. what we click. what we consider “interaction. ” and what we let mediate between us and the world are changing faster than most habits can. By the end of the issue. Herschander’s opening idea—life becoming less tactile—feels less like a complaint about technology and more like a question about what kind of humans we are training ourselves to be.
The Highlight July issue Sara Herschander touch screen time children organ donation life and death AI thirst traps housing great American novel religion