The hottest new hangout for middle schoolers is NPR’s comment section?

In Brief

Parents person spent years trying to support their kids disconnected societal media, truthful immoderate kids headed to the 1 spot nary big would deliberation to look for them: NPR.

On this week’s “This American Life,” big Ira Glass tells the communicative of the squad down NPR’s podcast “Wild Card,” who noticed a flood of baffling comments nether their Spotify episodes past fall. A shaper assumed the bizarre abbreviations and indecipherable emojis were bot postulation and shared screenshots successful NPR’s Slack. They past reported the posts to Spotify.

But Hannah Chin, an audio shaper and Gen Z colleague, took 1 look astatine the screenshots and recognized, astir instantly by Glass’s telling, that these weren’t bots. They were apt mediate schoolers who were excessively young for societal media, moving a radical chat successful the comments of the podcast. (Perhaps idiosyncratic astatine NPR should person grokked this sooner: it spotted kids doing the aforesaid happening connected TED Radio Hour amusement past year.)

As for wherefore NPR successful particular, erstwhile Glass tracked down 1 of the kids to ask, helium was fixed the benignant of unvarnished reply that a mediate schooler would give: “Um, I deliberation we just, like, looked for podcasts that didn’t person galore comments.”

“I archer you, buddy,” responded Glass, who has hosted “This American Life” for 3 decades, “I bash a nationalist vigor show, and that hurts a small to hear.”

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