Marlo Slayback

The baby boomer generation is the first to enter its most vulnerable years with unfettered access to the internet and, like the rest of us, it has trouble looking away. Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they’re looking at. This susceptibility is creating an entirely new type of responsibility for the adult children of these suddenly very online parents. These adult children describe watching their relatives — call them iPad parents — ingest content they have no context for, slipping into a zombified state of consumption that their loved ones often believe is exacerbating their decline. “It seems like an addiction,” says Beth, a 51-year-old lawyer, who says she has watched her 84-year-old mother’s attention span atrophy over the past few years. “It kind of has the same symptoms — getting fussy if she’s not online or just constantly going back to try and get online.” Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota, likens the process of regulating a parent’s internet access to getting an adult to give up driving in their later years. “Driving is part of your identity. It’s like a mark of freedom and independence,” she says. The online world is “also a source of your social connection.” All this amounts to a particularly tricky balancing act for adult children: figuring out how to preserve their parents’ independence while protecting them from an ever-advancing slop-filled ecosystem. Read Jessica Lucas’s report on how adult children now have to save their retired parents from slop-filled, scam-riddled feeds: nymag.visitlink.me/FQ9dBi

This past Valentine’s Day, 71-year-old Brad Reese, proud grandson of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups inventor H. B. Reese, posted a scathing open letter to the manager of corporate brand and editorial at Hershey, accusing the company of unforgivably altering many Reese’s products by replacing real chocolate with compound chocolate — basically using vegetable oils instead of cocoa butter to lower costs and replacing real peanut butter with “peanut-butter-style crèmes.” “And Reese wasn’t alone in feeling like everything was getting worse,” writes Rachel Handler. “Everyone in my life I spoke to agreed that something was amiss, that Reese’s — and commercial chocolate in general — didn’t taste the way it used to.” Handler would spend the next several months tumbling down a chocolate vortex, encountering dozens of eccentric characters, all disagreeing about the fundamental question of what chocolate even is and who it should be for. “I learned that — not to sound like a LinkedIn guy — what’s going on with chocolate is a parable for the modern world. That at this particularly bleak end stage of capitalism, everything we once treasured has or will lose its essential essence and MrBeast will always be involved somehow.” For our cover story, Handler takes a deep dive into the molten belly of the chocolate world. Read it in full: nymag.visitlink.me/vKKky_