Boys & Men Online

Open a sports app, a brokerage app, video game, or even shopping site, and you’ll likely find design features borrowed from slot machines. Gambling has moved from casinos and lottery tickets to becoming a core business model of our digital lives. Three forces have converged since the onset of COVID: more time spent on our devices in isolation, the expansion of legalized online gambling, and the ri...

Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation helped shape the strategy of Boys & Men Online. As you’ll hear in our conversation, it also changed my daily routine. I spent a lot of time preparing for this episode … and then the conversation went somewhere else, somewhere fascinating and unexpected. A few of the ideas we explore: * Impulsivity used to help men hunt. Now it helps DraftKings make money. Risk-taking...

First things first: On June 18th at 1 pm ET, we’re hosting a live conversation about “the gamblification of everything” with economic commentator kyla scanlon , Fantatics CEO Matt King , and our own Jonathan D. Cohen . Germán López of the New York Times will moderate the discussion and take your questions. It’s sure to be a fascinating conversation about what the normalization of online gambling i...

You may be one of the six million viewers on YouTube who watched the Saturday Night Live skit about the “ Man Park ,” where the lonely boyfriends of successful Manhattan women are taken to make friends. It’s funny because it captures something real: many men do struggle to make and maintain friendships. But it also gets something important wrong, as I discuss with Sam Pressler and Soren Duggan : T...

Last week, Boys & Men Online co-hosted a webinar with the Psychology of Technology Inst. to bring together researchers using new tools to study digital interactions. Many of the most important questions about technology—from sports betting and pornography to social media and AI companions— cannot be answered through recall surveys alone . People often misremember what they do online and struggle t...

Noelle Perdue is a writer, researcher, and media commentator focused on pornography, internet culture, censorship, and digital sexuality. She is known for bringing a nuanced, sex-positive but critical perspective to debates about pornography’s effects on relationships, intimacy, technology, and culture, including in the Netflix documentary Money Shot: The Pornhub Story . I first saw pornography wh...

We recently published a new commentary and landscape scan at AIBM.org to kick off our work on pornography—an issue that’s widely discussed, but rarely examined with clear, evidence-based thinking. The average American boy first encounters pornography around age 12. By the time he graduates high school, he’s spent years consuming content that looks very different from what researchers have studied—...

If you have boys in your life — whether you’re a parent, teacher, mentor, or coach — I think you’ll enjoy this week’s discussion with Kruti Kanojia of Healthy Gamer and Jim Festante of Health-e-Habits . We cover practical, realistic ways to help boys build a healthier relationship with games, social media, and the online world, including: * Shifting the focus from “how much screentime” to “what’s...

Sports betting in America is in a state of flux. The last twelve months have seen the rise of sports prediction market contracts, changes in betting options and gambling taxes, and the stubborn persistence of unlicensed operators. Between the possibility of new regulations, legislation, and ongoing lawsuits, the next twelve months may bring just as much change as the last twelve. What, exactly, is...

The myth of male loneliness? Over the past few months, we’ve seen a useful correction to the discourse about the so-called male loneliness epidemic. My colleagues Isaac Bledsoe and Ben Smith found that social isolation has increased among both men and women . In most surveys, young women actually report slightly more loneliness than young men. Sam Pressler notes that “the actual crisis of disconne...

The social distancing, mask-wearing, and spike in screen time during COVID prompted fears of a social and emotional recession for children and adolescents, who today say they missed out on the formative milestones that build social skills and emotional resilience. In the years since, Pew surveys have consistently found that nearly half of U.S. teens report being online “almost constantly.” Mental...

Welcome to Boys & Men Online from the American Institute for Boys and Men — a new research program to make digital life work better for boys and young men. In this podcast, we’ll talk with researchers, writers, and policymakers about how technology shapes our lives, from sports betting, gaming, and gamified finance to porn, AI companions, and parasocial relationships. In our first episode, Anders...