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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul waves during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 19, 2024, in Chicago, Illinois. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images There’s a hot new trend this back-to-school season: cellphone bans. At least eight states have enacted regulations limiting cellphone use in schools so far this year, and many more individual districts and schools have implemented similar policies on their own. The changes are driven by bipartisan concern that teenagers are unable to break away from their phones and concentrate in class, or even just talk to people in real life, as well as growing concern about the pervasive mental health challenges posed by social media. “At first I thought it was going to be really annoying, but it’s actually not that bad,” said Lev Zitcer, a freshman at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, which is limiting phone use this year. “I think there’s like a different level of communication that comes with, like, being bored.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul agrees. She’s been campaigning to enact a cellphone ban across the Empire State. “I’ve talked to schools where they have banned cellphones. We’ve found out that there are a lot of challenges involved. But if you get ahead of it, we can be successful,” Hochul told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Hochul, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Sean Rameswaram You’ve got a lot on your plate. You’ve got that — we saw you at the DNC. Obviously, a lot of election stuff in the air right now. There’s been a lot of controversy around congestion pricing. But we’re here to focus on getting cellphones out of the classroom. Why is this an important issue for you right now? Kathy Hochul This is the end of a long journey that I started about a year-and-a-half, two years ago, when I was seeing data about teenagers really struggling after the pandemic. And I wanted to know what’s going on with the kids. And I have a lot of teenage nieces and nephews and I’m seeing things happening that are not positive. I started talking to teenagers, going around to schools, every corner of the state, convening them and finding out that they are so affected by the bombardment of addictive algorithms on social media throughout the day. And also the extreme cases of FOMO. They need to know what’s happening — the girls meeting in the restroom without them? Is a party being planned and they’re not there? So these kids’ stress levels are off the charts. But meanwhile, this is during the school day when they’re supposed to be paying attention to a teacher, learning something and ultimately graduating. So it’s a huge distraction. I know the opposition, what they’re going to say — they’re going to tell me that they need to be able to reach their children if there’s a crisis. And I’ll tell you right now, that was my first reaction, like, well, okay, they may not need to have access to the internet, social media during the day, but they certainly need a cellphone to contact their parents if there’s a mass shooting — every parent’s nightmare. But what I heard from law enforcement disabused me of that notion … They said if there is a crisis on campus, no matter what it is, the last thing you want are your kids reaching for their cellphone, trying to communicate with them, take pictures, getting video of it. You want them to pay attention to the head of the classroom, their teacher, to lead them to safety. And I was persuaded the second I heard that from law enforcement. Sean Rameswaram Interesting. As you alluded to, a lot of schools are doing this. Schools across the country are doing this, states across the country are doing this. Blue states, red states, they’re taking different approaches. What approach do you want to take in New York? Kathy Hochul We’re winding down in our information-gathering process. First of all, I can’t do anything as governor without the legislature. So I’m basically building the case, building the data, the narratives, the information from the surgeon general, other experts, authors who study this, building the argument that, first of all, our young people are better off without access to a cellphone during the school day. And teachers, 72 percent of teachers in this country are saying it’s a big distraction. It is not helping the learning process. In fact, it’s hindering. So we are looking at and I’m going to be proposing this in the next few months before they meet again in January, more likely a cellphone ban … It is easier to lock them up at the beginning of the school day, get them out at the end of the school day instead of: “Who’s going to make sure they have them locked up again when they come back from recess? Who’s going to make sure they’re locked up after lunch? What if they go to the restroom?” … The teachers don’t want to be the phone police. They want to teach. Sean Rameswaram I want to ask you about how parents might feel about that, because parents seem to be a big part of this equation. And it seems generally, and we’ve heard it from even, you know, a parent on our team, parents want to be able to communicate with their kids throughout the school day. And I’m wondering, one, are you hearing that from parents in New York state, and two, how you’re going to sell this to them when the time comes? Kathy Hochul That’s a good question. And here’s what I would say: Talk to the other parents who came to our meetings, but especially talk to the parents who are teachers. We get a lot of them. And people who understand what has happened to their child in this setting, that they’re a different person than they would otherwise be because of this constant communication to others when they’re supposed to [not be] distracted, they’re supposed to be learning. One mom said, “My son is being bullied throughout the day. My husband now leaves work early, so he’s there to be there when he gets home from school to make sure he doesn’t take his own life.” Because the intense pressure on kids being bullied through their phones, through the social media platform, it’s intense. Now, this is maybe a rare case. I’m not saying it’s common, but people don’t realize the pressure they’re under about how the kids look, what they say. It’s a tough environment to be a teenager under any circumstance, but you exacerbate it when you have all these outside external factors that are hitting them at the same time. When I was growing up, yes, there were bullies. Yes there were mean kids. You walked down the other hall, you avoided them, right? You can’t avoid being bombarded with messaging throughout the day. And we need our kids to be liberated. Sean Rameswaram Where do you think we’ll end up as a country? … Do you think we’ll end up in a place where every school will be doing some version of this? Kathy Hochul My view is that if we never start out with an expectation that they’re allowed in schools, this will be the first generation we liberate from that, and then the subsequent ones will not have that same pressure … It’s all about listening to the kids. They want us to save them. And I’m the adult who’s going to be willing to do that.

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When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history: a partial reactor meltdown that didn’t release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades. Many existing plants stayed online, but 40 years later, Three Mile Island joined a wave of facilities that shut down because of financial hurdles and competition from cheap natural gas, closures that cast doubt over the future of nuclear power in the United States.Now Three Mile Island is coming back, this time as part of efforts to meet the enormous electricity demands of generative AI. This morning, the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, announced that it is reopening the facility. Microsoft, which is seeking clean energy to power its data centers, has agreed to buy power from the reopened plant for 20 years. “This was the site of the industry’s greatest failure, and now it can be a place of rebirth,” Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation, told The New York Times. Three Mile Island plans to officially reopen in 2028, after some $1.6 billion worth of refurbishing and under a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center.Nuclear power and chatbots might be a perfect match. The technology underlying ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot is extraordinarily power-hungry. These programs feed on more data, are more complex, and use more electricity-intensive hardware than traditional web algorithms. An AI-powered web search, for instance, could require five to 10 times more electricity than a traditional query.The world is already struggling to generate enough electricity to meet the internet’s growing power demand, which AI is rapidly accelerating. Large grids and electric utilities across the U.S. are warning that AI is straining their capacity, and some of the world’s biggest data-center hubs—including Sweden, Singapore, Amsterdam, and exurban Washington, D.C.—are struggling to find power to run new constructions. The exact amount of power that AI will demand within a few years’ time is hard to predict, but it will likely be enormous: Estimates range from the equivalent of Argentina’s annual power usage to that of India.That’s a big problem for the tech companies building these data centers, many of which have made substantial commitments to cut their emissions. Microsoft, for instance, has pledged to be “carbon negative,” or to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, by 2030. The Three Mile Island deal is part of that accounting. Instead of directly drawing power from the reopened plant, Microsoft will buy enough carbon-free nuclear energy from the facility to match the power that several of its data centers draw from the grid, a company spokesperson told me over email.Such electricity-matching schemes, known as “power purchase agreements,” are necessary because the construction of solar, wind, and geothermal plants is not keeping pace with the demands of AI. Even if it was, these clean electricity sources might pose a more fundamental problem for tech companies: Data centers’ new, massive power demands need to be met at all hours of the day, not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.To fill the gap, many tech companies are turning to a readily available source of abundant, reliable electricity: burning fossil fuels. In the U.S., plans to wind down coal-fired power plants are being delayed in West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and elsewhere to power data centers. That Microsoft will use the refurbished Three Mile Island to offset, rather than supply, its data centers’ electricity consumption suggests that the facilities will likely continue to rely on fossil fuels for some time, too. Burning fossil fuels to power AI means the new tech boom might even threaten to delay the green-energy transition.Still, investing in nuclear energy to match data centers’ power usage also brings new sources of clean, reliable electricity to the power grid. Splitting apart atoms provides a carbon-free way to generate tremendous amounts of electricity day and night. Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president for energy, told Bloomberg that this is a key upside to the Three Mile Island revival: “We run around the clock. They run around the clock.” Microsoft is working to build a carbon-free grid to power all of its operations, data centers included. Nuclear plants will be an important component that provides what the company has elsewhere called “firm electricity” to fill in the gaps for less steady sources of clean energy, including solar and wind.It’s not just Microsoft that is turning to nuclear. Earlier this year, Amazon purchased a Pennsylvania data center that is entirely nuclear-powered, and the company is reportedly in talks to secure nuclear power along the East Coast from another Constellation nuclear plant. Google, Microsoft, and several other companies have invested or agreed to buy electricity in start-ups promising nuclear fusion—an even more powerful and cleaner form of nuclear power that remains highly experimental—as have billionaires including Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos.Nuclear energy might not just be a good option for powering the AI boom. It might be the only clean option able to meet demand until there is a substantial build-out of solar and wind energy. A handful of other, retired reactors could come back online, and new ones may be built as well. Just yesterday, Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of energy, told my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II that building small nuclear reactors could become an important way to supply nonstop clean energy to data centers. Whether such construction will be fast and plentiful enough to satisfy the growing power demand is unclear. But it must be, for the generative-AI revolution to really take off. Before chatbots can finish remaking the internet, they might need to first reshape America’s physical infrastructure.

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