Cultural attitudes toward porn may be liberalizing, but the belief that minors shouldn't have unfettered access to it remains broadly shared. Parents are the natural guardians of their children's internet habits, but many report feeling powerless against the innumerable work-arounds and relentless societal pull toward unrestricted internet use. A new study by researchers at Stanford, NYU, the University of Georgia, and Georgia State followed the implementation of a law in Louisiana that required any website publishing a substantial amount of pornographic content to take reasonable steps to verify the age of users before giving them access. The researchers found that while search traffic to Pornhub'which complied with the law'dropped by 51 percent, traffic to its noncompliant rival, XVideos, rose by 48.1 percent. This is a classic tale of tech regulation: lots of friction while the primary aim remains unfulfilled. But one of the researchers, Zeve Sanderson, the executive director of NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics, isn't resigned to defeat. On today's episode of Good on Paper, we discuss what governments can even do to regulate the internet on behalf of minors and what doing so might cost the rest of us. Also, he explains, Louisiana's legislation shows that writing a law can be the beginning, not the end, of a policy process....

'At what precise moment had Peru fucked itself up'' So begins the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's 1969 masterpiece, Conversation in the Cathedral. What made the opening so famous and effective was the fact that many countries across Latin America, a landscape of shaky democracies, were asking themselves that question about their homeland. The number of people asking this seems to have grown in recent years all over the world. Perhaps you've asked it yourself. Vargas Llosa, who died in Lima this past weekend at the age of 89, nurtured a lifelong obsession with his native Peru: its corrupt political ecosystem, its inequality, its incapacity to make good on its promise. He dissected that obsession in many of his 30 novels. The answers he came up with never fully satisfied him, which only meant that he posed the question from another angle in the next book. I devoured his novels before and after emigrating from Mexico to the United States in the 1980s. For many of us Latin Americans, reading him was a way to demonstrate our investment in the region's future. His style was urbane, his research encyclopedic. His language was beautifully elastic; what fascinated me just as much was the elasticity, over decades of profound change, of his politics....

The next day Musk replied to the post, 'Some people just want to watch the world burn,' an iconic line from the 2008 Batman film 'The Dark Knight.' Alfred, the Wayne family's faithful butler, says the line to Bruce Wayne ' Batman ' to describe the motivations behind the Joker's chaotic acts of violence. Musk ' and Alfred ' was right. Some people do, in fact, say they think that society should be burned to the ground. It's part of a psychological measure political psychologists created called 'need for chaos.' New data from the Center for Political Communication at the University of Delaware suggests that those people ' the ones who want society to burn ' are the ones with more, not less, trust in Musk. They also report more trust in the Department of Government Efficiency, the government entity Musk advises, which the Trump administration claims it created to cut government waste and fraud. Somewhat like the Joker, whose perpetual sense of victimhood ' 'You wanna know how I got these scars'' ' drove his need for chaos and destruction, people can develop a need for chaos in response to a sense that they are losing....

To live together in social communities, people create and maintain expectations about what is normal and what is not. Sometimes things can fall outside the range of normal and people are OK with it. You might have a neighbor who likes to wear Revolutionary War-era costumes on their evening walks around the neighborhood. Their behavior seems weird to you, but you consider it an instance of everyone's freedom to express themselves. But other times something seems not only abnormal but also unacceptable. In this case, people take active steps to squelch what feels unfair, inappropriate, bad or deviant. Things that people think are morally abnormal ' aberrant behavior, transgressions, violations of their most sacred values ' are viewed as highly threatening and necessary to shut down, with force if necessary. Most people would find a neighbor who purposefully starves and tortures their dogs morally repugnant. That neighbor would need to be stopped and would deserve to be punished. A decade of research in my psychology lab and others' demonstrates that people struggle to express tolerance for different moral values ' for instance, about sexual orientation, helping the poor, being a stay-at-home mother and so on....