Does Your Smartphone Make You A Dumb Dad?

All my fears about sending texts, tweeting like a madman and refreshing my news feed are calmed by one person: my son

- Gary Shteyngart

I HATE CLICHÉS MORE THAN ANYTHING, but my kid is the best thing that has ever happened to me. J. has softened my approach to the world (even as the world falls apart around us); he has rekindled my interest in the ways and means of the universe; and he has allowed me, for the first time in my life, to live outside the busy monkey brain that thumps away inside my skull, at least whenever he cradles his downy head against my chest. He’s four, but he loves hexadecimals (whatever those are), tectonic plates, and the early work of Marvin Hamlisch. In some ways, I want to become more like him. I’m catching up on my National Geographic and my Wikipedia just so I can have a conversation on his level, and he’s helping me understand the origins of thunderstorms and the fractal wonders of the Fibonacci series. When I’m not around, he sets up his stuffed animals in a circle, takes out his whiteboard and says, “Animals, let’s do some maths problems.” But I am his daddy, and that means that he inevitably wants to be like me. And what does Daddy do?